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Nuclear startup that’s suing NRC raises $130 million with backing from Anduril’s Palmer Luckey and senior Palantir executive

Doug Philippone, co-founder of Snowpoint and former head of global defense at Palantir, will also join Valar’s board of directors.

Valar is one of several nuclear startups that hopes to benefit from President Trump’s push to deploy new reactor technology in the U.S. by cutting regulations and accelerating approvals.

Based outside Los Angeles, Valar is one of several reactor developers and states that are suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over its licensing process for small reactor designs. The parties to the suit are seeking a resolution with the NRC in the wake of Trump’s executive order that would overhaul the regulator. The case has been temporarily paused due to the government shutdown.

As brain organoids grow increasingly complex, leading scientists and bioethicists call for global oversight

In an effort to address these ethical grey areas, 17 leading scientists and bioethicists from five countries are urging the establishment of an international oversight body to monitor advances in the rapidly expanding field of human neural organoids and to provide ethical and policy guidance as the science continues to evolve. The call to action, published Thursday in Science, comes as U.S. government agencies are making new investments in organoid science aimed at accelerating drug discovery and reducing reliance on animal models of disease.

In September, the National Institutes of Health announced $87 million in initial contracts to establish a new center dedicated to standardizing organoid research. The move followed an earlier pledge by both the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration to reduce, and possibly replace, testing on mice, primates, and other animals with other methods — including organoids and organ-on-a-chip technologies — for developing certain medicines.

Government promotion of human stem cell models more broadly will only increase the recruitment of new researchers into the field of neural organoids, which has seen an explosion from a few dozen labs a decade ago to hundreds around the world now, said Sergiu Pasca, a pioneering neuroscientist and stem cell biologist at Stanford University who co-authored the Science commentary.

Japan’s vision for AI robots to empower humans

What if instead of replacing us in our jobs, AI-enabled robots were to help us become the best versions of ourselves? Prompted by the ageing crisis and a projected shortfall of carers, a research team in Japan is seeking to create a new robotic paradigm, where AI-enabled robots help us to help ourselves.

“By 2050, I’d like to realize a smarter, more inclusive society, where everyone will be able to use AI robots anytime and anywhere,” says Yasuhisa Hirata, a mechanical engineer at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan1. Hirata is the project manager on the ‘Adaptable AI-enabled Robots to Create a Vibrant Society’ project of the Japanese Government’s Moonshot Research and Development Program.

He envisages future AI-enabled robots functioning somewhere between a carer and a coach — a tool that can provide support, but which makes users feel as though they are performing tasks independently rather than being assisted by a robot. Such tasks might range from people standing up out of a chair, lifting a heavy object, or expressing themselves through dance.

Abandoned coal mine drainage identified as a significant source of carbon emissions

For the past 250 years, people have mined coal industrially in Pennsylvania, U.S… By 1830, the city of Pittsburgh was using more than 400 tons of the fossil fuel every day. Burning all that coal has contributed to climate change. Additionally, unremediated mines—especially those that operated before Congress passed regulations in 1977 —have leaked environmentally harmful mine drainage. But that might not be the end of their legacy.

In research presented last week at GSA Connects 2025 in San Antonio, Texas, U.S., Dr. Dorothy Vesper, a geochemist at West Virginia University, found that those abandoned mines pose another risk: continuous CO2 emissions from water that leaks out even decades or centuries after mining stops.

China-Linked Hackers Exploit Windows Shortcut Flaw to Target European Diplomats

The activity targeted diplomatic organizations in Hungary, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands, as well as government agencies in Serbia, Arctic Wolf said in a technical report published Thursday.

“The attack chain begins with spear-phishing emails containing an embedded URL that is the first of several stages that lead to the delivery of malicious LNK files themed around European Commission meetings, NATO-related workshops, and multilateral diplomatic coordination events,” the cybersecurity company said.

The files are designed to exploit ZDI-CAN-25373 to trigger a multi-stage attack chain that culminates in the deployment of the PlugX malware using DLL side-loading. PlugX is a remote access trojan that’s also referred to as Destroy RAT, Kaba, Korplug, SOGU, and TIGERPLUG.

A quest to find probiotics with immune benefits

Kirin has now worked LC-Plasma into a range of non-beer products including yoghurt beverages, green tea and other drinks. In 2020, these became the first ‘functional’ food or beverages in Japan to be allowed to be marketed as containing potentially immune-boosting ingredients.

“A food or beverage that might help improve immune function had been highly sought after in Japan for almost 30 years. But none succeeded in spite of much effort and expense,” Fujiwara says. “We conducted lots of studies and finally succeeded in meeting government requirements in 2020.”

Researchers at Kirin and NIID/JIHS have also been exploring in laboratory and animal studies the effects of LC-Plasma against various infectious diseases, including influenza, dengue fever, SARS-CoV-2 and common colds.

APT36 Targets Indian Government with Golang-Based DeskRAT Malware Campaign

A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as DeskRAT.

The activity, observed in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. It also builds upon a prior campaign disclosed by CYFIRMA in August 2025.

The attack chains involve sending phishing emails containing a ZIP file attachment, or in some cases, a link pointing to an archive hosted on legitimate cloud services like Google Drive. Present within the ZIP file is a malicious Desktop file embedding commands to display a decoy PDF (“CDS_Directive_Armed_Forces.pdf”) using Mozilla Firefox while simultaneously executing the main payload.

World’s first full-cell dual-cation battery developed in Ireland

Researchers at University of Limerick (UL) have developed a battery that could reshape the future of electric vehicles and portable electronics. Their breakthrough in energy storage technology has seen the development of the world’s first full-cell dual-cation battery.

This innovative system combines lithium and sodium ions to significantly enhance both battery capacity and stability, marking a new frontier in sustainable energy research.

The work, published in Nano Energy, was led by Hugh Geaney, Associate Professor of Chemistry at UL’s Department of Chemical Sciences and Principal Investigator at UL’s Bernal Institute, and Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Syed Abdul Ahad, his colleague at the Department and the Bernal Institute.

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