A California dairy farm worker who had contact with H5N1-infected cows appears to have contracted the avian influenza virus, state health officials reported Thursday.The person's illness is reported to be mild, with the only symptom being conjunctivitis (eye redness). This echoes the experience of other H5N1 human cases in this outbreak. The person...

Automattic Inc. and its founder have been sued by a WordPress hosting company that alleges an extortion scheme to extract payments for use of the trademark for the open source WordPress software. Hosting firm WP Engine sued Automattic and founder Matt Mullenweg in a complaint filed yesterday in US District Court for the Northern District of California."This...

In 2014, researchers monitoring acoustic recordings from the Mariana Archipelago picked up an unusual whale vocalization with both low- and high-frequency components. It seemed to be a whale call, but it sounded more mechanical than biological and has since been dubbed a "biotwang."Now a separate team of scientists has developed a machine-learning model...

We tend to think of agriculture as a human innovation. But insects beat us to it by millions of years. Various ant species cooperate with fungi, creating a home for them, providing them with nutrients, and harvesting them as food. This reaches the peak of sophistication in the leafcutter ants, which cut foliage and return it to feed their fungi, which...

Any striking marketing claims in companies' ads about the gut benefits of a popular probiotic may be full of, well, the same thing that has their target audience backed up.In a randomized controlled trial, the probiotic Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis—used in many probiotic products, including Dannon's Activia yogurts—did nothing to improve bowel...

Upholding the First Amendment, a senior US district judge has blocked California's deepfakes law, AB 2839, which was designed to stop deceptive AI-generated content from impacting election outcomes.Last month, a parody video creator known as "Mr Reagan" on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), Christopher Kohls, sued to block the law. He claimed that AB...