The Download: Flock’s new rules, cloning’s future, and children’s cells

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology.

Flock is tightening its rules in response to a growing surveillance backlash

The police-tech giant Flock is changing officers’ access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move comes amid a backlash over mass surveillance and reports of officers using the technology to stalk and harass current or former romantic partners.

To combat that, the company will require them to enter a criminal case number before searching its database and expand automated auditing of suspicious searches. But because Flock won’t verify those case numbers, officers could still find ways around the safeguards.

—James O'Donnell

Cloning could be used to save species—or make human “organ sacks”

—Jessica Hamzelou

This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice.

They hope their approach could be helpful in conservation efforts, especially in cases where we might have only a few individuals of a species left. But cloning has multiple uses, ranging from genetically modifying livestock to recreating beloved pets and potentially even creating “brainless” replicas of humans.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

This scientist is helping build a missing map of childhood

In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation about the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious attempt to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was floored, and then concerned. The project’s researchers had only made plans to study adults. “That’s when my little alarm went off,” she says. “Not again.”

Children’s cells are different from grownups’ cells in the way they express genes, which can cause drastically different and even deadly responses to drugs that adults tolerate well. Taylor has since pushed the Human Cell Atlas to include children and is working on a major database of healthy pediatric tissue.

The goal is to give researchers a baseline for how children develop—and potentially reveal how diseases that emerge in adulthood begin much earlier.

—Colleen de Bellefonds

This story is from the next issue of our print magazine, which is all about kids. Subscribe now to read it when it lands.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Ukrainian drones defeated US forces in a military exerciseThey wiped out an American tank brigade in the war game. (WSJ $)

+ The drill exposed US vulnerabilities to drone attacks.(Ars Technica)

+ Trump just declared 100% tariffs on many drones.(Verge)

+ Europe has a drone-filled vision for future wars.(MIT Technology Review)

2 OpenAI and Anthropic are cutting prices to compete with Chinese AI

Rising AI bills are pushing companies toward cheaper models. (FT $)+ China’s Z.ai aims to rival Anthropic and OpenAI in coding. (Bloomberg $)+ While DeepSeek is rapidly pushing up API prices. (Quartz)** **

3 Apple has trained its own AI model for China with support from Alibaba

A China-tailored model of its own could give Apple greater control. (Reuters $)+ And make it the first foreign firm with a Beijing-approved AI model. (Verge)

+ Chinese AI has divided the White House.(MIT Technology Review)

4 US efforts to build humanoid robots face a Chinese supply chain

To build an affordable device, you need Chinese parts. (NYT $)+ Chinese humanoids have business concerns of their own. (CNBC)+ Gig workers are training humanoids at home. (MIT Technology Review)

5 People are “marrying” chatbots. Lawmakers want to stop it.

Their interventions are a response to the rise of AI companion apps. (Wired $)+ Chatbots are pushing us toward a post-human internet. (NYT $)

6 Researchers have cast doubts over Anthropic’s new AI watermarksThe marks can disappear when text is rewritten. (Nature)

7 AI is scrambling the political mapData centers and surveillance are creating unlikely political alliances. (Axios)

8 Oxygen has been found nearly two miles underground

Earth’s deep biosphere could support more life than thought. (New Yorker $)

9 A new study challenges our understanding of how memories are stored

Mice retained memories after losing half of their synapses. (New Scientist $)

10 An Indian startup is testing cancer-sniffing dogs for early detection

AI interprets the dogs’ responses to patients’ breath samples. (Bloomberg $)

Quote of the day

“They were incredibly sloppy. If you’re serious about this, your AI shouldn’t be able to break out onto the internet and then do it again right afterward.”

—A former OpenAI employee tells Wired that the company’s rogue agent hack was a watershed moment for AI safety and cybersecurity.

One More Thing

AI materials discovery now needs to move into the real world

Startups flush with cash are building AI-assisted laboratories to find materials far faster and more cheaply. But they’re still waiting for their ChatGPT moment.

By far the most time-consuming and expensive step in materials discovery is not imagining new structures but making them in the real world. Before synthesizing a material, you don’t know if it can actually be made or whether it will have the properties you want.

Now startups like Lila Sciences and Periodic Labs are building labs where AI agents can design experiments, control robots, and analyze results, potentially shortening the discovery process from decades to a few years or less.

—David Rotman

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

Astronomers have created the largest-ever 2D map of the universe.
Lose yourself in the most breathtaking photos of the total solar eclipse.
Musician Andy Brewer has virtuosically composed an entire song with nothing but equalization.
Step inside the National Gallery’s Imaginarium, a virtual art world where masterpieces become digital adventures. (Big thanks to reader Peter Ryan for the find!)

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The Download: Flock’s new rules, cloning’s future, and children’s cells

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