Why you don’t want to get tuberculosis on your penis

While tuberculosis can attack anywhere, it’s extremely rare on the penis.

A man in Ireland earned the unpleasant distinction of developing an exceedingly rare infection on his penis—one that has a puzzling origin, but may be connected to his work with dead animals.

According to an article published in ASM Case Reports on Thursday, the 57-year-old man went to a hospital in Dublin after his penis became red, swollen, and painful over the course of a week. He also had a fever. Doctors promptly admitted him to the hospital and noted that he had received a kidney transplant 15 years prior. As such, he was on immunosuppressive drugs, which keep his body from rejecting the organ, but could also allow infections to run amok.

Initial blood work found hints of an infection, and the doctors initially suspected a bacterial skin infection (cellulitis) had taken hold in his nether region. So, they put him on some standard antibiotics for that. But his penis only got worse, redder, and more swollen. This prompted consultation with infectious disease doctors.

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Science-centric streaming service Curiosity Stream is an AI-licensing firm now

Curiosity Stream’s owner has more content for AI companies than it does for subscribers.

We all know streaming services’ usual tricks for making more money: get more subscribers, charge those subscribers more money, and sell ads. But science streaming service Curiosity Stream is taking a new route that could reshape how streaming companies, especially niche options, try to survive.

Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks launched Curiosity Stream in 2015. The streaming service costs $40 per year, and it doesn’t have commercials.

The streaming business has grown to also include the Curiosity Channel TV channel. CuriosityStream Inc. also makes money through original programming and its Curiosity University educational programming. The firm turned its first positive net income in its fiscal Q1 2025, after about a decade of business.

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Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser

There are fan-made browser versions of Red Alert, Unreal Tournament, and more.

Over the past couple of weeks, friends and colleagues have made me aware of multiple ingeniously implemented, browser-based ways to play classic MS-DOS and Windows games with other people on basically any hardware.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were the peak of multiplayer gaming for me. It was the era of real-time strategy games and boomer shooters, and not only did I attend many LAN parties, but I also played online with friends.

That’s still possible today with several old-school games; there are Discord servers that arrange scheduled matches of Starsiege Tribes, for example. But oftentimes, it’s not exactly trivial to get those games running in modern Windows, and as in the old days, you might have some annoying network configuration work ahead of you—to say nothing of the fact that many folks who were on Windows back in those days are now on macOS or Linux instead.

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How to know if your Asus router is one of thousands hacked by China-state hackers

So far, the hackers are laying low, likely for later use.

Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said.

The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning they no longer receive security patches, researchers from SecurityScorecard said. So far, it’s unclear what the attackers do after gaining control of the devices. SecurityScorecard has named the operation WrtHug.

Staying off the radar

SecurityScorecard said it suspects the compromised devices are being used similarly to those found in ORB (operational relay box) networks, which hackers primarily use to conduct espionage to conceal their identity.

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Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand

Google’s AI infrastructure chief tells staff it needs thousandfold capacity increase in 5 years.

While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.

During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale “the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”

While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking “for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level,” he told employees during the meeting. “It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there.”

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AI trained on bacterial genomes produces never-before-seen proteins

Genes with related functions cluster together, and the AI uses that.

AI systems have recently had a lot of success in one key aspect of biology: the relationship between a protein’s structure and its function. These efforts have included the ability to predict the structure of most proteins and to design proteins structured so that they perform useful functions. But all of these efforts are focused on the proteins and amino acids that build them.

But biology doesn’t generate new proteins at that level. Instead, changes have to take place at the nucleic acid level before eventually making their presence felt at the protein level. And the DNA level is fairly removed from proteins, with lots of critical non-coding sequences, redundancy, and a fair degree of flexibility. It’s not necessarily obvious that learning the organization of a genome would help an AI system figure out how to make functional proteins.

But it now seems like using bacterial genomes for the training can help develop a system that can predict proteins, some of which don’t look like anything we’ve ever seen before.

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Lilbits: World’s smallest ESP32 dev board, GMK’s first Panther Lake mini PC, and XBMC 4.0 for the actual Xbox

Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine is a cross between a mini PC and a game console. And while the nearly cube-shaped device has a pretty basic design, it’s also made to be customizable: Valve demonstrated a couple of swappable face plates when …

Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine is a cross between a mini PC and a game console. And while the nearly cube-shaped device has a pretty basic design, it’s also made to be customizable: Valve demonstrated a couple of swappable face plates when the company unveiled the Steam Machine and now third-party companies are starting to tease […]

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Tech company CTO and others indicted for exporting Nvidia chips to China

Four arrested and charged with illegal exports, smuggling, and money laundering.

The US crackdown on chip exports to China has continued with the arrests of four people accused of a conspiracy to illegally export Nvidia chips. Two US citizens and two nationals of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all of whom live in the US, were charged in an indictment unsealed on Wednesday in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

The indictment alleges a scheme to send Nvidia “GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading US authorities,” John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a press release yesterday.

The four arrestees are Hon Ning Ho (aka Mathew Ho), a US citizen who was born in Hong Kong and lives in Tampa, Florida; Brian Curtis Raymond, a US citizen who lives in Huntsville, Alabama; Cham Li (aka Tony Li), a PRC national who lives in San Leandro, California; and Jing Chen (aka Harry Chen), a PRC national who lives in Tampa on an F-1 non-immigrant student visa.

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Data-driven sport: How Red Bull and AT&T move terabytes of F1 info

Since the last time we spoke to Red Bull, its cars have 3 times as many sensors on them.

LAS VEGAS—A Formula 1 car runs on soon-to-be-synthetic gasoline, but an F1 team runs on data. It’s always been an engineering-driven sport, and while you can make decisions based on a hunch, the kinds of people who become good engineers prefer something a little more convincing. And the volumes of data just continue to get bigger and bigger each season. A few years ago we spoke to Red Bull Racing about how it stayed on top of the task, but a lot has changed in F1 since 2017, as we found out at this year’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.

It’s hugely popular now, for one thing, even in the United States: a 200 mph soap opera now with 24 episodes a season. Superficially the cars look the same—exposed wheels, front and rear wings, the driver in between some side pods. And the hybrid powertrains that make the cars move are still the same format: 1.6 L turbocharged V6 engines that recover energy from the rear wheels under braking as well as the turbine as it gets spun by hot exhaust gases.

But the cars are actually fundamentally different, particularly the way they generate their aerodynamic grip mostly via ground effect generated by the specially sculpted underside of their floors rather than the front and rear wings. A bigger change lurks in everyone’s accounts. The days where teams were free to spend as much money as they could find are gone.

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Tuxedo won’t sell a Linux laptop with Qualcomm Snapdragon X after all

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series processor made a big splash when they first hit the scene last year, because they were the first Arm-based chips for Windows PCs that promised competitive performance with the Intel and AMD processors that have domi…

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series processor made a big splash when they first hit the scene last year, because they were the first Arm-based chips for Windows PCs that promised competitive performance with the Intel and AMD processors that have dominated the market for decades. But what about PCs that don’t run Windows? Last June German PC […]

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