Eli Lilly and other drugmakers are reportedly planning to urge the Trump administration to pause Medicare drug-price negotiations that were put in place by the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

"They need to fix [the IRA]," Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks told Bloomberg at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

The results of the first round of IRA negotiations , announced in August, saw the list prices of 10 high-cost drugs get slashed by as much as 79 percent. Collectively, the negotiated prices are estimated to save seniors $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2026, when the prices go into effect. The savings will likely be well received, given that KFF polling has found that over a quarter of Americans struggle to afford prescription medications , and 31 percent say they haven't taken medicines as prescribed due to costs.

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OpenAI is making ChatGPT work a little more like older digital assistants with a new feature called Tasks, as reported by TechCrunch and others.

Currently in beta, Tasks allows users to direct the chatbot to send reminders or to generate responses to specific prompts at certain times; recurring tasks are also supported.

The feature is available to Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers starting today, while free users don't have access.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced a dramatic restructuring of the company's engineering organization—all around pivoting the company's focus to developing the tools that will underpin agentic AI.

Dubbed "CoreAI - Platform and Tools," the new division rolls the existing AI platform team and the previous developer division (which is responsible for everything from .NET to Visual Studio) along with some other teams into one big group.

As for what this group will be doing specifically, it's basically everything that's mission critical to Microsoft in 2025, as Nadella tells it:

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Anticipating that 2025 will be an "intense year" requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5 percent of its workforce—targeting "lowest performers."

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta's internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to "move out low performers faster" so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

"I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management," Zuckerberg said. "We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

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The Federal Trade Commission said yesterday it is sending over $1 million in refunds to 6,764 consumers who purchased Razer Zephyr masks that were deceptively marketed as providing N95 protection during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The FTC sued Razer in April 2024, and the gaming-hardware company agreed to a settlement, including a $100,000 fine and $1,071,254.33 toward a fund for consumer relief. The payments are being distributed to mask buyers imminently, the FTC announced yesterday .

"The FTC is sending checks and PayPal payments to 6,764 consumers who purchased the deceptively marketed products. Recipients will get a full refund," the agency said. "Consumers should cash their check within 90 days, as indicated on the check, or redeem their PayPal payment within 30 days."

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Plans to block new vehicles with software and hardware linked to either China or Russia are moving ahead. Today, the Department of Commerce published a final rule in the Federal Register that will prohibit the import of vehicles with Chinese or Russian connected-car vehicle software from model year 2027 and Chinese or Russian hardware from model year 2030.

While the move will no doubt protect domestic auto manufacturing from the threat of cheap imports, the ban has been proposed on national security grounds. Specifically, the US government has determined that "malign actors and foreign adversaries" could exploit the "progressively more complex hardware and software systems" on new cars. It also determined that the danger of that happening when that software or hardware is made by a company owned or controlled by either China or Russia is unacceptably high.

The proposed rule covers hardware and software that enable connectivity above 450 MHz and automated driving system software—the sensors or other ADS hardware is not covered by the rule. Originally, the government had also wanted to include OSes, telematics, battery management systems, and advanced driver assistance systems but narrowed the scope in response to public comments. (It also notes that while telematics are indeed a prime attack surface for a foreign adversary since they operate over cellular protocols, that's already covered.)

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A plucky male American stag beetle thinks he's found a mate on a rotting old tree stump—and then realizes there's another male eager to make the same conquest. The two beetles face off in battle, until the first manages to get enough leverage to toss his romantic rival off the stump in a deft display of insect jujitsu. It's the first time this mating behavior has been captured on film, and the stag beetle is just one of the many fascinating insects featured in the second season of A Real Bug's Life ,  a National Geographic docuseries narrated by Awkwafina.

The genesis for the docuseries lies in a past rumored sequel to Pixar's 1998 animated film A Bug's Life , which celebrated its 25th anniversary two years ago. That inspired producer Bill Markham, among others, to pitch a documentary series on a real bug's life to National Geographic. "It was the quickest commission ever," Markham told Ars last year . "It was such a good idea, to film bugs in an entertaining family way with Pixar sensibilities." And thanks to the advent of new technologies—photogrammetry, probe and microscope lenses, racing drones, ultra-high-speed camera—plus a handful of skilled "bug wranglers," the team was able to capture the bug's-eye view of the world beautifully.

As with the Pixar film, the bugs (and adjacent creatures) are the main characters here, from cockroaches, monarch butterflies, and praying mantises to bees, spiders, and even hermit crabs. The 10 episodes, across two seasons, tell their stories as they struggle to survive in their respective habitats, capturing entire ecosystems in the process: city streets, a farm, the rainforest, a Texas backyard, and the African savannah, for example. Highlights from S1 included the first footage of cockroach egg casings hatching; wrangling army ants on location in a Costa Rica rainforest; and the harrowing adventures of a tiny jumping spider navigating the mean streets of New York City.

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Virtualization software like Parallels and VMware Fusion give Mac owners the ability to run Windows and Linux on top of macOS, but for Apple Silicon Macs, that support was limited to the Arm-based versions of those operating systems. And while Windows and Linux both support some level of x86-to-Arm app translation that attempts to maintain compatibility with most software, there are still plenty of things that demand an Intel or AMD processor with the x86 instruction set.

Last week, Parallels released a new update that partially resolves this problem: Users of Parallels Desktop Pro 20.2.0 now have access to x86 operating systems via an "early technology preview" of Parallels' "proprietary emulation engine."

The technology preview is currently limited to certain 64-bit versions of Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2019 and 2022. Parallels also says it has tested several UEFI-compatible Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 22.04.5, Kubuntu 24.04.1, Lubuntu 24.04.1, and Debian versions 12.4 to 12.8. Fedora will install, but it's unstable. 32-bit versions of operating systems, as well as older versions of Windows like Windows 7 or 8, aren't supported.

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Chinese officials have reportedly discussed selling TikTok's US operations to Elon Musk as the threat of a US ban looms.

Sources "familiar with the matter" told Bloomberg that Chinese officials would "strongly prefer" that ByteDance remain in control of TikTok US, but if TikTok's bid to get the Supreme Court to block the ban fails, ByteDance wants to be prepared with "contingency plans."

One of those supposed contingency plans would apparently see Musk operating TikTok as part of X (formerly Twitter) operations. Under that scenario, Musk's X would control TikTok US, sources said, and thus gain access to a massive trove of TikTok data that the US has alleged poses a grave national security risk if left under a Chinese-owned company's control.

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