UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both.

UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits. There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers’ efforts to optimise the “doses” of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University.

They draw on data from the fields of addiction science, nutrition and public health history to make their comparisons, published on 3 February in the healthcare journal the Milbank Quarterly. The authors suggest that marketing claims on the products, such as being “low fat” or “sugar free,” are “health washing” that can stall regulation, akin to the advertising of cigarette filters in the 1950s as protective innovations that “in practice offered little meaningful benefit.”

NASA has delayed the Artemis II launch to March of this year, after a wet dress-rehearsal uncovered a hydrogen leak. From the NASA article:

Google’s parent company has leased one office tower and purchased options on two others in Alembic City, a development in the Whitefield tech corridor, totaling 2.4 million square feet, according to people familiar with the deal. The first tower is expected to open to employees in the coming months, while construction on the remaining two is set to conclude next year.

Options in the real estate industry give would-be tenants the exclusive right to rent, or in some cases buy, a property at a predetermined price within a specific time frame. It’s also possible Alphabet will not exercise the option to use the additional towers. If it does take all of the space, the complex could accommodate as many as 20,000 additional staff, which could more than double the company’s footprint in India, said the people, asking not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. Alphabet currently employs around 14,000 in the country, out of a global workforce of roughly 190,000.

[…] US President Donald Trump’s visa restrictions have made it harder to bring foreign talent to America, prompting some companies to recruit more staff overseas. India has become an increasingly important place for US companies to hire, particularly in the race to dominate artificial intelligence.

PayPal said on Tuesday it was booting its CEO and replacing him with its board chair Enrique Lores, sparing no ambiguity as to why: “The pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board’s expectations,” it said in a statement. One group that was blindsided was HP, where Lores was until Tuesday serving as CEO, according to people familiar with the matter.

Lores’ switchup sent them rushing to launch a search process, those people said. HP’s board does have internal candidates which it’s considering for the top job, according to a person familiar with the board’s thinking. As chair of PayPal’s board, Lores played a role in a process evaluating internal and external candidates. It was unclear when or if he recused himself from the final decision to name him as CEO. But HP’s board was only made aware that Lores was taking the CEO role at PayPal in recent weeks, the people said.

By now, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list has become more than a little notorious for the amount of entrants who go on to be charged with fraud.[…] Gokce Guven, a 26-year-old Turkish national and the founder and CEO of fintech startup Kalder, was charged last week with alleged securities fraud, wire fraud, visa fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The New York-based fintech startup — which uses the “Turn Your Rewards into [a] Revenue Engine” tagline — says it can help companies create and monetize individual rewards programs. The company was founded in 2022, and offers participating firms the opportunity to earn ongoing revenue streams via partner affiliate sales, Axios previously reported.

Guven was featured in last year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list. The magazine notes in the writeup that Guven’s clients included major chocolatier Godiva and the International Air Transport Association, the trade organization that represents a majority of the world’s airlines. Kalder also claims to have enjoyed the backing of a number of prominent VC firms. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that, during Kalder’s seed round in April of 2024, Guven managed to raise $7 million from more than a dozen investors after presenting a pitch deck that was rife with false information.

According to the government, Kalder’s pitch deck claimed that there were 26 brands “using Kalder” and another 53 brands in “live freemium.” However, officials say that, in reality, Kalder had, in many cases, only been offering heavily discounted pilot programs to many of those companies. Other brands “had no agreement with Kalder whatsoever — not even for free services,” officials said in a press release announcing the indictment. The pitch deck also “falsely reported that Kalder’s recurring revenue had steadily grown month over month since February 2023 and that by March 2024, Kalder had reached $1.2 million in annual recurring revenue.” The government also accuses Guven of having kept two separate sets of financial books.

In its latest earnings release, Nintendo reports that the Nintendo Switch has, as of December 31, 2025, sold 155.37 million units since its launch in 2017, compared to 154.02 million units for the 2004 Nintendo DS.

In November, Nintendo reported that the Switch and DS were neck and neck. We expected the holiday sales period would see the Switch surpass the DS, even with Nintendo announcing that primary development would focus on the Switch 2. Nintendo previously said that it would continue to sell the original Switch “while taking consumer demand and the business environment into consideration.”

Nintendo has to keep selling the Switch if it wants to dethrone Sony’s PlayStation 2 as the best-selling video game console of all time. The PlayStation 2, discontinued in January 2013, sold more than 160 million units over its 13-year lifespan.

Automakers have increasingly implemented door handles that retract into the bodywork for aerodynamic reasons, but they are now off limits in China.

My issue is with electronic-only door latch mechanism. It should be possible to open the door from both inside and outside the car in case of complete power loss.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won’t attend the annual RSA Conference in March, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Register. Sessions involving speakers from the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) have also disappeared from the agenda.

“Since the beginning of this administration, CISA has made significant progress in returning to our statutory, core mission and focusing on President Trump’s policies for maximum security for all Americans,” CISA spokesperson Marci McCarthy told us. “CISA has reviewed and determined that we will not participate in the RSA Conference since we regularly review all stakeholder engagements, to ensure maximum impact and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”

McCarthy declined to comment on whether the decision had anything to do with former CISA director Jen Easterly being named chief executive of RSAC last week. Easterly, who was appointed to lead America’s top cyber-defense agency under the Biden administration, joined her predecessor and CISA’s first-ever director Chris Krebs in President Trump’s line of fire back in July.

Fintraffic’s national traffic priority system, which is set to be introduced this summer, will recognize the location of an emergency vehicle and automatically change the lights to green to facilitate its passage.

(Why isn’t everyone doing this already?)