Like pretty much every other tech company in existence, Adobe has leaned heavily into AI over the past several years. The software firm has launched a number of different AI services since 2023, including Firefly — its AI-powered media-generation suite. Now, however, the company’s full-throated embrace of the technology may have led to trouble, as a new lawsuit claims it used pirated books to train one of its AI models.

A proposed class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Elizabeth Lyon, an author from Oregon, claims that Adobe used pirated versions of numerous books — including her own — to train the company’s SlimLM program.

Adobe describes SlimLM as a small language model series that can be “optimized for document assistance tasks on mobile devices.” It states that SlimLM was pre-trained on SlimPajama-627B, a “deduplicated, multi-corpora, open-source dataset” released by Cerebras in June of 2023. Lyon, who has written a number of guidebooks for non-fiction writing, says that some of her works were included in a pretraining dataset that Adobe had used.

Lyon’s lawsuit, which was originally reported on by Reuters, says that her writing was included in a processed subset of a manipulated dataset that was the basis of Adobe’s program: “The SlimPajama dataset was created by copying and manipulating the RedPajama dataset (including copying Books3),” the lawsuit says. “Thus, because it is a derivative copy of the RedPajama dataset, SlimPajama contains the Books3 dataset, including the copyrighted works of Plaintiff and the Class members.”

“Books3” — a huge collection of 191,000 books that have been used to train GenAI systems — has been an ongoing source of legal trouble for the tech community. RedPajama has also been cited in a number of litigation cases. In September, a lawsuit against Apple claimed the company had used copyrighted material to train its Apple Intelligence model. The litigation mentioned the dataset and accused the tech company of copying protected works “without consent and without credit or compensation.” In October, a similar lawsuit against Salesforce also claimed the company had used RedPajama for training purposes. 

Unfortunately for the tech industry, such lawsuits have, by now, become somewhat commonplace. AI algorithms are trained on massive datasets and, in some cases, those datasets have allegedly included pirated materials. In September, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a number of authors who had sued it and accused it of using pirated versions of their work to train its chatbot, Claude. The case was considered a potential turning point in the ongoing legal battles over copyrighted material in AI training data, of which there are many.

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Limitless clean energy is one step closer to becoming a reality, following the latest  nuclear fusion breakthrough.

Scientists from the UK and Austria have developed a new AI tool that can simulate the superheated plasma inside a fusion reactor.

The tool, dubbed GyroSwin, completes calculations within seconds that would usually take days on the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

This could help scientists to understand how to harness the unpredictable power of fusion energy and build the world’s first functioning reactors.

Fusion reactors replicate the processes found in the heart of the sun, where hydrogen atoms are smashed together and fused into helium.

However, to create a miniature star on Earth requires heating plasma to around 100,000,000°C and keeping it hot and dense enough for fusion to take place.

Since no material could withstand these temperatures, the plasma is trapped by powerful magnetic fields inside a doughnut–shaped device known as a tokamak.

With the help of GyroSwin’s simulations, engineers should be able to fine–tune these magnetic fields to create a stable fusion reaction.

Scientists from the UK and Austria have developed a new AI tool that can simulate the superheated plasma inside a fusion reactor

Nuclear fusion has the potential to create a nearly endless source of clean energy, and has previously been described as the ‘holy grail’ by scientists. 

Two types of hydrogen – deuterium and tritium – are the only fuels needed, while the only byproduct is helium.

This means there are no mountains of long–lasting radioactive waste or greenhouse gas emissions to damage the planet.

The problem is that making fusion reactors a reality requires us to harness some of the most unpredictable forces in the universe.

Superheated plasma doesn’t run around in a neat ring; it bounces and ripples in a process known as turbulence.

Co–creator of GyroSwin Dr Fabian Paischer, of the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, told Daily Mail: ‘Plasma leaks out of its magnetic cage due to turbulence, meaning it loses its potency for the fusion reaction to occur.’

For this reason, fusion reactions tend to be extremely short–lived. 

In fact, the current record for a sustained reaction sits at just 43 seconds!

Scientists use ring–shaped devices called tokamaks (pictured) to trap plasma in a magnetic cage. However, since plasma is turbulent, it tends to leak out of its cage over time  

What is nuclear fusion?

Nuclear fusion is a potentially limitless source of clean energy created by the same core processes inside the sun.

Using intense heat, magnetic fields and pressure, the nuclei of lighter elements are fused together to create heavier elements, releasing energy in the process.

By containing this star-like process in specially designed reactors, engineers can fuse hydrogen atoms together to produce helium, harnessing the clean energy produced and potentially cutting dependency on fossil fuels.

To keep a fusion reaction going indefinitely, scientists will need extremely accurate simulations of how turbulence forms under different conditions.

Since the dynamics inside a plasma are so complex, you can’t use the same kinds of simulations that we use to predict the weather or the flow of liquids.

The current best simulations track particles of plasma in five dimensions: three for their locations, one for their speed, and one for their direction relative to the magnetic field.

However, these simulations take days to complete, even when they are being run on the world’s best supercomputers.

GyroSwin, which has been developed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), Johannes Kepler University in Linz and an Austrian firm Emmi AI, offers a different solution.

Scientists first run extremely accurate – but expensive and slow – simulations on traditional supercomputers.

The results of these simulations are then used to train an AI so that it can learn to predict the subtle relationships between cause and effect.

Once the training is complete, GyroSwin can skip over the complex calculations and make predictions about the outcome of simulations in seconds rather than days.

By simulating the conditions inside a tokamak reactor, researchers can find ways to make the plasma less turbulent and ensure that nuclear fusion reactions last longer. Pictured: A staff member performs an upgrade to China’s experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST) 

These types of ‘AI surrogate model’ aren’t new, but what makes GyroSwin so exciting is just how accurate it appears to be.

Dr Paischer says: ‘GyroSwin is the first model that actually models the full plasma turbulence in all its beauty and across multiple scales.

‘Previous approaches only tried to model turbulence in a reduced form, meaning they always neglect important information to make predictions more efficient at the cost of accuracy.’

Importantly, the model is already starting to show signs of capturing the underlying physics of plasma turbulence.

While the AI will still need some traditional simulations to keep improving its training, it could speed up the production of working nuclear reactors.

Rob Akers, Director of Computing Programmes at UKAEA, told Daily Mail: ‘Fusion development is highly iterative, and credible designs can require very large numbers of simulations.

‘Cutting turnaround from days to seconds can speed up design loops and “what if” exploration dramatically.

‘It won’t solve fusion on its own, but it can materially speed up the engineering cycle –which is exactly what you need on the path to a working fusion machine.’

Currently, the record for a sustained fusion reaction is held by the Wendelstein 7–X fusion device, which maintained fusion for 43 seconds. This new AI tool could help future reactors maintain fusion indefinitely

In its current form, GyroSwin is a proof of concept, but the researchers plan on scaling it up for more practical scenarios.

The goal is to use the AI to guide fusion reactors that are already running or are soon to be built.

That could include the MAST Upgrade experimental tokamak that is under construction near Oxford, or the UK’s flagship STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) project, which aims to build a functioning prototype reactor by the 2040s.

Although a real, fully functioning fusion reactor is still within the realm of science fiction, these fundamental breakthroughs bring it a little bit closer to reality.

HOW A FUSION REACTOR WORKS

Fusion is the process by which a gas is heated up and separated into its constituent ions and electrons. 

It involves light elements, such as hydrogen, smashing together to form heavier elements, such as helium. 

For fusion to occur, hydrogen atoms are placed under high heat and pressure until they fuse together.

The tokamak (artist’s impression) is the most developed magnetic confinement system and is the basis for the design of many modern fusion reactors. The purple at the center of the diagram shows the plasma inside 

When deuterium and tritium nuclei – which can be found in hydrogen – fuse, they form a helium nucleus, a neutron and a lot of energy.

This is done by heating the fuel to temperatures in excess of 150 million°C and forming a hot plasma, a gaseous soup of subatomic particles.

Strong magnetic fields are used to keep the plasma away from the reactor’s walls, so that it doesn’t cool down and lose its energy potential.

These fields are produced by superconducting coils surrounding the vessel and by an electrical current driven through the plasma.

For energy production, plasma has to be confined for a sufficiently long period for fusion to occur.

When ions get hot enough, they can overcome their mutual repulsion and collide, fusing together. 

When this happens, they release around one million times more energy than a chemical reaction and three to four times more than a conventional nuclear fission reactor.

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Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the next administrator of NASA. The private astronaut and founder of the Shift4 payments processing platform will now be in charge of an agency that faces great uncertainty under President Trump.

Isaacman’s confirmation comes a little over a year after Trump nominated him. It was a volatile year for Isaacman, though, as Trump pulled his nomination in June after becoming concerned about the billionaire’s “prior associations.” (Isaacman had previously donated to Democrats, something Trump was reportedly aware of when he first nominated the entrepreneur.)

That led to months of sniping between Trump’s camp and people more closely aligned with Isaacman, like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who publicly attacked the credibility of acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy. Trump ultimately flipped in November and re-nominated Isaacman.

The billionaire will now oversee a trimmed-down space agency that Trump has tasked with returning to the Moon. SpaceX has a contract to land astronauts on the lunar surface, though Duffy had threatened to revoke that contract, and encouraged Jeff Bezos’ rival company Blue Origin to try to beat Musk’s effort.

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By STACY LIBERATORE, US SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR

Published: 16:19 EST, 17 December 2025 | Updated: 16:38 EST, 17 December 2025

Air traffic into two of the nation’s busiest airports was disrupted on Tuesday due to staffing shortages, triggering widespread delays across the US. 

At Dallas–Fort Worth (DFW), arrival delays reached up to 63 minutes after the FAA reduced traffic flow because of limited staffing, restricted runway use and sudden pop-up weather. 

Arrivals are being funneled onto just three runways while departures are limited to two, sharply cutting airport capacity during the evening peak. 

At Newark Liberty (EWR), the situation is more severe, with delays climbing to 95 minutes as staffing shortages were compounded by the loss of Runway 22L, which was taken out of service. 

Arrival rates at EWR were slashed to as low as 32 aircraft per hour, affecting flights from nearly every major US region and several Canadian airports.

The FAA indicated that weather was only a minor factor at Newark, with staffing and runway availability driving the disruption. 

Ground stops were lifted, but delays persisted due to ongoing capacity constraints. 

The disruptions come just months after the government shutdown in October, which led to widespread flight delays and staffing disruptions across the nation’s air traffic control system.

At Dallas–Fort Worth (DFW), arrival delays reached up to 63 minutes after the FAA reduced traffic flow because of limited staffing, restricted runway use and sudden pop-up weather (STOCK)

DFW is one of the world’s busiest airports, handling massive passenger volumes, with over 87.8 million passengers in 2024, making it the world’s third busiest.

The airport is expecting nearly 90 million in 2025, averaging over 189,000 travelers daily and projecting even higher numbers for busy periods like during the holidays. 

While final 2025 figures are not out, EWR saw strong recovery and growth in 2025, with August alone hitting 4.5 million passengers, up four percent from 2024.

The New Jersey-based airport sees tens of thousands of travelers daily, with averages around 40,000 passengers and nearly 1,200 daily flights 

However, peak days can exceed 80,000 passengers, especially during summer, serving over 45 airlines with global connections.

At DFW, arrival rates were set at 72 aircraft per hour, with delays applied to all contiguous US departures within a 1,600-mile departure scope, while Canadian departure airports were excluded. 

While EWR’s arrival rates are set at 34 to 32 aircraft per hour.

The government shutdown lasted for a historic 43 days, beating the last that hit 35 days in 2018 to 2019. Both occurred while President Donald Trump was in office. 

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Travel nightmare at America’s busiest airports as staffing shortages spark widespread flight delays

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YouTube is pulling its data from Billboard for use in the publisher’s industry-leading U.S. music charts. The decision is in response to a recent change Billboard made to its ranking formula, which continues to add more weight to paid, on-demand streaming compared with ad-supported, free streaming.

Billboard justified its decision to adjust its age-old formula by saying that the change will “better reflect an increase in streaming revenue and changing consumer behaviors.”

In other words, streaming now matters more than buying albums or songs, so it wants its charts to reflect that.

However, YouTube doesn’t like the new formula because it doesn’t want there to be much — if any — differentiation between free and paid streams, especially if the changes are meant to reflect how consumers today are enjoying music.

“Billboard uses an outdated formula that weights subscription-supported streams higher than ad-supported. This doesn’t reflect how fans engage with music today and ignores the massive engagement from fans who don’t have a subscription,” a YouTube blog post published on Wednesday explains. “Streaming is the primary way people experience music, making up 84% of U.S. recorded music revenue.”

“We’re simply asking that every stream is counted fairly and equally, whether it is subscription-based or ad-supported—because every fan matters and every play should count,” the post notes.

The ranking changes will be reflected starting with the charts published on January 17, which will include data from January 2-8, 2026. This will impact the Billboard 200 lists and genre-based album charts. In addition, the ratio between paid/subscription and ad-supported on-demand streaming tiers will be adjusted to 2.5:1 for the Billboard Hot 100, Billboard said.

To protest the new formula, YouTube said it will no longer provide data to Billboard after January 16, 2026.

Here’s what that change means in practice: Under the revised calculation, Billboard said it will take 33.3% fewer ad-supported on-demand streams of songs from an album, and 20% fewer paid/subscription on-demand streams of songs from an album, to equal an album unit. In short, it will take fewer streams than before for an album to climb the charts. This is a win for streaming in general but not necessarily for YouTube.

Here’s why. At present, the formula Billboard uses defines an album unit (the standard measurement for chart rankings) as one album sale. It counts 10 individual songs from an album as one album consumption unit, as well.

On the streaming side, it currently says an album unit equals 3,750 ad-supported streams — like YouTube’s — or 1,250 paid/subscription official audio and video streams.

After the changes, those figures will be adjusted, so it will take 2,500 ad-supported streams or 1,000 paid/subscription streams to count as one album unit. This means paid streams count 2.5x as much as ad-supported streams. While that’s less of a gap than the current 3:1 ratio, it’s still not what YouTube would prefer seeing here. The company is essentially doing what companies do in failed negotiations like this: it’s taking its ball and going home.

Of course, by not cooperating with Billboard, YouTube’s music data won’t be considered in chart rankings, which could lead labels and artists to deprioritize publishing their music on YouTube. That’s not a good long-term strategy for YouTube as an important player in the streaming music era. That’s why this move should be viewed as the negotiation tactic it is.

“We are committed to achieving equitable representation across the charts and hopefully can work with Billboard to return to theirs,” YouTube’s announcement concludes.

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Fifa will finally release its much-anticipated return to video games in 2026, several years after its acrimonious split with developer EA.

But it is Netflix, rather than a major game studio, which has secured the rights to the upcoming football game.

Once one of the most profitable brands in gaming history, issues including a costly licence prompted Fifa’s previous publisher Electronic Arts to stop using the name in 2023 – instead naming its best-selling game EA Sports FC.

Netflix said the new Fifa would be developed and published by Delphi Interactive – which has yet to release a video game – and released ahead of the 2026 World Cup.

It said subscribers will be able to play online via the Netflix app on iOS and Android devices – or on select TVs by using their phone as the controller.

EA Sports released the first Fifa game in 1993, and ran the franchise for 30 years until moving away from the branding to create its own.

The series was estimated to have around 150 million players.

But the renamed game still connected with fans – with EA FC 24 being the best-selling game in the UK in 2023.

Fifa president Gianni Infantino said the football governing body was “very excited” to team up with Netflix Games ahead of the World Cup in 2026.

“Our reimagined game truly marks the beginning of a new era of digital football,” he said.

“It will be available for free to Netflix members and is a great historic step for Fifa.”

California-based Delphi Interactive, the studio behind the game, is also working in partnership with IO Interactive on a new James Bond title, 007: First Light.

The firm’s boss Casper Daugaard said as “lifelong Fifa fans” it wanted to make the game “the most fun, approachable, and global football game ever created”.

Reaction to the announcement has so far been mixed, with some fans questioning whether the mobile-first focus from Netflix was the way forward for the franchise.

“FIFA should never have left EA,” said one person on social media site X.

“Let’s see what the new game’s got.”

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When the billionaire chief executive of AI chipmaker Nvidia threw a party in central London for Donald Trump’s state visit in September, the power imbalance between Silicon Valley and British politicians was vividly exposed.

Jensen Huang hastened to the stage after meetings at Chequers and rallied his hundreds of guests to cheer on the power of AI. In front of a huge Nvidia logo, he urged the venture capitalists before him to herald “a new industrial revolution”, announced billions of pounds in AI investments and, like Willy Wonka handing out golden tickets, singled out some lucky recipients in the room.

“If you want to get rich, this is where you want to be,” he declared.

But his biggest party trick was a surprise guest waiting in the wings. At Huang’s cue, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, walked out as the crowd whooped at Huang’s pulling power.

Starmer, looking slightly dazed, saluted his host’s “absolutely phenomenal” presentation, told the audience about how he had been “texting away” with Huang and effusively thanked one of the world’s richest men for his “confidence in what we are doing, in your investment, your foresight”. Huang sent him away with a gift: an inscribed AI processing unit.

Not done, Huang called to the stage Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, followed by Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for business. The parade of British cabinet ministers at this private Nvidia event spoke volumes about how successfully US tech oligarchs have pulled British politicians – serving and former – into their orbit.

This week, they landed another big fish. The $500bn ChatGPT maker, Open AI, hired the former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, prompting him to gush he was joining “the most exciting and promising company in the world”.

He was just the latest senior figure to pass through the revolving door between Westminster and Silicon Valley. In October, the former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak took advisory roles with Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s main rivals, and with Microsoft, which has invested heavily in both AI startups. Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak’s chief of staff, who sits in the House of Lords, also this summer took a senior role at Anthropic after it signed a memorandum of understanding with the UK government.

They followed the former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who spent seven years leading public affairs for Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, which runs Instagram and Facebook. Clegg is now an AI investor who last week predicted “we will move from staring at the internet to living in the internet”. He made tens of millions of dollars at Meta. Some reports said as much as $100m. He would not confirm that, but said he was paid “extremely well”.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair, prime minister for a decade until 2007, is becoming increasingly influential on technology policy, lobbying successfully, through his Tony Blair Institute (TBI), for the UK to introduce a digital ID.

TBI is part-funded by the foundation of Larry Ellison, the founder and chief executive of Oracle. A former TBI policy expert, Kirsty Innes, recently became a special adviser to Kendall.

The Commons science, innovation and technology select committee is monitoring the revolving door situation. Alex Sobel MP, a member of parliament’s joint committee on human rights, which is investigating AI, said: “I am deeply concerned tech companies may be using their huge buying power to water down much-needed regulation by hiring those who have served at the highest level of previous governments.”

Jobs with the biggest US AI companies could be a good fit for frontline politicians because they also required comfort with risk-taking, said one tech company insider. Another advantage is that tech leaders do not tend to demand polished management skills. Meanwhile, their value is growing, as AI companies increasingly target their products at government clients as well as businesses and consumers. Osborne’s task appears to be to wedge his foot in the door of governments to help OpenAI inject its technology into the bloodstream of public systems. It already has government-level arrangements with Argentina, Australia, Germany, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, the UK, Greece, Estonia and Kazakhstan, but it wants more.

Selling state-level AI is competitive. Palantir, which hosted Starmer at its Washington base in February and signed a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Defence in September, is pushing its systems into health trusts, police forces and local councils in Britain. The company’s UK communications are being led by a former head of strategic communications at Downing Street.

Britain is an important place for AI firms to gain influence: regulations on AI development remain looser than in the EU, its universities foster important innovations, and the UK also has one of the world’s most respected AI safety institutes.

The revolving door also spins the other way, sending tech industry people into positions of public influence. The UK government last month appointed Raia Hadsell, the vice-president of research at Google DeepMind, as an “AI ambassador”, alongside Tom Blomfield, the founder of the online bank Monzo. Blomfield is also a partner at Y Combinator, the San Francisco startup incubator that used to be led by Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.

Civil servants from the government’s digital service set up a consultancy called Public Digital, which has since won millions of pounds worth of public contracts. One of its partners, Emily Middleton, last year took a senior director general role in the government’s digital service.

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The dome built over the remains of the Chernobyl disaster has been damaged, raising fears it may no longer be able to contain radioactive material.

Officially known as the New Safe Confinement (NSC), the at least $2 billion protective shield was constructed over Reactor 4, which caused the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a nuclear watchdog, revealed this month that the NSC was severely damaged in a Russian drone strike in February. 

The IAEA team conducted a safety assessment earlier this month, finding the dome had lost its primary safety functions, including confinement capability.

IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi said: ‘Limited temporary repairs have been carried out on the roof, but timely and comprehensive restoration remains essential to prevent further degradation and ensure long-term nuclear safety.’

The inspection brought some relief, confirming that the dome’s main structure and monitoring systems remain intact. 

But beneath the damaged shelter lies massive quantities of radioactive material from the 1986 disaster, making the site a ticking time bomb.

The IAEA has urged urgent repairs and upgrades to Chernobyl’s protective shelter, calling for better humidity control, advanced corrosion monitoring, and a high-tech automatic system to keep the radioactive reactor remains under control. 

Nuclear watchdogs discovered this month that the dome built over the remains of the Chernobyldisaster has been damaged

It began on April 26, 1986, with the explosion of Reactor 4 that led to the largest release of radioactive material into the environment in human history

The damaged dome is the latest of several such expert missions since September last year, when the substations became increasingly affected by the military conflict.

‘These substations are essential for nuclear safety and security. They are absolutely indispensable for providing the electricity all nuclear power plants need for reactor cooling and other safety systems,’ Grossi said.

‘They are also needed to distribute the electricity that they produce to households and industry.’

In 2026, with support from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Chornobyl site will undertake additional temporary repairs to support the re-establishment of the NSC’s confinement function, paving the way for full restoration once the conflict ends.

‘The IAEA – which has a team permanently at the site – will continue to do everything it can to support efforts to fully restore nuclear safety and security at the Chornobyl site,’ Grossi said in a statement.

It began on April 26, 1986, with the explosion of Reactor 4 that led to the largest release of radioactive material into the environment in human history.

Around 30 to 50 people died from immediate blast trauma or acute radiation sickness in the first few months after the disaster

Following the tragic event, humans were evacuated from Chernobyl and the surrounding areas to avoid the extreme levels of radiation. 

The IAEA team conducted a safety assessment earlier this month, finding the dome had lost its primary safety functions, including confinement capability

Pictured is someone measuring levels of radioactivity in the area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power in 1990

While long-term deaths from radiation-induced cancers are harder to quantify, the UN Chernobyl Forum estimated up to 4,000 eventual fatalities among highly exposed populations, though figures vary widely, with Greenpeace suggesting tens of thousands, highlighting the difficulty in assessing the full toll. 

From then on, the site was known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ).

The absence of humans has allowed wildlife to flourish and thrive in the CEZ, which contains 11.28 millirem of radiation, six times the allowed exposure amount for human workers. 

A study in 2024 found that the dogs had mutated to develop a new superpower – they are immune to radiation, heavy metals and pollution. 

Scientists collected blood samples from 116 stray dogs living in the CEZ, finding two different populations that were both genetically distinct from other dogs in the surrounding area.

This suggests the animals have adapted to withstand long-term exposure to this toxic environment and would explain why they have continued to thrive in the wasteland.

Norman J Kleiman, an environmental health scientist at Columbia University, led a team of researchers to investigate how living in this harsh environment impacted the dogs’ genetics, as disasters that contaminate or destroy habitat can force wildlife to adapt to adverse environmental changes.

He and his colleagues collected blood samples from 116 ‘semi-feral’ dogs, which were humanely captured around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and 10 miles away in Chernobyl City.

These samples were taken during sterilization and vaccination procedures conducted by the Clean Futures Fund Dogs of Chernobyl program in 2018 and 2019.

Officially known as the New Safe Confinement (NSC), the at least $2 billion protective shield was constructed over Reactor 4, which caused the world’s worst nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986

The blood samples were then transported to the US for DNA extraction and analysis, which revealed the dogs’ unique genetic makeup.

‘Somehow, two small populations of dogs managed to survive in that highly toxic environment,’ Kleiman said in a statement.

‘In addition to classifying the population dynamics within these dogs . . . we took the first steps towards understanding how chronic exposure to multiple environmental hazards may have impacted these populations.’

He and his colleagues published their findings in the journal Canine Medicine and Genetics in March 2023.

Specifically, the researchers found nearly 400 ‘outlier loci,’ or genomic locations that show behavior or patterns of variation that are extremely divergent from the rest of the genome.

Then, they identified 52 genes associated with these outlier loci that ‘could be associated with exposure to the contamination of the environment at the Nuclear Power Plant,’ the study states.

In other words, the dogs’ contaminated environment caused them to develop genetic mutations that were passed down from generation to generation, ultimately driving their adaptation to the harsh conditions.

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Finding reliable domestic help in Nigeria is often difficult. It is a trust-lacking, informal industry where users rely on word-of-mouth referrals to find competent home care agents. Shaaré, a Nigerian home service marketplace that connects households to vetted cleaners known on the platform as sparklers, was built in 2023 to fill that gap.

Domestic work in Nigeria operates within the largely informal labour market. According to a 2025 report by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), 93% of the nation’s workforce was employed in the informal sector in 2024. Unlike formal sectors that offer clear dispute mechanisms or legal backing, Nigeria’s informal workforce sometimes lacks access to protection and labour rights enjoyed in regulated employment, especially for domestic workers whose jobs don’t follow a regular schedule and are outside the formal employment frameworks. Shaaré intended to use its platform to connect the domestic workers who fall among these 93% to households that require their services.

But for a long time, even this tech-enabled solution came with a significant challenge of speed. Shaaré’s promise to refine the experience of service delivery came with a significant caveat of speed. While the platform offered a vetted alternative to the informal domestic cleaning market, its backend operations were manual and slow. Customers would sometimes wait up to 12 hours to get a booking confirmation. 

On December 17, the company launched an instant matching feature, a new algorithmic system designed to automatically pair a paid booking with the best fit sparkler immediately. “It’s the biggest leap we’ve ever made as a company,” Awazi Angbalaga, founder of Shaaré, said. “It’s designed to transform how bookings happen, how work moves, and how fast we can offer great service.”

Instant matching and why Shaaré built it

Shaaré’s origins were decidedly low-tech. The company began in 2023 as a simple WhatsApp group where Angbalaga manually connected a handful of cleaners with friends and family who needed help. 

“It was very scrappy,” she admitted, noting they were faced with issues, including payment collection. To solve the problem, the team set up a Paystack storefront, typically used for e-commerce, and created over 200 product variations to cover every possible combination of a bedroom, guest toilet, and weekly service, services that could be offered. 

Behind the scenes, the operation ran on Google Sheets and a web of no-code automations that Angbalaga cobbled together herself. The new instant matching replaces that workflow with an automated system that ranks sparklers based on several factors, including location, availability, skill fit, and past performance ratings. Once a customer completes payment, the system surfaces the best-fit sparkler and updates their calendar immediately. It also provides the ability for users to book a preferred sparkler if they want a specific cleaner they have come to trust.

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The trust deficit

Technology may reduce delays and double bookings, but it doesn’t erase the deeper trust issues that plague the informal sector, including fears of theft, misconduct, or incompetence. For a platform like Shaaré that acts as an intermediary, the reputational risks are high. Angbalaga acknowledges that trust is the true product, describing the company as a care layer integrated into the tech ecosystem. 

To mitigate the risks inherent in sending strangers into private homes, the company enforces a vetting process that includes verifying home addresses, demanding guarantors, checking work history, and training during the onboarding process. 

Angbalaga admits that despite the new automation, the company still relies heavily on customer feedback to police quality. 

“We depend on our customers to know what truly is going on at the moments where we don’t have eyes,” she said, noting that human intervention and investigation remain a critical safety net. “The moment we hear back from customers on anything, we take that really seriously.”

Shaaré is not alone in trying to organise this sector. Companies like Eden Life pioneered subscription-based concierge models, while others like SweepSouth, the South African marketplace that expanded into Nigeria in 2022, focus on managed cleaning teams or ad-hoc bookings. What sets Shaaré apart, according to Angbalaga, is its emphasis on on-demand access without subscriptions. 

The platform operates on an 80/20 revenue split, with 80% going to the sparkler. To ensure fair pricing in a city where no two apartments are alike, Shaaré uses a dynamic pricing calculator. The tool adjusts rates based on home size, factoring in that a four-bedroom home in Lagos likely includes extra living areas, and calculates transport stipends automatically based on the worker’s location.

Shaaré has remained bootstrapped, a choice Angbalaga says allowed the company to validate the market demand without the pressure of artificial growth. Now, the challenge is synchronisation. While the platform’s technical capacity has effectively levelled up with this update, its ground operations are still playing catch-up. 

“Operationally, we’re not there, but we’re going to get there, and that means more cities for Shaaré, more jobs, and more customers served,” Angbalaga said. In a market where most households still rely on referrals and intuition, Shaaré bets that its structure can earn trust.

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On Wednesday, Cisco announced hackers are exploiting a critical vulnerability in some of its most popular products that allows the full takeover of affected devices. Worse, there are no patches available at this time.

In a security advisory, Cisco said it discovered a hacking campaign on December 10 targeting Cisco AsyncOS software, and in particular the physical and virtual appliances Cisco Secure Email Gateway, Cisco Secure Email, and Web Manager. The advisory said affected devices have a feature called “Spam Quarantine” enabled and are reachable from the internet. 

Cisco noted that this feature is not enabled by default and does not need to be exposed to the internet, which may be good news. Michael Taggart, a senior cybersecurity researcher at UCLA Health Sciences, told TechCrunch that “the requirement of an internet-facing management interface and certain features being enabled will limit the attack surface for this vulnerability.”

However, Kevin Beaumont, a security researcher who tracks hacking campaigns, told TechCrunch that this appears to be a particularly problematic hacking campaign since a lot of big organizations use the affected products, there are no patches available, and it’s unclear how long the hackers had backdoors in the affected systems. 

At this point Cisco is not saying how many customers are affected.

When reached by TechCrunch, Cisco spokesperson Meredith Corley did not answer a series of questions, and instead said that the company “is actively investigating the issue and developing a permanent remediation.”

Contact Us

Do you have more information about this hacking campaign? Such as what companies were targeted? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email.

The solution Cisco is suggesting to customers right now is essentially to wipe and rebuild the affected products’ software, as there is no patch available. 

“​​In case of confirmed compromise, rebuilding the appliances is, currently, the only viable option to eradicate the threat actors persistence mechanism from the appliance,” the company wrote. 

The hackers behind the campaign are linked to China and other known Chinese government hacking groups, according to Cisco Talos, the company’s threat intelligence research team, which published a blog post about the hacking campaign. 

The researchers wrote that the hackers are taking advantage of the vulnerability, which at this point is a zero-day, to install persistent backdoors, and that the campaign has been ongoing “since at least late November 2025.”

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