Mercedes-Benz (MBG.DE) on Friday spun out into a new company a group of chip experts in Silicon Valley that is working on creating a new generation of computing brains for self-driving cars, drones and other vehicles.
Athos Silicon, based in Santa Clara, California, will house a group of engineers who for five years worked at Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America to develop the new chips, which aim to be safe enough for use in cars while using less energy than existing chips.
As part of the spinout, Athos is receiving intellectual property developed by the group and what Mercedes-Benz described as a "significant" investment, though neither the carmaker nor Athos disclosed the value of the transaction.
For chips used in cars, reliability is key, so critical self-driving functions are often handled by two or more separate chips in order to have backups in case of a failure. The Athos team developed a way to get the same kind of reliability using "chiplets," which are tiny pieces of chips that can be bound together in a single package.
Keeping the chips in a single package can use 10 to 20 times less power than having separate chips that must communicate with one another across a circuit board, Athos Silicon Chief Executive Charnjiv Bangar said in an interview on Friday. Those power savings are important in electric vehicles where the car's computing brains must compete with its wheels for limited battery power.
"For an electric future, electricity is a new currency," Bangar said.
Athos Silicon intends to raise venture capital from other investors. Bangar declined to disclose Mercedes-Benz's precise stake, but said the carmaker will be a minority shareholder and the chip firm will have an independent board.
"Independence is important for Athos, so that we can reach out to other (carmakers), competitors of Mercedes. We need to make sure we have a neutral approach," Bangar said.
Denmark’s Genmab A/S is in advanced talks to acquire Merus NV, a Dutch drugmaker that’s developing a treatment for cancer of the head and neck, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Merus has received takeover offers in recent weeks from large drug companies and could announce a deal within days, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private.
According to experts, the best way to maintain a new habit is to track it. I’ve recently taken up running. And as runners typically do, I’m now hooked on tracking my distance, measuring my pace, and setting goals to get better. Naturally, this sent me down the rabbit hole of finding the best tracking device.
There are many options. From Fitbit to Apple Watch to Garmin, there’s a wide variety of gadgets to monitor our habits. Especially since it’s a growing market. According to Yahoo Finance, the global fitness tracker market was valued at $52.29 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $189.98 billion by 2032, growing 17.5 percent every year from 2026 to 2032. Looks like more and more people are interested in quantifying our health.
Beyond smartwatches, there are also rings. Oura, a Finnish company, pioneered data tracking 10 years ago through a smart ring. The design is unobtrusive, and yet it has the capacity to measure all kinds of information, of course, at a price. To access its full power, you need to pay $349 for the ring plus a $6 monthly subscription.
The Wall Street Journalreported last year that Oura is “the leading smart-ring brand, with over 60 percent of the market,” representing 5 million rings sold worldwide.
Oura and its competitors Ringcon and Ultrahuman have become popular for rings with nice aesthetics as well as a good capacity to track steps, heart rate, sleep cycles, and even menstrual health. But competition will be no more: earlier this year, the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled against Ultrahuman and Ringcon for patent infringement, effectively banning them from import and sales in the U.S. market starting Oct. 21.
These rings may be less benign than they seem. On Aug. 27, Oura sent out a press release announcing a partnership with the Department of Defense (now unofficially renamed Department of War) and Palantir’s FedStart platform to support “population-level analysis of risk and readiness.” Whatever that means. This triggered all kinds of online backlash over privacy concerns.
On the one hand, private companies profit from collecting data, but only if consumers willingly participate. If users feel betrayed, we cancel our subscriptions, delete the apps, and move on. That’s the market feedback loop. But it looks like the concern isn’t really about the companies but the possibility of the government accessing this private health data.
We’ve seen what this looks like in countries where the state is more overarching. In China, health surveillance is routine, and health data has become a tool for social control, especially after COVID. There’s a growing concern over the data leviathan wherein the alliance of tech companies and the state enables “social governance” in what some are naming a new era of “digital authoritarianism.”
Science fiction, the art of “what ifs,” has long warned us of this. Some might remember Gattaca, where genetic information dictates social status. What appeared as a futuristic dystopia is getting closer to home. Cutting through the noise of social media, it seems like there’s a legitimate fear.
To be fair, most of us are already handing over vast amounts of personal information. Amazon knows our purchase patterns, Instagram holds our photos, and Google tracks nearly everything in between. It’s quite possible the government is aware of all of this. It’s not as if avoiding a smart ring or a fitness tracker puts us “off the grid.” The difference is one of intimacy: we’re measuring our sleep cycles, stress levels, physical recoveries—it’s the literal state of our bodies.
While concerns might be overblown on social media, it does warrant the question: Should we be more careful and intentional about who we are sharing our sensitive data with?
Granted, no one is forcing us to purchase these devices, but what’s concerning is how little thought is put into the amount of information we are willingly giving to tech companies, especially if it comes in a cute ring that goes with everyday lifestyle, but even more, whether or not there’s a government overreach and how they might use the info.
In the meantime, I’ll keep running and tracking “manually,” and because I bring my phone with me, I’ll be sharing my health info with Apple (and Strava for my two friends who cheer me on, even though, as FEE’s Editorial Director pointed out a few months ago, it’s leaking information). Until then, please read the terms and conditions. We might be feeding the machines & co. more information than we should. It’s not about what we’re tracking; in reality, it’s about who is tracking us.
Vice President J.D. Vance commented on the negotiations over government funding on Capitol Hill during an interview this morning on "FOX News Sunday."
VICE PRESIDENT J.D. VANCE: We don't want to shut down the government, Martha, but it's really up to the Democrats.
Under our system, you need 60 Senate Democrats to vote for the clean continuing resolution that the president and House Republicans have put forward. I think it's preposterous, Martha. And I think the American people really should pay attention to the fact that Democrats are threatening to shut down the entire government because they want to give hundreds of billions of dollars of health care benefits to illegal aliens.
I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen a political party actually advertising the fact that they want to shut down every essential function of government and they want to use that as leverage so that they get more money for illegal alien health care benefits.
It's such a stark contrast between Republicans, who are trying to put the interest of the American people first, and Democrats, who I think just want to take money from the American people to give benefits to illegal aliens. We don't want to shut down the government.
But if Democrats refuse to just pass this clean continuing resolution, that's exactly what's going to happen. And I think the Democrats are going to bear the responsibility for it.
Katy, Texas is a town of 28,972 people on the west outskirts of Houston. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s hardly surprising. If you have—and that’s unlikely—it’s probably because a kid’s baseball game in Katy was recently shot up by three people—“Texas men”--and there’s compelling evidence they were jihadists.
So, why wouldn’t you have heard about it? Because the media does its best to maintain their prized narratives, and they hide anything that damages those narratives. When Islamists or trans commit acts of domestic terrorism, the Media try to avoid reporting at all. If that doesn’t, they don’t admit they’re jihadists or trans: “Texas men.” If that doesn’t work, they try to blame it on MAGA, white men, Republicans and always Trump. And when that doesn’t work, they tell us we may never know the motive, despite Islamists yelling: “Alah Akbar! They also fret about how the Islamist slaughter will affect the “Muslim Community.” When trans leave all manner of social media and “manifesto” evidence they’re trans and explain why they murdered, that’s why we can never know a motive.
President Trump recently told a press gaggle NBC was the worst network. Here’s why:
Graphic: X Post
Several gunshots rang out during the game, and one of the bullets ricocheted off a pole and struck the 27-year-old coach, NBC affiliate KPRC of Houston reported. [skip]
Video of the shooting posted to Facebook appears to show a number of players and coaches warming up on the field as multiple loud pops are heard. After a few seconds, they all run off the field and for cover. Voices in the video can be heard instructing people to "get down."
The Rac said the shooting may have occurred as a result of illegal hunting, which it said is common in the "country."
"People shoot on their land all the time. At the time we were unaware of anything in season," The Rac wrote in a Facebook comment. "Now that we have more information, we know that there were 3 individuals target practicing 600/700 yards away."
Call me a wackydoodle, but that doesn't sound like hunting. Nor does it sound like the shooters are 600-700 yards away.
"There was bullets flying everywhere. It wasn't one shot," Assistant Coach (for a different team) Corbin Geisendorff stated. "There's bullets flying everywhere off the poles, onto the field. It's just unbelievable.
As it turns out, three military-age men were arrested and charged with a felony each:
Graphic: Police mug shots. Public Domain.
Mahmood Abdelsalam Rababah, 23
Ahmad Mawed, 21
Mustafa Mohammad Matalgah, 27
No. They’re not Irish. Or MAGA. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security isn’t impressed, as The Texan reports:
Matalgah, as highlighted by the DHS, was granted citizenship in 2023 “despite prior arrests for drug possession.” Mawed, a 21-year-old from Lebanon, was granted entry into the U.S. in 2021 on an IR-2 visa “which automatically made him a legal permanent resident,” DHS asserted.
The DHS described the two as “the MONSTERS who opened fire on a children’s baseball field in Katy, Texas,” in an X post highlighting Matalgah and Mawed’s origins.
“This horrific act of terror, the firing on children praying before the start of a baseball game, is pure evil,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a press release on Friday.
“These individuals from high threat counties were let in by the Biden Administration. They clearly were not vetting the aliens they were letting legally enter our country and even become U.S. citizens,” McLaughlin continued.
“Not only did Biden fail the American people by leaving our borders wide open to criminals, but he also legally allowed them to gain status and citizenship to terrorize our communities.”
Surprise! Somehow, the mainstream media didn’t report on this aspect of the story, a story easily found by a regional Texas outlet. Of course, they didn’t report the three were Muslims, nor did they report since each is facing the same charge, it’s likely all three were shooting, which would support the witness cited by PJ Media.
I’ve been writing for several years about the virtual certainly of large-scale terrorist attacks across America, as in Terrorist attacks in America: just a matter of time? in July of 2024. Perhaps these three all-American lads just happened to be shooting at something with enough elevation to hit an occupied baseball field off in the distance. Perhaps they aren’t really Islamists. Perhaps we ought to worry about how this will affect the Muslim Community? Or perhaps we ought to find out if this was an Islamist precursor to more and worse.
Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog isStately McDaniel Manor.
Veracyte, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCYT), a leading genomic diagnostics company, announced that new data from the prospective, randomized integral biomarker BALANCE trial (NCT03371719) finds that the PAM50 molecular signature predicts which patients with recurrent prostate cancer benefit from hormone therapy with apalutamide in addition to salvage radiation therapy. The prostate PAM50 biomarker is currently available for Research Use Only on the Decipher GRID (Genomic Resource for Intelligent Discovery) research tool.
The new findings were shared today by Daniel Spratt, M.D., University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center, Case Western Reserve University, in a podium presentation at ASTRO 2025, the annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology, being held in San Francisco.
"Our findings mark the first time, to my knowledge, that a predictive biomarker has been validated in a prospective, biomarker-driven, randomized trial in non-metastatic prostate cancer," said Dr. Spratt. "Thus, this is an unprecedented advancement for patients who can be more-precisely selected to receive hormone therapy or forego the treatment and the potential side effects."
For the study, 295 men with recurrent, non-metastatic prostate cancer following prostate-removal surgery were randomly assigned to salvage radiation therapy with a placebo or apalutamide for 6 months. The PAM50 biomarker was a key stratification variable to ensure each arm had a similar proportion of luminal B and non-luminal B subtypes. They were followed for a median of 5 years during which they were evaluated for biochemical failure, which is a rise in levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) post treatment—an early sign of salvage therapy failure. Among the 127 men with luminal B molecular subtype tumors (as determined by the PAM50 signature), 72% of those taking apalutamide did not experience biochemical failure, as compared to the 54% rate in the placebo group [HR 0.45 (80% CI 0.29-0.68), p=0.0062]. In the non-luminal B subset, there was no difference between those taking apalutamide versus placebo (70% vs 71%) [HR 0.95 (80% CI 0.65-1.41), p=0.44].
"These results from NRG GU006 represent the highest level of evidence to support routine biomarker testing in recurrent prostate cancer patients planned to receive secondary radiotherapy," Dr. Spratt added. "With such a strong difference in the metastasis-free survival response to hormone therapy between luminal B and non-luminal-B tumors, the use of the predictive PAM50 biomarker is a game changer to help personalize treatment for men with recurrent prostate cancer beyond merely prognostic tools."
The PAM50 signature is the third biomarker—assessed through the whole-transcriptome-based Decipher platform—that a major study has shown predicts benefit from hormone therapy, radiation therapy or chemotherapy. Another trial—PREDICT-RT—recently completed enrollment two years early and is evaluating the Decipher Prostate test’s ability to predict benefit of combined hormone therapy (ADT and apalutamide) concurrent with radiation in patients with high-risk prostate cancer at initial diagnosis.
"Prostate cancer, like all cancers, is a disease of the genome," said Elai Davicioni, Ph.D., Veracyte’s medical director for Urology. "Our Decipher GRID tool uniquely enables researchers to better pinpoint adverse molecular features that are associated with poor outcomes. This can ultimately lead to more-personalized care for each patient based on their tumor’s unique molecular make-up. We are proud to partner with the world’s leading prostate cancer researchers to help uncover insights that can change the trajectory of care for each individual patient and also help deliver the next generation of prostate cancer diagnostics."
The BALANCE trial results are among 9 Decipher-focused abstracts being presented at the ASTRO 2025 conference. More information can be found here.
The United Therapeutics Corporation special call on September 28, 2025, focused on presenting results from the TETON-2 trial, which showed treprostinil, delivered via Tyvaso, significantly improved forced vital capacity (FVC) in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).The company views these findings as a significant milestone, demonstrating strong evidence of therapeutic benefit with a well-tolerated safety profile, and stated it would seek regulatory approval for the IPF indication.
