Across the world, unsuspecting people are unwittingly becoming caught up in a new and growing type of organized criminal enterprise: vehicle transport fraud and theft. Crooks use email phishing, fraudulent paperwork, and other tactics to impersonate legitimate transport companies and get hired to deliver a luxury vehicle. They divert the shipment away from its intended destination before using a mix of technology, computer skills, and old-school techniques to erase traces of the vehicle's original ownership and registration. In some cases, the car has been resold or is out of the country by the time the rightful owner even realizes it's missing. The nationwide epidemic of vehicle transport fraud and theft has remained under the radar, even as it's rocked the industry over the past two years. Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem.

A new wave of theft is rocking the luxury car industry--mixing high-tech with old-school chop-shop techniques to snag vehicles while they're in transport. When Sam Zahr first saw the gray Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible with orange interior and orange roof, he knew he'd found a perfect addition to his fleet. "It was very appealing to our clientele," he told me. As the director of operations at Dream Luxury Rental, he outfits customers in the Detroit area looking to ride in style to a wedding, a graduation, or any other event with high-end vehicles--Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Mercedes G-Wagons, and more. But before he could rent out the Rolls, Zahr needed to get the car to Detroit from Miami, where he bought it from a used-car dealer. His team posted the convertible on Central Dispatch, an online marketplace that's popular among car dealers, manufacturers, and owners who want to arrange vehicle shipments. It's not too complicated, at least in theory: A typical listing includes the type of vehicle, zip codes of the origin and destination, dates for pickup and delivery, and the fee. Anyone with a Central Dispatch account can see the job, and an individual carrier or transport broker who wants it can call the number on the listing. Zahr's team got a call from a transport company that wanted the job. They agreed on the price and scheduled pickup for January 17, 2025.

Intelligent audio and intuitive tools are transforming collaboration from connection to creativity, says Sam Sabet, chief technology officer at Shure, and Brendan Ittelson, chief ecosystem officer at Zoom. When work went remote, the sound of business changed. What began as a scramble to make home offices functional has evolved into a revolution in how people hear and are heard. From education to enterprises, companies across industries have reimagined what clear, reliable communication can mean in a hybrid world. For major audio and communications enterprises like Shure and Zoom, that transformation has been powered by artificial intelligence, new acoustic technologies, and a shared mission: making connection effortless. Necessity during the pandemic accelerated years of innovation in months. Audio and video just working is a baseline for collaboration, says chief ecosystem officer at Zoom, Brendan Ittelson. That expectation has shifted from connecting people to enhancing productivity and creativity across the entire ecosystem. Audio is a foundation for trust, understanding, and collaboration.

Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. In April 2024, a mysterious someone using the online handles "Waifu" and "Judische" began posting death threats on Telegram and Discord channels aimed at a cybersecurity researcher named Allison Nixon. These anonymous personas targeted Nixon because she had become a formidable threat: As chief research officer at the cyber investigations firm Unit 221B, named after Sherlock Holmes's apartment, she had built a career tracking cybercriminals and helping get them arrested. Though she'd done this work for more than a decade, Nixon couldn't understand why the person behind the accounts was suddenly threatening her. And although she had taken an interest in the Waifu persona in years past for crimes he boasted about committing, he hadn't been on her radar for a while when the threats began, because she was tracking other targets. Now Nixon resolved to unmask Waifu/Judische and others responsible for the death threats--and take them down for crimes they admitted to committing.

César de la Fuente is on a mission to combat antimicrobial resistance by looking at nature's own solutions. César de la Fuente is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he leads the Machine Biology Group. When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, César de la Fuente compiled a list of the world's biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve them. Antimicrobial resistance topped the list. Twenty years on, the problem has not gone away.

ALS stole this musician's voice. AI let him sing again. Patrick Darling used a music tool from ElevenLabs to perform a song with his former bandmates. There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling's song begins to play. It's a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It's Darling's first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years ago.

The Download: an exclusive chat with Jim O'Neill, and the surprising truth about heists Over the past year, Jim O'Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the country's federal health and science agencies. He oversees a department with a budget of over a trillion dollars. And he signed the decision memorandum on the US's deeply controversial new vaccine schedule. In an exclusive interview with earlier this month, O'Neill described his plans to increase human healthspan through longevity-focused research supported by ARPA-H, a federal agency dedicated to biomedical breakthroughs. Fellow longevity enthusiasts said they hope he will bring attention and funding to their cause.

Plus: Instagram's CEO Adam Mosseri has denied claims that social media is "clinically addictive" AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse. Just as software engineers are using artificial intelligence to help write code and check for bugs, hackers are using these tools to reduce the time and effort required to orchestrate an attack, lowering the barriers for less experienced attackers to try something out. Some in Silicon Valley warn that AI is on the brink of being able to carry out fully automated attacks. But most security researchers instead argue that we should be paying closer attention to the much more immediate risks posed by AI, which is already speeding up and increasing the volume of scams. Criminals are increasingly exploiting the latest deepfake technologies to impersonate people and swindle victims out of vast sums of money.

AI is already making online swindles easier. It could get much worse. Some cybersecurity researchers say it's too early to worry about AI-orchestrated cyberattacks. Others say it could already be happening. Anton Cherepanov is always on the lookout for something interesting. And in late August last year, he spotted just that.

Chinese open models are spreading fast, from Hugging Face to Silicon Valley. In this photo illustration, the DeepSeek apps is seen on a phone in front of a flag of China on January 28, 2025 in Hong Kong, China. The past year has marked a turning point for Chinese AI. Since DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025, Chinese companies have repeatedly delivered AI models that match the performance of leading Western models at a fraction of the cost. Just last week the Chinese firm Moonshot AI released its latest open-weight model, Kimi K2.5, which came close to top proprietary systems such as Anthropic's Claude Opus on some early benchmarks. The difference: K2.5 is roughly one-seventh Opus's price.