Republicans call on Trump to ‘finish the job’ while top Democrats warn against resuming hostilities

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

The failure of negotiations to end the US war with Iran has unleashed a barrage of starkly partisan political responses, with leading Republicans making hawkish calls for Donald Trump to “finish the job” while top Democrats warned that it would be disastrous for the president to resume hostilities.

The former UN ambassador during Trump’s first presidency, Nikki Haley, led the Republican charge. She told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that the current two-week ceasefire was a test of nerves.

• 2017 champion tears up tee box after poor shot

• 44-year-old is known for his fiery temper

Sergio García’s return to the scene of his greatest triumph has not been a happy one this weekend. The 2017 Masters champion made the cut at Augusta but on Sunday vented his frustration after a poor opening shot on the second hole by slamming his club into the ground before snapping off its head when he smashed it into a nearby cooler.

Masters officials are known for strictly enforcing rules and García was given a code of conduct warning for his outburst. A second code of conduct breach would result in a two-shot penalty and a third would lead to disqualification.

In both Republican and Democratic states, scepticism and hostility towards an unregulated construction boom is growing

When blue-collar Trump voters and Maga-friendly midwest states join the same cause as Bernie Sanders and liberal California teachers, something novel is afoot. Last month it was the turn of the Republican party in Texas to express forthright opposition to the construction of datacentres for artificial intelligence, pending adequate environmental safeguards for local communities. Across the United States, similar campaigns are being waged, as voters from across the political spectrum rail against the outsize influence and power of big tech.

For the White House, which has made the rapid rollout of datacentres a priority in its AI action plan, the scale of the protests is an unwelcome surprise. One of Donald Trump’s first acts on returning to office was to authorise the deregulated “build, baby, build” approach demanded by the Silicon Valley backers who helped to fund his campaign. Industry giants such Amazon and Microsoft are driving an estimated $710bn worth of investment in datacentres this year, as they stake their future on staying ahead in the AI race.

An American blockade in the strait of Hormuz raises energy-market dangers after failed negotiations – pushing a fragile ceasefire closer to collapse

As the US vice-president, JD Vance, took to a podium in Pakistan after 21 hours of diplomacy and said no deal had been reached to end the war with Iran, his boss Donald Trump was in Miami watching a mixed martial arts fight. The contrast was stark. Just when the outcome of a war and the stability of global markets hung in the balance, the president chose spectacle over engagement. Mr Trump may intend to project strength. But the impression he creates – in Tehran and among America’s allies – is of a president less interested in the substance of diplomacy than in the politics surrounding it.

The talks in Islamabad didn’t fail accidentally; the US and Iran were talking past each other. Washington’s position is that Iran must abandon its capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, while Tehran insists it is not seeking one and has the right to a civilian nuclear programme. The US vice-president’s “final and best offer” would have required Iran to give up that capacity altogether – terms that looked less like the basis of a negotiation than an attempt to impose the conditions of victory.

Bloomberg describes him as a "former Harvard Medical School professor whose research has focused on the intersection of AI and neuroscience." "For the past 20 years, I studied how the human brain stores and retrieves memories," Kreiman writes on LinkedIn. And now "My co-founder Spandan Madan and I built a new algorithm to endow humans with perfect and infinite memory." Engramme connects to your **memorome**, i.e., entire digital life. Large Memory Models work in the same way that your brain encodes and retrieves information. Then memories are recalled automatically — no searching, no prompting, no hallucinations. [The startup's web site promises "omniscient AI to augment human cognition."] We have built the memory layer for EVERY app. Read our manifesto about augmenting human cognition. ["We are not just building software; we are enabling a complete transformation of human cognition. When the friction disappears between needing a piece of information and recalling it, the nature of thought itself changes. This synergy between biological intuition and digital precision will be the most disruptive force in modern history, fundamentally reshaping every profession... We are dedicated to creating a world where everyone has the power to remember everything they have ever learned, seen, or felt "] Welcome to a new future where you can remember everything. This is the MEMORY SINGULARITY: after 300,000 years, this is the moment that humans stop forgetting. Bloomberg reports that the startup (spun out of a lab at Harvard) is "in talks with investors to raise about $100 million, according to people familiar with the matter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronauts make first remarks at jubilant homecoming in Houston after their record-breaking moon flyby

Still marveling over their moon mission, the Artemis II astronauts received a thunderous welcome home on Saturday from hundreds who took part in setting a record for deep space travel during the US space agency Nasa’s lunar comeback.

The crew of four arrived at Ellington Field near Nasa’s Johnson Space Center and Mission Control in Houston, flying in from San Diego, where they splashed down just offshore the evening before.

The biotech industry's engineered cells could become an $8 trillion market by 2035, notes Phys.org. But how do you keep them from being stolen? Their article notes "an uptick in the theft and smuggling of high-value biological materials, including specially engineered cells." In Science Advances, a team of U.S. researchers present a new approach to genetically securing precious biological material. They created a genetic combination lock in which the locking or encryption process scrambled the DNA of a cell so that its important instructions were non-functional and couldn't be easily read or used. The unlocking, or decryption, process involves adding a series of chemicals in a precise order over time — like entering a password — to activate recombinases, which then unscramble the DNA to their original, functional form... They created a biological keypad with nine distinct chemicals, each acting as a one-digit input. By using the same chemicals in pairs to form two-digit inputs, where two chemicals must be present simultaneously to activate a sensor, they expanded the keypad to 45 possible chemical inputs without introducing any new chemicals. They also added safety penalties — if someone tampers with the system, toxins are released — making it extremely unlikely for an unauthorized person to access the cells. "The researchers conducted an ethical hacking exercise on the test lock and found that random guessing yielded a 0.2% success rate, remarkably close to the theoretical target of 0.1%."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.