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Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is slashing a total of 20,000 jobs across the Department of Health and Human Services—or about 24 percent of the workforce—in a sweeping overhaul said to improve efficiency and save money, Kennedy and the HHS announced Thursday.

Combining workforce losses from early retirement, the "Fork in the Road" deferred resignation deal, and 10,000 positions axed in the reductions and restructuring announced today, HHS will shrink from 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000 under Kennedy and the Trump administration. The HHS's 28 divisions will be cut down to 15, while five of the department's 10 regional offices will close.

"This will be a painful period," Kennedy said in a video announcement posted on social media. Calling the HHS a "sprawling bureaucracy," Kennedy claimed that the cuts would be aimed at "excess administrators."

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Wondering what you’re missing out on? Here are our favorite smartphones not officially sold stateside, available in markets like the UK and Europe.

During its Nintendo Direct event Thursday, the company revealed “Virtual Game Cards,” which will allow players to share games or play across multiple systems. It also teased Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.

Switch players who buy their games on physical cards are used to being able to share those games with other players simply by handing them the card. Now, Nintendo is planning a process to allow players to share their digital Switch purchases in a similar way.

The new "virtual game card" system—which Nintendo announced today ahead of a planned late April rollout—will allow players to "load" and "eject" digital games via a dedicated management screen. An ejected digital game can't be played on the original console, but it can be digitally loaded onto a new console and played there without restriction by any user logged into that system.

While an Internet connection is required when loading and ejecting digital games in this way, the Internet will not be required to play the shared digital game after that initial process is complete. And while both Switch consoles will need to be synced up via a "local connection" the first time such sharing is done, subsequent shares won't require the consoles to be in physical proximity.

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The growing energy use of AI has gotten a lot of people working on ways to make it less power hungry. One option is to develop processors that are a better match to the sort of computational needs of neural networks, which require many trips to memory and a lot of communication between artificial neurons that might not necessarily reside on the same processor. Termed "neuromorphic" processors, this alternative approach to hardware tends to have lots of small, dedicated processing units with their own memory and an extensive internal network connecting them.

Examples like Intel's Loihi chips tend to get competitive performance out of far lower clock speeds and energy use, but they require a lot of silicon to do so. Other options give up on silicon entirely and perform the relevant computation in a form of phase change memory.

A paper published in Nature on Wednesday describes a way to get plain-old silicon transistors to behave a lot like an actual neuron. And unlike the dedicated processors made so far, it only requires two transistors to do so.

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The US Space Force celebrated its fifth birthday last year, when it boasted an annual budget of $29 billion, about 3.5 percent of the Pentagon's overall funding level.

On March 15, President Donald Trump signed a stopgap spending bill that set the Space Force's budget for fiscal year 2025 at $28.7 billion. This was the first cut to the Space Force's budget since Trump created the military's newest service branch in 2019.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top general in the Space Force, worries that the budget crunch will hamstring the military's ability to match China's fast-growing space architecture. The Space Force is charged with developing and operating satellites, ground systems, and weapons that the Pentagon could use to track and target enemy forces on the ground and in space.

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A significant hardware upgrade over its predecessor, the Light Phone III is the digital detox we need right now.

She’s seen enough. She’s had enough. She can’t book a one-way ticket to the stars (yet), but these gifts will help her transcend this world.

As Elon Musk continues to expand his political power in the US, his mother has repeatedly traveled to China to speak at events, model for Chinese brands, and promote Tesla.

As Elon Musk continues to expand his political power in the US, his mother has repeatedly traveled to China to speak at events, model for Chinese brands, and promote Tesla.

Yesterday afternoon, once the markets were closed and could no longer react immediately, US President Donald Trump announced that starting on April 2, all imported automobiles and many imported car parts will now be subject to an extra 25 percent tariff. Despite Trump's rhetoric during his election campaign and since taking office, tariffs are paid for by those importing the goods, not the exporters, so we can look forward to most new cars and trucks—and their maintenance costs—getting a lot more expensive.

During his first term in office, Trump started trade wars with key US trading partners like Canada, the European Union, and China. Upon his return in 2025, more trade wars have been the name of the game. A 25 percent tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico was threatened and then implemented at the beginning of March, before being partially reversed just two days later. Additionally, a 10 percent tariff on Chinese exports was also levied.

Less than two weeks later, a new 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports also joined the club.

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Vizio’s minimalist new budget bar cuts the frills, keeps the fun.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s pledge to spend an extra $100 billion on advanced manufacturing plants in the US will do little to help the country restore its global lead in chipmaking, according to Pat Gelsinger, who was forced out as chief executive of Intel late last year.

His comments come less than a month after the White House hailed the investment from TSMC, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, as an important milestone in efforts to bring production of the most advanced semiconductors back on to US soil.

“If you don’t have R&D in the US, you will not have semiconductor leadership in the US,” Gelsinger said. “All of the R&D work of TSMC is in Taiwan, and they haven’t made any announcements to move that.”

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Learn more about updates for Google Search, Maps, Gemini and more that can help with summer travel.Learn more about updates for Google Search, Maps, Gemini and more that can help with summer travel.

Get summer travel inspiration with trends from Google Search and Google Flights.Get summer travel inspiration with trends from Google Search and Google Flights.

Multi-frame generation has real potential to improve the gaming experience on cheaper laptops, but Nvidia’s RTX 5090 laptop GPU isn’t the huge leap you’re waiting for.

Fall asleep anywhere with this excellent sleep mask and its built-in headphones.

The arrival of OpenAI's DALL-E 2 in the spring of 2022 marked a turning point in AI, when text-to-image generation suddenly became accessible to a select group of users, creating a community of digital explorers who experienced wonder and controversy as the technology automated the act of visual creation.

But like many early AI systems, DALL-E 2 struggled with consistent text rendering, often producing garbled words and phrases within images. It also had limitations in following complex prompts with multiple elements, sometimes missing key details or misinterpreting instructions. These shortcomings left room for improvement that OpenAI would address in subsequent iterations, such as DALL-E 3 in 2023.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new multimodal image-generation capabilities that are directly integrated into its GPT-4o AI language model, making it the default image generator within the ChatGPT interface. The integration, called "4o Image Generation" (which we'll call "4o IG" for short), allows the model to follow prompts more accurately (with better text rendering than DALL-E 3) and respond to chat context for image modification instructions.

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The first ever fatal crash involving a fully driverless vehicle occurred in San Francisco on January 19. The driverless vehicle belonged to Waymo, but the crash was not Waymo’s fault.

Here’s what happened: A Waymo with no driver or passengers stopped for a red light. Another car stopped behind the Waymo. Then, according to Waymo, a human-driven SUV rear-ended the other vehicles at high speed, causing a six-car pileup that killed one person and injured five others. Someone’s dog also died in the crash.

Another major Waymo crash occurred in October in San Francisco. Once again, a driverless Waymo was stopped for a red light. According to Waymo, a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction crossed the double yellow line and crashed into an SUV that was stopped to the Waymo’s left. The force of the impact shoved the SUV into the Waymo. One person was seriously injured.

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WIRED’s advice columnist considers whether trying to remove your data and information from generative AI tools could lessen your impact on the technology.