President Donald Trump rallied business leaders to support his administration's new "Trump Accounts" initiative, designed to provide every American child born between 2025 and 2028 with a $1,000 nest egg. The announcement came as activists across the U.S. called for a general strike on January 30 to protest the President's immigration policies, following fatal shootings by federal ICE agents in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, in the tech world, Google disabled a Pixel phone feature due to a privacy bug, and concerns arose over potential censorship in a new version of TikTok, according to multiple news sources.
Trump's initiative, part of the "Big Beautiful Bill," aims to give each newborn American $1,000 as seed funding for an account invested in the SP 500, with restrictions on withdrawals. "Even people that truly hate me are making this investment," Trump said at an event in Washington, D.C., where he was joined by celebrities, CEOs, and members of his administration.
The call for a nationwide strike on January 30, organized by the National Shutdown campaign, protested President Trump's immigration crackdown. The action followed the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, by an ICE officer earlier in the month. "The people of the Twin Cities have shown the way for the whole country – to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcements reign of terror, we need to SHUT IT DOWN," the campaign's website stated. Thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets, and hundreds of businesses closed during a similar strike the previous Friday.
In the tech sector, Google addressed a privacy concern by disabling a feature on Pixel phones. Simultaneously, Meta shifted its focus from the metaverse to AI-driven social media experiences, according to Vox. A new version of TikTok also raised concerns about potential censorship.
Separately, in the scientific community, the preprint repository arXiv implemented a new policy requiring all submissions to be in English or accompanied by a full English translation, effective February 11. According to arXiv staff, the English rule will make moderation easier and maintain a broad readership. "We can't be fair in judging," arXiv staff stated regarding submissions in multiple languages. The policy change impacts the more than 20,000 scientific manuscripts posted on the site monthly by authors worldwide. Artificial-intelligence translators could potentially assist researchers in meeting this new requirement, according to Nature News.
Furthermore, research published in Nature highlighted efforts to understand autism spectrum disorder (ASD) through human induced pluripotent stem (hiPS) cells. A large patient collection of 70 hiPS cell lines, representing 8 ASD-associated mutations, idiopathic ASD, and 20 control lines, were used to generate human cortical organoids. The study aimed to identify shared and distinct mechanisms of ASD-linked mutations.
Discussion
Join the conversation
Be the first to comment