A power struggle within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over institute directorships deepened as a new presidential administration prepared to fill thousands of government jobs, according to Ars Technica. These political appointees are intended to help carry out the president's agenda and make government agencies responsive to elected officials.
Beyond personnel changes, advancements and challenges in various fields of science and technology emerged. VentureBeat reported that many enterprises deploying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are finding that retrieval has become a foundational system dependency, not just a feature. Dippu Kumar Singh wrote in VentureBeat that the failure of RAG systems often lies in preprocessing, where standard pipelines treat documents as flat strings of text, destroying the logic of technical manuals by slicing tables and severing captions from images.
In other news, Ars Technica highlighted a collection of overlooked scientific stories, including evidence suggesting humans, not glaciers, transported the stones to build Stonehenge from Wales and northern Scotland. Timothy Darvill received credit for this finding.
Meanwhile, a leaked series of chats exposed the daily life within a Southeast Asian scam compound, according to Hacker News. The compound operated as a "pig butchering" scam, promising romance and riches from crypto investments to defraud victims. An office manager named Amani sent motivational messages to his colleagues, stating, "Every day brings a new opportunitya chance to connect, to inspire, and to make a difference," before engaging in scams that defrauded victims of large sums of money.
Varun Raj wrote in VentureBeat that once AI systems are deployed to support decision-making, automate workflows, or operate semi-autonomously, failures in retrieval propagate directly into business risk. He reframed retrieval as infrastructure rather than application logic.
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