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The U.S. Transportation Department is proposing new rules to speed deployment of drones beyond the visual line of sight of operators, a key change needed to advance commercial uses like package deliveries. From a report: "We are going to unleash American drone dominance," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a press conference on Tuesday. Under current rules, operators need to get individual waivers or exemptions to use drones without visual line of sight. The department said eliminating those requirements "will significantly expand the use-case for drone technologies in areas like: manufacturing, farming, energy production, filmmaking, and the movement of products including lifesaving medications." The proposal includes new requirements for manufacturers, operators, and drone traffic-management services to keep drones safely separated from other drones and airplanes. "It's going to change the way that people and products move throughout our airspace... so you may change the way you get your Amazon package, you may get a Starbucks cup of coffee from a drone," Duffy said.

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Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found. Nature: The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted. The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature's news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE's retracted papers up to 14 July.

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OpenAI has released two open-weight language models, marking the startup's first such release since GPT-2 in 2019. The models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, can run locally on consumer devices and be fine-tuned for specific purposes. Both models use chain-of-thought reasoning approaches first deployed in OpenAI's o1 model and can browse the web, execute code, and function as AI agents. The smaller 20-billion-parameter model runs on consumer devices with 16 GB of memory. Gpt-oss-120B model will require about 80 GB of memory. OpenAI said the 120-billion-parameter model performs similarly to the company's proprietary o3 and o4-mini models. The models are available free on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license after safety testing that delayed their March announcement.

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The Government Accountability Office has issued reports criticizing the Department of Homeland Security, Environmental Protection Agency, and General Services Administration for failing to implement critical IT and cybersecurity recommendations. DHS leads with 43 unresolved recommendations dating to 2018, including seven priority matters. The EPA has 11 outstanding items, including failures to submit FedRAMP documentation and conduct organization-wide cybersecurity risk assessments. GSA has four pending recommendations. All three agencies failed to properly log cybersecurity events and conduct required annual IT portfolio reviews. The DHS' HART biometric program remains behind schedule without proper cost accounting or privacy controls, with all nine 2023 recommendations still open.

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