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“You never say never about M&A, because we keep relationships around the industry … but we’re not counting on that,” Kathleen Quirk told the Reuters NEXT conference in New York. “The stars and the moon and everything would need to align.”

FREEPORT EYES NEW TECHNOLOGY

The world’s largest publicly traded copper company produced 1.26 billion pounds (571,530 metric tons) of copper in the U.S. last year and 4.1 billion pounds (1.86 million metric tons) globally.

Freeport, which operates mines across the Americas and in Indonesia, would be interested only in buying a rival copper company or mine that could have synergies with its existing assets and technology, Quirk said.

SEEKING MORE INCENTIVES FROM WASHINGTON

Quirk called on the U.S. government to do more to protect the domestic copper industry from competitive global threats.

“If the U.S. wants to be self-sufficient in copper, some kind of incentive would help,” said Quirk, adding that permitting reform is one of the company’s other requests from Washington.

“We’re not going and asking Washington for handouts, but we are spending a lot of time with the administration to educate them on what we do.”

GRASBERG MINE FULLY ONLINE IN 2027

The disaster was caused by mud that breached a previously undetected hole in the mine’s retired open pit and rushed into a zone where a two-person electrical crew and a five-person boring crew were working. Mud reached that area in minutes.

Quirk went to Indonesia after the disaster to meet with the miners’ families and recovery workers.

“Our team has taken it very hard, but we’ve unified together, and we’re committed to coming out stronger and safer in the future,” Quirk said.

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Dryrobe, the maker of huge waterproof towel-lined coats favoured by cold water swimming fans, has won a trademark case against a smaller label that must now stop selling items under the D-Robe brand within a week.

A judge at the high court in London ruled the company was guilty of passing off its D-Robe changing robes and other goods as Dryrobe products and knew it was infringing its bigger rival’s trademark.

The ruling described a Dryrobe as “an oversized waterproof coat with a towelled lining, designed for surfers or swimmers to change under whilst also drying them, keeping them warm, and protecting them from the weather”.

The company has rigorously defended its brand against being used generically by publications and makers of similar clothing and is expected to seek compensation from D-Robe’s owners for trademark infringement.

Dryrobe was created by the former financier Gideon Bright as an outdoor changing robe for surfers in 2010 and became the signature brand of the wild swimming craze.

While they shot to prominence during Covid lockdowns, when outdoor swimming became a popular alternative exercise while gyms and leisure centres were shut, Dryrobes are now just as likely to be sported on the high street or by dog walkers in chillier and wetter parts of the UK as they are on beaches and riverbanks.

They have even sparked their own culture war. A sign appeared at a beach in Ireland warning visitors to “beware of Dryrobe wankers”, which prompted a counter action online, with social media posts by fans under the hashtag #dryrobewankers.

Sales of the brand, whose signature coats sport a large Dryrobe logo on the back, rose from £1.3m in 2017 to £20.3m in 2021 and made profits of £8m. However, by 2023 sales had fallen back to £18m as the passion for outdoor sports waned and the brand faced more competition.

Bright said the legal win was a “great result” for Dryrobe as there were “quite a lot of copycat products and [the owners] immediately try to refer to them using our brand name”.

He said the company was now expanding overseas and moving into a broader range of products, adding that sales were similar to 2023 as “a lot of competition has come in”.

Judge Melissa Clarke said: “In my judgment, D-Robe and Dryrobe have a high degree of visual similarity.” She said a “substantial proportion of attentive consumers” who knew the Dryrobe trademarks would link and “indeed confuse them” with the D-Robe sign.

The smaller label sought to defend itself against the claim by arguing that the term Dryrobe had become a generic descriptive term, but the judge ruled that most members of the public understood the term to be a brand name in 2022.

D-Robe changed its name to Delta Roam in May. A spokesperson said the rebrand had been in train before the case and it had already sold out of the majority of its D-Robe stock.

“We are in a good place,” the spokesperson said, adding that it had recently launched a product with the backing of the model Jodie Kidd. He said the new name was part of efforts to expand in the US, “where they think a robe is a jazzy dressing gown”.

Geoff Steward, the co-head of the intellectual property team at Addleshaw Goddard, the law firm that represented Dryrobe in the case, said: “As well as being an interesting judgment on trademark genericide, the case highlights the importance of a clear, modern and relentless trademark strategy in protecting brands against free riding, which Dryrobe deployed to great effect.”

The win for Dryrobe came almost two years after it settled out of court with the British fashion label Superdry in a separate trademark case.

Dryrobe agreed not to depict the “dry” element of its logo using “any member of the Helvetica family of fonts” after Superdry sought damages in a high court claim.

Rotherhithe Community Kitchen in south London has been delivering hundreds of cooked meals a week for the last two years to pensioners and vulnerable residents. Yet the volunteer group’s plans have been thrown into disarray by the news that they will not have access to cars and vans on New Year’s Day.

The group had relied on Zipcar, the car-sharing company that offered customers the ability to access its fleet of vehicles from the street using an app. The company caused shock across London on Monday when it said it would shut down UK operations from 1 January.

It will mean many of the volunteers will be unable to collect food from the Felix Project, a charity that gathers surplus food from supermarkets, cafes and restaurants. Obvious alternatives are further away, more expensive, or do not offer the same flexible hours.

“It’s going to be affected massively,” said Vimal Pandya, the community kitchen’s founder. “Personally me and my team, we are worried about the logistical challenge we will face. A lot of people like our group are going to struggle.”

The community kitchen’s drivers are among more than half a million people in London registered as car club members in 2020, and who could be left without convenient access to cars and vans, without the hassle and cost of ownership. The vast majority of those people were likely to be members of Zipcar, which had a near-monopoly position in the city.

The planned closure, subject to consultation with Zipcar’s 71 UK employees, is a big blow to hopes that car sharing in urban areas could reduce the need for private vehicle ownership. Yet some experts also suggested that Zipcar’s departure (the company still operates in the US and Canada) need not spell the end of the road for the idea in Britain.

Car sharing is prized by many urbanists and environmentalists as a way of reducing the ills associated with vehicle ownership. Most cars sit as two-tonne dead weights on the side of the road for 95% of the time, using up space. They also require large carbon emissions to produce, and people who do not own cars tend to walk, cycle and take public transport more. That benefits cities – reducing congestion and pollution – and improves people’s health further because they build more exercise into their daily routines.

Zipcar was founded in 2000 by two American entrepreneurs before being bought by US car rental group Avis Budget in 2013 for $491m (£371m). Zipcar’s revenues of £47m in UK barely registered compared with Avis Budget’s overall annual revenue of $12bn, and so a loss that grew to £11.7m in 2024 gave the parent company little incentive to continue.

Avis Budget has said the closure of Zipcar’s UK operations is part of a “broader transformation across our international business, where we are taking deliberate steps to streamline operations, improve returns”.

Zipcar’s most recent accounts, for 2024, said revenues had fallen as drivers had been taking fewer and shorter trips. “These changes reflect the ongoing impact of the cost-of-living crisis, which continues to suppress demand for discretionary spending,” it said.

Last year, Zipcar closed its operations in Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol to focus on London.

However, several experts noted that London has specific problems that made it much harder for the company and its rivals to succeed.

Some councils were very supportive but across 33 boroughs car-club operators face a patchwork of varying processes and prices that made it harder to operate. Zipcar’s closure will also coincide with the electric cars becoming liable for London’s congestion charge, adding unavoidable costs for any vehicles enter the charge zone.

As often seems the case in local politics, parking is a central issue. Residents in the wealthiest London borough, Kensington and Chelsea, pay as little as £63 for a year’s electric car parking. The same vehicle in a floating car club (accessible via app, without a fixed parking space) would pay £1,110 annually. For a petrol or diesel model it is £2,217.

Co Wheels has found success in towns and cities outside London, ranging from Glasgow, Bristol and Oxford all the way to the Orkney islands. Yet the cost and complexity of the capital have so far limited its efforts there.

“We should literally be charged one-twentieth of a resident’s permit,” said Robert Schopen, the head of partnerships at Co Wheels. “We’re taking cars off the street. We’re putting less polluting cars in their place.”

Elly Baker, the chair of the London assembly transport committee, said there needed to be central leadership across all of the capital’s boroughs on car clubs, allowing a single process and unified price guidelines for parking permits.

A spokesperson for London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, said car clubs could play an “important role” in reducing private car ownership.

Other European countries offer examples for London to follow. Germany introduced national car-sharing legislation in 2017, giving a nationwide framework for parking, subsidies and exemptions. Now, the country has 5.4 shared cars per 10,000 people, while France has 2.1 and Belgium has 6.3, according to the vehicle-sharing software company Invers. The UK lags behind at 0.7 (and Zipcar accounted for more than half of that).

“What we see is that car sharing around the world, especially in Europe, is growing,” said Bharath Devanathan, the chief business officer at Invers.

Devanathan said authorities should start to treat car sharing as a form of public transport, and integrate it with train and bus stations. He added that one unnamed client was already seriously considering entering the London market even before Zipcar’s exit, and despite the challenges: “There will be a group of operators that will fill this gap.”

Speaking about the closure of Zipcar’s UK operation, Devanathan said: “It’s very unusual that it’s happened at this scale and the biggest player, but this is definitely not the end.”

The company’s competitors can roughly be divided into two camps: fleet operators, which own or lease and maintain their own cars; and peer-to-peer services, that allow users to rent out their own vehicles to others via app unlocking or by providing lockboxes for keys – a kind of Airbnb for cars.

Examples of the fleet model across Europe include: Denmark’s GreenMobility, France’s Free2Move, which is owned by Peugeot and Fiat owner Stellantis; Germany’s Miles Mobility; Belgium’s Poppy; and Renault’s Mobilize in Madrid. Peer-to-peer players include Britain’s Hiyacar and the US’s Getaround.

One company already weighing up the UK gap left by Zipcar is Turo, a US-headquartered peer-to-peer platform. Rory Brimmer, the managing director of Turo UK, said his company had a “big opportunity” to win more users in London and would look at increasing marketing efforts. UK car owners earn an average of £400 a month from renting their vehicle, he said, enough to fully cover the cost of ownership of some cars.

“There is a void there that is going to need to be filled, because London still needs to move,” Brimmer said.

Yet it could take some time for other players to build momentum. In the meantime, more people will feel forced to buy cars, and others across London will be left without access.

For Rotherhithe Community Kitchen, the next month will be a scramble to find a way to get food out. Pandya said of the volunteers: “Knowing the reality, they are all worried and thinking: ‘How are we going to carry on?’”

(Bloomberg) — A rally that put the stock market within a striking distance of its all-time highs struggled to gain further traction ahead of next week’s Federal Reserve decision. Bitcoin halted its rebound. Bonds fell.

While most shares in the S&P 500 rose, the gauge was little changed. Bets on a Fed reduction next week remained intact despite a slide in jobless claims — a noisy reading that captured the Thanksgiving period. Meta Platforms Inc. jumped 4% as Bloomberg News reported executives are considering budget cuts for the metaverse group next year.

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Investor worries that the frenzy around artificial-intelligence has gone too far caused a wobble in equity markets last month. But the strong outlook for the sector alongside expectations that policy easing will fuel corporate profits propped up bets on further gains.

“The key question hanging over markets is whether a potential Federal Reserve rate cut next week can trigger a so-called Santa rally,” said Fawad Razaqzada at Forex.com. “For now, the S&P 500 forecast remains cautiously constructive, albeit with more hesitancy creeping in.”

The S&P 500 hovered near 6,845. The yield on 10-year Treasuries rose three basis points to 4.09%. The dollar fluctuated. The yen climbed as Bloomberg News reported that key members of the government wouldn’t try to stop the Bank of Japan if it decides to raise rates.

“After last week’s sharp rebound, the S&P 500 has made limited progress so far this week,” said Razaqzada. “Even so, the structure retains a mildly bullish slant.”

Several previously broken levels have now been reclaimed, reinforcing the impression that the bulls maintain a degree of control, he added.

To Matt Maley at Miller Tabak, while the market has spent the past few days consolidating gains, the set-up is a very good one.

“So unless we get a big reversal over the next few trading days, the advantage will definitely be with the bulls,” he said.

Maley notes that one area that could do well if we get a strong year-end rally is the small-cap space.

“A push to a new significant all-time high might finally attract the kind of momentum money that could help this part of the stock market outperform,” he said. “Of course, if the mega-cap tech stocks start to roll-over in a big way, all bets will be off.”

The US tech sector is likely to remain a key driver for the market’s next leg up, but its recent underperformance also points to other compelling opportunities across the market, according to Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi at UBS Global Wealth Management.

“As we expect US equities to rally into 2026, we think under-allocated investors should add exposure,” she said. “Beyond the tech sector, we expect a good performance from the health care, utilities, and banking sectors to broaden the foundation for further gains.”

Hoffmann-Burchardi continues to expect two rate cuts by the end of the first quarter of 2026.

“In addition to being supportive to equities, the Fed’s easing path also creates a positive backdrop for quality bonds,” she said.

On the macro front, applications for US unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest in more than three years, indicating that employers are still largely holding onto workers despite a wave of recent layoffs.

Separate data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed announced layoffs at US companies fell last month after surging in October, but were still the highest for any November in three years.

“Overall, the net takeaway from the data served to confirm the crosscurrents evident in the labor landscape,” said Ian Lyngen at BMO Capital Markets.

Policymakers will not yet have the government’s November jobs report in hand for their meeting next week. The report, originally due Dec. 5, was delayed until Dec. 16 as a result of the record-long government shutdown. That release will also include October payrolls figures.

“There remain some negative payroll employment readings. But the US labor market is not collapsing based on timely data & reports that have leading indicator properties,” said Don Rissmiller at Strategas. “We continue to believe the Fed will cut the fed funds rate again by 25 basis points in December.”

While investors are largely betting policymakers will cut rates again, officials have rarely been so divided as many still prefer leaving rates elevated to keep inflation in check.

Before their final policy meeting of the year, Fed officials will get a dated reading on their preferred inflation gauge. On Friday, the September income and spending report — long delayed because of the government shutdown — is due to be released.

The figures will include the personal consumption expenditures price index and a core measure that excludes food and energy. Economists project a third-straight 0.2% increase in the core index. That would keep the year-over-year figure hovering just below 3%, a sign that inflationary pressures are stable, yet sticky.

Corporate Highlights:

Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg is expected to meaningfully cut resources for building the so-called metaverse, an effort that he once framed as the future of the company and the reason for changing its name from Facebook Inc. Meta Platforms risks a temporary European Union ban on the rollout of new policies over how its AI features in WhatsApp, after being hit by the latest probe into Big Tech’s alleged dominance on the continent. Paramount Skydance Corp. said Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. isn’t being fair in its process to sell itself and isn’t acting in shareholders’ best interests, as a competitive bidding process is underway. Salesforce Inc. gave an outlook for revenue in the current period that topped analysts’ estimates, suggesting the software company is persuading customers to buy its AI tools. Snowflake Inc. gave an outlook for operating margin that fell short of analysts’ estimates, raising concerns among investors about the profitability of new AI-based tools. Dollar General Corp. raised its full-year outlook, showing how value-focused retailers are winning over consumers hunting for deals. Kroger Co. lowered the top end of its full-year sales forecast, suggesting that competition is intensifying among food sellers for discerning consumers. Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Montreal and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce all beat estimates on results that included strong performance in their capital-markets businesses, continuing a trend seen across other Canadian lenders and wrapping up a year marked by buoyant markets and more advisory work. Novo Nordisk A/S left open the door for additional work on its pill version of Ozempic for Alzheimer’s disease after a pair of failed trials, saying that patients showed a biological response in a handful of areas despite getting no cognitive improvement. Rio Tinto Group’s new chief executive will focus on cutting costs and selling assets in a bid to turn the world’s second largest miner into a slimmed-down operation centered primarily on iron ore and copper. Some of the main moves in markets:

Stocks

The S&P 500 was little changed as of 12:06 p.m. New York time The Nasdaq 100 was little changed The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.1% The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.5% The MSCI World Index rose 0.3% Bloomberg Magnificent 7 Total Return Index rose 0.3% The Russell 2000 Index rose 0.7% Meta rose 4.1% Currencies

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed The euro fell 0.1% to $1.1659 The British pound was little changed at $1.3350 The Japanese yen rose 0.2% to 154.93 per dollar Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin fell 1.6% to $92,266.32 Ether was little changed at $3,164.38 Bonds

The yield on 10-year Treasuries advanced three basis points to 4.09% Germany’s 10-year yield advanced two basis points to 2.77% Britain’s 10-year yield declined one basis point to 4.43% The yield on 2-year Treasuries advanced four basis points to 3.52% The yield on 30-year Treasuries advanced two basis points to 4.75% Commodities

West Texas Intermediate crude rose 1.4% to $59.78 a barrel Spot gold rose 0.2% to $4,212.92 an ounce ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Cornell’s NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF) hosted its 2025 Annual Meeting on November 18 at the Statler Hotel, bringing together researchers, industry partners, faculty, students, and national collaborators to spotlight CNF’s leadership in micro- and nanotechnology. 

The program showcased advances in photonics, quantum devices, semiconductor fabrication, sustainability, life sciences and workforce development. Speakers across academia and industry emphasized a shared mission: strengthening U.S. semiconductor leadership through collaboration and a robust innovation pipeline

Decision-Making Amid Uncertainty 

Invited keynote speaker Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, Cornell Graduate, author and founder of Decisive, a decision sciences company, chose to address the audience through an informal interview/Q&A led by Prof.  Judy Cha, Director of the CNF. It was an engaging conversation providing insight into complex problem solving and decision-making process.   

IBM: Wafer Scale Semiconductor Lab to Fab Process Development and Prototyping 

Dr. Dirk Pfeiffer, Director of IBM’s Microelectronics Research Laboratory (MRL), was a plenary speaker at the CNF Annual Meeting. In his presentation, Dirk outlined MRL’s core mission of accelerating semiconductor technologies from early-stage innovation to wafer-scale development and manufacturing, bringing concepts effectively from “lab to fab”.  Dirk highlighted the importance of academic partners like the CNF that remain vital for understanding emerging materials before they reach manufacturing. 

Driving Innovation Through Community and Collaboration

The meeting also featured talks from Cornell researchers, including flying microrobots developed in Itai Cohen’s lab, advances in assisted reproduction from Alireza Abbaspourrad’s group, and new Creative Technologies for Teaching and Workforce Training led by Becky Lane at the Center for Teaching Innovation.

CNF Director Judy Cha presented the Nellie Whetten Award to Ph.D. student Yeryun Cheon recognizing the achievements of women in science, while a special panel of CNF staff introduced a new suite of tools.  Attendees were able to ask questions and hear directly from CNF experts about the equipment and the expanded capabilities now available to the research community. Throughout the day, participants engaged with vendors and student posters featuring emerging work in nanofabrication, materials research, and device innovation.

Across presentations, one theme resonated: CNF’s unique position as a national nanofabrication user facility for research, prototyping, product development, nanofabrication training, and cross-disciplinary discovery. As quantum and nanofabrication technologies continue to accelerate, CNF is helping to equip researchers, industry partners, and future engineers for the next wave of innovation.

The event was made possible with support from CNF’s sponsors: AJA International, JEOL, Oxford Instruments, REYNOLDSTECH, Corning, 3C Technical, ASML, Edwards, EFC Gases and Advanced Materials, Evident, GenISys, Heidelberg Instruments, IEEE, Kurt J. Lesker, LAB 14, Lam Research, Pozzetta, Plasma-Therm, Samco, Semi, Tescan, Xallent, Applied Energy Systems, RedBarnHPC, C&D Semiconductor Services, The Cornell Store, and Wegmans.

As for Wilcox, he’s long been one of that small group of privacy zealots who buys his SIM cards in cash with a fake name. But he hopes Phreeli will offer an easier path—not just for people like him, but for normies too.

“I don’t know of anybody who’s ever offered this credibly before,” says Wilcox. “Not the usual telecom-strip-mining-your-data phone, not a black-hoodie hacker phone, but a privacy-is-normal phone.”

Even so, enough tech companies have pitched privacy as a feature for their commercial product that jaded consumers may not buy into a for-profit telecom like Phreeli purporting to offer anonymity. But the EFF’s Cohn says that Merrill’s track record shows he’s not just using the fight against surveillance as a marketing gimmick to sell something. “Having watched Nick for a long time, it’s all a means to an end for him,” she says. “And the end is privacy for everyone.”

Merrill may not like the implications of describing Phreeli as a cellular carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But there’s little doubt that some of the company’s customers will use its privacy protections for crime—just as with every surveillance-resistant tool, from Signal to Tor to briefcases of cash.

Phreeli won’t, at least, offer a platform for spammers and robocallers, Merrill says. Even without knowing users’ identities, he says the company will block that kind of bad behavior by limiting how many calls and texts users are allowed, and banning users who appear to be gaming the system. “If people think this is going to be a safe haven for abusing the phone network, that’s not going to work,” Merrill says.

But some customers of his phone company will, to Merrill’s regret, do bad things, he says—just as they sometimes used to with pay phones, that anonymous, cash-based phone service that once existed on every block of American cities. “You put a quarter in, you didn’t need to identify yourself, and you could call whoever you wanted,” he reminisces. “And 99.9 percent of the time, people weren’t doing bad stuff.” The small minority who were, he argues, didn’t justify the involuntary societal slide into the cellular panopticon we all live in today, where a phone call not tied to freely traded data on the caller’s identity is a rare phenomenon.

Ly shows that one function this serves is to send versions of a protein to different parts of the cell. Many proteins contain ZIP code-like sequences that tell the cell’s machinery where to deliver them so the proteins can do their jobs. Ly found many examples in which longer and shorter versions of the same protein contained different ZIP codes and ended up in different places within the cell.

In particular, Ly found many cases in which one version of a protein ended up in mitochondria, structures that provide energy to cells, while another version ended up elsewhere. Because of the mitochondria’s role in the essential process of energy production, mutations to mitochondrial genes are often implicated in disease.

Ly wondered what would happen when a disease-causing mutation eliminates one version of a protein but leaves the other intact, causing the protein to only reach one of its two intended destinations. He looked through a database containing genetic information from people with rare diseases to see if such cases existed, and found that they did. In fact, there may be tens of thousands of such cases. However, without access to the people, Ly had no way of knowing what the consequences of this were in terms of symptoms and severity of disease.

Meanwhile, Cheeseman, who is also a professor of biology at MIT, had begun working with Boston Children’s Hospital to foster collaborations between Whitehead Institute and the hospital’s researchers and clinicians to accelerate the pathway from research discovery to clinical application. Through these efforts, Cheeseman and Ly met Fleming.

One group of Fleming’s patients have a type of anemia called SIFD — sideroblastic anemia with B-cell immunodeficiency, periodic fevers, and developmental delay — that is caused by mutations to the TRNT1 gene. TRNT1 is one of the genes Ly had identified as producing a mitochondrial version of its protein and another version that ends up elsewhere: in the nucleus.

Fleming shared anonymized patient data with Ly, and Ly found two cases of interest in the genetic data. Most of the patients had mutations that impaired both versions of the protein, but one patient had a mutation that eliminated only the mitochondrial version of the protein, while another patient had a mutation that eliminated only the nuclear version.

When Ly shared his results, Fleming revealed that both of those patients had very atypical presentations of SIFD, supporting Ly’s hypothesis that mutations affecting different versions of a protein would have different consequences. The patient who only had the mitochondrial version was anemic, but developmentally normal. The patient missing the mitochondrial version of the protein did not have developmental delays or chronic anemia, but did have other immune symptoms, and was not correctly diagnosed until his 50s. There are likely other factors contributing to each patient’s exact presentation of the disease, but Ly’s work begins to unravel the mystery of their atypical symptoms.

Cheeseman and Ly want to make more clinicians aware of the prevalence of genes coding for more than one protein, so they know to check for mutations affecting any of the protein versions that could contribute to disease. For example, several TRNT1 mutations that only eliminate the shorter version of the protein are not flagged as disease-causing by current assessment tools. Cheeseman lab researchers, including Ly and graduate student Matteo Di Bernardo, are now developing a new assessment tool for clinicians, called SwissIsoform, that will identify relevant mutations that affect specific protein versions, including mutations that would otherwise be missed.

“Jimmy and Iain’s work will globally support genetic disease variant interpretation and help with connecting genetic differences to variation in disease symptoms,” Fleming says. “In fact, we have recently identified two other patients with mutations affecting only the mitochondrial versions of two other proteins, who similarly have milder symptoms than patients with mutations that affect both versions.”

Long term, the researchers hope that their discoveries could aid in understanding the molecular basis of disease and in developing new gene therapies: Once researchers understand what has gone wrong within a cell to cause disease, they are better equipped to devise a solution. More immediately, the researchers hope that their work will make a difference by providing better information to clinicians and people with rare diseases.

“As a basic researcher who doesn’t typically interact with patients, there’s something very satisfying about knowing that the work you are doing is helping specific people,” Cheeseman says. “As my lab transitions to this new focus, I’ve heard many stories from people trying to navigate a rare disease and just get answers, and that has been really motivating to us, as we work to provide new insights into the disease biology.”

Go high or go wide? DeepSeek and ByteDance, the two leaders of China’s AI industry, are adopting vastly different strategies.

On Monday, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.2, another open-weight model that anyone can tinker with. The startup says it performs on par with the latest models from OpenAI and Google, and it even beats them on some key mathematics benchmarks.

That same day, ByteDance, whose dominance in AI applications we covered previously, introduced even more ways for people to use its chatbot, Doubao. ByteDance is now working with a Chinese smartphone manufacturer to embed Doubao into the operating system, giving it access to different apps and allowing it to conduct agentic tasks with them. In other words, it’s coming for Apple’s Siri.

Both ByteDance and DeepSeek have AI apps with over 140 million monthly users. But their latest announcements represent two diverging trends in China’s AI industry. While some companies are still competing with their Western counterparts to build ever more capable models, others have quietly withdrawn from that game and are focusing on how they can integrate their AI tools into people’s everyday lives.

DeepSeek Resurfaces

DeepSeek’s latest open-weight model may have disappointed some of its most loyal followers, who are still waiting for R2, a much-anticipated update to the initial model that rocked Silicon Valley in January. Instead, DeepSeek released V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale, which are better-optimized versions of its previous model V3.2-Exp, released in September.

Still, V3.2 caused a stir in the AI industry because DeepSeek claims it can solve the type of advanced math questions asked at the International Mathematical Olympiad, and its performance on other coding and reasoning tasks is supposedly on par with or above GPT 5 and Gemini 3. “It suddenly dawned on me why they call the company DeepSeek with the whale as a motif. Because just like a whale, it rarely surfaces, but every time it surfaces, it always makes a massive splash,” says Jen Zhu Scott, an AI investor and the cofounder and CEO of Power Dynamics, a modular data-center solutions firm.

However, I can’t help but feel like this arms race of AI models is getting a little tiring, particularly because so many new ones have been released in the last month, each claiming to take humanity one step higher. In less than 20 days, we had OpenAI’s GPT 5.1, Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5; throw in Chinese open source models like Moonshot’s Kimi K2 and DeepSeek’s V3.2, and it becomes a total mess. My attention span can be summarized by this perfect meme.

“At the end of the day, we can’t keep up with all these hairline differences between different models, different releases,” Zhu says. “It actually doesn’t make a huge difference, apart from some kind of stock market speculation on who’s gonna win.”

Early benefits are visible. While 53% of Irish firms report productivity gains from AI agents, only 38% see cost savings. This highlights the gap between task efficiency and enterprise impact. Trust is particularly thin: just 7% express high trust in agents across multiple functions.

Why trust is the bottleneck

The impact of low trust is not abstract; especially for specific high stakes activities. No Irish respondents report high trust in agents to conduct financial transactions, only 4% for autonomous customer interactions, and 9% for data analysis and insights.

Companies hesitate to hand over critical decisions to systems they can’t fully audit, govern, or explain. This explains why measurable value is lagging despite investment intent.

In parallel, the 2026 Global Digital Trust Insights Survey shows a world grappling with other data-related tensions: 41% of Irish organisations are adopting AI and machine learning to strengthen their cyber defence, while globally managed services are being used to support AI (38%), threat management (28%), data protection (27%) and third-party risk (17%).

Yet, 39% of respondents globally indicate that a data breach has cost their organisation over $500,000 in the last three years, and most companies (83%) split spend evenly between proactive and reactive measures — a sign that resilience and trust mechanisms are still maturing.

Data foundations still decide outcomes

Ireland’s trust gap is anchored in data readiness. Four in ten organisations cite data issues as the top barrier to realising value from agents. Integration with legacy systems is also more acute locally than in the US.

The Digital Trust Insights Survey aligns with this finding: Irish firms are increasing cyber risk investment (57%), but knowledge gaps and unclear risk appetite remain prominent barriers to using AI for cyber defence.

Without high quality, well governed, securely accessible data, agent performance, trust and return on investment will stall.

From back office to the front line

Adoption patterns are shifting. Customer service is now the leading use case in Ireland, ahead of operations and finance. But adoption remains patchy in sales and marketing, and only a minority are using agents to redesign processes or create new products.

That hesitancy mirrors cyber trends: while 78% of organisations expect cyber budgets to rise and 41% are adopting AI and machine learning to strengthen their cyber defence, many teams admit to skills and knowledge gaps in applying AI responsibly.

Until governance, assurance and risk ownership are crystal clear, leaders will keep agents near the “human in the loop” perimeter and away from autonomous decisions in revenue critical journeys.

What Irish leaders can do now

Build transparent guardrails: Treat trust as a design requirement, not an afterthought. Define “high stakes” thresholds (such as financial postings, contractual commitments or regulated customer interactions, for example) and require explainability, human validation and auditable logs for those flows. The Digital Trust Insights Survey data shows boards are backing cyber and data risk investment; use that momentum to embed Responsible AI policies and model risk controls alongside your existing cyber frameworks.

Fix data at the source: Prioritise the datasets that feed your first scaled agents and apply basic hygiene: lineage, quality rules, access controls and retention. Integrate with legacy systems via standardised APIs to limit brittle point-to-point builds. Our AI Agent Survey indicates that data issues and integration are the biggest Irish barriers; solving them will lift both performance and confidence.

Make cyber and AI one conversation: Security leaders are already prioritising AI capabilities; align this with your agent roadmap so threat detection, data loss prevention and identity controls are tuned to agent behaviours (for example, elevated scope service accounts or automated actions). Given that only a small fraction of organisations report full capability across data risk measures, closing this gap raises assurance and accelerates adoption.

Upskill for oversight, not just usage: The surveys point to knowledge and skills gaps as top obstacles. Train for oversight, not just usage. Governance, failure modes, red-teaming and incident playbooks matter as much as daily operations. This supports safe autonomy where it matters and reduces reliance on ad hoc controls.

Measure enterprise value, not task wins: Link agent outcomes to cost to serve, cycle time and revenue metrics, not just task time saved. With only 38% reporting cost savings despite widespread productivity gains, shifting measurement will force process redesign and accountability at the business unit level. Start with two or three journeys where you control both the data and the decision rights.

The destination is trusted autonomy

Irish leaders agree: AI agents will reshape work. But without trusted autonomy built on secure data and transparent governance, the promise will stall.

Start earning trust now, and enterprise-scale value will follow.   

This article was first published on www.businesspost.ie