An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neuroscience News Science Magazine: Surgeons have performed the first fully robotic heart transplant in the U.S., using advanced robotic tools to avoid opening the chest. [...] Using a surgical robot, lead surgeon Dr. Kenneth Liao and his team made small, precise incisions, eliminating the need to open the chest and break the breast bone. Liao removed the diseased heart, and the new heart was implanted through preperitoneal space, avoiding chest incision. "Opening the chest and spreading the breastbone can affect wound healing and delay rehabilitation and prolong the patient's recovery, especially in heart transplant patients who take immunosuppressants," said Liao, professor and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and circulatory support at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and mechanical circulatory support at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center. "With the robotic approach, we preserve the integrity of the chest wall, which reduces the risk of infection and helps with early mobility, respiratory function and overall recovery." In addition to less surgical trauma, the clinical benefits of robotic heart transplant surgery include avoiding excessive bleeding from cutting the bone and reducing the need for blood transfusions, which minimizes the risk of developing antibodies against the transplanted heart. Before the transplant surgery, the 45-year-old patient had been hospitalized with advanced heart failure since November 2024 and required multiple mechanical devices to support his heart function. He received a heart transplant in early March 2025 and after heart transplant surgery, he spent a month in the hospital before being discharged home, without complications.

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Apple's Swift programming language is expanding official support to Android through a new "Android Working Group" which will improve compatibility, integration, and tooling. "As it stands today, Android apps are generally coded in Kotlin, but Apple is looking to provide its Swift coding language as an alternative," notes 9to5Google. "Apple first launched its coding language back in 2014 with its own platforms in mind, but currently also supports Windows and Linux officially." From the report: A few of the key pillars the Working Group will look to accomplish include: - Improve and maintain Android support for the official Swift distribution, eliminating the need for out-of-tree or downstream patches - Recommend enhancements to core Swift packages such as Foundation and Dispatch to work better with Android idioms - Work with the Platform Steering Group to officially define platform support levels generally, and then work towards achieving official support of a particular level for Android - Determine the range of supported Android API levels and architectures for Swift integration - Develop continuous integration for the Swift project that includes Android testing in pull request checks. - Identify and recommend best practices for bridging between Swift and Android's Java SDK and packaging Swift libraries with Android apps - Develop support for debugging Swift applications on Android - Advise and assist with adding support for Android to various community Swift packages

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Comcast is introducing new simplified, contract-free broadband plans that eliminate its unpopular 1.2TB data cap for residential customers. "The company began enforcing a data cap in 2008, when it set that limit at 250GB," notes PCMag. "Four years later, it raised that to 300GB, then lifted it to 1TB in 2016 and inched it up again to 1.25TB in 2020 after suspending it entirely during the early months of the pandemic." The report notes that existing customers will need to switch to these updated plans to benefit from the cap removal. PCMag reports: Steve Croney, Comcast's COO for connectivity and platforms, describes these new "everyday price plans" as "built on simplicity and transparency -- no hidden fees, no confusion." Comcast began showing the new plans on its sign-up pages Thursday morning. The monthly rates largely match those announced when Comcast advertised a rate-lock offer in April: - 300Mbps downloads for $40 with a one-year lock or $55 with a five-year lock, then $70 a month - 500Mbps for $55 with a one-year lock or $70 with a five-year lock, then $85 - 1Gbps for $70 with a one-year lock or $85 a month with a five-year lock, then $100 - 2Gbps for $100 with a one-year lock or $115 with a five-year lock, then $130 Upload speeds on those plans will vary by location but should start at 40Mbps. These plans also include one year of Xfinity Mobile wireless service, which combines Verizon's coverage with Comcast's Wi-Fi network.

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Facing mounting competition from autonomous taxi services like Waymo, Uber is in early talks to help fund Travis Kalanick's potential acquisition of Pony.ai's U.S. subsidiary (source paywalled; alternative source). If completed, the deal would reunite Kalanick with Uber (now under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi) and position Pony.ai to operate independently of its Chinese parent amid rising U.S. regulatory pressures. The New York Times reports: The company, Pony.ai, was founded in Silicon Valley in 2016 but has its main presence in China, and has permits to operate robot taxis and trucks in the United States and China. The talks are preliminary, said the people, who were not authorized to speak about the confidential conversations. Mr. Kalanick will run Pony if the deal is completed, they said. It is unclear what role, if any, Uber would take in Pony as an investor. Financial details of the potential transaction could not be determined. Pony went public last year in the United States, raising $260 million in a share sale. Its market capitalization stands around $4.5 billion. If the deal goes through, Mr. Kalanick, 48, will remain in his day job running CloudKitchens, a virtual restaurant start-up that he founded after leaving Uber in 2017. He would also work more closely with Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over as Uber's chief executive after Mr. Kalanick's ouster. The discussions are the starkest sign yet that Uber is under pressure from Waymo, the driverless car unit spun out of Google, and other autonomous car services. When Mr. Kalanick was Uber's chief executive, the company tried developing autonomous vehicle technology. It then bought Otto, a self-driving trucking start-up run by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer. Google later sued Mr. Levandowski for theft of trade secrets and sued Uber to bar it from using its self-driving technology. Under Mr. Khosrowshahi, Uber has taken a different tack to self-driving cars. The company has struck roughly 18 partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies like Wayve, May Mobility and WeRide to bring pilot programs for driverless car services into Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The goal, Mr. Khosrowshahi has said in podcast interviews, has been to put "as many cars on Uber's network as possible." He has maintained that while autonomous vehicles are growing steadily, ride-hailing networks will have both human and robot drivers for years.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google's AI search features are killing traffic to publishers, so now the company is proposing a possible solution. On Thursday, the tech giant officially launched Offerwall, a new tool that allows publishers to generate revenue beyond the more traffic-dependent options, like ads. Offerwall lets publishers give their sites' readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more. In addition, Google says that publishers can add their own options to the Offerwall, like signing up for newsletters. The new feature is available for free in Google Ad Manager after earlier tests with 1,000 publishers that spanned over a year. While no broad case studies were shared, India's Sakal Media Group implemented Google Ad Manager's Offerwall feature and saw a 20% revenue boost and up to 2 million more impressions in three months. Overall, publishers testing Offerwall experienced an average 9% revenue lift, with some seeing between 5% and 15%.

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Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: The upcoming Blender 5.0 3D modeling software application is introducing High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support on Linux when making use of Wayland -- no X11 support for HDR -- and Vulkan graphics accelerator. HDR support for Blender 5.0 on Linux is currently considered experimental. Enabling the HDR support on Linux for the Blender creator software requires having a High Dynamic Range display (of course) and be running on a Wayland desktop, enabling Vulkan API acceleration rather than OpenGL, and enabling the feature currently deemed experimental. Additional details can be found via this Blender DevTalk thread.

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Google is bringing its AI Overviews-like feature to YouTube in the form of an "AI-powered search results carousel." The Verge reports: As shown in a video, the search results carousel will show a big video clip up top, thumbnails to a selection of other relevant video clips directly under that, and an AI-generated bit of text responding to your query. To see a full video, tap on the big clip at the top of the carousel. The feature is currently only accessible on iOS and Android and for videos in English and will be available to test until July 30th, per the YouTube experiments page. Additionally, only a "randomly selected number of Premium members" will have access to it, YouTube says in a support document.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After sending cease-and-desist letters to VMware users whose support contracts had expired and who subsequently declined to subscribe to one of Broadcom's VMware bundles, Broadcom has started the process of conducting audits on former VMware customers. [...] Ars Technica reviewed a letter that a software provider and VMware user in the Netherlands received that is dated June 20 and informs the firm that it "has been selected for a formal audit of its use of VMware software and support services" [PDF]. The security professional who provided Ars with the letter asked to keep their name and their employers' name anonymous out of privacy concerns. The anonymous employee told Ars that their company had been a VMware customer for "about" a decade before deciding not to sign up for a new contract with Broadcom's VMware a year ago. The company had been using VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere. "Our CEO decided to not extend the support contract because of the costs," the employee said. "This already impacts us security-wise because we can no longer get updates (unless the CVSS score is critical)." The letter notes that an auditing firm, Connor Consulting, which is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices around the globe, will perform a review of the company's "VMware deployment and entitlements, which may include fieldwork or remote testing and meetings with members of your accounting, licensing, and management information systems functions." The letter informs its recipient that someone from Connor will reach out and that the VMware user should respond within three business days. The letter, signed by Aiden Fitzgerald, director of global sales operations at Broadcom, claims that Broadcom will use its time "as efficiently and productively as possible to minimize disruption." Still, the security worker that Ars spoke with is concerned about the implications of the audit and said they "expect a big financial impact" for their employer. They added: "Because we are focusing on saving costs and are on a pretty tight financial budget, this will likely have impact on the salary negotiations or even layoffs of employees. Currently, we have some very stressed IT managers [and] legal department [employees] ..." The employee noted that they are unsure if their employer exceeded its license limits. If the firm did, it could face "big" financial repercussions, the worker noted.

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