What happened
The Senate Homeland Security Committee yesterday voted along party lines to hold former U.S. infectious disease chief Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for repeatedly refusing to answer questions last week in testimony on the federal response to Covid-19. Committee Chair Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and other Republicans contended that Fauci could not invoke his Fifth Amendment rights “because he’d already received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden,” CNN said. But “GOP lawmakers also openly acknowledged” last week that they “hoped to get Fauci to perjure himself in his testimony, allowing them to bring new charges.”

Who said what
“Fauci faced no risk of federal prosecution,” Paul said. “All he had to do was tell the truth.” Fauci’s lawyer called the vote a “crude political stunt” to “punish” a public servant for “exercising his constitutional rights.” Paul appears so “hellbent on putting Fauci in jail” that his office immediately hand-delivered the contempt resolution to federal prosecutors, Politico said. Contempt referrals “rarely bypass the full Senate,” The Wall Street Journal said, and “it isn’t clear whether a referral made in such a manner is legally valid.”

What next?
The Justice Department yesterday evening said it had received Paul’s referral, is “reviewing it and will work with the Senate accordingly.” If prosecutors decide to file charges and win a conviction, Fauci faces up to a year in prison. 

What happened
Scientists at Stanford University yesterday reported in the journal Science that they had successfully directed artificial intelligence to create 16 new viruses. This first-ever use of AI to design and build viruses not found in nature raised “hopes for medical advances” like eliminating drug-resistant bacteria, The New York Times said, “while also raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens.”

Who said what
“Synthesizing viruses from scratch is hardly new,” the Times said, but the Stanford and Arc Institute researchers went “well beyond” previous efforts by teaching AI to “recognize patterns of DNA structure in nature, and then to use that data to write recipes for entirely new viruses.” Their AI tool, Evo, was fed genetic sequences “much like ChatGPT and other language models are trained on large sets of existing text material,” CNN said.

What next?
The new study “arrives at a moment of heightened anxiety regarding danger posed by increasingly powerful AI models,” The Wall Street Journal said. Evo was constrained to create “simple viruses” that can “only infect bacteria and pose no threat to humans.” But the breakthrough “raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions,” Johns Hopkins health security experts said in a corresponding Science article. “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.” 

This year’s Tour de France Femmes has been rocked by allegations that some riders are artificially exaggerating their bust size to gain an aerodynamic advantage. Several women’s WorldTour teams have raised concerns that cyclists riding for rival outfits are padding their sports bras to give them a boost in time trials, according to Dutch cycling news site WielerFlits.

The practice of “chest fairing,” also known as “bra boosting” or “bra doping,” involves increasing the surface area of the chest to change the airflow around the torso. An optimized chest fairing can reduce drag by as much as 3.6%, which could gain a time trial cyclist at least 0.78 seconds every kilometer, according to research published in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics in 2024. 

“You won’t gain tens of seconds,” said study lead Bert Blocken, an aerodynamics expert at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University. But over a 20- to 30-km time trial “it could save enough seconds to make the difference.”

The UCI, cycling’s governing body, took the unusual step this week of issuing a warning that the Tour de France Femmes race jury overseeing the final checks for Monday’s stage 4 time trial would pay “particular attention” to clothing and accessories that “could modify riders’ morphology.”

But “confusion remains as to what exactly” the jury was tasked with looking for, said Cycling Weekly. Also, “how are you going to police it?” Koen de Kort, head of technical and innovation at professional cycling team Lidl-Trek, told The Athletic. Determining the permissible amount of bra padding veers into a “gray area of what you’re allowed to check.”