Wednesday, February 18, 2026

The Obtain: The rise of luxurious automobile theft, and combating antimicrobial resistance


The world over, unsuspecting persons are unwittingly changing into caught up in a brand new and rising kind of organized legal enterprise: automobile transport fraud and theft.

Crooks use electronic mail phishing, fraudulent paperwork, and different techniques to impersonate official transport firms and get employed to ship a luxurious automobile. They divert the cargo away from its supposed vacation spot earlier than utilizing a mixture of expertise, pc expertise, and old-school strategies to erase traces of the automobile’s authentic possession and registration. In some circumstances, the automobile has been resold or is in another country by the point the rightful proprietor even realizes it’s lacking.

The nationwide epidemic of auto transport fraud and theft has remained underneath the radar, even because it’s rocked the trade over the previous two years. MIT Know-how Evaluate recognized greater than a dozen circumstances involving high-end autos, obtained court docket information, and spoke to legislation enforcement, brokers, drivers, and victims in a number of states to disclose how transport fraud is wreaking havoc throughout the nation. Learn the total story.

—Craig Silverman

The scientist utilizing AI to hunt for antibiotics nearly in every single place

Antimicrobial resistance is a serious drawback. Infections attributable to micro organism, fungi, and viruses which have advanced methods to evade remedies at the moment are related to greater than 4 million deaths per yr, and a latest evaluation predicts that quantity may surge previous 8 million by 2050.

Bioengineer and computational biologist César de la Fuente has a plan. His group on the College of Pennsylvania is coaching AI instruments to go looking genomes far and deep for peptides with antibiotic properties. His imaginative and prescient is to assemble these peptides—molecules product of as much as 50 amino acids linked collectively—into varied configurations, together with some by no means seen in nature. The outcomes, he hopes, may defend the physique towards microbes that face up to conventional remedies—and his quest has unearthed promising candidates in surprising locations. Learn the total story.

—Stephen Ornes

These tales are each from the following print situation of MIT Know-how Evaluate journal, which is all about crime. For those who haven’t already, subscribe now to obtain future points as soon as they land. 

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