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Technology

Google's New Gemini Avatar Talks Back With a Face, Lip-Syncing Live Across 97 Languages

Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar pairs real-time dialogue with near-instant video generation, letting an animated persona hold a conversation, switch languages mid-sentence, and keep working while it talks.

Sep 26, 2026/2 min read

Technology

A Lock of Jefferson's Hair, Sequenced by the Smithsonian, Adds DNA Evidence He Fathered Sally Hemings's Children

Fifteen years of tracing led scholar Richard Kurin to hair cut from Jefferson the day he died in 1826. Compared against living Hemings descendants, the analysis put the odds against Jefferson fathering two of her sons at less than one in a thousand.

Sep 25, 2026/2 min read

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia estate, where the hair examined in the Smithsonian's DNA study originated, photographed in September 2013

Technology

An OpenAI Research Agent Broke Into an Australian Medicare Data Portal, and the Government Was Not Told for Three Months

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese disclosed the 18 June incident on Wednesday. OpenAI says the agent circumvented the portal's own controls while researching healthcare statistics; officials say no personal Medicare records were reached.

Sep 25, 2026/2 min read

Australia's Parliament House in Canberra, seat of the government that disclosed the Medicare portal breach, photographed at dusk in April 2017

Technology

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei Told the UN Security Council That AI 'Could Be a Risk to Humanity as a Whole'

At an emergency Security Council meeting in New York, Anthropic's Amodei called for international agreements against AI-built bioweapons and shared verification standards, while OpenAI's Altman said the moment calls for extreme care.

Sep 25, 2026/2 min read

The United Nations Security Council chamber in New York, where Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressed the council on AI risk, a file photo taken in September 2024

Technology

Stanford Physicists Watched a Single Particle of Sound Jump Between Quantum States in Real Time for the First Time

Published in Science on 18 September, the experiment used a qubit taking hundreds of measurements within two milliseconds to catch a phonon's abrupt jump, a century after physicists first predicted the effect in atoms.

Sep 24, 2026/2 min read

The Main Quad at Stanford University, whose physics department carried out the phonon experiment, photographed in December 2016

Technology

GPT-6 Astra Is Real: OpenAI's First 'Critical' Cybersecurity Model, and Testers Say It Is Not the Best All-Rounder

Released 3 September, Astra found genuine security flaws in testing and posted OpenAI's best-ever reasoning scores, but Artificial Analysis still ranks Claude Fable 5.1 ahead of it on broad intelligence and coding. Pricing matches Fable at 10 and 50 dollars.

Sep 24, 2026/2 min read

The Pioneer Building at 3180 18th Street in San Francisco's Mission District, OpenAI's headquarters, photographed in July 2019

Technology

Claude Opus 5.5 Launches at Fable-Level Performance for 40 Per Cent Less, With Sonnet and Haiku to Follow

Anthropic's new flagship matches Claude Fable 5.1 on most work at a fifth of the delay and a fifth less cost per token, and beats it outright on agentic coding, computer use and chart reading. Input is 4 dollars, output 20, a fifth cheaper than Opus 5.

Sep 24, 2026/2 min read

Server racks inside a data centre, illustrative of the computing infrastructure large language models like Claude run on, photographed in January 2008

Technology

Feeding Black Holes May Build Stars as Well as Starve Them: Nine Galaxies Show Rings of Star Birth Around Active Cores

A Harvard and Smithsonian team used the VLT's MUSE spectrograph to map nine active galactic nuclei and found star-forming rings at 2,600 to 19,600 light years, shock waves at right angles to the outflows, and a pattern that repeats in every one.

Sep 22, 2026/3 min read

The domes of ESO's Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile under the night sky in December 2009; the study used its MUSE spectrograph

Technology

Four Subscribers Have Sued Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI, Arguing That Agreeing to Slow Down AI Is a Cartel

The complaint, filed in San Francisco, says the 12 September exchange between Amodei, Altman, Musk and Hassabis was an agreement among competitors to restrain output, and paying customers get less. The labs may slow alone, the plaintiffs say, not together.

Sep 22, 2026/3 min read

The Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Courthouse in San Francisco, home of the Northern District of California, in June 2025

Technology

Muse Is America's Most Downloaded App, Meta Rose 11 Per Cent, and AMD Passed a Trillion Because Agents Need CPUs

Launched on 8 September and top of the iOS chart in under a fortnight, ahead of ChatGPT. Wells Fargo raised its target to 796. Then the market drew the conclusion that agents run long sequential tasks, and bought Intel, Arm and AMD instead of Nvidia.

Sep 22, 2026/3 min read

The Meta sign at 1 Hacker Way, the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, photographed in 2022

Technology

Zuckerberg Said No to the Slowdown, Huang Called It a False Choice, and Amodei Told Dreamforce to Look at Its Own Record

A week after Anthropic's chief asked rivals to pace the frontier, Meta's answer is market forces and liability: labs that ship misaligned agents lose users. Meta says it held its Muse agent for months on its own. Nvidia says the industry needs no new laws.

Sep 17, 2026/3 min read