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Technology

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Technology

Apple's Foldable Is the iPhone Duo, Costs 1,999 Dollars and Ships on 23 October. Everything Else Ternus Announced

A 7.6-inch inner screen, a 5.4-inch outer one, Touch ID in the side button, two batteries and a titanium body. Plus the iPhone 18 Pro from 1,199 dollars, two new watches and AirPods 5. What was said, and what was not.

Sep 10, 2026/3 min read

The glass cube of Apple's Fifth Avenue store in New York, with shoppers on the plaza in front of it

Technology

A Detector a Mile Under South Dakota Saw One Event It Cannot Explain, and Its Own Scientists Say Do Not Get Excited

The LUX-ZEPLIN collaboration reported a single particle interaction in ten tonnes of liquid xenon that matches no known background. It is a 2.6 sigma result, one chance in two hundred of being a fluke, and far from a discovery. Why it matters anyway.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

The LUX detector, LZ's predecessor, suspended inside its water tank 4,850 feet underground at the Sanford lab in South Dakota. LZ now occupies the same cavern with a far larger xenon vessel

Technology

Nvidia Is Buying Hugging Face for 12.93 Billion Dollars, Putting the Chipmaker in Charge of Where Everyone's Models Live

The company that sells the hardware now owns the repository: three million models, half a million datasets, eighteen million developers. Jensen Huang promises it stays open and that Nvidia compute will not be required. What changes and what to watch.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

The entrance to Nvidia's headquarters campus in Santa Clara, California, with the company's sign beside the steps

Technology

Apple's Event Is Tomorrow, John Ternus's First as Chief Executive. Only the Foldable Would Count as a Surprise

Surprise and Shine begins at 10am Pacific on Wednesday at Apple Park, a week after Tim Cook handed over. What is confirmed, which is almost nothing, and what is expected: a foldable iPhone above two thousand dollars, two Pro models and two watches.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

An aerial view of the ring of Apple Park in Cupertino, where Wednesday's event takes place

Technology

MIT Wired Bacteria Into Transistors. Its Biggest Circuit Is Twenty-Four Colonies on a Dish That Takes Eight Hours to Add

Engineered colonies of a plant bacterium pass chemical signals across five millimetres of agar, switching each other on and off like components on a board. The team built adders, routers and logic gates. The point is a computer that can grow on a leaf.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

Bacterial colonies grown in patterns on an agar plate. These are E. coli; the MIT circuits use colonies of Pantoea agglomerans printed onto agar in the same way

Technology

Saturn Has Grown a Ten-Sided Storm at Its South Pole, and Nobody Saw It Start

Hubble has confirmed a decagon riding a jet stream around Saturn's south pole, each side longer than Earth is wide. The northern hexagon has been there for forty years. This one was not there in 2022.

Sep 6, 2026/3 min read

Saturn and its rings in natural colour, imaged by the Cassini spacecraft. The new decagon at the south pole is not visible in this view

Technology

Life Runs on Four Letters. A Bacterial Enzyme Has Just Read Eight Without Being Told

RNA polymerase from E. coli transcribed a synthetic eight-letter genetic alphabet using the same signals it uses for natural DNA. The finding, in Nature Communications, means cells may not need rewiring to speak an expanded language.

Sep 6, 2026/3 min read

Researchers loading a sample into a cryo-electron microscope, the instrument the UC San Diego team used to image the enzyme at work

Technology

OpenAI Has Released a Model That Uses Your Computer, and Priced It Like a Specialist

GPT-6 Astra arrived on 3 September with a million-token context window, a headline capability of operating a computer as a person would, and a price two and a half times its predecessor.

Sep 5, 2026/3 min read

Racks of servers and networking equipment in a machine room, the kind of hardware a frontier model is trained and served on

Technology

Eighteen Years to Map a Fly Brain, and the Point Was Never the Fly

Researchers have published the complete wiring diagram of the male fruit fly central nervous system: more than 166,000 neurons and about 125 million connections, the largest brain map by neuron count yet produced.

Sep 4, 2026/3 min read

A fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, feeding on a piece of banana in close up, its compound eye a bright red. This is the animal whose complete nervous system has now been mapped

Technology

Anthropic Shipped the Same Model Twice Under Two Names, and the Difference Is Who Is Allowed to Use It

Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 are the same model with different safeguards. One is generally available. The other is restricted to a set of American organisations through trusted access programmes, for work in cybersecurity and the life sciences.

Sep 1, 2026/4 min read

A three dimensional protein model rendered in a virtual environment at Idaho National Laboratory, where researchers can examine and manipulate the structure

Technology

Chrome Deleted the Last of the Old Extensions Yesterday, and the Ad Blockers Are the Point

31 August was the date the remaining Manifest V2 extensions came out of the Chrome Web Store. They stopped running more than a year ago. What changed yesterday is that you can no longer get them back.

Sep 1, 2026/3 min read

The Google sign outside the company's Charleston Road offices in Mountain View, California, photographed in 2022