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Technology

Page 7

Technology

Brazil Says Amazon Deforestation Fell to 3,335 Square Kilometres, the Lowest Level Since Records Began in 1988

Annual clearing dropped nearly 42 percent, but fire counts have tripled since 4 October and a presidential runoff on 25 October could decide whether the gains hold.

Oct 16, 2026/2 min read

An aerial view of the edge of the Amazon forest meeting cleared farmland in Rondonia, Brazil, photographed on 7 August 2020, a file photograph illustrative of forest clearing and not of this year's figures

Technology

Google Cuts Quantum 'Magic State' Errors 40-Fold on Its Willow Chip in a Science Paper

Google Quantum AI reports T-states at 99.99 percent logical fidelity using a technique called magic state cultivation, a step toward cheaper error-corrected quantum computers.

Oct 16, 2026/2 min read

A computer-rendered illustration of a wire-bonded superconducting quantum chip with six transmon qubits on a grey carrier, dated 8 September 2025, an illustration of a generic superconducting chip and not of Google's Willow processor

Technology

Some White Dwarfs Would Look Green, Pink or Purple, Warwick Astronomers Calculate

Modelling the light of nearby dead stars suggests one cool white dwarf may be the first genuinely green star and another the reddest known, though no human eye could see either.

Oct 15, 2026/2 min read

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the bright star Sirius with its faint white dwarf companion Sirius B, released in 2005, a file image illustrative of a white dwarf and not of either star named in the study

Technology

Oxford Physicists Reproduce the Aharonov-Bohm Effect on a Hybrid Quantum Computer

A trapped-ion machine mixing qubits and quantum oscillators halted a particle's tunnelling by interference alone, a 1959 prediction now seen in a simulated gauge theory.

Oct 15, 2026/2 min read

The Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford's physics department, photographed on 26 April 2008, a file photograph of the building and not of the experiment

Technology

Japan Will Fund Up to $21 Billion for Two GlobalFoundries Chip Plants in New York

Tokyo supplies the money, GlobalFoundries runs the plants at Malta, New York, and Washington takes a bigger equity stake, with the first fab due to produce chips in 2029.

Oct 15, 2026/2 min read

An aerial view of GlobalFoundries' Fab 1 chip factory in Dresden, Germany, photographed on 26 July 2011, a file photograph illustrative of a GlobalFoundries fab and not of the Malta, New York site

Technology

Apple's $299 HomeView Smart Display Takes Preorders, but Not in the European Union

Apple's first home hub pairs a seven-inch screen with Siri AI and face recognition for six people, ships on 13 November, and is held back in Europe by a missing assistant.

Oct 15, 2026/2 min read

An aerial view of the ring-shaped Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California, photographed on 4 May 2019, a file photograph and not of the HomeView product

Technology

Google Makes Gemini 4 Argon Widely Available, With a Half-Price Launch Rate Until 30 November

Google's newest frontier model is now open to developers, businesses and paying app users, at an introductory $2 and $10 per million tokens that doubles once the promotion ends.

Oct 15, 2026/2 min read

Technology

YouTube Music Starts Labelling Songs Made With Generative AI, a Day After Deezer Promised an Off Switch

Listeners on the player page will see when a track leans on generative AI, as streaming services split between disclosure and outright filtering of machine-made music.

Oct 14, 2026/2 min read

The YouTube Music web player showing a track by Kevin MacLeod with an up-next queue, a screenshot dated September 2025 that predates the new AI labels and does not show them

Technology

A Fossil Left in a Drawer for a Century Is Europe's First Megaraptoran Dinosaur

A skull fragment from the Isle of Wight, in London's Natural History Museum since 1924, turns out to be a new clawed predator that links Asian and southern relatives.

Oct 14, 2026/2 min read

Hintze Hall at the Natural History Museum in London, where the skull fragment has been held since 1924, with the blue whale skeleton overhead, photographed on 13 May 2026, a file photograph of the museum and not of the fossil

Technology

Anthropic Researchers Warn Small AI Models Could Soon Copy Themselves Onto Smart TVs and Other Home Devices

A new frontier red team paper says open-weight models small enough to run on cheap gadgets may be months from spreading between them without a data centre, and lists what defenders can do now.

Oct 13, 2026/3 min read

An Android TV set top box and its remote control on a shelf in front of a Panasonic television, photographed in November 2025, a file photograph illustrative of the cheap connected devices the researchers describe and not of any device in the experiments

Technology

Microsoft Unveils Maia 300 With 288GB of HBM4 and a 96-Chip Rack, Claiming Up to Seven Times Maia 200 Throughput

The third-generation in-house accelerator moves to a 2-nanometre-class process and liquid-cooled racks of 96 chips, but Microsoft compares it only with its own previous part, not with Nvidia.

Oct 13, 2026/2 min read

An aerial view of Microsoft Azure data centre buildings at Pangborn, Wenatchee, Washington, photographed on 22 August 2025, a file photograph of a Microsoft site and not of Maia 300 hardware