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Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is the focus of a Justice Department antitrust probe over whether its investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies, according to people familiar with the matter... View Source

If you're after the best picture quality, you'll always want to go with a disc... View Source

YouTube will soon count a view as soon as a video starts to play, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos. The update will go into effect on August 24th, "which means creators will likely see their total view counts increase faster moving forward," the platform says. Instagram and TikTok similarly add a view to a video when it starts to play or replay, while X co... View Source

Over the weekend, senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) excoriated health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr in a letter over his “calamitous” response to the summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak. New cases of explosive diarrhea, triggered by a microscopic parasite that’s been found to infest pre-packaged lettuce, have only recently started slowing down — despite Kennedy Jr declaring that t... View Source

Alphabet is looking to raise about A$5 billion ($3.6 billion) in what would be its debut bond offering in Australia, people familiar with the matter said, as US tech firms binge on debt to fuel AI spending. Bloomberg Tech's Ed Ludlow joins to discuss this as well as the latest from Anthropic. (Source: Bloomberg)... View Source

Samsung may have as many as five different foldable phones next year... View Source

Analogue and Supreme are teaming up to release metallic versions of the Analogue Pocket handheld in red and gold as part of Supreme's fall / winter 2026 collection. Here's how they're described on Supreme's website: Metallic portable handheld multi-video-game-system. Unibody aluminum with 24K Gold-plated and custom red glossy finishes. They also have a Supreme logo on the front and the back. I dig... View Source

Last month, OpenAI confirmed that an unreleased model had hacked into Hugging Face in order to obtain answers to an exam it was given. Scenarios that used to play out in sci-fi movies suddenly seem very real. Miles Brundage joins Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal on the Odd Lots podcast to talk about why his non-profit advocates for third-party auditing of AI models and why a kill switch may not be... View Source

Buying an older iPhone is a great way to save money while taking advantage of Apple's long support. But is the iPhone 15 too old to be worth it now?... View Source

X-ray: NASA/CXC/Ohio State Univ./J. Rodriguez et al; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope combine to reveal a vibrant view of 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula, in this Aug. 11, 2026, image. Located in the Large Magellanic Cl... View Source

After a solid but often unfocused debut in 2023, Ahsoka season 2 has finally kicked off its marketing campaign with a stellar first trailer that promises higher stakes and a much bigger scale when it premieres on Disney Plus early next year.As part of the D23 2026 celebrations, Disney and Lucasfilm shared a first look at the long-in-the-works second season of the live-action show – set between Ret... View Source

Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani joins Bloomberg Open Interest to explain why the company is shifting toward DoorDash and Grubhub, how delivery robots could cut last-mile costs and why sidewalk delivery is only the beginning. Kashani says the same AI-powered technology could eventually transform hospitals, logistics and everyday robotics. (Source: Bloomberg)... View Source

The first Zipline drone deliveries for Uber Eats orders will start later this year... View Source

Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoverie... View Source

It's a good time to be a Lego Star Wars fan. Not only are there a bunch of Mandalorian movie tie-in sets to look forward to, but there are eight brand new sets out, as part of Lego's new Smart Play system. Aimed at kids, these new Smart Play sets are designed to make play more interactive than ever before by introducing light and sound effects without the need for app support. The key element of t... View Source

Today I’m talking to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor. Everywhere you go, people say they don’t trust the media — and yet they’ve never consumed more of it. Audiences have moved on from legacy names in favor of Substacks and podcasts and TikTok news influencers that seem to be everywhere in our feeds.  Why would anyone want to start a new global news organization in the middle of all... View Source

OpenAI has revealed a new feature for ChatGPT’s desktop app on macOS that basically tracks your clicks, keystrokes, and more — all so it can fine-tune its AI model, raising obvious privacy concerns. The feature, called Computer History, lets ChatGPT “learn from everything you do on your computer,” said Ari Weinstein, an OpenAI product and engineering manager, on X. The compa... View Source

SoftBank Group Corp. has invested $200 million in Gravis Robotics, a Swiss startup that makes autonomous software for construction machinery... View Source

A bug in macOS screen sharing lets attackers view your screen, open files and do just about anything else they want... View Source

5 Min Read NASA Challenge Tests Wheel Designs for Moon Base Mobility NASA engineers, NASA Robotics Academy students, and teams from the Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge pose with the wheel prototypes at NASA’s Johnson Space Center Rock Yard in Houston on July 31, 2026. Credits: NASA/Luna Posadas Nava NASA engineers, NASA Robotics Academy students, and teams from the Rock and Roll with NASA Challe... View Source

A trio of heavyweight black holes are entangled in a dance of death that will quite possibly see them gradually all merge to form an even greater behemoth.Scientists have discovered the black holes in a galaxy that is so far away its light has taken 12.5 billion years to reach us, meaning we see it as it was less than 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. And it's offering strong supporting eviden... View Source

Apple's changing its rules for data collection consent prompts after Germany's Federal Cartel Office accused Apple of giving the prompts a design that favored its own apps. Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompts reportedly cost social media apps nearly $10 billion when they launched with iOS 14.5, making cross-app tracking of users largely opt in. But as a designated "gatekeeper" under the EU's... View Source

The surge in new AI debt is potentially crowding out long-end Treasury demand and has played a major role in the rise of bond yields, with some estimates suggesting it has pushed up 10-year rates by about 0.3 percentage point this year. Robert Schiffman of Bloomberg Intelligence has more. (Source: Bloomberg)... View Source

Just because you're listening to music on your laptop doesn't mean that you have to settle for its subpar speakers... View Source

(Image credit: NASA)Imagine orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth and seeing your home planet below — up in smoke.That was the reality recently for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) who captured this image of the volcano Mount Rainier covered in smoke from nearby wildfires. What is it?This past July, hundreds of wildfires devastated a number of regions across Canada. But unf... View Source

The smart speaker market is more or less dominated by major tech companies: Apple, Google, Sonos, and Amazon. But WiiM’s powerful 100W Sound smart speaker is an attractive alternative because it’s not locked down to play nicely with select music services. It supports over 20 services, and it sports Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 and ethernet, giving you multiple ways to connect. Additionally, it taps int... View Source

Nvidia Corp. has agreed to spend as much as $105 billion to support a massive new data center campus in Ohio set to be leased by OpenAI, according to a financial filing, marking the latest tie-up between two dominant forces driving the AI boom... View Source

3 min read Summer Triangle Corner: Deneb This image shows an illustration of the constellation Cygnus, Latin for “swan,” in the night sky. The Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, also known as the Veil Nebula, is located near one of the swan’s wings, outlined here in a rectangular box. NASA Bird constellations abound in the night sky, including Cygnus, the majestic swan. Easy to find with its dazzling... View Source

On Aug. 17, 1877, American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered Mars's moon Phobos. Moons of Mars: Amazing Photos of Phobos and DeimosHall was working at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. and looking through a 26-inch refractor telescope — which was then the largest in the world — when he first spotted the moon. Six days earlier, he had discovered another, smaller moon that he first descr... View Source

Uber is teaming up with drone company Zipline to start airborne takeout deliveries later this year, with the goal of reaching 1 million daily drone deliveries by 2029. Uber also said it was making a strategic investment in Zipline, a California-based company that has been orchestrating drone deliveries in Texas since 2025. The news comes as Uber's delivery rivals begin to step up their own drone d... View Source

Online marketplaces are being flooded with AI slop — but is anybody willing to actually pay for it? In the case of CGTrader, a long-established online marketplace for 3D assets used by video game developers, film editors, and 3D printing nerds, users are sending a clear message. As 404 Media reports, the marketplace is being flooded by AI-generated assets, representing one in six models — but they... View Source

The US Supreme Court refused to let Verizon Communications Inc. try to recoup $47 million it paid after being accused of privacy violations by the Federal Communications Commission... View Source

You probably use Bluetooth regularly, but different accessories call for different types of Bluetooth... View Source

Earth Observatory Science Earth Observatory Chasing Fire Clouds in Utah Earth Earth Observatory Image of the Day EO Explorer Topics All Topics Atmosphere Land Heat & Radiation Life on Earth Human Dimensions Natural Events Oceans Remote Sensing Technology Snow & Ice Water More Content Collections Global Maps World of Change Articles Earth Matters Blog Blue Marble: Next Generation EO Kids... View Source

Deutsche Telekom AG agreed to buy a fiber company and a television provider in Poland from Macquarie Asset Management for an enterprise value around €1 billion ($1.2 billion), part of the German company’s strategy to expand its broadband offering... View Source

The Omnibook X isn't flashy, but it still excels in almost every way... View Source

Melbourne, Florida, 17th August 2026, CyberNewswire... View Source

A rare planet-forming disk around a young triple-star system in the Orion constellation has been tipped over by a river of gas over 1 trillion miles (1.6 trillion kilometers) long. The discovery, made at radio wavelengths with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, could explain why astronomers keep finding planets with orbits that are drastically misaligned with the rota... View Source

Alphabet is looking to raise about $3.6 billion in what would be its debut bond offering in Australia, according to people familiar with the matter. Initial price guidance on the deal may be provided as early as Tuesday, with the notes potentially pricing the following day. Mandeep Singh of Bloomberg Intelligence has more. (Source: Bloomberg)... View Source

What kind of data is being collected by our devices, and how is it being used? Should we "Ask app not to track"?... View Source

Serve Robotics Inc. announced a new partnership with Grubhub and an expansion of its collaboration with DoorDash Inc. to two more US cities, its latest moves following a fallout with former investor Uber Technologies Inc... View Source

Hi-tech cameras orbiting Earth and on the ground, along with AI, help firefighters extinguish blazes before they spreadThe fires in Spokane, Washington, this summer are the latest reminder that when a wildfire is detected can be just as important as where it starts. A blaze found within minutes can often be contained before it spreads. Wait too long, and a small spark can become a major disaster.A... View Source

Meet Noodle and Loaf, aka Carb Cats. | Image: The Verge, Getty Images Like the pets of any self-respecting millennial, my cats have their own Instagram account. Noodle and Loaf - aka Carb Cats - aren't exactly celebrities. But they are used to having their photos taken a lot. Between their Instagram account, my regular need to test smartphone cameras, and the fact that they are two adorable idiots... View Source

This should be a golden era of launch. During the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than three-fold increase from only a decade ago. By every metric available, the launch industry is crushing it: Prices have never been more competitive, launches never more frequent, and access to space never more rapid. Paradoxically, though, there is a growing cr... View Source

The chipmaker is getting creative to help customers pay for its semiconductors... View Source

The greatest invention in pet tech in recent years is the litter robot. A machine that scoops your kitties' poop so you don't have to - what else could a cat owner possibly want? How about insights into your kitty's litter box usage that could flag health issues? Sign me up. But I have two feline friends… No worries, kitty facial recognition can handle that. At least, that is the idea behind the L... View Source

Nvidia, Meta releases are tacit admission that the US moat isn’t holding... View Source

As "The X Files" famously told us, "the truth is out there." But at the same time, inquiring minds are immersed today in finding out whether or not the proof is out there — specifically, proof that at least some unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) come from somewhere beyond Earth.The UAP acronym originally stood for "unidentified aerial phenomena," a term that itself was a rebranding of "uniden... View Source

Anthropic has clarified how it's planning to apply invisible watermarks to Claude-generated text in order to comply with Europe's AI transparency rules. On Friday, Anthropic announced that Claude's text marking system is "a version of the SynthID-Text approach" - an open-source watermarking technology developed by Google DeepMind that creates detectable patterns using wording probabilities. This w... View Source

Ulvac Inc. shares plunged the most in more than seven years after the supplier of chip vacuum pumps gave an annual outlook that fell short of analyst estimates due to production constraints... View Source

Blue Origin plans to return its Florida launch site to a dual-pad facility to support its bigger, more powerful New Glenn "9x4" rocket, which is still under development. As facility repairs continue following the explosion of one of Blue Origin's New Glenn "7x2" rockets during tests at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Launch Complex-36 in May, the company has announced its intent to expand the... View Source

El Niño coupled with Saharan dust is making this year’s hurricane season a dud. But there’s still potential for dangerous storms... View Source

An age-old economics tenet posits that excessive government borrowing can leave little room for companies to tap financial markets and drive up their interest rates to punishing levels. It’s called the “crowding out” theory... View Source

Researchers found that a metabolite produced by gut bacteria can weaken the barrier that protects the brain and promote changes associated with the cognitive disease... View Source

Scenarios that used to be the domain of sci-fi writers are coming true. We have machines that can talk. We have machines that are capable of ignoring the intent of their creators. And we have machines that are capable of planning and coordinating with other machines to deceive their creators. All of this came together last month, when it was revealed that an unreleased OpenAI model had hacked into... View Source

As part of a restructuring, OpenAI reportedly disbanded a team that assesses the potential for catastrophic risks with its models... View Source

Rakuten Group Inc. is working with defense AI startup Helsing to bring the German company’s military drones to Japan... View Source

Helen Jewell, CIO of fundamental equities international at BlackRock, says that portfolio diversification is key to riding out the volatile artificial intelligence trade. "It's so important that portfolios are constructed utilizing other parts of the market," Jewell tells Bloomberg Television. "The UK, the European banks, the health care stocks. Not just being really focused on that one sector." (... View Source

Robotera, a Chinese robotics startup backed by HSG and CDH Investments, is planning an initial public offering in Hong Kong, people familiar with the matter said, as a growing number of companies in the industry look to go public... View Source

Integrated BagLev hooks keep Peak Design’s City Line crossbody bag and backpack off the dirty ground. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge It's just a hook, sewn into a bag, but I really, really like it. Peak Design is so proud of its clever integration that the San Francisco-based maker of camera gear gave it a name: BagLev, for its ability to keep its new City Line of bags levitated above the di... View Source

The next generation of chief executives will need to spend more time building flexible organizations as the deployment of artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes how companies do business, according to Harvard Business School Professor Linda Hill... View Source

A fourth party is pursuing legal action against xAI, alleging that Grok was used to create CSAM based on her childhood photos... View Source

Singapore equities are among the world's best performers as strong economic growth, resilient bank earnings and a stronger Singapore dollar attract investors. While some fund managers see further upside, others warn valuations have become increasingly stretched after a multi-year rally. (Source: Bloomberg)... View Source

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 17 – A… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. A Golden Corona Eclipse Explanation: This total solar eclipse app... View Source

A Japanese company known for a game app based around virtual teen idols filed for bankruptcy, the latest in a wave of corporate failures that climbed to the most in 12 years as inflation and worker shortages hit weaker firms... View Source

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is selling its gaming arm in a deal worth at least $1.5 billion that will boost the Chinese e-commerce leader’s pivot to AI... View Source

CXMT Corp.’s ascent to the pinnacle of Chinese markets heralds a potentially consequential shift away from private-sector giants toward a new generation of hardware companies more closely aligned with Beijing’s strategic ambitions... View Source

Nandalal Weerasinghe, Governor at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, says inflation will slow back toward the central bank’s target of 5% over the second half of this year and into next year. He speaks with Haidi Stroud-Watts and Paul Allen on Bloomberg: The Asia Trade. (Source: Bloomberg)... View Source

Alphabet Inc. hired banks for what would be a debut offering of Australian dollar bonds, as US tech firms flood credit markets with debt to fund investments in AI... View Source

In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night… Come on, you know the rest! DC Comics' Green Lantern Corps. spans the infinite boundaries of the cosmos with its legion of 7,204 intergalactic space cops representing all races, genders, and biological entities patrolling thousands of Guardian sectors of the universe. The fabled interstellar law enforcement society based on the planet Oa, armed with the coolest... View Source

Google has added some smart theft-detection features to Android in recent years... View Source

According to the Financial Times, OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team at the end of last month. The job of the preparedness team was to assess if models posed serious risks and develop ways to mitigate those risks. (You know, like the possibility that it could go rogue and hack another company.) According to FT, responsibility has instead been divided up for specific areas like bio and cyber, t... View Source

Stripe Inc. has finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter Inc., a startup that helps companies switch between artificial intelligence models, for more than $7 billion, according to people familiar with the matter... View Source

If you really want a OnePlus phone, you can still make it work... View Source

In every possible universe? | Image: Backwoodz Studioz "Breakups are… tough." It's the opening lines of an interlude towards the end of DOOMED! Called "It Happens in Every Universe." It's also basically the thesis of the entire record. It's no grand revelation, but it's a well-trodden subject that Open Mike Eagle manages to mine for artistic gold. Eagle's subject matter is usually personal, and hi... View Source

Aaron Kaufman used to meet his lofty daily protein goals — a gram for each pound he weighs — with ground beef... View Source

You probably don't need antivirus software on your Android phone, but there are some exceptions... View Source

Alex Cooper is leaving her long-time talent agent for CAA after raising money to expand her business... View Source

A Super Nintendo or PlayStation looked better on retro TVs than today's ultra-sharp displays, but why is there such a difference?... View Source

The program makes upgrading your hardware incredibly convenient, but weigh your options... View Source

Electric vehicles offer plenty of benefits. There’s the instant torque, savings on fuel — and, of course, they’re much kinder to mother Earth. Yet compared to vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, EVs come with a key disadvantage drivers hope they never have to experience: they’re much more dangerous when they catch on fire. (An important caveat, though, is that they c... View Source

The differences between the iPhone and Android show up when you connect them to your car, as well... View Source

On Friday, Amazon customers received an email alerting them to an update to the site's terms and conditions. Most notably, it stated that disputes would now be resolved through arbitration and said users agree to a class action waiver. Amazon framed this as a "fast and efficient" way to resolve issues, but it notably would prevent customers from seeking the involvement of a judge or jury in most c... View Source

What do you get when you let an endless feed of AI fruitslop videos loose on screen-addicted kids? A great recipe for violent extremism, it turns out. A new analysis by researchers at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) argues that the AI-generated fruit videos infesting our feeds is a font for covertly spreading “violent and extremist content.” Most of these reels se... View Source

The new Apple Upgrade program makes the monthly cost of an iPhone even cheaper than before... View Source

A decade ago, young adults were flocking to vaunted tech giants like Google and Apple in pursuit of exciting jobs on the cutting edge of tech. In 2026, however, the status quo of young people who are uncritically enamored with the tech industry and its billionaire overlords has gone completely out the window. A new survey conducted by CNBC‘s Generation Labs asked over 1,000 US adults aged be... View Source

Let's look at how to use the Retro app, whether it's free and whether it can compete with other social media apps... View Source

The format remains unique in console history... View Source

Spherical "Aerobots" may one day swarm the caves of Titan — a moon of Saturn that NASA says is one of the most Earthlike in our solar system.Titan is covered in rivers, lakes and seas of hydrocarbons, like methane and ethane, as well as a strange "karst" terrain including underground sinkholes and caves. No rover could easily traverse this surface, but flying vehicles may have more success.So a ne... View Source

California Attorney General Rob Bonta joins Bloomberg This Weekend and calls the landmark youth safety case against Meta a “tobacco moment,” alleging the company knowingly designed Facebook and Instagram features that harmed children and put profit ahead of their safety. Bonta tells hosts Joe Mathieu and Carol Massar the states are seeking financial penalties as well as changes to Meta’s products,... View Source

It could be wise to wait, or settle for a cheaper model... View Source

ChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request. The feature is opt-in, rather than opt-out, and you can exclude certain apps and websi... View Source

When far-right white nationalist Jake Lang rolled up to a peaceful religious procession in Dearborn, Michigan earlier this month with a sign calling to “deport 100 million” Muslims, he clearly didn’t plan on making any friends. Predictably, the repeat-agitator of Michigan’s Arab-American community — who served four years in prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection... View Source

On Aug. 16, 1963, NASA's M2-F1 aircraft prototype made its first glide flight. This wingless aircraft kind of looked like a flying bathtub. NASA made it to test a new concept called the lifting body, which was an unpowered glider that provided an alternative way to return piloted spacecraft to Earth. Instead of pummeling out of the sky in a ballistic reentry, the lifting body landed sort of like a... View Source

A macabre community is thriving on Reddit, united by one core feeling: massive regret over having brought children into the world. The community, called r/RegretfulParents, is basically an anonymous forum for remorseful moms and dads to vent their darkest frustrations. It bills itself as a “safe place for parents who think they shouldn’t have become parents to rant, confess, and get th... View Source

Take time to enable these features today before you need them; they could help save your life in an emergency... View Source

MORRISON, Colorado - The Artemis II crew that circuited the moon earlier this year came full circle, dropping by a distinctive spot on Earth that's visually reminiscent of both the moon and Mars.On Aug. 3, the vast and stunning Red Rocks Amphitheatre served as both an inoculation of near-term nostalgia and heart-felt congratulations to the crew for the impressive journey of Artemis II. The 10-day... View Source

Nuclear holocaust isn’t a scenario to be taken lightly. In the unlikely event that nuclear war ever breaks out, it’s a safe bet that the world as we all know it will cease to exist, and any unlucky survivors will be ushered into a new kind of living hell. That’s where “Amble” comes in, a health startup selling boutique pharmaceutical solutions to 21st century problems... View Source

It's only available with the top-tier Premium subscription plan, for one... View Source

Meta faces a landmark federal trial brought by 29 states over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to addict young users and that the company improperly collected children’s data. Bloomberg News Tech Reporter Alexandra Levine joins Joe Mathieu and Carol Massar on Bloomberg This Weekend to explain that the case could expose Meta to substantial penalties and potentially... View Source

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started It all started in July, when one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test. The agent escaped its isolated testing environmen... View Source

There are alarmingly few degrees of separation between moral paragon of the AI industry Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Jeffrey Epstein. According to a new investigation from the Wall Street Journal, Amodei’s wife Cami Clark communicated with Epstein for several years while trying to get the deceased sex criminal and accused sex trafficker to invest in her women-focused porn company. In March... View Source

An object observed by the James Webb Space Telescope lends credence to a strange explanation for the mysterious red spots in the early universe... View Source

Local journalism in the US has spent the better part of two decades on life support. First came widespread digitization, which guttered subscriptions and left newspapers and magazines in shambles. Then private equity swooped in, snapping up publications like candy and turning them into digital ad farms run by skeleton crews. Add to this a steady erosion of trust in journalism and a drop-off in lit... View Source

In 2027 and 2028, there will be two spectacular, long-duration solar eclipses. Here’s what you need to know about them... View Source

Chinese researchers have presented a new map of the moon, updating a previous edition based on new scientific findings and recalibrating the moon's ancient geologic eras.The comprehensive map of the moon, with a scale of 1:5 million, was unveiled by the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences (IGCAGS) on Aug. 6. The map is an update of a 2024 edition and puts forward new bound... View Source

Observatories have been built in mines, deep under the Antarctic ice sheet, and elsewhere in an effort to detect the fleeting particles... View Source

Using AI to crank out everything imaginable, from your homework to emails to code, is great and all — until you have to own up to it. Fearless embracers of AI are suddenly clutching at their pearls, after Anthropic announced that its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, potentially exposing anyone who wants to get away with using the tech without detection. The announcement has cau... View Source

When it comes to space exploration, rockets are probably one of the coolest things you'll learn about as a kid. Zooming off into space, traveling to new planets and searching for potential life are all things that feel like they should be impossible. For any age of space enthusiast, it's pretty darn cool. For kids, though, learning about rockets can mark an amazing introduction, sparking a lifelon... View Source

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 16 – Milky… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Milky Way over Yellowstone Explanation: The Milky Way was not... View Source

The compact Polaroid Go is great for road trips and adventures. | Image: Polaroid Smartphone cameras are convenient, but they lack the charm of analog instant cameras. If you’re trying to relive the nostalgia of waiting for an instant photo to develop, Amazon is selling the second-generation Polaroid Go instant camera with a 16-photo film pack for $71.99 (usually $109.99). That’s the lowest price... View Source

SpaceX keeps setting spaceflight records.Elon Musk's company launches far more frequently than any other outfit, and it operates the largest satellite constellation ever assembled — the Starlink broadband network, which consists of nearly 11,000 satellites (and counting).On Saturday evening (Aug. 15), SpaceX set another mark, for the shortest time between orbital flights: It launched two Falcon 9... View Source

Samsung's newest party trick could actually help you improve your diet, and therefore your overall health... View Source

All is not well in the fourth estate. On Tuesday, the publisher of Axios hit “post” on an article about how he basically uses AI to read for him now, instead of recruiting the moldering neurons in his brain. “AI has become my reading buddy,” began Nicholas Johnston, who formerly served as the news site’s editor-in-chief. According to Johnston, the tedious process of a... View Source

If you want the best quality out of your Bluetooth audio, it's worth reviewing some settings... View Source

Doh! | Image: Activision / 20th Century Fox At D23, when asked about the potential for a sequel to the cult classic The Simpsons: Hit & Run game, Matt Groening replied, "I think the original game is coming back in some form," before current showrunner Matt Selman added, "or not." The tone in both of their voices and the body language suggests that Groening may have just revealed something he w... View Source

The woman claimed that AI tools are "taking everyday life and turning it into child sexual abuse."... View Source

If you squint you can just about make out the hat. | Screenshot: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge Your AI Slop Bores Me is brilliant in its simplicity. There are two tabs: human and LARP as an AI. On one side you enter a request. On the other, you submit an answer. But the important thing is that there's a human on both sides of the equation. Prompts can request a response as text or image, and then w... View Source

Replacing the battery on your Apple Watch can extend its life, but you'll have to determine whether it's worthwhile for your model... View Source

While there have been many twists and turns in the company's evolution, it remains one of the biggest names in the telecommunications industry... View Source

When will the price of RAM come back down again?... View Source

Anthropic has explained its text watermarking approach... View Source

If your internet has been slower than usual lately, your router might need a reset. Here are some things you can try... View Source

They’re far more powerful and fun than their bargain price suggests. | Photo: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge When I'm asked what to buy if you want to get into making electronic music, I often recommend Elektron's budget-minded Model:Samples and Model:Cycles grooveboxes. They don't grab headlines the way Teenage Engineering's gear or the Telepathic Instruments Orchid do, and even compared to the com... View Source

The use of AI chatbots has invaded almost every profession. From lawyers getting caught citing hallucinated cases and major consulting firms generating nonsensical reports to teachers using AI to revise likely AI-generated essays from students, the tech has become practically ubiquitous. Even those responsible for setting new rules on how to regulate the use of AI are making extensive use of the f... View Source

The news doesn’t stop when markets close. Hosts Joe Mathieu, Carol Massar and Lisa Mateo bring clarity, context and a bit of humor to the weekend’s biggest headlines, LIVE from New York. Joined by Natalie Oliverio, Navy Veteran & Military Journalist, Nathan Bomey, Axios Business Reporter, Denver Riggleman, Former US Representative (R-VA), and Amanda Agati, PNC Chief Investment Officer. (Source... View Source

Xbox offers refunds on some games and apps, but there are stipulations you should understand before requesting one... View Source

AI coding startup Cursor is now officially a part of SpaceX... View Source

The new X-Men MCU cast on stage at D-23. | Image: Marvel Entertainment With Spider-Man: Brand New Day behind us, and its reveal of Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, Marvel is finally ready to officially welcome the X-Men into the MCU. At the D23 event in Anaheim yesterday, the company revealed the cast for its upcoming, untitled X-Men film, which is scheduled to hit theaters on May 5th of 2028. Though, see... View Source

For most people, the mental calculation to grab a meal from McDonald’s is pretty simple: it’s relatively cheap, fast, and goes down easy, even if it doesn’t always feel so good afterward. For McDonald’s, however, the question of how to keep a customer coming back is far more complicated — apparently requiring an expansive web of corporate surveillance. That’s the stun... View Source

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed on Saturday that his country struck the Progress Rocket Space Center deep within Russia using ground-launched cruise missiles. "In Russia’s Samara region, one of the key enterprises within Roscosmos—the Progress Center, which was involved, among other things, in electronics production–was hit," Zelenskyy said on the social media site X. "Flamingo m... View Source

Going analog is all the rage, but does it apply to the small screen?... View Source

The OhSnap Snap Grip Stand, in black and silver. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge I told myself I wouldn't buy an OhSnap accessory for my phone. Every one I'd tested was nice, but felt overpriced and slightly flawed. After I weighed in on the $40 Snap Grip 5 last year, I wound up sticking with my $25 Syncwire instead. But OhSnap's $50 Snap Grip Stand finally got me. To have a truly useful ver... View Source

Earbuds range in price from under $10 to hundreds. What do you get for the money?... View Source

Season two of Star Wars: Ahsoka is still months away, but Lucasfilm still took the opportunity to tease it a bit at D23. The company dropped the first trailer for the new season ahead of its January 20th, 2027 debut. The clip shows a darker, witchcraft-filled take on the Star Wars universe, with Grand Admiral Thrawn (blue skin, red eyes, and an unsettlingly calm demeanor) threatening to thrust the... View Source

The public blowback to Meta’s contentious smart glasses continues to grow. The popular camera-equipped accessories, which have earned the pejorative nickname of “pervert glasses,” are systematically being abused by men to harass women in public . It’s become such a contentious issue that a German nonprofit filed a criminal complaint over privacy concerns. Just this week, En... View Source

Joining Bloomberg This Weekend to discuss the war in Ukraine one year after the Trump-Putin Alaska summit, Former Republican Congressman and current CEO of RIIG Technologies Denver Riggleman also spoke with hosts Joe Mathieu and Carol Massar about the role of private companies in offensive US cyber operations. Riggleman says that these operations could create serious risks if targets are misidenti... View Source

USB ports and cables have tons of potential capabilities, but making sense of them can be tricky if you don't know where to look... View Source

They’re the Lennon–McCartney of overanalyzing pop music. | Image: Daniel Randall As if you needed more reason to love Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" beyond its pop perfection, it is also, according to lore, the genesis for Switched on Pop, one of the best music podcasts out there. Cohosts Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding obsessively dissect pop songs, from the theory behind their musical choices... View Source

There's a pretty major difference between USB-C and USB4. We'll dive into the details and how to tell them apart... View Source

On Aug. 15, 1977, astronomers using Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope detected the famous "Wow!" signal, which to this day is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that we are not alone in the universe. Astronomer Jerry Ehman was using the telescope to scan a region in the constellation Sagittarius when it detected a weird, 72-second-long radio burst. The signal was too strong to b... View Source

Shawn Levy, Ryan Gosling | Image: The Walt Disney Company/Image Group LA The annual Disney fan event showed off the cast of Marvel’s X-Men movie, plus a new trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, and our first look at the VisionQuest TV show for Disney Plus. For Star Wars fans, there was a teaser trailer for season two of Ahsoka, plus a special look at Star Wars: Starfighter with an appearance from... View Source

An influencer who attended a “luxury eco-retreat” put on by ChatGPT maker OpenAI got far more of a reaction than she bargained for. Instagram personality and self-styled “public speaker” Grace McCarrick went on an all-expenses-paid-by-OpenAI gathering alongside other content creators at a high-end resort in upstate New York late last month. Considering how radioactive the s... View Source

Don't wait to have your car checked out if its traction battery is having problems... View Source

Our indie game roundup this week features a handful of '90s-inspired entries along with a dog game, a cat game and a sheep game... View Source

The DC Universe expands further into the cosmos this month with the addition of "Lanterns". Created by Chris Mundy, Tom King and Damon Lindelof, the superhero show sees the veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan (played by Kyle Chandler) take rookie John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) under his wing. Wider parts of the Green Lantern Corps lore are incorporated in the story too, as the series unpacks what the fa... View Source

Maximum camera. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge It wasn't long ago that shooting with a super high-resolution camera meant making serious sacrifices for the sake of all those megapixels. Enter the A7R VI. Sony's latest flagship high-res camera is a 66.8-megapixel spec monster. In addition to its modest bump in resolution from the last-gen A7R V, it uses a new sensor and processor that... View Source

In the United States, there’s practically no escaping from mass surveillance company Flock Safety’s 120,000 license plate reading cameras spread across 49 states. The company has partnered with 6,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 private customers, leading to terrifying false arrests and even crooked cops stalking innocent women. Just last week, 404 Media reported that the Flock h... View Source

The $60 billion acquisition has been finalized... View Source

New plugin support for CrossPoint Reader lets Xteink’s devices access DRM-protected ebooks. One of the big tradeoffs with Xteink's pocket-friendly e-readers is a lack of easy access to ebooks. On a Kindle or Kobo you can download tens of thousands of titles through each device's respective online bookstores, but with Xteink's devices you have to source DRM-free ebooks on your own. That's about to... View Source

A roundup of recent reviews from Engadget... View Source

On Episode 223 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and guest co-host Dale Skran are joined by Dr. Scott Pace to discuss the future of exploration on the Moon.We're headed for a space renaissance, and it will be focused on the Moon. The US, China, and international partners of both are vying to land people there and construct a permanent lunar base. Meanwhile, NASA is evolving to embrace commercial ent... View Source

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 140, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, don't forget to hydrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Will Ferrell and Fabrizio Romano and Heather Cox Richardson, scrolling and scrolling through Ordinary Abundance, watching Avatar Aang (whi... View Source

The guy we have to thank for Dick Cheney living as long as he did with extraordinary heart problems says that president Donald Trump ain’t looking too hot. “The president has not looked well,” wrote Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, in a new essay for The New York Times. Reiner acted as Cheney’s cardiologist for 27 years,... View Source

Disney has announced an anime based on Kingdom Hearts, featuring a brand new story... View Source

Justin Blinder had just been laid off when he first came up with the idea for Ground Truth. It was 2020, two weeks before covid lockdown went into effect, and the Brooklyn-based artist and technologist had no idea what the future would hold. He started working for the food delivery apps, and as he was riding his bike across the city, he began noticing the stark differences between neighborhoods. "... View Source

Where were you when the historic total eclipse happened this week? One woman was on a beach with a curious choice of companion: Anthropic’s AI model, Claude. “Last night, a total solar eclipse crossed Europe. I brought my Claude’s small body to the beach to watch it together,” wrote a user on X who goes by Oli. Oli, we should explain, built a small computer with a microphon... View Source

Stripe and private equity firm Advent previously offered a deal PayPal didn't take, the Wall Street Journal says. Now, they're negotiating a new price... View Source

Alibaba Group Holding’s open-weight models have accumulated more than 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, eclipsing Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc. and domestic peers to become the world’s No. 1 artificial-intelligence model... View Source

The island could capture billions of gallons of water a year if it implemented systems to catch it as it falls from the sky... View Source

Of all the models in the renewed Nikon Action range released in 2026, the Action Zoom 10–22x50 is definitely one of the most attention-getting, with its zoom capability from 10x to 22x magnification. These are Nikon's third-generation 10-22x50 binoculars, building upon the past designs of 2007's Action VII Zoom XL 10-22x50 and 2013's Aculon 10-22x50 in 2013. The new design features a generous 16.3... View Source

Mastercard card payments were temporarily declined for some Australian customers on Saturday afternoon because of a global issue that has since been resolved, according to the company... View Source

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 15 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Bright Perseids from Sweden Explanation: Known for its bright and f... View Source

The UK will look at watering down its zero-emission vehicle sales mandate, a win for automakers that have been pushing new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to bring forward a review of the targets... View Source

The company will also be able to expand its fleet across more of the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles... View Source

US retail sales fell in July by the most in more than a year as consumers pulled back on purchases at online stores and auto dealers. Sales dropped by 0.6%, the forecast was for a 0.1% gain. Bloomberg's Michael McKee has the numbers followed by Aditya Bhave from BofA Securities with reaction. (Source: Bloomberg)... View Source

NASA will hold a two-day aerospace exposition this November, and it may draw a surprising number of "Simpsons" fans.The event, which NASA announced today (Aug. 14), will be held Nov. 7 and Nov. 8 at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Florida's Space Coast. It's called "Max Power," which is also a famous Homer Simpson pseudonym.In the 13th episode of the show's 10th season, which first aired in February... View Source

Nvidia Corp. on Friday disclosed a nearly $21 billion stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a $30 billion one in Intel Corp... View Source

Anthropic PBC is telling prospective investors its second-quarter revenue jumped at least 14-fold versus the same period a year ago, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News... View Source

Empty space is not as empty as it looks.That is the takeaway of a new study examining signals from a dead star, offering what researchers say is the strongest evidence yet that extreme magnetic fields can alter the properties of a vacuum, causing seemingly empty space to act like a prism and changing how light travels through itThe findings, led by Rachael Stewart, a graduate student in physics at... View Source

Amazon.com Inc. reintroduced a clause in its user agreement that seeks to prevent shoppers from filing class-action lawsuits against the online retailer, inserting a legal buffer between itself and plaintiffs attorneys that it removed five years ago... View Source

That makes it the cheapest EV in Kia's lineup... View Source

'For All Mankind' was pretty good, wasn't it? Sadly, the show's run has finished now, and while we've got spin-off 'Star City' picking up the mantle, it's still going to be a while before we get any more space politics drama on our screens. Luckily, we can find it on our tabletops instead, with these fantastic space board games.If you haven't seen it, For All Mankind is the story of an alternate h... View Source

Nuclear energy is often touted as an ultra-efficient alternative to dirtier energy sources like coal or natural gas. Expanding the world’s capacity for atomic power is the key to avoiding a cascading climate disaster, some of the industry’s proponents say — but what if it’s too late? With record setting heatwaves scorching Europe, water levels in the continent’s major... View Source

OpenAI is on track to generate more than $40 billion in annualized revenue, roughly double its run rate at the end of 2025, according to sources. Bloomberg’s Rachel Metz explains how growth in paying ChatGPT users, enterprise adoption and coding assistant Codex are driving the surge, and why the enormous cost of computing power remains a key challenge for the AI company. She joins Tim Stenovec on... View Source

3 min readPreparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Artist’s rendering depicting lunar surface operations at a future base in the lunar South Pole. NASA NASA is asking U.S.-based collegiate teams to submit bold, original concepts to the 2027 edition of a student challenge focused on aerospace innovation that could help the agency envision a future on... View Source

Cards Against Humanity isn't done with its scorched-Earth campaign against SpaceX and Elon Musk.The Chicago-based company behind the popular fill-in-the-blank adult card game is inviting the public to join its design committee to erect an "Elon Musk is a Sad Little B----- with No Friends" monument on a stretch of land it owns near SpaceX's Starbase manufacturing and test facility in South Texas. C... View Source

Google will now allow you to remove visible watermarks from the images, videos, and music made with AI tools. With the update, you can toggle off a new "Media watermark" setting in Gemini and Google's AI video generator, Flow. When toggled off, Google will remove the "sparkle" watermark that appears in the bottom-right corner of content generated with the company's Nano Banana and Omni models. Tho... View Source

Bloomberg’s Tim Stenovec takes a look at OpenAI, which is on track to generate annualized revenue of more than $40 billion, roughly doubling its run rate from the end of 2025. Plus, how a New York City bill backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani could force Amazon to directly employ its delivery workers, and Meta's former chief AI scientist joins a new venture firm to invest in early AI startups. (Source:... View Source

A lot of automakers talk about wanting to minimize or eliminate driver distractions so as to make the experience of driving more rewarding and safer overall. Lamborghini has a different strategy; it wants the driver to become one with their vehicle. This helps explain the storied super car maker's tagline for the new Revuelto SV: the quantum of driving. "For us, quantum of driving is the moment wh... View Source

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a new type of cosmic monstrosity: a “black hole star.” The glowing red object, dubbed MoM-BH*-1, is 100,000 times more massive than our Sun and is trapped in a shell of gas so thick that it looks like a star the size of the entire solar system. But unlike an actual star, it’s not fusion powering its center, but a bl... View Source

The UK government issued a wildfire alert to mobile phones on Friday as drought and the tail end of a heat wave left much of the country at very high fire risk... View Source

The invisible SynthID will remain... View Source

Credit: NASA In honor of America’s historic 250th anniversary, NASA announced on Friday MAX POWER, a public exposition of American air and space innovation, Nov. 7 and Nov. 8, on and near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The multi-day, family-friendly event will showcase the next-generation aircraft, spacecraft, autonomous vehicles, and technologies that will help define the future of... View Source

Strings of code in Samsung's Galaxy Wearable app hint at an upcoming pair of over-ear headphones that could compete with the AirPods Max, SamMobile reports. Samsung's reportedly referring to the headphones as the "Galaxy H1," and SamMobile says they could launch sometime in 2027. That would make these the company's first pair of over-ear headphones since the Level On in 2015, which was released we... View Source

Get a jump start on the US trading day with Dave Gura on "Bloomberg Open Interest." Signs the consumer is finally slowing sown. Today, retail sales post their biggest drop in more than a year as confidence slides. Oil rises as Washington threatens more economic pressure on Iran. Plus, OpenAI’s revenue surge ahead of a highly anticipated IPO. And we’ll hear from Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley and... View Source

Google has a week to make it easier to find third-party app stores... View Source

Explore This Section Science Citizen Science Volunteer Develops… Overview Resources Opportunities Citizen Science Highlights About Science Activation   Certain kinds of clouds are misbehaving – appearing more often and lower in the sky than they used to. To help identify the factors influencing these changes (e.g. shifts in Earth’s long-term weather patterns), scientists have asked people around t... View Source

The MacBook Neo is an easy recommendation. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you’re a student looking for an affordable laptop, I have bad news and I have good news. The bad news is that computer prices are out of whack due to the ongoing RAM and storage crunch, making some a little pricier than they used to be and others wildly more expensive. The good news? Despite that, there are... View Source

Last month, Bloomberg revealed that a startup founded by Bill Gates’ 23-year-old daughter, Phoebe Gates, had dabbled in some seriously questionable business practices. According to the reporting, Gates’ online affiliate marketing startup Phia used a shady technique called “cookie stuffing,” to collect commissions from online sales it had nothing to do with — a sneaky trick... View Source

A key New Mexico natural gas pipeline project that would supply power-generation systems for a planned Oracle Corp. data center project has been delayed and is now expected to enter service next year... View Source

An 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) Falcon 9 rocket stage hit the moon last Wednesday (Aug. 5), stirring lunar regolith in a massive plume of dust observable all the way from Earth. The rocket joined some 3,000 manmade objects scattered on the surface of our planet's companion. Some experts think it's about time we start treating the pristine lunar environment with a bit more respect.Around 200 tons... View Source

The version of The X-Files: I Want to Believe that premiered in 2008 was not exactly the movie co-writer / director Chris Carter intended to make. Carter wanted to bring agents Mulder and Scully back to the big screen with a grisly story about faith and the supernatural. But executives at 20th Century Fox felt that Carter's ideas were too dark, and he was pushed to turn the project into a PG-13 fe... View Source

224 Ventures is a new AI-native venture firm launched by former AIX Ventures co-founder Shaun Johnson, ex-Google DeepMind researcher Oriol Vinyals, and AI pioneer Yann LeCun. The trio plans to make seed-stage bets and launches with more than $100 million in assets under management. 224 Ventures General Partner Shaun Johnson discusses why the most compelling opportunities may be “nonconsensus” bets... View Source

5 min read NASA’s COFFIES Uses AI to Predict Storm-Causing Active Regions on Sun  As humanity looks to the Moon and stars for future exploration, predicting space weather — conditions in space primarily driven by the Sun — is more important than ever.  Now, a team of astrophysicists and data scientists with NASA’s COFFIES (Consequence Of Fields and Flows in the Interior and Exterior of the Sun) ha... View Source

Arguably the coolest new photo feature for the Pixel 11 lineup is Google's new Camera Looks, which process image data differently at the sensor level to produce photos that don't have that "smartphone" look. The result is new styles like "Digi," which mimics the style of photos taken by older digital cameras. But to use Camera Looks, at least initially, you'll need to have one of Google's Pixel 11... View Source

“Supergirl” just can’t flop in peace. The 2026 film is one of the biggest box office failures of the year and is the DC franchise’s lowest grossing film since Catwoman (2004).  And now it’s the subject of yet another controversy: the apparent use of AI slop during its production. A behind the scenes video released by Warner Bros shows director Craig Gillespie and acto... View Source

"How can you validate human sweat to make something?" will.i.am tells Mishal Husain that in the era of AI, human creativity "should be worth more than just compute output." (Source: Bloomberg)... View Source

If you didn't catch it in theaters, here's when you can watch it on Disney+... View Source

Amid the major uptick in national defense space contracts since the Trump Administration announced plans to assemble a "Golden Dome" missile-defense system in orbit, Rocket Lab has landed another deal to contribute to the cause. The California-based company was awarded a $397 million Space Force contract to design, manufacture and launch a fleet of "Flatellites" to augment existing infrastructure'... View Source