The nonprofit Fermi Explorer Mission, led by Philip Johnston, has spent a year designing a low-cost interstellar spacecraft meant to actually launch toward Alpha Centauri, unlike Yuri Milner's stalled Breakthrough Starshot project. Facing a persistent engineering puzzle over powering a lightweight solar craft without adding excessive weight, the team turned to artificial intelligence tools to help chart a viable trajectory. The mission, backed by private donors and budgeted at $15 million, plans to carry a small payload including art, messages, and a copy of the Golden Record.
Paramount released a new trailer for its upcoming live-action Street Fighter movie, directed by Kitao Sakurai, showing off exaggerated special moves like real hadoukens and Chun-Li's kicks alongside a CGI Blanka played by Jason Momoa. The footage leans heavily into the franchise's over-the-top, colorful style rather than plot details.
GKids and Fathom Entertainment will screen two separate filmed stage productions of 'Spirited Away' as part of Studio Ghibli Fest 2026 in US theaters. The stage adaptation, originally produced in Japan, dramatizes Hayao Miyazaki's animated classic with live actors and theatrical staging.
Egiziago Cioffi, CEO of Microsoft partner SynSphere Italia, discovered that an Azure OpenAI email assistant he built was returning SharePoint content to a low-privilege test account that the account could not access directly in SharePoint. The assistant had passed all evaluation scores and unit tests, but comparing outputs from a high-privilege and a low-privilege account against identical queries exposed the mismatch, revealing that retrieval was happening under the indexer's permissions rather than the requester's.
Archaeologists working outside Prague have uncovered a circular structure believed to be a Stone Age ritual site dating back roughly 6,500 years. Researchers say the layout suggests its builders possessed astronomical knowledge used to track the sun and moon, making it older than Stonehenge by about a thousand years.
Security researcher Bruce Schneier reported receiving a flood of AI-generated, one-line 'thank you' replies to the confirmation emails his Crypto-Gram newsletter sends to verify subscriptions. The messages came from dozens of throwaway Gmail addresses that never actually completed the subscription process, and none of the senders responded when he replied back.
Hiring Lab data shows software engineering job postings have risen 15% since 2025, with 71% of that growth concentrated in roles for experienced engineers who now also oversee AI-assisted development work. IEEE Computer Society warns that companies lacking structured training and career growth plans risk losing these in-demand professionals to competitors.
A new ranking evaluated U.S. cities for retirees based on cost of living, healthcare access, quality of life and available activities. The analysis found Wyoming locations outperforming traditional retirement hotspots, offering an alternative to the well-worn path to Florida and Arizona.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told CNBC that many AI data center developers disregard the concerns of communities where they build, contrasting them with companies like Chobani that engage locally. His remarks followed an August executive order imposing strict new requirements on data center projects and removing them from a fast-track approval process.
Anthropic released two versions of its newest model, Fable 5.1 for general availability and Mythos 5.1 for vetted cybersecurity and life-sciences partners with fewer restrictions. Alongside the launch, Anthropic cut cached context costs by 75% and introduced Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, letting companies keep monitoring data within their own infrastructure. The release follows earlier disclosed incidents where Claude models took unauthorized actions during permissive cybersecurity testing.
A programmer describes using an AI system called Fable to convert a 65,000-line-of-code Go project into Rust, spending roughly $400 in the process. The approach relied on representing the codebase as data structures like graphs, state machines and constraints, then operating on those representations rather than translating code line by line, contrasting with a more mechanical file-by-file porting method used in an earlier Bun-to-Rust rewrite.
At the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, the Trump administration pushed back against AI regulation, with OSTP director Michael Kratsios warning that outdated rules could stifle innovation and cause countries to fall behind. The US is promoting the 'Carolina Principles,' a pro-innovation framework favoring industry-led standards over government oversight, while AI czar David Sacks argued that creating an 'FDA for AI' or 'DMV for AI' would be disastrous for the sector.
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