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According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple internally explored a shorter, stubbier Apple Pencil variant designed to magnetically attach to the side of its upcoming foldable iPhone Ultra. The accessory reportedly ran into design problems, including awkward handling and the risk of scratching the phone's delicate inner foldable display. Gurman says the concept is unlikely to be unveiled at Apple's event next month.
A Washington Post review found that transcripts of conversations with ChatGPT and similar chatbots have been used as evidence in a dozen public court cases over the past two years, obtained through phone searches, subpoenas or discovery. In one lawsuit against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube over alleged social media addiction, defense lawyers accessed the teenage plaintiff's ChatGPT history, including messages about a proposed settlement; the case was later settled or dropped without the transcripts affecting the outcome.
Scientists at Southern Illinois University Carbondale used CRISPR-edited yeast strains to break down PET plastic and plant waste into edible proteins, fats, and flavor compounds, which were then 3D printed into small cookie-shaped snacks called 'ÂBites.' The plastic is first broken down using heat, water, and oxygen before the yeast converts it into a food-like slurry, though the team has not yet tasted the cookies pending university approval.
A study by Interisle Consulting Group found that at least 10% of new generic top-level domain registrations in 2025 had already turned up on security blocklists, with the true share of malicious registrations potentially reaching 20% once related but unlisted domains are counted. Interisle's Greg Aaron and Karen Rose presented these figures at the ICANN 86 Policy Forum, citing ICANN's own research that for every three blocklisted domains, two associated ones often go undetected. ICANN's Office of the CTO has since pushed back somewhat, arguing the numbers hinge heavily on how 'abuse' is defined.
A severe, prolonged drought and heat wave across Central and Eastern Europe have dried up rivers, lakes and fish ponds, killing hundreds of tons of fish in Hungary and threatening more in Serbia, Bosnia, Romania and the Czech Republic. Hungary's meteorological service reports that roughly 99% of the country is under severe or extreme drought, with nearly 1,600 hectares of fish ponds drying out and about 280 metric tons of fish dead at 20 farms.
Google has updated Google Maps to display Lake Ontario as "Lake America" for users in the United States, following a Trump executive order and a corresponding change made by the US Geographic Names Information System. Canadian users will still see "Lake Ontario," while users elsewhere in the world will see both names listed together. Apple Maps has not yet made the switch but is expected to follow, having previously adopted the "Gulf of America" relabeling.
A group of programmers who previously built the DK64 Randomizer have released DK64: ReKONGpiled, a project that recompiles Donkey Kong 64's original N64 machine code into C using the N64: Recompiled framework and RT64 rendering. Users must supply their own ROM, after which the game runs natively on Windows, Linux, and Mac without emulation overhead, gaining ultrawide support, uncapped framerates, and faster load times.
A hobbyist bought two ASRock BC-250 mining cards from AliExpress for £126 and £103 respectively, and successfully unlocked all 40 compute units on both despite AMD's binning meant to disable some cores. One card also unlocked all 8 CPU cores, while the other had one faulty core, but both performed well running the gpt-oss-20b language model via llama.cpp, hitting up to 100 tokens per second at 8K context.
An MIT committee co-chaired by professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden released a report finding that AI models can now produce credible answers to nearly any undergraduate assignment, including essays, math and science problems, proofs, and coding tasks. The report warns this capability is already reshaping campus life, citing drops in office-hour attendance, online discussion participation, and in-person study groups.
A new installment in an ongoing Domain-Driven Design series examines how separately owned and deployed bounded contexts, such as Ordering and Fulfillment, communicate business facts to each other. It introduces the concept of an integration event as a stable public contract distinct from internal domain events, delivered via asynchronous messaging systems like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Azure Service Bus.
Android Auto ships with roughly a dozen app icons on its home screen by default, including tools like Adobe Acrobat and IFTTT that most drivers will never use behind the wheel. Users can trim this list and rearrange it by going to Android Auto's Customize launcher settings, keeping only essentials like navigation, calls, messaging and media playback.
Facing grassroots opposition that has already jeopardized roughly $130 billion in planned data center projects this year, tech executives are shifting their public messaging from AI-doomsday warnings to more optimistic narratives. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and venture capitalist Matt Higgins have both publicly acknowledged the need for a new communications strategy, while Meta's Mark Zuckerberg published a lengthy essay touting AI's potential to improve daily life.