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Meta has agreed to roll out new safety restrictions for teen accounts on Instagram and Facebook within six months, as part of an $18 billion settlement reached with 48 states. The agreement follows scrutiny over how the platforms have handled minors' safety and mental health concerns.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang defended the company's expanding financial backing of AI startups and data center projects, arguing critics misunderstand the unprecedented capital needs of building and deploying AI. He spoke on CNBC after Nvidia posted stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings, noting the firm has invested in model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic and backed massive compute projects, including a $105 billion Ohio campus and a $500 billion Wall Street financing partnership.
An unidentified free model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter and quickly drew massive usage from developers who couldn't determine its origin, sparking days of speculation about which lab built it. Z.ai revealed the model was actually its own GLM-5.3-Flash, running entirely on Chinese chips, and priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 50 cents per million output tokens, with a launch discount cutting that in half through September 9.
A new emulator called Afterglow lets users run original After Dark screen saver modules, including Flying Toasters and Fish, directly on modern macOS. Unlike previous methods that required emulating vintage Macintosh hardware or classic Mac OS, Afterglow runs the original 68k module code natively without needing ROMs or an emulated operating system. The project was built as a software preservation effort to keep these 1990s animations usable and accessible.
Apple has started displaying advertisements in its Maps app in the US and Canada, marked only with a small 'ad' label next to some search results. The rollout is inconsistent—not every search or city shows ads yet—and there are no sponsored pins as seen in Google Maps, but unlike other apps, Apple has not provided any toggle to turn the ads off.
LM Studio has integrated Z.ai's newly released GLM-5.3-Flash model into its Bionic agent platform, adding multimodal image input and a 1 million-token context window. The company says the model outperforms its predecessor, GLM-5.2, while costing roughly 9-10 times less to run, and it's served from US-based servers with zero-data-retention enabled by default.
Palaeoclimatologist Julia Cole and colleagues reconstructed a millennium of sea surface temperatures using Galápagos coral skeletons, published in Science. They found that strong El Niño events have occurred more often over the past century, since industrial-era greenhouse gas emissions began, than in the thousand years before it.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center on 30 August after completing vibration testing at Goddard Space Flight Center. The telescope's wide field of view and infrared sensitivity are expected to let it survey far more sky in far less time than the Hubble Space Telescope, dramatically expanding the catalog of known exoplanets.
A mining-engineering professor in China describes being repeatedly denied underground access for research, despite designing systems meant to operate in those very environments. She notes that laws such as China's 2012 labor-protection statute, along with similar rules in dozens of countries, prohibit women from underground mine work without distinguishing between routine labor shifts and brief, supervised technical visits.
A massive ice and rock collapse in the mountains along the Nepal-Tibet border unleashed a torrent of mud, rock and water down the Bhotekoshi River on Wednesday, killing around 350 people with more than 1,000 still missing. The US Geological Survey confirmed the landslide itself generated a 5.2-magnitude seismic signal, ruling out earlier theories that an earthquake or a glacial lake burst had caused the disaster.
New research indicates that partnerships between animals and microbes are far older than previously thought, potentially originating alongside the first complex animal life forms. Scientists examined evidence suggesting these symbiotic relationships were already established at the dawn of animal evolution rather than emerging later.
Researchers have proposed an explanation for why solar and atmospheric neutrino detectors have historically measured fewer neutrinos than theoretical models predicted. The finding addresses a decades-old puzzle in particle physics tied to how neutrinos change type, or 'flavor,' as they travel.