YouTube announced a set of creator tools built around AI, including Ask Studio for personalized feedback on draft videos, dynamic thumbnails that automatically pick the best image for viewers, and expanded A/B testing that will let creators trial three Shorts cuts starting in 2027. The company also plans live auto-dubbing in real time next year, a 'live showdown' co-hosting feature, and AI auto-tagging of products to boost affiliate earnings, alongside expanding its Amazon affiliate program beyond the U.S.
At its Made on YouTube event, YouTube announced updates to its Studio app, including expanding the Ask Studio AI Q&A feature to iOS and Android, and adding AI-driven feedback on unpublished video drafts covering pacing and structure. The app also gains a research feed showing trending content, AI-generated thumbnails and titles matched to a creator's style, and a dynamic thumbnail tool that tests three versions on different audience segments.
Researchers analyzed four Arabidopsis thaliana datasets—MA16 and MA32 mutation-accumulation lines, HPG1 natural accessions, and rtel1-1 repair mutants—to track how centromeric DNA changes over generations. High-molecular-weight DNA was extracted and sequenced using PacBio HiFi and Illumina platforms at facilities including the Max Planck Genome Centre and Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen.
Researchers analyzed length-of-day (LOD) records from 1964 to 2019, after removing known effects from the atmosphere, oceans, tides and surface mass changes, to isolate multidecadal variations. They modeled these residual variations using torque equations that account for gravitational pull from the inner core alongside electromagnetic and topographic coupling at the core-mantle boundary, finding that gravitational torque from the inner core contributes to the slow, multidecadal changes in how long a day lasts.
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro shares nearly identical dimensions, weight and 6.3-inch OLED displays with last year's 17 Pro, but adds a variable aperture camera for exposure control, a slightly smaller Dynamic Island supporting three Live Activities, and a redesigned vapor cooling chamber. It costs roughly $100 more than the 17 Pro and drops the orange color option available on the prior model.
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro physically shrinks the Dynamic Island by moving some Face ID components under the display, freeing up extra screen space. That space is now used to show more detail in a second Live Activity, such as a timer's remaining time instead of just an icon, while the device can also run three Live Activities at once, up from two.
A comparison of Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and 17 Pro finds the two devices nearly identical apart from new color options, including a Burgundy shade and a returning black finish. The newer model is slightly heavier and features a smaller Dynamic Island, made possible by an infrared sensor hidden under the display, but otherwise shares the same design and functionality as its predecessor.
Apple's rumored foldable device, the iPhone Duo, runs a modified version of iOS built around its dual-screen hinge design. It supports side-by-side app use on the inner display, a relocated status bar, and hinge-aware layouts that shift keyboards and controls depending on how the phone is folded.
Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station claims Apple's iPhone 20 Pro and Pro Max, expected next year for the anniversary refresh, will feature bigger displays than the iPhone 18 Pro line—6.41 inches and 6.96 inches respectively. The leak also describes a borderless quad-curved glass design with a hole-punch cutout and a smaller Dynamic Island, echoing earlier Bloomberg reporting on a glass-front-and-back build with a metal band.
A blog post examines how Nix's dynamic derivations feature fundamentally changes the nature of its build graph, shifting Nix from an 'applicative' system—where every build step is known in advance—to a 'monadic' one, where the graph can be constructed as the build itself progresses. The author revisits earlier writing on the topic after noticing renewed interest, including talks at NixCon 2026 and a new tool called cargo-dyndrv.
Vivo has launched its X500 series in China, led by the new X500 Pro Max flagship, which uses Sony's Lytia L910 sensor with LOFIC technology to claim 17 stops of dynamic range. The Pro and Pro Max models also debut MediaTek's Dimensity 9600 Pro chip, enabling 4K 240fps slow-motion capture, 10-bit Log recording, and new cinematic styles, while the base X500 uses the 9600M variant.
A hobbyist project called Mini-AGI has been shared on Hacker News as a byte-level language model that builds its own architecture and trains from scratch on a single consumer GPU with 8GB of VRAM. Rather than keeping all parameters in memory, it stores weights as disk files and loads them as needed, letting it expand or prune capacity while it continuously reads and learns from a text corpus without forgetting prior knowledge. The creator says it's currently a toy-scale demonstration, not a competitive model, and weights won't be released until the current training pass over its corpus finishes in a few weeks.
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