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Meta has announced Petal, a new subsea cable linking France and the United States that will deliver 1 petabit per second of bandwidth, double the capacity of its existing Anjana cable. The 4,000-plus mile cable uses 48 fiber pairs in a two-core design and is being built with NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries, with Orange supporting the French landing point. Meta expects Petal to enter service in 2029.
Meta announced its Connect 2026 conference will run September 23-24, where it plans to showcase advances in AI, smart glasses and VR. The event is free to watch via livestream after registering on Meta's website or through the Meta for Developers Facebook page, with sessions starting September 23 at 7PM ET and continuing September 24 at 1PM ET.
Meta tested a feature letting human contractors handle phone calls made on behalf of its Muse AI assistant, rolling it out to half its employees last week. Staff raised privacy concerns about sensitive data reaching call-center workers, and one contractor made a racist remark during a call negotiating an employee's bill. Meta has paused the human concierge feature, apologized to the affected employee, and barred the contractor from further work on its projects.
Aftershock, working with Zotac, has released the Cherry Bloom PC, a prebuilt gaming computer priced at roughly AU$19,995 (about $14,200). It pairs an RTX 5080, Ryzen 9800X3D, 64GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, a 2TB PCIe Gen4 SSD and a 1300W Platinum PSU with 70 handcrafted titanium-alloy cherry blossoms that open when the system heats up and close as it cools, all visible through a 270-degree case window.
Meta launched an AI agent called Muse designed to shop on users' behalf across e-commerce sites, and it quickly gained popularity. Amazon has since blocked Muse from accessing its platform, and observers have raised privacy and security concerns about the tool.
Scientists studying a rhombohedral graphene device mapped two distinct electronic phases—an anomalous metal (AM) state and a superconducting (SC) state—by measuring resistance across varying gate voltages, magnetic fields, temperatures and currents. Using multiple voltage probe pairs on a second device, they found the SC and AM regions occupy consistent boundaries in the phase diagram, matching results from an earlier primary device, though the absolute resistance values differed between contact pairs.
Researchers analyzing human liver tissue from pancreatic cancer patients, alongside mouse models, report that hepatocytes supply the amino acid serine to metastasizing pancreatic cancer cells, supporting their growth in the liver. The work, which included tissue from the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Rapid Autopsy Program, used immunohistochemistry to examine markers including PHGDH, albumin, CK19, Ki67 and FOXO3A in liver samples.
The publisher has released an author correction to a research paper on large recoverable elastic energy in chiral metamaterials achieved through twist buckling. No details of the specific correction are included beyond the licensing and reprint terms attached to the notice.
A PhD student wrote to Nature's advice column describing a loss of motivation after switching from wet-lab work to bioinformatics, citing years-long difficulty obtaining clinical metadata needed for their project. Life coach Vikki Wright and educator Nicole Barnes responded, framing the experience as a recognizable 'third-year slump' tied to adjusting to a new working environment rather than necessarily a sign to quit.
Gravel excavation workers in northern Austria unearthed a cache of more than 1,000 kilograms of iron bars dating to the second or third century BC, according to a study published in Antiquity. Researchers say it is the largest such hoard ever recorded, containing enough raw metal to forge roughly 500 swords.
Meta Superintelligence Labs product head Nat Friedman said on X that Muse, Meta's AI product, was 'heavily inspired' by the open-source OpenClaw but was 'built from scratch.' The admission followed viral claims from users, including AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda, that Muse resembled a consumer-friendly version of OpenClaw, citing shared file structures like SOUL.md.
Advanced Micro Devices' stock climbed enough to push its market valuation above $1 trillion, according to reporting on the milestone. The chipmaker joins a small group of companies including Nvidia, SpaceX, and Meta that have reached the trillion-dollar threshold.