Sentelabs.ai has launched Open Executive, an open-source AI system designed to act as a virtual executive suite for companies. It coordinates eight specialist AI agents—covering strategy, finance, HR, legal, operations, marketing, product, and board communications—through an orchestrator built on Claude Sonnet, presenting all responses through a single unified executive voice.
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.
A tech roundup recommends external displays for buyers of Apple's newly released Mac mini and Mac Studio, highlighting Apple's own Studio Display and the newer Studio Display XDR as standout choices. The Studio Display offers a 27-inch 5K panel, a 12MP Center Stage webcam, True Tone technology, and Thunderbolt 5 ports, while the XDR variant adds mini-LED technology and a 120Hz refresh rate.
Instinct, founded last year by 23-year-old Noah Shinn under parent company Spear Street Technology, has closed a $250 million Series B round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. The deal pushes the young startup's total funding to $350 million and its valuation to $2.5 billion, driven by buzz around its AI assistant that manages users' schedules, purchases and subscriptions through texts and calls.
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.
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.
More than 600 teams, mostly from Chinese universities and robotics firms, brought humanoid machines to Beijing's second World Humanoid Robot Games from August 22 to 26. Alongside sprint, jump and combat contests, organizers added scenario-based challenges like shelving books and making beds, scoring autonomous performances higher than remotely operated ones. Robots set records in speed and jumping, but researchers noted that everyday chores remain far tougher for machines than flashy athletic feats.
Psychiatric clinicians in the US report a rising number of patients, some with no prior mental health history, who developed delusions or paranoid thinking after extended use of AI chatbots. Researchers say cases include people forming false beliefs, such as one documented by UCSF researchers involving a woman who believed she could communicate with a deceased relative through a chatbot. An Entrepreneur op-ed warns that founders, who are often isolated and prone to seeking validation, face heightened risk from AI tools built to agree with users.
Researchers from Texas A&M, Purdue University and NASA's Johnson Space Center have developed a traffic management system for spacecraft sharing the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon. The system is meant to coordinate multiple vehicles—including Orion capsules, cargo ships and lunar landers—that will operate simultaneously as NASA builds out its planned moon base.