Indian startup Airbound has closed a $37 million Series A round led by Greenoaks, with backing from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures, bringing its total funding to nearly $50 million less than a year after an $8.65 million seed round. The company is developing lightweight, tail-sitter drones that take off and land vertically, aiming to carry cargo more cheaply than trucks by minimizing the aircraft's own weight relative to payload.
SiFive unveiled the BigSky SF-2U870, a 2U rack server built around 32 of its P870-D cores running at 2.2GHz, paired with 256GB of DDR5-5600 memory and 64 lanes of PCIe 5.0. The system supports double-wide GPUs up to 450W, includes networking and storage options, and is compliant with the RVA23 profile, enabling it to run Ubuntu 26.04 without modification.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to unveil the AirPods 5 as soon as its expected September 9 event, alongside a foldable iPhone, iPhone 18 Pro models, and updated Apple Watches. The new earbuds will reportedly come in two versions—a standard model and one with active noise cancellation—replacing the entry-level AirPods last updated in 2024.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple may release an updated Mac mini within days, ahead of the anticipated September event for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra. The refresh follows persistent supply shortages and rising demand tied to users running AI models locally, with Apple said to have tested both M5 and M6 chip variants.
Thomson Reuters unveiled Thomson, its first proprietary large language model, which it built by fine-tuning an open-source base rather than training from scratch. The company says it spent roughly $40 million on the project, using its own legal, tax and news archives from Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint and Reuters alongside hundreds of subject-matter experts to specialize the model for professional work.
OpenAI will restore a five-hour usage limit for Codex and ChatGPT Work on Plus subscriptions starting tomorrow, according to engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux. The cap had been temporarily suspended for several weeks, leaving only a weekly limit in place, but is now returning alongside that weekly cap. Pro subscribers on the $100 and $200 tiers will remain exempt from the five-hour restriction for the coming months.
At Hot Chips 2026, IBM unveiled an early look at a future mainframe processor featuring 11 IBM Z cores on a 2-nanometer process, clocked above 5.7 GHz, capable of natively executing both z/Architecture and AArch64 instructions on the same cores without emulation. The chip will include specialized accelerators for AI fraud detection, I/O, compression, cryptography and sorting, plus a large cache hierarchy topping out near 3.5 GB of virtual L4 cache. IBM hasn't named the chip or its host system but expects it around 2028, likely powering a future z18-class mainframe.
Pacific Fusion, a well-funded startup, has begun assembling a large fusion energy machine that uses intense electrical pulses to compress hydrogen fuel capsules, aiming to be the first device to produce more energy than it consumes. The facility, located near a major US nuclear-weapons laboratory, may also support research on maintaining the nation's aging nuclear warhead stockpile. It joins dozens of other startups racing to commercialize fusion as a clean, virtually limitless energy source.
Northwestern University researcher Reese Richardson expanded his earlier investigation into Thermo Fisher's antibody catalogue and found over 18,000 questionable validation images spanning 15 supply companies, publishing the findings in a public database on August 25. Many of the western blot images used to prove antibody quality show signs of digital manipulation, according to his analysis.
Evolutionary ecologist Daniel Blumstein and his UCLA team launched a free OnlyFans account called OnlyMarms to raise money for their long-running yellow-bellied marmot research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. The family-friendly page shares wildlife camera footage of marmots and relies on viewer tip donations, having already brought in over $4,000 and roughly $100 daily.
As sleep monitoring devices become more widespread and sleep-enhancement technology moves from treating disorders to optimizing rest, employers and institutions are gaining new tools to measure and potentially demand better sleep from workers. A 2016 Dutch Data Protection Authority ruling already found that companies tracking employees' sleep via wearable devices violated privacy law, since such data counts as sensitive health information and consent from employees can't be truly voluntary given workplace power imbalances.
A researcher has assembled historical footage and photographs, including a BBC film of scientist Susan James testing helicopter noise levels at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, to document the scale of the UK's former scientific civil service. In the early 1980s that service employed tens of thousands of scientists and engineers across more than 70 research centres, including the RAE and the Building Research Establishment in Watford, running national programmes in aerodynamics, weaponry, acoustics and building science.
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