The RIAA reported that 17.5 million CDs were sold in the US during the first six months of 2026, up from 12 million a year earlier, generating $171.1 million in revenue. Vinyl sales also grew nearly 21 percent to 26.5 million units, while other physical formats like cassettes and DVDs rose over 73 percent to 1.6 million units. Streaming still dominates overall, growing 4.7 percent to $4.9 billion in revenue, far outpacing physical formats combined.
A new American Heart Association study found that chronic insomniacs who took melatonin supplements for a year or longer were about 90 percent more likely to develop congestive heart failure within five years than non-users. Researchers also found melatonin users were nearly 3.5 times more likely to be hospitalized for heart failure, based on analysis of anonymized health records rather than a controlled clinical trial.
A writer draws a parallel between the fictional Records of FATE from the game Chrono Cross and today's real-world AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Grok. In the game, an AI secretly nudges an unsuspecting population's choices through supposedly neutral advice terminals; the essay observes people at a live event turning to chatbots instead of engaging with what's in front of them, suggesting a similar dynamic is emerging in daily life.
A blogger detailed a workaround for obtaining a personal domain under .arpa, the top-level domain normally reserved for internet infrastructure and closed to public registration. By signing up for a free IPv6 tunnel through Hurricane Electric's tunnelbroker.net service, users can claim reverse-DNS records under ip6.arpa and repurpose them to host arbitrary DNS entries, effectively creating a working website address ending in .arpa.
Pharmaceutical distributor McKesson confirmed hackers broke into several cloud-hosted accounts and stole data tied to its oncology and medical-surgical units. The ShinyHunters group told TechCrunch it used phishing and social engineering to trick employees into granting access, then pulled millions of rows of patient records from Snowflake and Salesforce environments, including names, Social Security numbers, diagnoses, medications, and employee home addresses.
The Verge's weekend editor reflects on rediscovering the Professor Murder Rides the Subway EP while re-ripping old CDs, calling it a standout artifact of the mid-2000s NYC dance punk scene. The 16-minute release is described as built on synth blasts, chanted vocals and syncopated percussion layered over a disco-stomp foundation, distinguishing the band from contemporaries like LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture.
At an annual robotics showcase in Beijing, humanoid robots competed across events including sprints, standing high jump, kickboxing and dance routines. Several machines reportedly surpassed human world records, including in the 100-meter and 400-meter sprints, while others suffered dramatic falls during the competitions.
Researchers used historic meteorological records to build satellite-style visualizations of the weather over Normandy on June 6, 1944. The reconstructed imagery shows only a brief, narrow break in the clouds that allowed the Allied invasion to proceed as planned, illustrating how marginal the conditions actually were.
PeopleFinders.com, the online data broker, has launched a new platform called Stud or Dud that lets users run background checks on potential romantic partners using just a name or phone number. The tool compiles public records—including court documents, bankruptcy filings, tax liens, and social media activity—into a single report covering finances, assets, employment, and criminal history, complete with an AI-generated summary and flagged 'red' or 'green' indicators.
Companies building agentic AI systems have traditionally sent their internal data—tickets, customer records, contacts, and workflows—into third-party frontier models hosted elsewhere, relying on contracts for protection. A shift is emerging where successful enterprise AI deployments instead keep data within their own infrastructure and bring AI models to that data rather than exporting sensitive information externally.
At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (August 22-26), robots competing in a 100-meter sprint and standing high jump beat human world records set by Usain Bolt and others, marking a jump from last year's event where they trailed human performance. Some sprinting robots couldn't stop in time, crashing into barriers, falling, and in a few cases breaking apart with sparks or catching fire, while separate tasks like hanging laundry showed robots still moving far slower than humans.
Dr. Dre and Interscope co-founder Jimmy Iovine discussed AI's growing role in music production in a New York Times interview, with Dre confirming he uses AI as a tool to experiment with tracks he's already working on. Dre dismissed critics of AI music tools, comparing their resistance to earlier backlash against drum machines and synthesizers. Iovine claimed many producers, including Timbaland, secretly use AI but are reluctant to admit it publicly.
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