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Tech News
Researchers uncovered bones and stone tools inside a cave in China that belonged to Denisovans, an extinct human relative, spanning a period of roughly 120,000 years. The finds offer new physical evidence about the group's biology, diet, and daily life over an extended timeframe.
Tools such as Pangram and Originality.ai are being used to identify AI-generated writing, offering some clarity for educators, publishers and employers trying to spot machine-authored content. However, these detectors remain imperfect, producing errors that limit how much confidence users should place in their results.
A career-focused article identifies 12 behavioral and situational cues—like being excluded from meetings or decisions—that suggest an employee's influence at work is declining. It pairs each warning sign with corrective strategies, including adopting AI tools and shifting from task execution to strategic contribution.
Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli, former Google DeepMind researchers, have founded Fusionality in Lausanne to build standardized hardware and software for controlling fusion reactors. The company raised $3.7 million in pre-seed funding from Founderful and Playfair, with Felici as CEO and Buchli as CTO.
Researchers report in Nature that an abandoned quarry in southwestern China contains fossils and artefacts showing Denisovans occupied the site for at least 30,000 years, possibly up to 120,000 years. The finds include bone tools resembling those made by Neanderthals and evidence that Denisovans hunted deer and other animals skillfully.
A new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, shared with WIRED, documents a trend dubbed 'Slop Jihad' in which young supporters of ISIS and al-Qaida use generative AI to turn violent extremist imagery into cartoons, memes and fan edits. One example recreates an infamous ISIS execution video using SpongeBob SquarePants characters, shared on TikTok. Tech Against Terrorism has separately published findings on the same phenomenon.
Samsung and TSMC, the world's two largest chipmakers, have confirmed plans to deploy ASML's High NA extreme ultraviolet lithography systems, machines that can cost roughly $400 million each and etch finer circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. Samsung plans to use the tools for DRAM production starting in 2028 and expand its scaling roadmap by 2030, while TSMC expects broader adoption driven by increasingly complex transistor designs needed for AI chips. Both companies join Intel as customers of the technology.
Sony has begun pushing Android 17 to the Xperia 1 VIII, with the update also arriving for the Xperia 1 VII and Xperia 1 VI. The release adds a Desktop mode for connecting phones to external displays like a PC, along with new wallpaper and icon customization, a redesigned Quick settings panel, and upgraded screen recording that captures full-screen or single-app video with audio. The Xperia 1 VIII also gains the ability to save and name up to three custom looks in its AI Camera Assistant.
OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Sites, a feature that lets users generate landing pages, guides, games, and simple apps by typing a prompt rather than coding or dragging design elements. The tool aims to make website creation as effortless as drafting a document, producing a finished page directly from natural-language instructions.
ESP32 Bit Pirate is a free, open-source firmware project that converts common ESP32-S3 development boards into a versatile bench tool for probing dozens of hardware protocols including I2C, SPI, UART, JTAG, SWD, CAN, LoRa, Wi-Fi and BLE. Users can control it via USB serial, a browser-based Web CLI over Wi-Fi, or Web Serial, and the accompanying web tools support flashing, logic capture and chip programming without installing desktop software.
AI-powered dermatology tools designed to identify skin conditions like melanoma are becoming more accurate overall, but researchers have found these systems perform less reliably for patients with darker skin. The disparity stems largely from training datasets that contain far fewer images of skin conditions on non-white patients.
A commentary piece examines why large companies remain stuffed with sprawling, disorganized software stacks—from SAP and Workday to countless spreadsheets and scripts—despite growing AI capabilities. It challenges the Silicon Valley assumption that generative AI will let anyone instantly build custom tools to replace this mess, arguing that most workers aren't tool-builders and don't think in terms of reinventing their workflows.