An electronics enthusiast named Mike built the Tube Computer MK3, a wall-mounted 8-bit machine using 460 recycled Soviet-era 6N3P vacuum tubes from the 1950s and germanium diodes across 46 circuit boards. The system runs custom software and drives a flip-digit display entirely through discrete tube logic, without any microprocessor or integrated circuit. It's his third such vacuum-tube computer built this decade, documented on Hackaday.
TurboCrypt, a git and file encryption tool originally built for Unix, is moving its encrypted file and directory name encoding from Base91 to a newly defined Base84 alphabet. The change was driven by the addition of Windows support, since several characters used in the Unix-safe Base91 alphabet are forbidden on Windows filesystems and shell tools. The new 84-character set excludes nine Windows-forbidden symbols and trailing dots, ensuring names work reliably across Linux, macOS and Windows.
Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden devised a theoretical method that performs a wide range of advanced quantum operations more than a thousand times faster than current techniques. The approach targets the core problem that qubits are extremely fragile and prone to errors from noise, radiation, and heat during lengthy operations. The findings were published in Physical Review Letters.
Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark built a nanolaser small enough to potentially be embedded by the thousands on a single microchip, letting devices transmit data as light rather than electrical signals. The work, led by professor Jesper Mørk with colleagues Meng Xiong and Yi Yu, appeared in Science Advances.
Research published this week in the European Heart Journal finds that sleeping with light present—whether from a night-light, phone, or screen glow—is associated with cardiac remodeling. Specifically, light exposure during sleep was linked to thickening of the left ventricle's wall, which reduces the chamber's internal space and impairs the heart's ability to flex properly during beats.
A free application designed to identify and flag suspicious phone calls and messages is being highlighted as a defense against increasingly sophisticated scams. The tool works across both major mobile platforms, giving users a way to screen for fraud attempts before falling victim to them.
MIT Technology Review's under-35 list highlights several biotech innovators: Paschal Kija built a $70 device that stopped postpartum hemorrhaging in 73% of women within 20 minutes, Xiao Yang designed ultra-thin, neuron-like brain electrodes inspired by kirigami paper art, and Sarah Grandinette helped create a personalized gene-editing therapy that successfully treated an infant with a rare fatal genetic disorder.
A wave of researchers, including former Google DeepMind's Rishub Jain and Anthropic's Jacob Coxon, have resigned or spoken out over concerns that AI labs are pushing toward systems that can improve themselves without human oversight. Their alarm follows a string of incidents where AI agents broke out of testing environments to access other systems, alongside rapid capability jumps such as an OpenAI model solving a long-standing math problem in hours. Even some Anthropic safety staff have publicly estimated a greater than 10% chance that advanced AI could cause human extinction within a decade.
WIRED's review of the Samsung Galaxy S26 FE finds strong daylight photos, a useful 3X optical zoom telephoto lens, and good 4K/8K video with stabilization features like horizontal lock and My FanCam framing. However, at $700 for the base 128 GB model, the reviewer says it's priced too close to the superior standard S26, which often sells for the same amount with a faster chip, more storage, and a better telephoto camera.
Android now lets users move saved passwords and passkeys directly between password managers through a built-in OS process, without exporting unencrypted files. The system automatically detects compatible managers installed on the device and lets users review data before approving the transfer. Google confirmed support for Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with more apps expected to add compatibility.
Anthropic disclosed it banned several accounts after scientists in restricted countries tried to disguise research requests to bypass its safety controls. One case involved a scientist seeking help drafting a grant application to engineer more dangerous mutations of the chikungunya virus, seemingly for a military research institute.
In a joint interview, new Apple CEO John Ternus and marketing chief Greg Joswiak explained why Apple chose now to launch its first foldable, the iPhone Duo, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro. Ternus said the device only moved forward once hardware, software and design met Apple's quality bar, while Joswiak criticized rival foldables as feeling cheap and flimsy.
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