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Apple unveiled the AirPods 5 lineup alongside its new iPhones, splitting it into a $129 standard model and a $149 version with a wireless charging case, swipe-based volume gestures, and Live Translation. Both versions now include active noise cancellation and IP57 water resistance, features previously reserved for pricier AirPods.
The EU's Copernicus climate agency reported that August tied with July 2023 as the hottest month ever measured globally, following a summer that also produced the second-hottest June and July on record. NOAA separately confirmed this was the hottest US summer, surpassing the Dust Bowl era, while global average temperatures ran 1.65°C above preindustrial levels.
Mutant has issued a vinyl edition of David Fleming's Emmy-winning score for the show 'Widow's Bay,' packaging the music with detailed extras for collectors. The release aims to capture both the playful and unsettling tone that defines the series.
TrendForce projects Apple will ship 5 million units of its newly announced iPhone Duo foldable in 2026, giving it nearly a quarter of the global foldable smartphone market. That would help offset a broader slump in the category, with non-Apple Android foldable shipments expected to fall more than 20% year-over-year even as total foldable shipments edge up slightly to about 20.2 million units.
Franklin "Frank" Kuo, who helped build the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet system in 1971, has died at age 91. ALOHAnet was the first public wireless packet data network and served as a direct influence on Robert Metcalfe's later creation of Ethernet.
Jimmy Kimmel announced his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a Democrat, will air only on YouTube rather than broadcast television. Kimmel said the change protects ABC's local affiliate stations, particularly in Texas, from potential FCC license challenges tied to Chairman Brendan Carr's past threats against the network.
Meta's new agentic AI app Muse has been downloaded over 83,000 times on iOS in the US since its Tuesday launch, pushing it to the No. 2 spot on Apple's App Store charts, according to Sensor Tower data. That pace trails Meta's own past launches like Threads and the Meta AI app, as well as ChatGPT's debut week, and Muse is performing far weaker on Android, ranking only 338th in Google Play's Productivity category.
At Apple's 'Surprise and shine' event, new CEO John Ternus unveiled Audio Intelligence, an AI feature for recent Apple Watches and iPhones that transcribes and summarizes conversations, including a 'Live Rewind' that recalls the last 15 seconds of speech and a 'Siri Recap' that ambiently logs chats when enabled. Apple says the feature is encrypted and does not store raw audio, though it functions much like ambient-recording wearables from startups such as Plaud and Looki.
Two hobbyists at the Recurse Center, working around the same time Apple unveiled its own Reference Image proof-of-capture system, built a competing open-source camera using a Raspberry Pi Zero, a crypto chip, and a shutter button. Instead of storing signatures in metadata, which gets stripped when images are shared, their system embeds a signed perceptual hash directly into the pixels using frequency-domain steganography that survives compression like WhatsApp resizing.
OpenAI has released an Agents API that gives developers programmatic access to its Codex agent harness, handling session management, orchestration, context compaction and recovery on OpenAI's servers. Applications supply tools and choose an execution environment, including an OpenAI-hosted sandbox where agents can run code, edit files, and connect to MCP servers. Billing follows standard model, tool, and container rates, and OpenAI has published sample use cases like incident-response bots and GitHub issue investigators.
Historian Katja Hoyer recounted how East Germany (GDR), through agrarian specialists like Hellmut Naderer, partnered with Vietnam to establish coffee collectives such as Viet Duc in the mid-1980s. That Cold War-era cooperation laid groundwork that eventually helped Vietnam grow into one of the world's largest coffee producers.
A security researcher published a proof-of-concept called the Deathray, a tiny WebGPU program that locks up a Mac's graphics pipeline after a single click on a malicious webpage. The bug reproduces across Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS Tahoe, but does not cause the same lasting freeze on other operating systems. An infinite compute-shader loop feeding a shared buffer into a render shader appears to be the trigger, forcing victims to hard-restart their machine.