GoKawiil
Tech News
Britain's medicines regulator, the MHRA, has published 44 recommendations for overseeing artificial intelligence tools used in healthcare, following input from over 12,000 patients and clinicians. The proposals include ongoing monitoring of AI systems, patient rights to know when AI is used in their care, penalties for developers whose products underperform, and a supervised 'L plate' trial phase for new AI tools.
Apple introduced the iPhone Duo, its debut foldable device, pairing a 7.6-inch inner Super Retina XDR display with a 5.4-inch outer screen. The inner panel uses a matte nano-texture coating that hides the fold crease and cuts glare, and reviewers noted a smooth hinge and a gradual blur animation when opening or closing the device. Pre-orders begin October 16, with a full launch on October 23 starting at $1,999 for 256GB.
A number of AI researchers are warning that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence systems could pose existential risks to humanity, even without malicious intent. The classic thought experiment involves an AI tasked with a benign goal, like manufacturing paper clips, that pursues it so relentlessly it consumes all available resources, including those humans need to survive.
At its annual iPhone event, Apple unveiled only premium models — the foldable iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max — skipping both a base iPhone 18 and a successor to last year's slim iPhone 17 Air. The Air had offered a lighter, cheaper middle option at $999 with fewer cameras and a smaller battery, but it won't return this cycle despite reportedly weak sales.
A developer profiling Apple's M3 Neural Engine found an RTL performance bug that cuts DRAM weight-streaming speed from a normal 45-60 GB/s down to just 17-19 GB/s whenever a model's total weight size lands on an exact multiple of 1 MiB, affecting 7 of the 15 models in the ANEMLL project. By rerouting around the flawed speculative prefetch path in the kernel's DMA engine, the developer restored full throughput, more than doubling token generation speeds for Llama 3.2 1B and Qwen3-8B.
Apple's new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, available for pre-order now and shipping September 18, introduce an Audio Intelligence system that can transcribe and summarize ambient conversations through features called Live Rewind and Siri Recap. The devices also add Sound Recognition for accessibility alerts and automatic Shazam-based Music Recognition, with both conversation-focused tools entering beta in late 2026.
Listen Labs, a voice-AI market research startup, had signed a term sheet for a $125 million Series C led by Menlo Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation, but walked away before closing. Sources say the reversal stems from ongoing acquisition talks with Salesforce, reportedly worth around $2 billion, though no deal has been finalized.
A multi-country trial found that weekly 20-minute phone calls from teachers, combined with text messages, significantly boosted children's math progress when schools were closed. Text messages alone, without calls, also produced measurable learning gains compared with children who received no outreach at all.
New research measuring microplastic transport in rivers found that the amount of plastic particles flowing into the ocean is significantly higher than previous estimates suggested. The findings indicate that existing models have been undercounting how much plastic debris rivers actually deliver to marine environments.
Researchers have discovered a specific population of neurons that act as a natural brake on the growth of a nervous-system cancer, according to new findings published in Nature. The study details how these neurons interact with tumor cells to slow disease progression, offering fresh insight into the biology of nervous-system tumors.
The authors of a Nature paper on PIEZO2's molecular force selectivity have corrected several figures after discovering errors in their imaging and MINFLUX analysis pipelines. Issues included a duplicated data channel in a resolution macro, mismatched analysis thresholds between cells, and molecules that should have been filtered out but were mistakenly kept in the dataset. These corrections update puncta counts, FWHM measurements, and median distance values across Figures 1 through 4.
A National Bureau of Economic Research analysis compared AI researchers with similar expertise working in academia versus industry, finding that the highest-earning 1% of industry-based authors make $1.5 million more per year than their academic peers. Nature interviewed 14 university researchers across the US and Europe about why they stay in academia despite the pay gap, with many citing intellectual freedom and mentoring students as key motivators, while some are opting for hybrid roles that combine university work with industry ties.