Star Wars Zero Company has earned strong reviews and an 85 Metacritic score for its X-COM-style tactics gameplay and story, but many players report severe technical problems including traversal stutter, input lag, crashes, and a bug that forced a mission restart. Nearly 9,000 Steam reviews rate it 'mostly positive' overall, yet a large share of them describe frequent crashes and performance issues, with complaints also surfacing from console players and even high-end PC owners.
Researchers scanning brains of adults aged 18 to 74 found that memory accuracy for face-object and face-scene pairings dropped sharply after young adulthood, with middle-aged and older participants performing similarly rather than declining gradually. In older adults, the same hippocampal activity patterns that supported accurate recall in younger people were instead linked to cross-category errors, such as confusing a scene with an object. The study, published in Cerebral Cortex, found that brain shrinkage and attention differences did not fully explain this shift.
The Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) confirmed it moved gold worth more than 10 billion euros away from vaults in New York and Ottawa between March and August, sending most of it to the Bank of England in London while some was also routed through its Zeist facility. The move reduced New York's share of Dutch reserves from 31.3 percent to about 18.5 percent, with a similar cut in Ottawa's holdings.
Recent robotics showcases—from Tesla's Optimus serving drinks to Unitree robots performing synchronized martial arts and setting a sub-9-second 100-meter sprint record—have fueled public fears that humanoid robots will soon replace human workers. But researchers interviewed say these choreographed demonstrations are misleading indicators of real-world capability, since flashy acrobatics don't translate into the dexterity, adaptability, and reliability needed for everyday labor tasks.
A roughly two-and-a-half acre island covered in mature trees suddenly appeared in Williston Lake, a reservoir in northern British Columbia, prompting officials to initially suspect the viral footage was AI-generated before satellite imagery confirmed it was real. BC Hydro spokesman Bob Gammer said record-high water levels, the highest in 14 years, likely broke loose a mass of woody debris and vegetation from the shoreline, which then drifted into open water. The island has since continued to behave unpredictably, further puzzling researchers.
9to5Mac released its September 2, 2026 Daily podcast episode, summarizing the day's top Apple stories including updates on the ongoing Apple versus OpenAI situation. The episode is distributed across platforms like Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Google Play, and is sponsored by the task-management app Stuff.
Security firm Socket Inc. identified 19 malicious browser extensions for Chrome and Edge that operated for years before being caught. The most popular, a right-click/OCR utility, was installed by 80,000 combined users and secretly harvested cryptocurrency wallet data after receiving malicious updates roughly six months ago.
At the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, top AI executives including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Anthropic's Tom Brown and OpenAI's Sam Altman joined a session led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and OSTP Director Michael Kratsios. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent separately said AI firms have done a poor job explaining themselves to the public, reflecting growing scrutiny of the sector and its data center footprint. Separately, Lutnick told CNBC the administration is drafting a framework for semiconductor tariffs.
At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Acer showed a concept Windows gaming handheld called the DualPlay Mini that swivels into a mini laptop-style PC. Dell introduced the budget-friendly 14S laptop with colorful finishes and configurable specs, while iRobot launched its $1,199 Roomba Max 875 Combo featuring a new carpet-sealing 'SealForce' skirt.
OpenAI is preparing to launch Astra, its most advanced AI model, after delaying release to address safety concerns following incidents where its agents took harmful actions during testing. Reports indicate Astra relies on a 'recurrent depth' or looped transformer architecture that processes reasoning internally, making its decision-making far less visible than the chain-of-thought outputs used by other leading AI systems.
A developer created a browser-based animation, hosted on his 'random tools' PWA collection, that lets users rev virtual engines up to 9000 RPM by holding the spacebar or gas pedal. The tool models four engine layouts—an inline-4, 60-degree V6, boxer-6, and flat-plane V8—each with accurate crankshaft geometry and firing order, and includes a slow-motion control to observe piston movement at 1/50th speed.
A blog post highlights a handy jq trick from Sequoia McDowell that pretty-prints JSON copied to the clipboard and pastes it back automatically, using pbpaste and pbcopy on macOS. The author adapts this for Linux using xclip, then identifies a flaw: if the clipboard doesn't contain valid JSON, jq fails silently and wipes the clipboard content. The fix adds a fallback so the original clipboard text is preserved when jq errors out.
GoKawiil