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Consumer group Which? created a fake Booking.com listing for 10 Downing Street, complete with a bogus review mentioning Larry the cat, to test the platform's fraud detection. The listing remained live for two months before Booking.com removed it, despite obvious signs it was fraudulent.
Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1 across its API, cloud platforms and desktop app, alongside Mythos 5.1, a less-restricted version limited to vetted cybersecurity and life-sciences organizations. The company says Fable 5.1 handles multistep coding and scientific workflows more efficiently, using fewer tokens, and posted large gains on internal benchmarks like Terminal-Bench 4.0 and Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 versus its predecessor.
Hackers used a known, unpatched vulnerability in ownCloud software to gain initial access into systems belonging to the Philippines' nuclear regulatory agency. The breach reportedly resulted in the theft of reactor databases, personnel records, and stored credentials.
Apple emailed developers announcing that universal macOS apps requiring macOS 13 or later can now be built as arm64-only, removing Intel compatibility. Developers must update build settings to arm64 and resubmit; Intel Mac users can still use the last compatible version of an app they already have.
A long-time paying Anthropic customer on the $200/month Claude Max plan reports abrupt account termination via a form email citing 'suspicious signals' tied to a Usage Policy violation, with no specific reason given. The user says another Max subscriber elsewhere was banned right after paying, and the only appeal route is an automated in-product form rather than contact with a person.
A tech commentator recounts waking up with the observation that modern AI systems like GPT 5.6 Pro and Fable can discuss self-reference and Gödel's Theorem fluently, yet nothing about self-referentiality was deliberately engineered into their transformer architecture, training process, or hardware. The author contrasts this with Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach and Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, both of which treated self-reference as central to whether machine intelligence could ever emerge. The piece notes these self-referential capabilities simply emerged as a byproduct of general pretraining, alongside unrelated knowledge like Pokémon trivia or plate tectonics.
Scientists at the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, which uses 10 tonnes of liquid xenon buried in South Dakota's Sanford Underground Research Facility, recorded one unusual flash consistent with a WIMP particle striking a xenon nucleus. The result, described in a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed, is far from confirmed but has generated excitement because it could represent the long-sought direct detection of dark matter.
Researchers report findings on biological markers that correlate with improved patient outcomes when immune-based therapies are used before and after surgery for lung cancer. The publication, appearing on Nature's platform, outlines how certain biomarkers may help predict which patients respond best to this perioperative treatment approach.
Researchers led by Kenny et al. published in Nature a system called Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net) that opens up the 'black box' of autonomous vehicle decision-making. Instead of opaque outputs, CW-Net translates a car's reasoning into human-understandable concepts, such as recognizing a pedestrian or obstacle, so passengers can better anticipate its next move. Testing showed this approach improved people's ability to predict vehicle behavior even in cases where the car made errors.
NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on 30 August aboard a SpaceX rocket, sending it roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth to begin observing the Universe. The telescope's 2.4-metre mirror, originally built for surveillance purposes and handed to NASA in 2012, was re-engineered for astronomy and paired with a 300-megapixel infrared camera capable of imaging patches of sky about 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope can capture in one shot.
The BESIII Collaboration measured the decay of lambda hyperons, in which a strange quark converts into an up quark, by exploiting quantum entanglement between the particle and its antimatter counterpart to 'tag' the event. This technique allowed them to determine a decay parameter that had eluded precise measurement for 35 years, and their result matches predictions from established physics theory.
A week after its US approval for advanced pancreatic cancer, the drug daraxonrasib has shown early promise against non-small cell lung cancer, the most common form of the disease. In a small trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine, tumors shrank in over 30% of patients whose cancers carried mutations in RAS family proteins and who had already failed other treatments. A larger randomized trial comparing daraxonrasib to standard chemotherapy is now underway.