Code strings found in the latest Pixel Watch app update (version 5.1.0.990450614) indicate Google is deprecating Safety Signal, a Health Premium feature that provides cellular connectivity to the Pixel Watch 2 and Pixel Watch 3 LTE when paired phones are out of range or the watch lacks its own carrier plan. The service currently supports emergency contact calls, Safety Check, Emergency Sharing, Emergency SOS and Fall Detection in the US, Canada, the UK and Germany. Google has not announced a shutdown date or a replacement.
Apple and Dolby Laboratories announced that Formula 1 races streamed on Apple TV in the U.S. will gain Dolby Atmos audio, debuting during the U.S. Grand Prix weekend in Austin starting October 23. The feature joins the existing Dolby Vision picture support, available on supported devices at no extra cost beyond an Apple TV subscription.
Google has confirmed that its newly released Googlebook laptops do not yet support cross-device 'Better Together' features with Samsung phones, even those running Android 17. Google's Mishaal Rahman said on Reddit that support for Samsung devices will roll out over the coming weeks, after users reported the feature failing to work and at least one buyer returning their device.
Strands Labs has launched Strands Decider 2B, a small open-source 'decision model' built for fast local experimentation within its strands-labs initiative. Unlike general-purpose LLMs, it is designed to choose among predefined options or assign numerical scores rather than generate free-form text, and it also outputs a reliability score for each decision. The model is intended to integrate with the Strands Harness SDK and the recently launched Strands harness.
Counterpoint Research reports that Apple became the top-selling smartphone brand through European carriers in Q2 2026, with its share rising from 33% to 37% year-over-year while Samsung's fell from 39% to 34%. Overall European smartphone sales fell 8%, with carrier sales down 4% versus an 11% drop in the open market; vivo and Motorola also grew carrier sales by 90% and 27% respectively.
Researchers from Leibniz University Hannover and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf analyzed six radioactive fragments ejected during the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion. The particles, some fused with zirconium or formed from burning graphite moderator material, proved more physically and chemically stable than previously assumed, according to the team's findings published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
A smart-home enthusiast who automated most of a house using Home Assistant found that certain devices, like garden lights on a timer, still required manual control via an app that no one in the family wanted to use. To solve this, they commissioned an illustrator to create a hand-drawn floor plan of the house, which was turned into an interactive dashboard showing live states like a flickering fireplace and glowing garden lights.
A developer has published an open-source DNS ad-blocking project that runs on the ESP32-C3, a roughly $2 microcontroller, without requiring PSRAM. Instead of storing blocklist domains as strings in RAM, the system stores them as sorted 40-bit hashes in flash memory, allowing over 140,000 domains to fit in about 0.7MB of flash and be matched via binary search in roughly 10 milliseconds using only about 50KB of RAM.
The research team built a diagnosis pipeline that uses Jev, a lightweight decision-making tool, to analyze Kubernetes cluster evidence without any LLM agent involved. The pipeline programmatically collects cluster objects, events, logs, and resource data, then has Jev select likely root causes and supporting evidence to assemble a diagnosis report. Tested across 21 SREGym-Lite faults, the pipeline passed 80 of 105 diagnoses (76.2%) with a median diagnosis time of 14.6 seconds.
An independent developer released TerrainSR, a model trained on paired 100m-to-10m elevation data that generates higher-resolution terrain heightmaps from coarser input. The model excludes built-up and human-modified land from its training data so outputs avoid artifacts like roads or buildings, and on an RTX 4070 it can process a 50x50km patch in 0.74 seconds.
OpenAI has published results claiming its AI systems made progress on more than 300 mathematical problems, following an earlier claimed solution related to a Millennium Prize problem. The company presented the findings as an attempt to demonstrate credibility to the mathematics research community.
Apple TV has released the first two episodes of 'Small Prophets,' a British comedy created by Mackenzie Crook, after acquiring international rights in August following its BBC premiere. New episodes will air weekly on Wednesdays through November 4, though UK viewers won't get access on Apple TV until 2027.
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