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Meta released Muse Gadgets, an open-source project providing firmware and a Linux SDK so developers can build custom hardware that connects to its Muse AI agent, with suggested projects like e-ink displays or HDMI stick devices. The company also built its own gadget, Muse Home Link, a USB-C device that lets Muse control smart home devices, and is giving away 5,000 units free to subscribers while supplies last.
Astronomer Jason Wang, with collaborators Matas Kulikauskas and Sarah Blunt, has released an online tool called 'Where Is the Planet' that predicts the current and future positions of directly-imaged exoplanets and brown dwarf companions in their orbits. The tool accepts requests to add new orbits and provides a citation record for researchers who use it in published work.
Researchers critiquing a series of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health studies say they replicated and expanded the same statistical methodology used to link nuclear power plants to elevated cancer rates. Applying that methodology to other landmarks, they found it also attributes huge numbers of cancer deaths to Costco warehouses, private colleges, Harvard itself, and even Major League Baseball stadiums. The critics argue this shows the method produces spurious correlations regardless of the landmark chosen, undermining the original nuclear-cancer papers published in Environmental Health, Nature Communications, and other journals between December and this year.
Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Ban Flock Act, which would prohibit federal agencies from operating automatic license plate reader systems or accessing data from such systems run by local police or private vendors like Flock. The bill allows exceptions only for toll collection and future congressional approvals capped at 48-hour data retention, and would cut federal grants to state and local governments that fail to comply, while allowing lawsuits and enforcement by state attorneys general.
A co-founder of Kingdom Come: Deliverance developer Warhorse Studios has publicly said he hopes Grand Theft Auto 6's pricing will lead to higher game prices across the industry. The comment was made amid ongoing debate over rising AAA game costs and development budgets.
An Entrepreneur contributor opinion piece argues that AI companies defaulting to English-first product design are overlooking a vast multilingual user base. The piece cites ITU data showing 2.2 billion people remained offline in 2025, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, and warns that simply bolting translation onto English-trained models produces uneven results across languages.
California has passed a new law that imposes fines on autonomous vehicle companies when their robotaxis block emergency responders. The legislation also sets new requirements for how these companies must respond when their vehicles interfere with police, fire, or medical personnel.
David Ellison announced on X that the newly merged Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will operate under the name Skydance, after a consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit from 12 state attorneys general. The $111 billion deal, finalized September 21, follows a year-long bidding war in which Ellison prevailed after Netflix withdrew its interest in Warner Bros. Discovery.
Apple said Friday it is overhauling macOS privacy settings that let third-party apps with Full Disk Access read users' message histories. The change follows reports that Meta's Muse AI assistant surfaced content from a user's Apple Messages conversation, prompting a dispute between Meta and security researchers over whether that required explicit user consent beyond granting system-level file access.
A dedicated site now tracks record configurations for the Heilbronn Problem, which asks how to place n points in a unit-area region so the smallest triangle formed by any three points is as large as possible. It covers three standard containers—square, triangle, and optimal convex regions—providing exact coordinates, symmetry analysis, proof references, and an in-browser rational arithmetic verifier. The site also maintains a running list of recent record improvements and a feed for updates.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, NYU, and Stanford unveiled Ataraxos, an AI system that defeated four-time Stratego world champion Pim Niemeijer in a series, winning 15 games, losing one, and drawing four. The system combines a self-play-trained strategy network with a second neural network that estimates the likely positions of an opponent's hidden pieces, allowing it to search a narrowed set of plausible game states before each move rather than attempting to brute-force the full hidden-information space.
Anthropic and the Vatican, under Pope Leo, reportedly share concerns about unchecked AI development but diverge on the question of AI consciousness, according to a report. Anthropic has been researching the possibility that AI systems could have some form of consciousness and the moral questions that would raise, a position the Vatican reportedly does not share.