Latest Tech News

Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more

Filtered by: ac Clear Filter

New Brain Interface Interprets Inner Monologues With Startling Accuracy

Scientists can now decipher brain activity related to the silent inner monologue in people’s heads with up to 74% accuracy, according to a new study. In new research published today in Cell, scientists from Stanford University decoded imagined words from four participants with severe paralysis due to ALS or brainstem stroke. Aside from being absolutely wild, the findings could help people who are unable to speak communicate more easily using brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), the researchers say

Ice discs slingshot across a metal surface all on their own

Scientists have figured out how to make frozen discs of ice self-propel across a patterned metal surface, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. It's the latest breakthrough to come out of the Virginia Tech lab of mechanical engineer Jonathan Boreyko. A few years ago, Boreyko's lab experimentally demonstrated a three-phase Leidenfrost effect in water vapor, liquid water, and ice. The Leidenfrost effect is what happens when you dash a few drops of

New Mac Pro could boast M4 Ultra chip, per report

Apple has long been rumored to have a new Mac Pro in development, and a new report suggests it will come with a more powerful chip than we’ve yet seen: the M4 Ultra. Earlier this year, Apple was expected to have two pro-focused hardware updates coming: a new Mac Studio and also the next-gen Mac Pro. The Mac Studio launched in March, but there’s been no update on a new Mac Pro since then. Now, a Macworld report indicates that’s because it will come with a brand new chip that’s still in develop

Topics: m4 mac new pro ultra

AWS launches AI agent marketplace with a hackathon and $100k in prizes for developers

Kmatta ZDNET's key takeaways The new agents marketplace will launch in beta next month. The companies will also launch an educational hub for IT clients. Developers could win a chunk of $100,000 for building agents. As is often the case with hyped-up new technologies, interest in AI agents among business leaders is soaring -- some CFOs report committing 25% of their AI budgets to them. However, practical understanding of how to implement and use them effectively remains somewhat fuzzy. A ne

How to turn off ACR on your TV - and why you shouldn't wait to do it

Adam Breeden/ZDNET Did you know that whenever you turn on your smart TV, you invite an unseen guest to watch it with you? These days, most popular TV models utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a form of ad surveillance technology that gathers information about everything you watch and transmits it to a centralized database. Manufacturers then use your data to identify your viewing preferences, enabling them to deliver highly targeted ads. Also: Your TV's USB port is seriously underut

Cadillac’s Elevated Velocity concept could foreshadow the brand’s future in off-roading

is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. On the surface, Cadillac’s new Elevated Velocity looks like your typical concept car: gull-wing doors; a plush red interior; a retractable steering wheel for fully autonomous driving; and futuristic lighting scheme. But the real attenti

Data brokers just gave us another reason to hate them

If you were holding a competition for the scummiest business model, then data brokers would be very high up the list. These companies make money by buying personal data from app and website owners and selling it to companies who want to spam us. A US Senator has now drawn attention to the latest sketchy practice by these companies: making it harder for us to opt out by hiding that option from search results … The dark world of data brokers Data brokers are companies that buy personal data fro

Reported plans for Apple’s tabletop robot seem both excellent and awful

Yesterday’s Bloomberg report on Apple’s upcoming tabletop robot didn’t reveal anything new about the hardware, but plans to give it a personality could represent a huge gamble. The starting point seems both uncontroversial and a great idea – basing the UI on the friendly Finder icon that we’ve known and loved since the welcome screen of the original Macintosh back in 1984 … A Finder-based animated face While Mark Gurman said Memoji-styles alternatives are being considered, animating the Finde

What I look for in typeface licenses

Typeface licenses Process Journal I can’t remember the last time I undertook a design project where we didn’t use a commercial typeface. I often recommend these to clients because: The world of commercial typefaces is broad and it opens up a range of high-quality options for a project Using a commercial typeface is an easy way to level-up a design (though it won’t fix a bad design) Supporting independent foundries is important There’s no judgement on open source typefaces – I’m often pairi

I Replaced My Mac With an iPad for an Entire Week. It Went as Well as You’d Expect

Even the most die-hard iPad fans have started to lose faith in recent years. Apple has constantly hobbled its tablet’s potential, twinning laptop-grade chips with an operating system that screamed, “You still need a Mac to do your work.” But now iPadOS 26 promises Mac-like multitasking, a revamped Files app, and proper background tasks. All of which sounds like something that should be fully investigated. Because we do things properly here at WIRED, this could not be a mere cursory glance at ne

Windows 10 users looking for a new OS? Apple's $599 MacBook can't come at a better time

Kerry Wan/ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Apple could be developing a new budget-friendly MacBook for around $599. Rumors state it would house an A18 Pro chipset -- the processor found in the iPhone 16 Pro. Despite corroboration by industry experts, information is speculative. About a month ago, rumors starting surfacing that Apple was developing a lightweight MacBook that runs on iPhone hardware. Notable Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo supported the rumors in a post on X in July, claiming the compa

Nyxt: The Emacs-like web browser

Nyxt: the Emacs-like web browser Did you know...? LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out by buying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net. Nyxt is an unusual web browser that tries to answer the question, "what if Emacs was a good web browser?". Nyxt is not an Emacs package, but a full web browser written in Common Lisp and available under the BSD three-clause license. Its target audience is developers who wa

Deal: The Jackery Explorer 300 Power Station is portable, powerful, and at an all-time low price

Getting the right power station can get tricky, with too many options crowding the current market. If you want a battery that is actually portable, the Jackery Explorer 300 Portable Power Station is a great option, and it is currently discounted by $90, bringing the price down to an all-time low of $169. Buy the Jackery Explorer 300 Portable Power Station for just $169 ($90 off) This offer is available from Amazon. It’s labeled as a “limited time deal,” which means the sale should end relativel

Open Banking and Payments Competition

Much of the operation of the financial industry is legible to people outside of it. Your credit card works basically like you understand it to (excepting the occasional mythmaking about second order consequences). Debates about what terms banks are allowed to offer on credit cards are fairly straightforward and can be easily followed by non-specialists. But some issues are under the hood, and a societal debate about them doesn’t exactly wear its consequences on its sleeves. Consider the controv

Show HN: Real-time privacy protection for smart glasses

Privacy Infrastructure for Smart Glasses Build smart glasses apps without privacy concerns. Smart glasses apps face privacy hurdles. This real-time privacy filter sits between the camera and the app, automatically ensuring compliance. How it works: Replace your raw camera feed with our filtered stream. The filter processes live video, applies privacy protections, and outputs a compliant stream in real time. Use this processed stream for AI apps, social apps, or anything else. Features: Anon

The Grimmest Ensign Deaths on ‘Star Trek’

Lots of people die in Star Trek, and do so pretty horrifically. Boldly going is deadly business, but there’s always something particularly grim when tragedy strikes at the lowest rung on Starfleet’s officer ladder: the lowly ensigns that keep any good starship or space station humming along as they try to survive long enough to eke it out to lieutenant junior grade and beyond. In last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds, we got to sadly see poor Ensign Gamble pay the ultimate price in a particu

9to5Mac Daily: August 13, 2025 – iPhone 17 pricing, Apple vs Elon

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players. Sponsored by Backblaze: Never lose a file again. Use code “9to5daily” at checkout for 10% off or try for free. New episodes of 9to5Mac Daily are recorded every weekday. Subscribe to our podcast in Apple Podcast or your favorite podcast player to guarantee new episodes

Researchers Harness Black Metal to Turbocharge Solar Power

Several years ago, an optics expert developed a technique for turning shiny metals pitch black. The trick resulted in a material perfectly suited for absorbing sunlight—so much so that generators built with it produced 15 times more power than comparable devices. The team used black metal to develop a new design for solar thermoelectric generators. Known as STEGs, they can convert various types of thermal energy into electricity. However, technological limitations significantly curbed their pot

Starlink Rival Announces Plans to Take on Musk With a $1.5 Billion Satellite Push

Texas startup AST SpaceMobile announced its plan to launch 45 to 60 satellites by 2026, establishing itself as a worthy competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation in building space-based broadband networks. The company announced its second-quarter earnings on Monday, revealing that it had $1.5 billion on its balance sheet to fund the deployment of dozens of its satellites, CNBC reported. The next day, AST SpaceMobile’s shares soared by more than 10% with the prospect of the company providing

PSA: YouTube will start guessing your age from today (Updated)

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority TL;DR YouTube will start estimating the age of its US viewers beginning today, August 13. The platform will use AI to determine if you are under 18 and automatically apply age-appropriate experiences to your account. You can dispute the age estimation by providing a government ID, selfie, or a credit card. Update, August 13, 2025 (4:59 PM ET): Just as promised, YouTube’s new age checks have gone live, and users are already reporting running into restrictio

Microplastics are everywhere — including in the air around plastic treaty negotiations

is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Thousands of delegates have descended upon Geneva this week for what’s supposed to be the culmination of years of negotiations that, if successful, are supposed to end in a groundbreaking

Nginx introduces native support for ACME protocol

We are very excited to announce the preview release of ACME support in NGINX. The implementation introduces a new module ngx_http_acme_module that provides built-in directives for requesting, installing, and renewing certificates directly from NGINX configuration. The ACME support leverages our NGINX-Rust SDK and is available as a Rust-based dynamic module for both NGINX Open Source users as well as enterprise NGINX One customers using NGINX Plus. NGINX’s native support for ACME brings a variet

Data Brokers Face New Pressure for Hiding Opt-Out Pages From Google

United States senator Maggie Hassan is pressing major data brokers after an investigation by The Markup/CalMatters and copublished by WIRED found at least 35 firms hid opt-out information from search results, making it harder for people to take control of their own data and safeguard their privacy online. Hassan, the top Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee, put five of the top firms—IQVIA Digital, Comscore, Telesign Corporation, 6sense Insights, and Findem—on notice Wednesday, demanding th

RFK Jr. Is Supporting mRNA Research—Just Not for Vaccines

This month, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was canceling 22 contracts and investments worth nearly $500 million as a part of a “coordinated wind-down” of mRNA vaccine research. Yet some projects that do not involve mRNA or vaccines have been caught up in the purge. At the same time, the administration has quietly endorsed research into mRNA treatments for cancer and genetic disorders. HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been suspicious of mRNA vaccines

Ai2’s MolmoAct model ‘thinks in 3D’ to challenge Nvidia and Google in robotics AI

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Physical AI, where robotics and foundation models come together, is fast becoming a growing space with companies like Nvidia, Google and Meta releasing research and experimenting in melding large language models (LLMs) with robots. New research from the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) aims to challenge Nvidia and Google in physical AI with th

macOS Tahoe adds 15 beautiful new screensavers, available here

macOS Tahoe is a big update for Mac screensavers, with 15 brand new options coming. But there’s no need to wait to check them out, as all the new screensavers are available below. The next major software update for Mac users is macOS Tahoe, which is currently in beta and should ship to all users next month. macOS Tahoe includes Apple’s new Liquid Glass design, three brand new apps, big Spotlight and Control Center upgrades, Live Activities, and more. Screensavers are another nice addition. m

Mesmerizing Hypnoloid, a Kinetic Desktop Sculpture

This Hypnoloid object is sort of the opposite of a spinning top. Whereas a top contacts the surface it's balancing on only at its point, the Hypnoloid contacts the surface with every square millimeter of its surface area. The shape is called an oloid, and it's a bit difficult to understand. The 20th-century German sculptor, inventor and mathematician Paul Schatz, who discovered it, describes it thusly: "If the distance of two centers of disk is equal to the radius, then the convex hull produce

Star Tries to Swallow a Black Hole, Ignites One of the Strangest Supernovas Ever Seen

Black holes are dark, menacing objects with gravity so intense that not even light can escape, so you don’t want to mess with them. A recent discovery of one of the strangest supernovas ever observed reveals the tragic story of a star that tried to defy the powerful pull of a nearby black hole but later conceded in an explosive death. A team of astronomers discovered the unusual supernova, dubbed SN 2023zkd, while digging through observations of particularly interesting targets gathered by tele

‘Are You Surprised?’: Trump Shrugs Off New Suspected Hack of Documents by Russia

President Donald Trump was asked on Wednesday about the recent hack of a computer system that holds highly sensitive federal court documents. Russia is suspected to be behind the attack, as the New York Times first reported on Tuesday. But Trump doesn’t seem to think it was a big deal, even as the president prepares to meet with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Trump was asked by a reporter if he would bring up the hack when he meets Putin in Alaska on Friday. “I guess I could,” Trump replied