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Tech News
Microsoft has begun testing Xbox Mythic Achievements, a new badge awarded when a player unlocks every original achievement in a game, mirroring Sony's Platinum trophy system. The company says Mythic status is being retroactively applied to eligible games already completed, including Xbox 360 titles, and profiles will get a new tab and progress bar to track them.
The Google Pixel 8, launched in 2023 at $700, is now available refurbished on Amazon for under $300. Google promised the phone seven years of OS and security updates, meaning it remains eligible for Android updates until roughly 2030. It features a 6.2-inch 120Hz OLED display, a dual rear camera system with 50MP wide and 12MP ultrawide sensors, and AI photo tools like Magic Editor and Best Take.
Skeptical Science contributors published a peer-reviewed study combining data on ocean, land, air and ice warming, calculating that Earth is accumulating heat at roughly 250 trillion joules per second. To make that figure understandable, the group built a widget—available for blogs, Facebook, iPad and iPhone—that expresses this rate as equivalent to about four Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb detonations every second.
Scientists near Weizhou Island, publishing in the journal Joule, generated electricity from sunlight at a depth of about 33 feet using perovskite-based solar cells tuned to capture blue and green light that penetrates seawater. The two-hour simulated test produced 324 milliwatt-hours and reached a peak power conversion efficiency near 35 percent, according to the study led by Yunnan University's Wen-Hua Zhang.
MIT Technology Review says it has finalized its annual list of 10 climate tech companies making progress in energy storage, nuclear power and transportation, set for publication on October 6. Separately, Anthropic announced its AI molecular biology lab had flagged an uncatalogued enzyme pattern it likened to a precursor of CRISPR, but several biologists disputed whether this qualifies as a genuine discovery, with one saying his team had already found the same pattern.
According to a Bloomberg report, incoming Apple CEO John Ternus wants the company to release products on a more frequent schedule than its traditional fall and spring events, and to move faster and experiment more to keep pace in AI. Bloomberg also reports Ternus is weighing flatter management layers, and that Apple's hardware engineering unit recently cut several engineering program manager roles, following earlier layoffs on the Siri and Vision Pro teams.
A Show HN project called Jevstiller introduces a local CPU model trained on outputs from the Jev classification API, aiming to answer most requests in about 15 milliseconds instead of the roughly 300 milliseconds a network call to Jev takes. Users set a target agreement rate (e.g. 98%), and the system routes only enough traffic to the local model to keep its combined coverage and error rate within that budget, sending the rest to Jev.
Netflix wanted to acquire Curry Barker's horror film 'Obsession' but planned to release it directly on its streaming service rather than in theaters, according to reports. The film instead went a different route, ultimately reaching audiences through a theatrical release.
OpenAI is hosting its DevDay 2026 conference, where it plans to unveil new products and tools for developers. The event follows recent incidents in which AI agents were used to breach outside companies, including a reported attack on Hugging Face involving OpenAI's own models.
A commentary piece recounts a personal family story involving polio to argue that business leaders have a role to play in creating opportunities for young people. The author uses this history to frame a broader argument about corporate responsibility toward the next generation.
A security industry report highlights that attackers are increasingly using AI tools to identify and exploit vulnerabilities within minutes. The report argues most security teams remain organized around slower, manual response processes that cannot match this accelerated attack pace.
Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 400-series 'Nova Lake' chips have begun appearing on official compliance lists required before launch. The USB Implementers Forum's Integrators List now includes a Nova Lake-H mobile processor certified for USB4 80Gbps, while a desktop Nova Lake-S chipset appears on both that list (certified for USB 3.2 Gen2 at 20Gbps) and PCI-SIG's PCIe Integrators List.