In a Fast Company interview, Walmart U.S. President and CEO David Guggina described how the retailer is combining its extensive store footprint, supply chain infrastructure, e-commerce operations and customer data into one integrated system. He argued this convergence lets Walmart respond faster to shifting customer needs and extract greater value from its existing assets.
Executives Johanna Faries of Blizzard Entertainment, Justine Palefsky of Kindred, and Alphonzo Terrell of Spill joined a panel moderated by Fast Company's Morgan Brady to discuss how companies can turn passive audiences into engaged communities. They emphasized that authentic community cannot be created through marketing gimmicks but must be built by listening to customers and relinquishing some corporate control.
CNET's daily Wordle guide confirmed that the solution for puzzle #1916, released Sept. 17, is THETA, the Greek letter often used in Greek life symbols. The site also provided hints beforehand, noting the word starts with T, ends with A, contains two vowels and one repeated letter. Wednesday's answer, WISPY, and other recent solutions were listed for reference.
CNET published its daily hints and full answer list for the New York Times Strands puzzle, edition #928, dated Sept. 17. The day's theme centers on classic newspaper comic strips, with answers including ZIPPY, ZITS, MUTTS, BLONDIE, PEANUTS and PICKLES, alongside a spangram tying the theme together.
Researchers analyzing Mercury's surface features have found that the planet has been shrinking at a faster rate than earlier models suggested, as its interior cools and contracts. The findings come from renewed analysis of geological formations like fault scarps that record the planet's contraction over billions of years.
Researchers led by Stanford computer scientist James Zou built a system called Virtual Biotech, using up to 37,000 AI agents modeled like departments of a biotech company, overseen by a 'chief scientific officer' agent. After analyzing thousands of past clinical trials, the AI swarm flagged an immune-dampening protein as a target and, with human guidance, proposed a candidate treatment for lung cancer, detailed in a new Science paper.
A study published in Cell introduces a specialized AI toolkit for longevity research, including large language models trained specifically on ageing-biology data, 17 benchmark tasks to evaluate performance on ageing-related questions, and an interface linking these models with AI research assistants. When tested against major commercial models from companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek, the purpose-built ageing models outperformed the larger general-purpose systems on most benchmark tasks.
Researchers recording brain activity directly from six people found two adjacent regions in the orbitofrontal cortex that compete during risky decisions, described in a Nature Neuroscience study published September 15. One region activates when a person leans toward pursuing a reward, while the other activates when they lean toward avoiding risk, with signals rapidly alternating between the two before a final choice is made.
A study finds that children who received school meal programs went on to earn more income as adults compared with peers who lacked such access. Researchers tracked long-term economic outcomes to establish this connection between childhood nutrition support and later earnings.
Nature has published an author correction to a 2017 paper on genomic deletion of malic enzyme 2 (ME2) in pancreatic cancer, fixing several figure mistakes made during assembly. These include a duplicated AMPKα immunoblot image, an incorrect β-actin loading-control blot, and a mislabelled timepoint in bioluminescence imaging data.
Researchers led by Mamdouh Eldamaty and Nicholas Reeves say gravitational surveys and ground-penetrating radar reveal signs of a concealed complex of corridors and rooms adjoining Tutankhamun's KV62 tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The team believes this structure predates Tutankhamun's burial and could be linked to Queen Nefertiti, though excavation approval from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities is still pending.
OpenAI announced on 8 September that one of its AI models had solved a major open problem in fluid dynamics, the Navier-Stokes puzzle. The claim provoked backlash after researchers, including Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge, said they had already been working on the same problem using AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic and were tipped off before the announcement. Twenty-five Fields Medal winners have since signed an open letter warning that AI involvement in mathematics raises serious plagiarism and credit-attribution concerns.