Samsung has begun pushing One UI 9 to the Galaxy S26, S26+, S26 Ultra and the newly released S26 FE, roughly a month after the update first appeared on its Z Fold 8 Ultra, Fold 8 and Flip 8 foldables. The rollout brings AI tools like My FanCam, which automatically crops video to track a chosen person, along with upgrades to Now Brief, Now Nudge, Interpreter, Voice Recorder and Document Scan.
A developer named Fabian released Chat-Man, a tool that connects WhatsApp to AI agents through an MCP server, allowing programmatic reading, searching, and sending of messages. It also includes a web interface for non-technical users to manage groups, contacts, and bulk messaging, plus webhook support for starred conversations. Fabian built it after needing WhatsApp integration across multiple personal projects and wanting to avoid paying for separate integrations each time.
Charter's Spectrum brand has finished absorbing Cox, with former Cox customers now billed by Spectrum starting Wednesday. The deal, agreed in May 2025, cleared its last regulatory hurdle after the California Public Utilities Commission approved it last month, giving Charter over 35 million customers nationwide.
In-N-Out Burger confirmed that its store managers now earn an average of $200,000 per year, up from $180,000 in 2023, not including profit-sharing. The chain attributes the pay levels to a founding philosophy of treating employees like family, a tradition upheld by current owner Lynsi Snyder.
An entrepreneur whose company works with university admissions teams describes discovering that staff didn't want a new CRM to replace tools like Slate or Salesforce, but relief from hours spent on manual tasks such as sorting emails, downloading transcripts, and cross-checking student records across systems. The piece argues that this hidden, repetitive work—not the underlying software—is the true source of workplace friction.
Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company known for Ozempic and Wegovy, is rebranding itself as simply 'Novo' starting this week. The move shifts the company's public identity toward a shorter, more casual name as it markets directly to consumers rather than solely to healthcare providers.
A Stanford team led by Sergiu Pașca genetically engineered mice to lack most of their cortex and hippocampus, then implanted human brain organoid cells into the resulting gap. The human cells expanded to fill much of that space within weeks to months, and mice with the human tissue performed better on memory maze tests than mice without it.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel took the stage in Los Angeles to formally launch Specs, standalone AR glasses priced at $2,195, following a preview earlier this year at Augmented World Expo. Spiegel positioned Specs not as AI glasses like rivals' offerings but as a 'wearable computer' meant to reduce reliance on smartphones.
Nvidia Inception's Global Head of Physical AI, Les Karpas, will speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 about why robotics hasn't had its breakthrough moment the way ChatGPT transformed language AI. His session will examine the lack of an internet-scale dataset for physical AI, unlike the vast text corpora that powered large language models or the road-mile data amassed by self-driving companies like Waymo.
Senator Mitch McConnell reappeared at the US Capitol after a 92-day absence following a fall and pneumonia, during which he made no public statements at all. Footage showing him appearing disoriented and unresponsive to reporters has circulated widely, prompting concern from medical professionals and the public alike.
A new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute finds that 53% of Americans are extremely or very concerned about AI's environmental impact, up from 41% a year ago. The rise is driven largely by Democrats, though the poll also shows widespread unease about the local effects of data centers that power AI and cloud computing.
Nothing CEO Carl Pei has responded to speculation that the upcoming Phone 4b is actually a rebranded CMF device rather than a genuine Nothing product. Pei clarified that the Phone 4b is instead a direct successor to the Phone 3a Lite, positioning it within Nothing's existing budget lineup rather than its sister sub-brand CMF.