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Tech News
Alibaba's research division Damo Academy has released as open source an AI vision-language model called Damo Radar, trained to interpret contrast-enhanced CT scans of 18 abdominal organs and flag around 150 conditions, including malignant tumors. Tested on nearly 40,000 real patient scans, the model reached an average diagnostic accuracy score (AUC) of 0.913 out of a possible 1.0 across 146 clinical findings.
LeoLabs has built a transportable radar system called Scout-S, a shipping-container-sized unit that can be set up almost anywhere in a matter of hours using just a generator and a Starlink connection. The system is designed to monitor the rapidly growing number of satellites and debris fragments in low Earth orbit, which has swelled from roughly 2,000 objects in 2019 to nearly 17,000 today, with Starlink accounting for most of that growth.
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.
A longtime Oura Ring wearer has stopped using smart rings after about a year, citing fit issues caused by weight loss and temperature swings, the need to remove the ring for weightlifting, and damage from frequent hand washing. The user says two devices broke over the period, partly due to inconsistent removal for water exposure and physical activity.
The European Space Agency is pressing ahead with its Envision mission to Venus after NASA signaled it likely can't deliver the US-built synthetic aperture radar it had promised under a 2024 partnership agreement. That radar was meant to be the spacecraft's main tool for mapping the planet's volcanic surface through its thick sulfuric-acid clouds at ten times the resolution of NASA's 1990s Magellan mission. ESA's project scientist says development will continue at full pace regardless.
A retro electronics builder documents connecting a Tiny TV Mark 2 video rasterizer board to a custom three-board CRT driver circuit designed by Eric Schlaepfer, aiming to display television images on a small 3JP7 radar display tube. The tube uses electrostatic deflection plates that require thousands of volts, so the driver boards step up low-voltage signals from Tiny TV into the high voltages needed to steer the electron beam. The setup includes a 60-volt bias board, a deflection and video driver board, and a 1,200-volt power supply, all synchronized with horizontal, vertical and video timing signals.
Anker unveiled the Soundcore SleepLab Pro at IFA 2026, a bedside speaker that uses 60GHz radar to monitor heart rate, breathing, and sleep stages without requiring any wearable device. The device uses that biometric data to personalize soundscapes, lighting, and breathing exercises, including a 28-day sleep improvement program and over 180 built-in sounds, all without needing a phone or subscription for core functions.
Anker has unveiled SleepLab, a bedside speaker that uses 60GHz millimeter-wave radar to monitor heart rate and breathing without requiring a wearable device. Over roughly a month of use, it learns which combinations of binaural beats and ambient lighting help the user relax and stay asleep, operating standalone without a phone or subscription. The device can be reserved for $1, with the radar-equipped Pro model priced at $269.99 and a non-radar version at $169.99.
CarPlay received three notable app upgrades in August: MLB's app now lets users browse games and hear live radio feeds with in-car score displays, Meta AI joined ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok as a chatbot option (though still in limited testing), and The Weather Channel's Storm Radar app added live weather maps, radar layers, and route-based alerts. These updates arrive ahead of Apple's broader CarPlay overhaul expected with iOS 27 in September, which will add a dedicated Siri app and AI features.
The Weather Channel has released a CarPlay version of its Storm Radar app, filling a gap left by Apple Weather, which still isn't supported on CarPlay. The new app shows a live map with radar, clouds, and precipitation layers, plus current conditions and forecasted weather at a driver's destination alongside ETA. The same update also brings new home screen widgets and a redesigned Apple Watch app.
San Francisco startup Mara raised $7 million in pre-seed funding to build Spike, a portable counter-drone system carried in a backpack. The system pairs a launcher holding up to 48 lightweight 250-gram Seeker interceptors with a Spotter sensor unit that fuses optical, acoustic and optional radar detection to track fiber-optic and autonomous drones that evade radio-frequency jammers. Mara says each Seeker costs roughly the same as the sub-$1,000 FPV quadcopters it's meant to destroy, undercutting rival interceptors by a claimed 20-fold margin.
Particle, the AI newsreader startup started by ex-Twitter engineers, has launched Radar, a search engine that transcribes and semantically indexes over 130,000 podcasts to surface quotes and highlights. The product grew out of a popular clip-sourcing feature in Particle's news app and is now offered as a standalone API for AI agents and data buyers, including hedge funds and search platforms like Exa.