GoKawiil
Tech News
Counterpoint Research reports that global AI glasses shipments grew 263% year over year in the first half of 2026, driven largely by cheaper display-less models like Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses, which made up 96% of all shipments. Meta captured 94% of that display-less segment, while AR-enabled glasses, though still a small niche, saw shipments jump 449% year over year, led by Rokid ahead of Meta.
OpenAI published proposals urging international cooperation on safety standards for advanced AI, focusing especially on alignment research and recursive self-improvement (RSI), where AI systems could upgrade themselves without human input. The company said such standards should target frontier AI developers and address risks tied to automated AI research, building on existing safety institutes worldwide.
A group of prominent mathematicians, including Timothy Gowers, Ravi Vakil and Edward Witten, has launched the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, based at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and online at agmai.org. The group aims to advise AI companies on how they present and release mathematical results and to serve as a communication channel between the mathematics community and the AI industry.
A university research lab is publishing a week-long series of open-source releases instead of a traditional paper, arguing that AI agents have made individual research projects fast and cheap, which undermines the value of isolated publications. The author challenges both student pessimism about job prospects and PhD students' rush to join frontier AI labs, claiming academia is positioned for a resurgence precisely because of its resource constraints.
According to reports from The Washington Post, New York Times and Politico, the White House is drafting an executive order that would let OMB Director Russell Vought approve or reject every grant awarded by the NIH. The move follows a meeting in which NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya reportedly failed to stop the effort, marking the latest attempt by Vought to steer the agency's funding decisions after earlier attempts to cut its budget and impose political criteria on grants were blocked by Congress and the courts.
Researchers have identified numerous rock glaciers—ice masses disguised beneath layers of rock and debris—that were previously overlooked in freshwater assessments. The newly mapped ice reserves amount to roughly 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, hidden in mountainous terrain around the world.
Researchers have formally described Leopardus tilcayo, a small spotted feline native to South America, marking the first new cat species identified by science in over a century. Genetic analysis places it within the tiger cat lineage, distinguishing it from previously known relatives despite its similar leopard-like markings.
Chinese authorities have imposed disciplinary measures on several prominent academics after investigations into research-integrity violations flagged by an online research sleuth known as 'Student Geng.' The sanctions form part of a broader crackdown covering 31 research teams accused of misconduct.
Biochemist Anna Pertl at the Whitehead Institute prompted an AI system called Co-Scientist to generate novel strategies for disrupting molecular condensates that fuel the cancer-driving protein MYC. Unlike a simple chatbot, the tool deploys multiple autonomous agents that search literature, debate competing explanations, and iteratively refine hypotheses before returning results, a process that can take hours. The work builds on prior findings by her supervisor Richard Young, whose lab showed cancer cells hijack condensates at super-enhancers to overproduce MYC, research now being pursued commercially through his company Dewpoint Therapeutics.
A university president outlines six principles meant to help institutions resist political pressure on research funding, peer review and academic autonomy, citing examples from the United States and Hungary. The piece traces how funding cuts, shifting grant priorities and legal campaigns against institutions like Central European University have already eroded independent scholarship in some countries.
An essay contends that people should almost never use AI to generate written text meant to convey ideas or arguments, even with detailed prompts or human editing afterward. The author distinguishes this from other AI uses they endorse, like transcription, data analysis, brainstorming, and copyediting, arguing only the act of drafting substantive prose should be avoided.
NASA and IBM Research have jointly released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI system pretrained on SomBench, a dataset of nearly two million co-registered lunar data bundles across 11 modalities. The model fuses imagery, topography, mineralogy, radar, gravity and other planetary datasets to help scientists analyze the Moon's surface, with USRA scientist Rachel Slank contributing planetary science expertise during development.