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Tech News
San Francisco startup Rainmaker used planes and drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds above Homer, Alaska on 23 August, a cloud-seeding technique meant to accelerate rain formation. The company says the operation produced 19 million US gallons of water in three hours, but local resident Cooper Freeman says the community was not informed in advance and no environmental monitoring followed.
Users can now add, remove, and organize widgets for CarPlay through the Settings app on their iPhone. The process involves selecting options under General > CarPlay, enabling widget display, and choosing preferred widgets from compatible apps. Additional automation features like Smart Rotate and Widget Suggestions enhance the widget experience while driving.
Owners of the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential began losing the weather display from their devices' screens during August and September, leaving only the time showing. Within the last day, users on Reddit and in reader comments have reported that the weather information has started reappearing on their devices.
Android Authority's Insights team found code for an unreleased Android Auto feature that would use an animated raccoon character, paired with a temperature caption, to show weather conditions on the dashboard. Columnist Andy Walker argues the cartoonish design clashes with Android Auto's usual large, legible, high-contrast interface elements meant to be read quickly while driving.
A CNET reviewer spent several months testing Amazon's Alexa Plus, Google's Gemini for Home and Apple's Siri AI for weather forecasting accuracy in a high-desert city with microclimates. The test found Alexa Plus gives the longest, most detailed responses—including wind, air quality and 'feels like' temperatures—but occasionally mispredicted rain and tended to overestimate high temperatures.
Hurricane Polo is expected to impact a broad swath of the southwestern and central United States with severe weather, even though the storm itself is not forecast to make landfall. States in the region are preparing for the effects of its remnants.
A team led by Jim Wild of Lancaster University, publishing in Space Weather, re-examined an 1871 Nature report describing a magnetic disturbance that delayed trains in Exeter, England, previously dated to 1841. The researchers concluded that date was likely a transcription error, and the actual rail disruption occurred years later, meaning the Carrington Event of 1859 need not be displaced as the earliest documented case of severe geomagnetic interference with British rail signaling.
Climate researchers have released a new map showing how an unusually powerful El Niño weather pattern is expected to alter conditions across different regions worldwide. The map identifies areas likely to see the most significant disruptions to rainfall, temperature and storm activity as the phenomenon intensifies.
A new report warns that the current strong El Niño event, which is pushing global temperatures unusually high, could contribute to nearly half a million deaths over the next six months. The report describes the extreme heat as a preview of conditions expected to become the norm within a few decades.
RadarScope, the widely used radar and severe weather tracking app for iPhone, has released a CarPlay version as part of its 5.7 update. The new CarPlay interface isn't a simple port—it includes navigation overlays, multiple radar data types like MRMS and satellite, and route tracking directly on the map.
Google has updated its Pixel Weather app to include a refresh button on the larger home screen widget, letting users manually pull the latest conditions instead of waiting for background updates. The company also removed the left/right arrow buttons previously used to scrub through hourly and daily forecasts within the app. The changes appear in version 1.1.20260716.979549101 of the app.
Apple's iOS 27 update splits the Weather app's main forecast screen into three tabs: Conditions, Precipitation, and Wind. Tapping the new icons instantly switches both the hourly and 10-day outlook to show rain chances or wind gust speeds, data that was previously tucked into separate menus.