XPRIZE Wildfire’s $11 million competition found wildfire detection is faster than suppression: in Alaska, all finalists detected a high-risk fire in under 10 minutes, but none fully extinguished it and the $3.5 million grand prize went unclaimed.
Sep 23, 2026 ·Ars Technica
Tom Frazier’s free open-source “Slop Mop” Chrome extension analyzes LinkedIn posts and flags or hides ones that match a threshold for low-value writing using a Jev-based probabilistic decision model, without removing posts from the feed (they can still be reported).
Sep 23, 2026 ·
The Register
Insta360’s Spatial Capture uses 3D Gaussian splatting to let you recreate a real space in 3D by recording a 360 video for a few minutes (up to 2 minutes) and processing it in the cloud, producing an explorable “video game” look of the location.
Sep 23, 2026 ·
CNET
YouTube says Custom Feeds will roll out “soon” in the US for web, mobile, and TV, letting users create multiple saved homepage tabs by describing what they want and rating video suggestions to tune recommendations.
Sep 23, 2026 ·Ars Technica
Worx JawSaw is $91 after a $99-off Prime Big Deal Days discount plus an on-page coupon (down from $190), saving more than 50%.
Sep 23, 2026 ·CNET
Enveda raised a $311M Series E at a $2B valuation to advance nature-derived AI drug candidates into clinical trials.
Sep 23, 2026 ·
TechCrunch
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 chip is 30% smaller than its predecessor, delivers double the AI capability, and cuts power consumption by up to 40% for next-generation “hearables.”
Sep 23, 2026 ·CNET
Modal Motors is developing electric motors that avoid rare-earth magnets to reduce reliance on China’s rare-earth supply chain.
Sep 23, 2026 ·TechCrunch
Meta’s AI agent Muse (via an avatar called “Marley”) handled multiple real-world tasks in parallel, successfully completing several user requests end-to-end and leaving only the security-plan downgrade as a partial win because it required a phone call.
Sep 23, 2026 ·
The Verge
Inherited positional information from the early embryo’s ectoderm sets a boundary where hindbrain fate stays separate from midbrain/forebrain fate, explaining why you don’t have “two brains.”
Sep 23, 2026 ·Ars Technica
MJWarp advances MuJoCo physics for up to 2,048 parallel “worlds” in one batched call (mjw.step), shifting the bottleneck from single-world latency to aggregate throughput for large-scale robotics sampling and learning workflows.
Sep 23, 2026 ·Hugging Face
Bull will integrate SiPearl’s Rhea1 CPUs into the CPU-only partition of Jupiter, supplying domestic European silicon to the EU’s first exascale supercomputer that came online last year.
Sep 23, 2026 ·The Register
Netflix released the official trailer for Brad Bird’s animated feature Ray Gunn, which will come to Netflix in December as a neo-noir science-fiction mystery featuring retro-futuristic elements like flying cars, jet packs, laser guns, and aliens.
Sep 23, 2026 ·Ars Technica
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills that will expand data-center reporting on electricity use and water impacts starting next year, alongside changes aimed at preventing data centers from shifting grid-connection costs onto other ratepayers.
Sep 23, 2026 ·The Verge
F5 patched a critical heap-based buffer overflow in BIG-IP APM (CVE-2026-94127, CVSS 9.3) that CISA and F5 say is under active exploitation, including when APM is configured as an OAuth Authorization Server on the same virtual server.
Sep 23, 2026 ·The Register
Disney is raising the ad-free Disney+ and Hulu bundle to $21.99/month (from $19.99) and both ad-free stand-alone plans to $21.49/month (from $18.99), while ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu stand-alone plans rise to $12.49/month.
Sep 23, 2026 ·TechCrunch
Anthropic says its Claude AI autonomously discovered a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages after searching DNA-sequence data and completing 21 hours of work involving nearly 950 agents and 210 million tokens.
Sep 23, 2026 ·The Verge
Google acquired Wiz for $32 billion earlier this year, underscoring how much investor capital has flowed into “AI-native” cybersecurity startups.
Sep 23, 2026 ·TechCrunch
Disney raised prices for multiple streaming plans, with Disney+ ad-free up 13% to $21.50/month and the Disney+ and Hulu ad-free bundle rising by $2 to $22/month (ad-supported Disney+ to $12.50/month, while the ad-supported Disney+/Hulu bundle stays $13/month).
Sep 23, 2026 ·
Engadget
A Samsung refrigerator software update triggered “abnormal symptoms” affecting the refrigerator’s power and screen for some customers, after which Samsung stopped issuing the update as of September 23 and said it was aiming to have some fridges fixed by September 24.
Sep 23, 2026 ·Ars Technica
