Alvaro Lopez Ortega / 2026-09-01 Briefing

Created Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:14:15 +0000 Modified Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:14:45 +0000
5754 Words

Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, lowering costs by up to 45% for agentic workloads, and unveiled Enterprise Frontier Safeguards after customer complaints. WhatsApp remittance startup Félix raised $200M, becoming a unicorn. Google introduced Google Pics, its AI design suite for Workspace. Aslan secured $20.8M to supply AI agents for intelligence operations.

🤖 AI & Automation

Anthropic unveils Claude Fable 5.1, Mythos 5.1

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 (generally available) and Claude Mythos 5.1 (trusted access only), which share the same model but differ in safeguards, with Mythos focused on cybersecurity and life sciences. Fable 5.1 delivers higher benchmark performance in coding, knowledge work, and scientific research while cutting costs by 25% for typical workloads and up to 45% for agentic tasks, alongside improved safeguards and data privacy options. The model also shows early scientific promise, including solving a long-standing engineering issue.

Empirik uses AI to predict/prevent IT outages, raised $21M seed, spun out from Sequoia.

Empirik, an AI-powered platform that predicts and prevents IT outages by analyzing system changes and their downstream effects, raised $21 million in seed funding and spun out from Sequoia Capital. Backed by Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures, the company was incubated at Sequoia and is led by CEO Kartik Chandrayana, with customers including S&P Global and Guardant Health.

John Deere tests AI assistant JD for farmers: best practices & trends from field, machine, ops data

John Deere is testing a new AI assistant called “JD” that uses farmers’ own field, machine, and operational data to answer questions about equipment settings, fuel usage, and harvest timing. The company is piloting it with select US customers in the John Deere Operations Center, with plans to expand access and add capabilities for other industries.

AI startup Mirage’s 24-hour AI news show on X cost ~$50K in tokens; avatars struggled to converse.

Mirage, a video AI startup, streamed a 24-hour simulated news channel on X featuring AI avatars that interviewed real tech figures, reaching about 60,000 viewers at a cost of roughly $50,000 in tokens. The experiment showcased realistic but imperfect avatars that struggled with conversational cues, leading to mixed feedback and highlighting the gap between convincing short clips and sustained, engaging broadcasts.

AI hits 44% ARC-AGI for 67 cents

A small transformer trained from scratch in just 1.5 hours on an RTX 5090 achieves 44% on ARC-AGI-1 for 67 cents, outperforming many large language models and matching TRM/HRM. The gains come from modern architecture tweaks, greater data diversity, and reduced augmentations, with the model also scoring 7% on ARC-2. The open-source project highlights low-cost sample-efficiency exploration in transformers.

Atlas: A World Model for Spatial Intelligence

Atlas is World Labs’ next-generation world model, pretrained as a multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer to natively process text, images, video, and 3D. It performs camera-controlled generation, spatial reconstruction, space-time simulation, and image generation, with performance scaling alongside training compute. Atlas will power future versions of Marble and other World Labs products.

Running 104GB Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on 48GB Mac with at ~12 tok/s

Slotstream enables running the 125B-parameter Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 4-bit model on low-memory Macs starting at 16GB RAM via expert-offloading and SSD streaming, despite the model normally requiring over 100GB. It is Mac-native using MLX and Swift, includes an auto-mode balancing memory usage and speed, and plans to add MTP speculative decoding next.

Dwarf Fortress’ creator says the industry’s in shambles over AI

Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams criticized the game industry’s reliance on generative AI, saying CEOs expect to automate game creation without understanding the work and predicting a “pop and a reckoning.” He compared current corporate attitudes to past layoffs, such as his father’s, and lamented that AI talk has overshadowed discussions of actual game mechanics.

Keenable SELECT: an agent that searches the web in SQL

Keenable SELECT is an MCP server that runs DuckDB SELECT queries on live web data, using operators like WEB_SEARCH, WEB_FETCH, and SEM_EXTRACT to search, filter, and extract information efficiently. It saves query results as reusable result sets and can generate shareable HTML reports via a second agent, with each report linking to the full query trajectory. The system shifts work from expensive token-heavy page reading into SQL-like operations, enabling searches across thousands of pages with minimal LLM cost.

State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations

The open model ecosystem grew sharply—repos rising from 2.43M to 2.96M, datasets to 1M, and Spaces to 1.44M—but distribution remains highly skewed, with 85.6% of models under 200 downloads and 1.5% of repos accounting for 99.2% of all downloads. Chinese labs increasingly skip small-model releases and debut frontier-scale models up to 2.78T parameters, while AMD and NVIDIA lead in publishing open models. Notably, only one repository appears in both the top-25 downloaded and top-25 liked lists, underscoring that attention does not equal adoption.

Fuck you, show me the prompt

LLM abstraction frameworks often hide the actual prompts they send, making it hard to assess their value. The author recommends intercepting API calls with mitmproxy to inspect those prompts, then deciding whether to keep the framework or simply use the prompt directly.

The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

The article notes that prominent frontend educators are shifting focus away from web development, then details how to diagnose high “Style” cost in Chrome traces. It emphasizes checking selector complexity, invalidation scope, and using Chrome’s Selector Stats as key optimization measures.

ArXiv has almost 600 submissions today and most are AI slop

Today’s arXiv mathematics listings feature five new papers. They cover convergence acceleration for Fitness Centrality iteration, explicit Cartesian coordinates for three-dimensional clothoids, the Tate conjecture for abelian fourfolds, a counterexample to radical equality in primitive axial algebras, and homomorphisms of complex tori.

Google Antigravity introduces Boost deep reasoning (/boost)

Google Antigravity’s Boost deep reasoning (/boost) is an on-demand multi-agent pipeline for complex software engineering tasks, decomposing problems into subtasks, delegating to specialized subagents, and verifying solutions iteratively. It works in three phases—strategy formulation, parallel execution with local verification, and synthesis with regression checks—targeting deep reasoning challenges such as concurrency bugs and intricate refactoring.

Is MCP Good Yet?

The article evaluates support for five MCP features across Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, Grok, and OpenCode, finding that most features are only partially implemented, opt-in, or absent. No tool fully supports all features; Codex and Claude Code offer the broadest coverage, while Grok and OpenCode lag behind.

💼 Business & Funding

Aslan raises $20.8M for AI agents posing as analysts and undercover spies for FBI/intel

Aslan, which develops AI agents for the FBI and broader intelligence community, raised $20.8 million. These agents are capable of posing as analysts and undercover operatives in online forums.

Félix, WhatsApp remittance for Latinos, raises $200M Series C co-led by a16z & GC, incl $113M debt

Félix, an AI-powered WhatsApp remittance platform for Latino immigrants in the US, raised $200 million in a Series C round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, including $113 million in debt. The funding brings its total to nearly $300 million and propels it to unicorn status, with the company having processed over $8 billion in transactions and grown revenue 2.5x in the past year. Félix plans to use the capital to expand its offerings and enter new Latin American markets.

21-bank consortium including BofA, Citi, Goldman Sachs to launch stablecoin venture in H1 2027

A consortium of 21 banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs, plans to launch a stablecoin venture in the first half of 2027. The effort, aimed initially at commercial clients with dollar-denominated tokens, is a defensive move against the growing popularity of digital assets in cross-border payments.

Epiris to buy Gamma Communications for ~£1B, 53% premium

Private equity firm Epiris has agreed to acquire European enterprise communications provider Gamma Communications for approximately £1 billion. The deal values Gamma at a 53% premium to its share price on April 7.

Salesforce leads $160M+ HiBob raise at $3.2B+ valuation

Salesforce is leading a $166 million funding round in HR software company HiBob, valuing the firm at over $3.2 billion, up from $2.66 billion in 2023. Farallon Capital Management also participated in the round, which brings HiBob’s total funding since 2015 to more than $700 million.

Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development

Nori Robotics introduced a $1,688 bimanual mobile humanoid robot designed for robotics developers and researchers, featuring 19 degrees of freedom, two 7+1 DOF arms, a telescoping lift, cameras, lidar, and a Raspberry Pi 5. Founder Antonio built it after struggling to find affordable hardware for robotics research, and the company assembles the robots in San Francisco with an open SDK and browser-based simulator. The robot can already perform tasks like cleaning, opening drawers, restocking shelves, and pouring beers, with the first unit shipped and a next batch in production.

Oracle pins hopes on ‘Star Wars’ productivity jump to lightspeed from AI-assisted engineering

Oracle is betting that AI-assisted engineering will deliver a dramatic productivity leap, which it likens to the “Star Wars” jump to lightspeed. The company is touting the potential for “superhuman” coders following its recent layoffs of 21,000 employees.

Insider: Red Hat is capping devs’ bot budgets

Red Hat is reportedly capping how much developers can spend on AI coding bots, with rules against sharing allowances. The move suggests tighter controls on bot usage within the company.

🔧 Dev & Open Source

Is Minifying CSS Necessary? (2023)

Minifying CSS offers negligible performance benefits, with tests showing only a 2 KB size difference for a large library and parsing time differences under 54 ms even for 100,000 declaration blocks. The author concludes that adding a minification step is unnecessary because it has no perceptible effect on page load or render performance.

Wasmi 2.0 - Engineering of the Fastest Wasm Interpreters

Wasmi 2.0, a WebAssembly interpreter, has been released after eight months of work, running approximately 2.2x faster than version 1.0 in benchmarks. It adds features like stable fuel metering, a validation crate feature to reduce binary size, and an improved CLI, and benchmarks show it is among the fastest portable Wasm interpreters across multiple hardware setups.

Coherence and orphan instance rules

Typeclasses enable overloading based on type arguments, with instance resolution sometimes requiring explicit type annotations when types are ambiguous. Coherence is the global property that at most one instance matches any constraint, so the same method with the same type parameters always resolves identically throughout a program. Overlapping instances or incoherent modules violate coherence and can break invariants such as consistent hashing in data structures.

This Month in KDE Linux: August 2026

In August, KDE Linux introduced a data-safety feature using Btrfs sub-volumes and automatic snapshots, enabling users to view and roll back file versions in Dolphin. It also added default CJKV input support, improved its QA system, fixed security and update bugs, and expanded documentation. The project is now 85% toward its Beta milestone.

Let’s Use the Emergent CSS random() Function in all the Browsers

Safari has become the first browser to support the new CSS random() function, enabling randomized effects like confetti without JavaScript, as part of a broader move to reduce reliance on frameworks. However, the feature remains in early spec stages and is not yet available in other browsers, leaving its adoption uncertain.

The Robot Framework language

Robot Framework uses plain-text .robot files with sections like Settings and Test Cases, where test cases are sequences of keywords. Proper indentation and at least two spaces are required to distinguish keywords, arguments, and test names. It supports both testing and RPA tasks.

The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

East River Source Control has appointed Martin von Zweigbergk, creator of the Jujutsu version control system, as its chief technology officer to lead engineering on next-generation version control platforms. He will continue as a core maintainer of Jujutsu under the Apache 2.0 license, while the company’s ERSC Storage is set to enter private beta later this month.

A browser-based viewer for Office Open XML documents

@silurus/ooxml is an open-source JavaScript library that parses and renders .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files directly to Canvas in the browser using a Rust/WebAssembly engine, with no server-side conversion or iframes needed. It includes built-in viewers and document APIs for custom previews, thumbnails, and navigation, though feature support varies by format and document complexity.

Ubisoft’s FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

Ubisoft will block For Honor on SteamOS and Linux starting September 10 by disabling Easy Anti-Cheat, citing an inability to meaningfully deploy protection on the platform. This renders the game unplayable on Linux desktops, Steam Deck, and Steam Machines, though Ubisoft left open the possibility of reinstating support in the future. The move has drawn criticism as another intentional Linux block by a major publisher.

Io_uring Without Readahead

Turso added application-level readahead to its io_uring backend because O_DIRECT disables kernel readahead. Using a 32-page window increased submitted SQEs, but the block layer merged most reads into far fewer, larger device requests, improving performance. Disabling the sqpoll polling thread cut system time but slightly increased wall time.

Vermell – Minimal, dependency-free C++ web framework using epoll

Vermell is a minimal, dependency-free C++20 web framework for Linux that uses an epoll-based event loop with worker threads for high performance under load. It includes strict typing, an in-tree JSON DOM, templating, and hardened default security settings, requiring only a single header and static library to build. Installation supports CMake, npx, Docker, and APT across multiple architectures.

Building Without Predicting

The author is building a home by living in a bare cabin and adding only what he proves he needs, rather than predicting future requirements. Inspired by Stewart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn,” he started with used insulated cabins for separate purposes and kept water features outdoors. The process emphasizes deferring decisions and discovering actual needs through experience.

DoltLite: A SQLite fork with Git-style version control, built with 2k agent PRs

DoltLite, a SQLite fork with Git-style version control powered by Prolly Trees, reached Beta 0.50.0 after five months and about 2,000 agent-generated pull requests. Beta status indicates a stable storage format, near-full SQL compatibility, complete version control features, and production-ready performance, enabling branching, merging, diffing, and remote sync for SQLite databases.

2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up

The article explains how 2004 RuneScape ran efficiently on 56k dial-up by minimizing bytes, using a single TCP connection and a 600ms server tick. It details the packet structure, with only opcodes encrypted via ISAAC while packet bodies remained unencrypted, and traces a player’s movement to show the careful byte-saving design.

Linus Torvalds’ uEmacs – the editor he has used since the 1980s

Linus Torvalds’ uEmacs/PK 4.0 is an outdated, “crusty” full-screen editor based on MicroEMACS 3.9e, with keybindings that only loosely resemble real Emacs. Torvalds warns that it is a bad editor and advises against using it, except for those who have been using it since the 1980s and cannot retrain their fingers to other editors.

📱 Apps & Devices

Google launches Google Pics: Gemini/Nano Banana suite to rival Canva/Adobe Express on Workspace

Google has launched Google Pics, a new AI-powered design suite for Workspace users that competes with Canva and Adobe Express. Built on Gemini and the Nano Banana model, it offers precise image generation and editing, including object-level manipulation and upscaling, and integrates with Docs, Slides, and Drive.

Dyson unveils $499 CameraJet: AI toothbrush with 100K-pixel lens, 28fps scan, trained on 470K images

Dyson has introduced a $499 AI-powered toothbrush called the CameraJet, featuring a built-in camera that scans teeth at 28 images per second to deliver real-time feedback and target plaque-prone gaps with a precision jet. The company claims it is the first smart toothbrush with an integrated camera, differentiating it from app-based models by Oral-B and Philips. It is now available for preorder in blue and pink.

Google raises the price of its Google TV Streamer by $50 to $150 in the US, as well as for “selec…

Google has raised the price of its Google TV Streamer to $149.99, a $50 increase from its original launch price, citing rising component costs. The new price is already live on the Google Store and Best Buy, while other retailers may still have older pricing. Google also increased prices on select Nest cameras and doorbells in the U.S., effective August 31.

Texttile, a multiplayer blog engine for people who write together

Texttile is an open-source, Elixir-based blog engine built for collaborative writing, allowing multiple people to edit the same entry simultaneously, including dragging and sorting photos and videos in real time. It avoids external services, runs as a lightweight Docker container, and treats media as first-class citizens. The author created it after finding WordPress inadequate for shared travel blogging with his wife.

“iT woRKs BeTter in THe aPp!!”

The author criticizes Google for failing to let Android users subscribe to an events calendar via a link, forcing a clumsy desktop-site workaround. They argue this illustrates a broader pattern of half-finished apps that push users back to the web, effectively reinventing the browser. The piece concludes that if companies insist on apps, they should complete them properly.

Movie Scene Map – 13,312 films, series, games, anime and manga

Movie Scene Map is a free interactive atlas of 15,535 real filming locations across 166 countries, covering films, TV series, video games, anime, and manga. It is built from open Wikidata and Wikipedia data, with coordinates, photos, and articles, and is available for download as GeoJSON or CSV. The map is curated rather than complete, with coverage depending on Wikidata contributions.

Play Store blocks AuroraStore, hurting GrapheneOS users

The article provides setup guidelines for AI contributors to the AuroraStore project on GitLab, instructing them to read the project’s README for an overview and setup. It also requires using the GitLab CLI (glab) to create branches and open merge requests.

Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS

Firefox for iOS now includes an optional built-in Ad Blocker that uses Apple’s WebKit Content Blocker and EasyList to block many third-party ads and ad-related trackers before they load. It is off by default and can be enabled in Settings > Browsing > Ad Blocker, but it does not block ads served directly by visited sites or ads in search results. The feature aims to reduce distractions and give users more control over their browsing experience.

Google rejected AnkiDroid’s Play Store updates because its donations go to a 501(c)(6) tax-exempt organization, which Google does not consider valid under its payments policy. The free open-source flashcard app, with over 10 million installs, is removing donation links from its Play Store build under protest to avoid removal on September 11. Google has not explained why 501(c)(6) status is insufficient, and AnkiDroid is seeking public support.

Restroom Archive

The “Restroom Archive” webpage contains minimal content, primarily navigation elements like “Skip to main content” and a title header. No substantive news or article information is provided on the page.

Fastpotify

Fastpotify is a lightweight native Spotify client for Linux, macOS, and Windows that starts in under a second and uses only 100–250 MB of RAM. It offers gapless local playback up to 320 kbps, Spotify Connect controls, library browsing, playlist editing, search, and customization options like themes, keyboard shortcuts, and Winamp skin support with a mini player.

RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

RotaryCell is a project that turns an unmodified rotary telephone into a portable, battery-powered cellular phone using an ESP32-S3-based LilyGO board and a Silvertel AG1171 line interface, with all electronics mounted reversibly inside the case. The hand-wired prototype works without altering the original phone parts, while two integrated PCB designs have been ordered but not yet validated.

☁️ Cloud & Security

Anthropic launches Enterprise Frontier Safeguards for business data control after customer pushback

Anthropic is replacing its controversial 30-day data retention policy for business customers with Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, giving companies control over data review, storage, and management while enabling automated safety monitoring without human review. The change follows customer feedback, and the old policy still applies to non-enterprise subscribers. The new safeguards will roll out in phases, with broader availability expected this fall.

Air Security emerges from stealth with $50M led by Sequoia and Greenoaks for AI agent security

AIR Security, a six-month-old Israeli startup founded by Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, emerged from stealth with $50 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks. The company is building an “inline firewall” for AI agents to protect them from malicious content, compromised tools, and untrusted sources entering their context. The funding will support its research into AI agent supply chain vulnerabilities as enterprises increasingly rely on autonomous systems.

Microsoft testing fix for Exchange Online and Outlook outage lasting 17+ hours since Monday

Microsoft confirmed a widespread, multi-hour outage affecting Outlook and Exchange Online, causing email delays, authentication failures, and other issues starting around 11:30 AM ET Monday. The company identified a problem with an authentication component and said it was testing a remediation strategy on part of its infrastructure. The outage, which lasted over 17 hours, highlighted the business world’s reliance on email.

US lawmakers demand investigation into admin’s secret surveillance of Americans

Two Democratic lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the Trump administration’s use of Homeland Security Investigations administrative summonses to secretly obtain records on journalists, nonprofits, and unions without judicial oversight. The request focuses on non-disclosure language in the summonses and their use outside customs matters, which privacy experts say is not legally binding. The GAO confirmed it received the request and is examining it.

GCP us-central1 having major issues

A network service degradation in Google Cloud’s us-central1-b zone affected multiple products, including App Engine, BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes Engine, causing elevated packet loss and errors. The issue began on September 1, 2026, and was triggered by routine network maintenance that impacted two clusters. Most services recovered, and maintenance was halted pending proactive audits.

GrapheneOS may skip Pixel 11 over missing hardware security feature

GrapheneOS says it may stop supporting Google’s Pixel 11 because the devices appear to lack usable ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) support, a hardware security feature the project relies on to mitigate memory corruption exploits. The project recommends Pixel 8–10 instead and is considering skipping the Pixel 11 generation to focus on a planned Motorola flagship expected in 2027 that would meet its security requirements.

Self-Hosting on the Dark Web

The article details how the author made their static website available as a Tor hidden service with a .onion address, using Tor’s built-in encryption and anonymity. The setup involves configuring Tor to forward traffic to a local nginx server and building a separate site copy with the onion URL to avoid linking to the clearnet domain. A deployment pipeline automatically syncs both the clearnet and Tor versions.

Tailcat: Tailscale Without Tailscale, by Tailscale

Tailcat is an open-source Go package and CLI tool from Tailscale that runs the Tailscale data plane—WireGuard, NAT traversal, and DERP fallback—without the control plane, functioning like netcat for bidirectional byte transfer. It requires no IP addresses, accounts, admin access, or Tailscale company dependency, using a DERP rendezvous server and key-based addressing for connections. The article explains its operation as a standalone subset of Tailscale’s components.

Windows 11 misses the pointer while Defender cries wolf

The August 27 Windows 11 update is reportedly scrambling cursor customization settings for users. Additionally, Windows Defender is generating bogus antivirus alerts, adding to the update’s issues.

AWS: DuckDB will provide ‘connective tissue’ across the data estate

AWS claims that DuckDB, an in-process OLAP system from the Netherlands, will serve as “connective tissue” across the data estate after its acquisition of DuckLab. The cloud giant envisions DuckDB becoming an “SDK for data” as developers scale their systems.

Next bus to Altrincham delayed by Windows Defender

A bus to Altrincham was delayed, with the cause attributed to either Windows Defender or possibly AI, though the confusion stems from a firewall warning. The exact reason remains unclear behind the alert.

🌍 Society & Science

Study: ~33% of UK adults used illegal streaming in past 3 months, costing £1.4B annually

A study found that roughly one-third of UK adults used illegal streaming services in the past three months, costing the sports, TV, and film industries about £1.4 billion in annual revenue. In response, a coalition of broadcasters and sports bodies is urging the government to take action against pirated content.

A Crash Course in Predicate Logic

The article introduces predicate logic for programmers, defining predicates as Boolean-valued functions that can be either concrete (computable) or abstract (defined by meaning). It explains syntax and logical operators like &&, ||, !, and =>, using programming examples to bridge human language and code, adapted from the author’s book Logic for Programmers.

Zuzai, a new word, indicates the absence of AI

The article proposes coining the new word “zuzai”—a recursive acronym for “uses zero artificial intelligence”—to describe things made without AI. It argues that existing phrases like “AI-free” are clumsy and that “zuzai” could become widely used, though it acknowledges neologisms depend on organic adoption.

Andy Hertzfeld oral history

Andy Hertzfeld joined Apple in 1979 and became the second software engineer on the Macintosh team, porting QuickDraw and writing Toolbox code and desk accessories. He left Apple after the Mac launch due to conflict with manager Bob Belleville, then developed the Switcher multitasking utility and helped organize the 1984 Hacker’s Conference.

UEFA’s Champions League draw creates unfair clusters; a Cayley graph fixes it

UEFA’s new 36-team Champions League league-phase draw can randomly produce dense clusters of teams that play each other far too often, harming their collective chances of advancing. The article proposes a mathematically fair fix using the symmetric graph C(36; ±{1,4,10,17}) to eliminate this risk, requiring only a small tweak to UEFA’s country-pairing rules.

The war with Iran will not be won through airstrikes, so what’s left?

The article argues that 180 days of intense U.S. airstrikes have failed to collapse Iran’s military or resolve the conflict, leaving the Pentagon without effective tools. It proposes two alternative moves: Congress recognizing the independence of Iran’s minority groups (Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs, Baluchis, Azeris) to pressure Tehran without airstrikes, and economic enlistment for indebted Americans to address a troop shortfall for a possible ground invasion.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Captures Mars Vista as Clear as Day

NASA’s Perseverance rover captured one of its sharpest Mars panoramas yet at a location called Falbreen, stitching together 96 Mastcam-Z images taken on May 26, 2025. The enhanced-color mosaic reveals a float rock atop a sand ripple, a boundary between geologic units, hills up to 40 miles away, and a deceptively blue sky. Scientists are studying Falbreen because it may contain some of the oldest terrain Perseverance has explored.

Urban Congestion Pricing and the Response Times of Emergency Medical Services

New York City’s congestion pricing reduced total emergency medical service travel times by roughly 63–70 seconds, or 5–6%, with hospital transport times improving by 54–59 seconds. These gains were linked to lower vehicle and truck density near the toll zone and were concentrated near its boundary, with no evidence that delays shifted to nearby untolled areas.

Saab has unveiled its A3 collaborative combat aircraft concept

Saab unveiled its A3 collaborative combat aircraft concept, an autonomous, tailless, supersonic double-delta design meant to complement the Gripen E and serve as a steppingstone toward a future Swedish crewed fighter in the 2040s. The company is developing two uncrewed demonstrators, A1 and A2, with the A1 planned to fly within 15 months. Saab says the A3 is not its answer to Sweden’s fighter replacement decision but an offer to move the air force into the unmanned space.

When Russia Colonised California

From 1812 to 1842, the Russian Empire ruled part of California through Fort Ross, a colony in Sonoma intended to supply food for its Alaskan settlements. It marked the southern edge of Russian America and played a pivotal but little-known role in shaping the US, yet most Californians remain unaware of this history.

NASA: Fill in a name, and you can have an exclusive coordinate in the universe

NASA is offering the public a chance to claim an exclusive “pixel” in the universe by submitting a name, with one pixel per email address that can be retrieved and shared via a printed certificate on social media. The article also highlights the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a next-generation observatory designed to study dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics, with a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument.

Ex-Crips leader found guilty in 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur

Duane “Keffe D” Davis was found guilty of orchestrating the 1996 drive-by shooting murder of rapper Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas, becoming the first conviction in the long-cold case. Prosecutors argued that Davis, though not the gunman, ordered the attack and supplied the weapon used by his nephew. His sentencing is scheduled for October 13.

ESA’s Cluster quartet prepares for its final Tango

ESA’s Cluster mission, a quartet of spacecraft, is preparing for its final “Tango” after an extended 26-year run. Originally planned for just two years, the mission is bowing out thanks to heroic engineering efforts that kept it operational for over two decades.