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A new study using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy

Electric eels hunt in pitch-black, murky waters by generating electric fields around their bodies. Now, Chinese scientists have mimicked this natural radar, giving robots the ability to “feel” objects without making physical contact. “We want the machine to sense an approaching target – distinguish its material and surface condition – before any physical contact,” said Zhang Weiqiang, a professor at Xidian University, in a video interview last week. Their work was published last month in the...

A new study suggests that imagining movement with both an ordinary human thumb and an additional robotic thumb may do more than exercise the mind: it may strengthen the brain networks responsible for sensing and controlling movement. The research, led by Alsuradi, Hong, Korres and colleagues, examines how the brain responds when people simultaneously imagine […]

Zeyi Yang / Wired: A look at Unitree's G1 and R1, the humanoid robots behind viral influencer accounts worldwide, as Unitree shipped 5,500+ units in 2025 and readies its China IPO  —  The Unitree G1 has found online fame as a relatively affordable robot that can charm a crowd.  But can it ever hold down a real job?

Many fascinating phases in quantum materials emerge when electrons, atoms and other microscopic components begin to act collectively. But these phases do not necessarily appear out of nowhere when a material crosses a transition temperature. Before long-range order develops, microscopic fluctuations can already be present.

LG will unveil a bipedal humanoid robot in the first quarter of 2027, built on Nvidia’s Jetson Thor processor, Isaac GR00T foundation model and Halos safety system. The two signed the agreement at Nvidia’s Santa Clara headquarters on 13 August. LG will show a bipedal humanoid robot in the first quarter of next year. The […] This story continues at The Next Web

Vercel analysis reveals Anthropic is dominating both token volume and spend, despite being more expensive than competitors.

Hyperliquid traders value Unitree at nearly $38 billion versus $9 billion at its IPO, leaving leveraged bets vulnerable when trading begins, Allium analysts said.

In an interview with TechRadar, Honor explained why it developed a custom imaging chip to sit alongside the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in the Robot Phone.

A new paper published in Physical Review Letters reveals that a leading dark matter candidate—the hypothetical "dark photon"—would not have heated the early universe as previously thought. The finding opens a vast region for experimental searches and could change the hunt for dark matter.

No surprises on inflation and new financing developments in the artificial intelligence trade drove the record-breaking action on Wall Street last week.

No surprises on inflation and new financing developments in the artificial intelligence trade drove the record-breaking action on Wall Street last week.

A new flexible sensor platform could make health monitoring more reliable in the noisy, constantly moving environments where conventional wearable electronics often struggle. Researchers Hong, Seo, Jin and colleagues report a heterogeneous epoxy-engineered lead zirconate titanate, or PZT, nanocomposite sensor array designed to detect physiological signals while resisting interference from surrounding mechanical noise. The study, […]

Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, faced backlash after users exploited a loophole, prompting it to post offensive messages. The incident highlights vulnerabilities in AI systems.

Users have been requesting that the AI Coach wouldn't be quite so forward, and Google has listened.

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Scientists have uncovered why two seemingly opposite ways of targeting the same brain receptor can both promote weight loss. In mice, activating the GIP receptor in the brainstem reduced appetite, while blocking it in the hypothalamus removed a kind of “brake” on fullness signals. The discovery helps explain why very different obesity drugs can achieve similar results and suggests that carefully combining GIP-targeting treatments with GLP-1 drugs like those related to Wegovy and Ozempic could produce stronger effects.

Great physicians are curious about the patient in front of them, and that curiosity is what drives them to dig deeper, writes Dr. Natasha Chida.

When Twitch announced that streamers could opt out, thousands of users questioned why their content was being used to train AI models in the first place.

The week's biggest tech news stories from Google, Garmin, Spotify and more for August 15, 2026.

Google's Nano Banana image generator is pretty good but some people have been put off by the fact that its images have a visible watermark in the bottom right corner, unlike the images generated with ChatGPT's latest model. So now Google is finally letting you choose to remove the watermark. There's a new setting for this that you will see in Gemini and Flow, and it will also be available in Google Search's AI Mode soon. And the good news is that it's not just for images. You'll also be able to remove watermarks from videos created with Gemini Omni and songs created with Lyria. The...

Recently, the field of magnetics has been proposed a new class of magnetism called altermagnetism, which could allow

Author(s): Dmytro Abraimov et al.Can high-temperature superconductors take accelerator dipoles past the limits of Nb-Ti and Nb₃Sn? The U.S. Magnet Development Program and industry partners tested C3, a canted-cosine-theta dipole wound with commercial REBCO CORC® wires, reaching 5.99 T in a 65 mm clear aperture at 4.2 K, with no measurable degradation after a thermal cycle. Field quality and energy loss were limited by strong conductor magnetization, yet the results reveal no fundamental showstopper on the path to 8–10 T. Alongside the magnet performance, the authors report fabrication incidents and open questions candidly and invite accelerator physicists to join as early adopters of this emerging technology. [Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams 29, 083902] Published Fri Aug 14, 2026

Author(s): Tim J. Wilson and Hong-Wen JiangQuantum dot–based spin qubits require ultrafast, high-fidelity charge readout for quantum error correction and real-time feedback. Improving readout sensitivity has often required complex high-impedance resonators or specialized circuits. This work shows that optimizing a gate lever arm directly coupled to an superconducting microwave resonator dramatically enhances readout sensitivity, achieving integration times at the tens of nanoseconds scale without the use of high-impedance devices, and revealing how readout noise evolves across distinct physical regimes. These results show a practical route toward faster, more scalable architectures for fault-tolerant quantum computing. [Phys. Rev. Applied 26, 024040] Published Fri Aug 14, 2026

Author(s): Nicolas Baù, Mitra Dowlatabadi, Tommaso Chiarotti, Massimo Capone, and Antimo MarrazzoA Green’s-function framework based on real-space dynamical embedding is presented for first-principles simulations of superconducting proximity effects at interfaces. The method treats normal and anomalous renormalizations on equal footing and addresses the mesoscopic length scales and small energy scales characteristic of the effect without explicitly modeling thick slabs. [Phys. Rev. Research 8, 033184] Published Fri Aug 14, 2026

In the somewhat stale smartphone market, Honor decided to shake things up a bit and finally launched the much-anticipated Honor Robot Phone. As the name implies, it's no ordinary phone, and it doesn't belong to the already existing Honor smartphone lineups. Instead, the Robot Phone bags several "industry first" technologies and it's built on over 100 patents. And if the photos are not obvious enough, the centerpiece feature is the robot arm-like gimbal that extends and can do all sorts of stuff. Honor says it's the world's most compact gimbal, weighing only 2.6g and being 6mm thin....

A team of scientists led by the University of Washington has studied how star formation is declining in the Andromeda galaxy using highly detailed Hubble surveys.

Microsoft has sharply reduced its China footprint, but Azure and AI demand from Chinese companies operating abroad are giving it a reason to stay. The post Microsoft Nearly Left China. AI Gave It a Reason to Stay appeared first on TechRepublic.

In the Leiden Declaration, mathematicians issued a treatise on how AI challenges their field. Others must do the same. The post Biology Needs an AI Declaration appeared first on SingularityHub.

Google enabled A.I. features for K-12 schools that have allowed student access to Gemini. Until this week, Google automatically enabled Gemini in Classroom only for students 18 or older.

Buyers now get their first impression of your company from ChatGPT, not Google. Here's why PR is the lever that shapes it.

Just because engineers are building humanoid robots to look like us, that doesn't mean they're intelligent or even capable

LG's humanoid robot finally has a real target date: early 2027, built on NVIDIA's Jetson Thor chip and Isaac GR00T model.

When one mentions "waves," we immediately think of a perturbation that propagates. This applies to waves on the shore, sound waves in the air or electromagnetic waves that we use to transmit information via optical fibers. The same idea of propagating perturbations applies to gravitational waves (GWs), which entered the mainstream media a decade ago after their first direct detection. These are perturbations of the elastic fabric that we are all embedded in, called spacetime.

The Unitree G1 has found online fame as a relatively affordable robot that can charm a crowd. But can it ever hold down a real job?

ChatGPT is rolling out a deeper integration with Google Drive, allowing users to add Google Drive files to their ChatGPT Library and edit documents without leaving the chat. Here are the details.

The invisible SynthID will remain.

Google enabled A.I. features for K-12 schools that have allowed student access to Gemini. Until this week, Google automatically enabled Gemini in Classroom only for students 18 or older.

Chairman and CEO of LG Corp. Kwang Mo Koo visited the Nvidia headquarters at Santa Clara, California, to sign a memorandum of understanding with CEO Jensen Huang. This memorandum focuses on expanding the AI capabilities of both companies. LG and Nvidia CEOs posing with a miniature humanoid robot The headline-grabbing announcement is that LG plans to unveil a humanoid robot in the first quarter of 2027. This bipedal robot will use Nvidia’s Jetson Thor for on-board compute and the Isaac GR00T open reasoning humanoid foundation model. The Nvidia Jetson Thor offers 2,070 TFLOPs of...

AI-based "tissue clocks" can estimate the biological age of human organs from histological images, researchers at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine (LBI-NetMed) at the University of Vienna showed.

See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from August 10–14. The post AI Scale, Security Crises, and Robot Ambitions Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.

Apple reportedly trained a China-specific AI model with Alibaba, changing how Apple Intelligence may work for users and businesses in mainland China. The post Apple Intelligence in China: Alibaba Backs a Custom AI Model appeared first on TechRepublic.

Astronomers working with the JWST have found a galaxy only 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang that contains three black holes. Two are close to the galaxy's center and will merge soon. The third is more distant, and is expected to merge much later. The discovery shows that black hole mergers were an important contributor to the masses of the SMBH we find in galaxies today.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

Emma Roth / The Verge: Google adds a toggle in Gemini and Flow to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, and music; SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata remain  —  Google will still embed invisible SynthID and C2PA watermarks into AI-generated images, videos, and music.

Google will now allow you to remove visible watermarks from the images, videos, and music made with AI tools. With the update, you can toggle off a new "Media watermark" setting in Gemini and Google's AI video generator, Flow. When toggled off, Google will remove the "sparkle" watermark that appears in the bottom-right corner of content generated with the company's Nano Banana and Omni models. Though visible watermarks are now optional, AI-generated content will have invisible SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata embedded in the background, according to Josh Woodward, the vice president of Google Labs, Gemini, and AI Studio. That means you … Read the full story at The Verge.

In the US, says Isaac Mazor, “manual citrus harvesting costs around $42–43 per 900-lb field bin, versus $25-30 using our technology.” The post Inside Nanovel’s bid to crack robotic citrus harvesting appeared first on AgFunderNews.

Gemini now lets you toggle off visible watermarks on Nano Banana images, Omni videos, and Lyria music, though the feature remains restricted in certain countries.

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Apple is reportedly taking a new route to bring artificial intelligence features to customers in China: training a large language model of its own with help from Alibaba.

AI has helped scientists measure the brain’s hidden cleaning system, revealing that fluid moves rapidly around its outer spaces but about 50 times more slowly through deep tissue. The discovery could eventually help researchers detect circulation problems linked to Alzheimer’s, aging, and concussions.

A single human brain cell may be far more powerful than scientists once realized. Researchers found that cortical neurons can perform remarkably complex computations, giving them capabilities more like tiny biological computers than simple on-off switches. This could help explain why the human brain supports abilities such as language, imagination, and mathematics.

A protein inside appetite-controlling brain cells may play an important role in preventing overeating and obesity, particularly when high-fat foods are readily available. Unexpected differences between males and females could also help explain why obesity risk—and responses to weight-loss drugs—can vary.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a bizarre object from just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang that looks like an enormous star but shines far too brightly to actually be one. The mysterious red object, dubbed a “black hole star,” may contain a black hole about 100,000 times the mass of the Sun wrapped inside a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen roughly the size of our solar system.

Astronomers have released more than three million new spectra in a sweeping expansion that, for the first time, brings SDSS-V optical observations to the Southern Hemisphere. The data reveal everything from rare stars and glowing nebulae to hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources and supermassive black holes changing over time.

Scientists have discovered that the aging human brain may be far less isolated from the rest of the body than once believed. Stanford researchers found that large numbers of immune cells from the blood begin entering the brain as early as middle age, where they can transform into microglia, the brain’s specialized immune cells. The finding overturns a long-standing assumption that these cells remain largely separate from the body’s immune system throughout life.

A tiny superconducting engine has successfully converted heat near absolute zero into useful work, demonstrating the first cyclic quantum heat engine of its kind. Future versions could operate autonomously inside quantum computers, potentially eliminating huge numbers of costly, noise-producing microwave cables.

Chinese AI company Manus has laid out its plans to operate as an independent company following the reversal of its acquisition by Meta. The US social media company agreed to buy Manus last year but Chinese regulators quickly opened an investigation into the deal, as they were concerned that it violated Chinese export controls. In April, China’s National Development and Reform Commission blocked the purchase. Manus will now revert to being an independent company and to meet with regulatory requirements must delete some user data collected while it was part of Meta, it said Tuesday. The failure of the deal illustrates the problems that US and Chinese companies are having as they attempt to build a hold on the AI market. While regulatory authorities

The Shelford Group has announced a major expansion of its pioneering Surgical Training in Advanced Robotic Technology (START) programme, extending accredited, platform-agnostic robotic surgery training to surgical trainees across the South East of England. Already available in the North East, North West and East of England, START will now be offered in Thames Valley, Wessex and Kent, Surrey and Sussex from the 2026/27 academic year.

The cull lands on Tuesday. Group Chat, Podcasts, Copilot Labs and consumer Deep Research all retire that day, according to Microsoft’s own support page. Mico goes at the same time, out of the voice experience and into Learn Live as a tutor. The whole thing sits inside a bigger change. Microsoft has started merging its […] This story continues at The Next Web

Latin squares are arrangements of symbols in a grid in which every symbol appears exactly once in each row and column. These symbol arrangements, which were first studied more than three centuries ago, are now widely used to optimize experimental designs and develop secure cryptographic systems, puzzles or other complex combinatorial structures.

PI (Physik Instrumente), a global leader in precision motion control and nanopositioning systems, is expanding its portfolio of direct-drive vertical translation stages with the V-571.Z family.

As quantum and photonics technologies continue to evolve, the need for precise optical alignment under cryogenic conditions is becoming increasingly critical.

Apple recently posted and removed details explaining how Mac users in China could set up their computers to work with Alibaba’s Qwen AI. Now, Reuters has confirmed long-held speculation that Apple has revisited its Google Gemini AI playbook and built its own proprietary AI model for China with support from Alibaba.   Apple worked with a Chinese partner because US models such as ChatGPT or Claude are not being made available there, though Chinese AI development doesn’t seem to be held back by that lack. Apple and Alibaba have not commented on the claims, the report said. The approach echoes Apple’s work with Google to build more advanced large language models (LLMs) for use with Apple Intelligence, and the news will likely be seen as broadly positive by Chinese iPhone users. They can now look forward to working with

Introduction Google has just unveiled Gemini 3.7 Flash, marking a significant milestone in the evolution of large language models designed specifically for developers and enterprise users. Released on August 13, 2026, this latest iteration of Google's Gemini family represents a substantial leap forward in intelligence, speed, and cost-effectiveness. With 867 points and 441 comments on Hacker News, the community's enthusiasm is palpable, though discussions reveal both excitement and concerns abou...

Ukraine intelligence claims that Russia's latest S-71 'Monochrome' cruise missiles use Nvidia's Jetson Orin NX modules with AI capabilities, allegedly for terminal guidance.

Apple has reportedly trained a custom AI model for the China market alongside domestic tech giant Alibaba, a rare cross-border partnership that cuts across growing tensions between Beijing and Washington. The China-focused large language model was developed in partnership with Alibaba and trained with the company's support, Reuters reports, citing three unnamed people familiar with the matter. Developing a custom model of its own marks a departure from Apple's previous strategy in the country and would give the company more control over its products in the competitive Chinese smartphone market. Historically, Apple has used domestic Chines … Read the full story at The Verge.

By Umar Farooq That was one of the questions at the heart of my last week (20th-24th July) at the Imperial Robotics Summer School, hosted at Imperial College, London; a week that sharpened my thinking and pushed me to look at robotics problems from angles I don’t usually get to in my day-to-day work. The […]

China should try to make sure that its new international artificial intelligence body is not seen as “naturally opposed” to the United States and its allies in case it puts off prospective members, analysts have warned. They said the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (Waico) was not designed as an alternative to the US Pax Silica partnership, which was established last December with the aim of reducing “coercive dependencies”. Waico was established at the World Artificial...

The Shelford Group has announced a major expansion of its pioneering Surgical Training in Advanced Robotic Technology (START) program, extending accredited, platform-agnostic robotic surgery training to surgical trainees across the South East of England.

Goldman Sachs has secured the role every Wall Street firm wanted, and it is now working the phones. The bank is in talks with investors about Nvidia’s $500bn AI-compute financing deal, having landed a prized mandate that effectively casts it as the lead, and for now near-sole, lender behind one of the largest infrastructure-funding efforts […] This story continues at The Next Web

Warehouse automation is sometimes thought of as a simple technology decision. A business could spot a bottleneck, add

Apple has trained its own large language model for the Chinese market with Alibaba’s support, a striking break from the company’s usual habit of leaning on other people’s models. According to a Reuters report, Apple is the first foreign firm Beijing has approved to offer a proprietary AI model in mainland China, a rare concession […] This story continues at The Next Web

Researchers engineered a fuel-driven DNA origami nanosyringe that moves in approximately 14 nm steps to reversibly penetrate model lipid membranes and transport molecular cargo. The device also triggered localized DNA assembly, RNA transcription, and catalytic RNA cleavage inside synthetic cell-like vesicles.

Short-lived radioactive isotopes, or radioisotopes, can image tumors or inflict high levels of cellular damage to them. As a result, these radioisotopes can be effectively used in cancer treatments.

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arXiv:2608.13092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RGB-Event Video Person Re-Identification (RE-VReID) aims to retrieve specific person across non-overlapping cameras with complementary RGB videos and event streams. However, existing methods often decouple spatial and temporal modeling, which limits their interaction. In addition, global-level RGB-Event fusion fails to fully exploit fine-grained discriminative cues. To address these issues, we propose Paths, a unified framework with spatio-temporal modeling and hierarchical multi-modal fusion for RE-VReID. Specifically, we first design a Memory-Augmented Backbone (MAB) to maintain modality-specific identity prototypes for stable intra-modal representation learning. Then, we propose a Prompt-aware Spatio-temporal Transformer (PST) to jointly model spatial and temporal cues within a unified Transformer. Finally, we introduce a Hierarchical Multi-modal Fusion (HMF) to integrate RGB and event features at global and local levels. With these

Reuters: Sources: Apple trained a China-specific LLM with Alibaba's support, which would make Apple the first foreign company to offer a proprietary AI model in China  —  Apple (AAPL.O) has trained a large language model specifically for the China market, three people familiar with the matter said …

Unitree’s IPO will gauge investors’ appetite for a technology that has yet to prove its commercial viability amid intensifying geopolitical tensions.

Unitree’s IPO will gauge investors’ appetite for a technology that has yet to prove its commercial viability amid intensifying geopolitical tensions.

Just three weeks after launching Gemini 3.6 Flash, today Google is releasing Gemini 3.7 Flash. The company says this is its "most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents". Gemini 3.7 Flash is "the direct result of developer feedback and algorithmic innovations" that will also be used in future models, according to Google. Compared to Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.7 Flash has improvements in software engineering, knowledge work, and web development workflows. Google says Gemini 3.7 Flash will be better than its predecessor at coding tasks like debugging and issue...

A $500 billion mechanism has been proposed using Nvidia chips as collateral to enable firms involved in the AI race to buy them.

LG and Nvidia have formed a strategic alliance to take the lead in the Physical AI era. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for strategic business cooperation on August 13 (local time) at the Nvidia headquarters in Santa Clara, California, the United States, with top executi

LG Group will unveil a humanoid robot based on Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T robot foundation model in the first quarter of next year, and extend its partnership with the U.S. tech giant in artificial intelligence (AI) data center and mobility businesses. LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signed “a strategic business collaboration" memorandum of understanding (MOU) detailing the partnership during their meeting at Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, Thursday (local time). LG Group Vice Chairman Kwon Bong-seok, LG Electronics CEO Lyu Jae-cheol, LG Uplus CEO Hong Bum-shik, LG CNS CEO Hyun Shin-gyoon and other LG Group executives also attended the event. The MOU came just two months after top executives from both companies agreed to cooperate in the AI industry. The MOU specifies areas for cooperation and details their plans in each field. “As our collaboration gains momentum, the tasks where the two companies can work together have become clearer in the

Author(s): Rachel BerkowitzBack-to-back jets produced during heavy-ion collisions reveal a plasma property predicted by quantum chromodynamics. [Physics 19, s100] Published Thu Aug 13, 2026

Author(s): Chao Yin and Andrew LucasUsing the two-dimensional random-bond Ising model as a concrete example, certain gapless ground states under quantum perturbations are shown to have a universal structure exhibiting spontaneous symmetry breaking, generalizing the classical Peierls argument for stability against thermal fluctuations. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 070405] Published Thu Aug 13, 2026

Google’s new Gemini 3.7 Flash model brings sizable gains in workflow automation and document handling, two areas that could make Spark much more useful.

Scientists in China have proposed a new framework that could reshape how catalytic materials are designed for the planet’s most urgent challenges. Called eco-nanozymology, the concept brings together nanotechnology, enzymology, environmental science, and ecology to create catalytic systems capable of influencing not only individual chemical reactions but also broader cycles of energy and matter. The […]

Google says Gemini has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users, making it the company’s 14th product to hit the milestone as AI adoption accelerates. The post Gemini Becomes Google’s 14th Product to Reach 1B Monthly Users appeared first on TechRepublic.

Apple is reportedly weighing multiyear publisher deals with variable payments to supply current news and information for Siri AI. The post Apple in Talks to Pay Publishers for Siri AI Content appeared first on TechRepublic.

Honor’s Robot Phone pairs a 200MP moving gimbal camera with flagship Android hardware, but its price and mechanical design bring trade-offs. The post Honor Launches Robot Phone in China With a 200MP Moving Camera appeared first on TechRepublic.

Scientists have discovered a rare star formation hidden in a distant galaxy, unlike anything seen before beyond the Milky Way. What’s more, the discovery offers a brand new way to measure the distribution of dark matter in distant galaxies.

Researchers found GPT-4 generates convincing personality questions from an oven manual, though only clinical questionnaires kept a coherent statistical structure.

A research team led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has developed a new material that combines inorganic material with biological components to produce hydrogen peroxide more efficiently.

The amorphous corporate mascot will no longer haunt Copilot Voice.