August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
US growth holds at 1.5 per cent as durable-goods orders rise
The second estimate left annualized US growth at 1.5 per cent in the second quarter. Higher imports offset an upward revision to consumer spending, while July durable-goods orders rose 1.1 per cent. A rebound in transportation equipment supported the move; the smaller 0.4 per cent gain excluding transportation limits how broadly the manufacturing-demand improvement can be read.
US real consumption stalled as July incomes outpaced spending
US income rose faster than spending in July, but consumption was flat after inflation. Consumers viewed current conditions more positively in August while their short-term outlook weakened. The decline in new-home sales was not statistically significant, yet unsold inventory reached 9.6 months of supply, adding another sign of caution in household demand.
Visual Studio brings organization-wide Copilot agents into each eligible repository
Visual Studio now exposes organization-shared Copilot agents inside eligible repositories and lets teams choose reasoning effort by task. Amazon OpenSearch MCP Apps returns interactive charts beside an assistant's text. SMITH trains one policy to create tool schemas and use the resulting tools together. The three systems expand where agent tools are built and used.
Zoom's enterprise growth leaves its online business behind
Zoom's second-quarter revenue rose 4.9 per cent, while enterprise sales grew faster than its online business. nCino reported 10 per cent subscription growth and a GAAP operating margin of 8 per cent, up 1,500 basis points year on year. Enterprise software demand supplied the stronger growth line at both companies while their profitability measures moved in different directions.
A 1 megawatt box in Lenox, and a lead time measured in years
Solid-state transformers are being read as a way around the transformer queue. The one piece of measured hardware here is a single 1 megawatt unit that has spent a summer on a live feeder and goes home in September.
A detector that misfires and a number you cannot see
Pew's headline figure says roughly one page in ten shows signs of machine writing, while Microsoft's Paint quietly writes a unique number into every AI image you make. One measurement is rough by its own account, the other is exact, and an ordinary reader can act on neither.
A hundred million years of supernova dust, one metre down
Earth's seabed forgets after about 10 million years. The Moon, churned but never washed, holds the same dust for 80 million to 100 million — and a new model says how deep Artemis has to reach to read it.
Doha will not buy its own passage through Hormuz
Qatar says the closed strait cannot be settled bilaterally with Iran, and turns down the separate arrangement that would move its own gas first. What does Doha's refusal buy, and what does it cost?
Half the coastal estimate is the geoid, and its settings arrived five months later
The March paper reported coastal sea level sitting higher than most hazard assessments assume. That finding is a subtraction, and how the subtracted surface was built became public only with the addendum of 25 August.
Heat and acidity land in the same month, four times too often
A 43-year reconstruction of the surface ocean turns a coincidence into a number: across low and mid latitudes, marine heatwaves and extreme acidification overlap about 4 times more often than independent chance allows. Most events are small and brief, which is exactly why the monitoring that would make them manageable is still missing.