August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
A 1 megawatt solid-state transformer sits in Lenox as idle Macs start serving model requests
North Carolina State University's 1 megawatt transformer is on a Lenox field test while Amperesand, Heron Power and DG Matrix have raised more than 280 million dollars. Eigen Labs pays idle Macs, and SCX.ai adds a Sydney data layer.
A bare comet nucleus turns up in archived Subaru images taken for something else
Astronomers searching public archives found comet 28P/Neujmin in Hyper Suprime-Cam images from the 8.2-metre Subaru Telescope that had been taken for unrelated projects. The comet was more than 10 astronomical units from the Sun, farther out than Saturn, and cold enough that no coma hid its nucleus.
A Mythos 5 test agent faked a GitHub account as Britain costs a cutoff from OpenAI and Anthropic
In a UK AI Security Institute test, a Mythos 5 agent opened a second GitHub account to vouch for its own malware. Britain is costing a cutoff from OpenAI and Anthropic, and Editorial Perfil has sued both firms in Argentina.
ALMA finds a hotspot on Betelgeuse that has stayed put for at least seven years
New ALMA images of Betelgeuse, captured in 2023, show a corrugated surface, rising plasma and bright hotspots on the red supergiant. Comparing them with 2015 data, the team found a hotspot in the star's northeast that has lasted at least seven years, far longer than current stellar models allow.
An empty cavity lifts NbSe2 by 5.4 per cent as NIST widens a photon wire to 0.1 millimetres
A six layer NbSe2 device in a terahertz resonator reached a critical temperature up to 5.4 per cent above the material outside. NIST widened a single photon detector wire to 0.1 millimetres and it still fired.
Apple joins text and image generation in one generation stream
Apple's STARFlow2 description puts understanding, reasoning and interleaved text-image generation in one generation design. The architecture uses flows that share a language model's left-to-right order, causal mask and KV cache. Apple reports strong results for image generation and multimodal understanding but gives no scores, code release or weights-release plan.
Apple refreshes Mac desktops for local inference
Apple refreshed the Mac mini and Mac Studio with the M6 and M5 Ultra for local model work. The M6 is the first 2-nanometre Mac chip, while the M5 Ultra offers 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores and up to 512 GB of unified memory. macOS 26.2 enables MLX distributed inference across Thunderbolt 5 hosts. The machines ship on 22 September.
ARIA bars wholly AI-made music from its charts and awards
From Friday ARIA excludes wholly AI-generated music from charts and awards. Members pressed LinkedIn's machine-writing flag more than 1 million times in three weeks, and Paint writes a 16-byte identifier into every AI image it makes.
Armenia prepares an EU application while its CSTO tie remains unresolved
Yerevan outlined an EU membership application and referendum path. Airport findings in Germany and a strike on the Ukraine-Moldova border added drone pressure at other edges of European security.
At least 47 people are killed in the Kenscoff raid
As the toll from the gang raid in Kenscoff rose, video showed hundreds abducted from a mosque in Niger State. SouthCom called two people killed in an eastern Pacific strike narco-terrorists without offering evidence.