August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Mummies sold online carry arsenic, mercury and dormant fungi
Di Minin's University of Helsinki team monitored four mainstream platforms for six weeks in mid-2025 and found threatened species offered illegally. Ars Technica warns that mummified remains sold online carry arsenic, mercury, lead and dormant fungi.
NASA prepares to launch the Roman Space Telescope on 30 August
China's Manned Space Agency scrubbed Sunday's Long March 5 and said Chang'e 7 now waits until at least 2027 after weather tied to Typhoon Narra. NASA set the Roman Space Telescope for 30 August on a Falcon Heavy from Kennedy.
Nvidia declares CUDA Python 1.0 stable
Nvidia released its official Python libraries and tools for reaching CUDA as CUDA Python 1.0. It reserves breaking changes for major releases, features for minor releases and fixes for patches. cuda.core provides the runtime, cuda.compute covers parallel algorithms and cuda.bindings tracks the toolkit. Documented support extends through CUDA 13.3, with installation available through pip.
Nvidia posts a seventh straight loss as SoftBank prepares a 1 trillion yen OpenAI bond
The Nasdaq fell 0.76 per cent and Nvidia lost 2.9 per cent on a seventh down day. SoftBank plans a 1 trillion yen OpenAI bond at 4.3 per cent to 4.9 per cent.
Ocean heat and acid share a month as dry air cuts extra typhoon rain
Marine heatwaves and extreme acidification overlapped about 4 times more often than chance in low and mid latitudes from 1982 to 2024. Drier air limits extra typhoon rain. Woodland in Guildford stayed 4.5 degrees Celsius cooler.
OpenAI shuts ChatGPT accounts used in a Russia-origin influence operation
OpenAI says it shut Russia-origin accounts producing material for a purported Israel-based institute, while TeamT5 reports wider AI use by Chinese state-backed hacking groups.
OpenAI's Jalapeño chip enters its first outside benchmark
SemiAnalysis tested the OpenAI-Broadcom Jalapeño inference processor in InferenceX. It reported more tokens per user and higher throughput per kilowatt than Nvidia Blackwell systems in the same test. OpenAI says the chip targets the prefill stage. Very small shipments are due at the end of 2026, with wider deployment planned for 2027.
OWASP study finds expert rankings diverge from incident data
OWASP researchers compared security risks in large-language-model applications with 7,714 incidents. Prompt injection ranked first with experts but twelfth in incidents, while misinformation ranked thirteenth for experts and second in incidents. Agreement was measured at 0.20. The study labelled 6,639 incidents across 20 categories, and changing classifier precision adds uncertainty to the resulting distribution.
Perplexity brings its agent onto local Nvidia hardware
Perplexity's Portable Computer package runs locally on an Nvidia DGX Spark or a Linux computer with an RTX card carrying at least 24 GB of video memory. The company says local work consumes no billing credits. The package includes Qwen 3.8 27B and PPLX 27B; Linux access is limited to specified subscribers. A hybrid mode hands difficult steps to Claude Opus 5.
Rakuten's online market keeps losing merchants over its drone deal with Helsing
The Tokyo cafe bar Berg left the Rakuten Ichiba platform on Thursday, followed by the Osaka leather goods maker QuatroGats and the mail-order firm Cataloghouse. All three objected to Rakuten's tie-up with the German defence artificial intelligence company Helsing. Berg cited its anti-war stance, while QuatroGats, which sells peace and nuclear-abolition designs, said the partnership did not match its corporate philosophy.