September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Leaded ink makes a burned lab papyrus readable on tomography
A PLOS One paper reports a modern Egyptian papyrus written with soluble lead-salt ink, carbonized, then virtually unrolled by laboratory X-ray tomography. Berkeley News says lead absorbs up to 25 times the X-rays of charred papyrus and that ink at 25 micrograms per square centimetre was visible.
LRO found McGetchin crater, 728 feet across, a once-in-a-century lunar hit
NASA Science said Robert Wagner identified a 728-foot, 141-foot-deep crater named McGetchin, formed between 11 April and 22 May 2024. CBS News said the hole is bigger than the Roman Colosseum and that two Science Advances papers report it.
Meeks holds a 2.8 billion dollar Israel bomb sale
Gregory Meeks said he will not clear a 2.8 billion dollar sale of 40,000 2000-pound bombs to Israel. The Guardian lists 20,000 MK-84, 20,000 BLU-117 and 20,000 I-2000 warheads and notes that a hold is not a veto; a kill needs a joint resolution.
Meta is preparing camera-free Luna glasses after a privacy backlash
TechCrunch and The Verge, both citing The Information, say Meta is building camera-free Luna glasses with six microphones and a side button for Meta AI and Muse, possibly shown at Connect, with an October shipping aim.
Nvidia aims to double next year chip volume
CNBC quotes Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, before a Scotland gathering with King Charles III, expecting next year's chip volume to be double this year's. He pointed to AI across industries and to public infrastructure spending. CNBC recalled a recent 70 percent growth pointer for the year to January 2028, about 673 billion dollars. The company still withholds a public unit total.
OpenAI will publish unexpected model behavior under a new reporting framework
OpenAI posted a public misalignment-reporting framework and six incident reports. WIRED says the company used to disclose such events too rarely, and quotes alignment chief Kai Chen saying monitoring is not good enough for maximum-speed scaling.
Paris weighs a force to follow UNIFIL if the UN leaves in January
Al Jazeera says Emmanuel Macron received Lebanese president Joseph Aoun at the Élysée, with Jordan's King Abdullah in the talks, to discuss a non-UN or EU-led successor if UNIFIL's roughly 7,500-strong mission ends in January. Al-Monitor, in a Reuters-dated report, says European and Arab military chiefs were due in Paris the same day on army needs and the drawdown. Aoun told AFP that extending UNIFIL remains the best option.
Snap opened Specs Intelligence on iOS; Mac stays invite-only
The Verge says Snap's Specs Intelligence anticipatory assistant is in iOS preview on 16 September 2026, with the full early-access experience waitlisted for Mac beside Specs glasses. Tom's Guide adds that anyone 18 or older in the US can try the iOS preview without an invite, connecting Gmail and Calendar, while that preview omits anticipatory suggestions and actions.
TensorRT Edge-LLM finishes Thor's agent benchmark 6.4 times faster
NVIDIA says TensorRT Edge-LLM ran Qwen3.6-27B on one Jetson AGX Thor for the MLPerf Inference v6.1 Edge Agentic workload. AI Daily Post repeats 24 minutes 36 seconds versus 2 hours 37 minutes for llama.cpp, 6.4 times, at 52.33 tokens per second across 1,007 turns. Those timings sit in both accounts.
Terminal bladder tumours mostly seed later tumours
A Nature autopsy series reconstructed 104 tumours from 20 patients and found metastasis-to-metastasis seeding as the dominant spread pattern. News Medical, sourced to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, quotes Gavin Ha that metastasis is the major driver of death from bladder cancer in this programme.