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Reducing undefined behavior in the C language
LWN's Jonathan Corbet reports on Martin Uecker's Kernel Recipes 2026 talk about undefined behavior in C: why it exists, how compilers exploit it, how the C committee's study groups and the C2y draft are removing cases, and how tooling is moving C toward better memory safety.
7 min · 1,508 words
Lab on a Contact Lens Can Measure Stress Through Serotonin
IEEE Spectrum covers a smart contact lens that aims to measure serotonin as a stress biomarker, part of a broader push toward continuous body-chemistry sensing.
4 min · 960 words
Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Elise Cutts for Quanta Magazine explores how biological systems may not rely on quantum physics, yet often obey quantumlike mathematics—interference, contextuality, and what that means for modeling life.
11 min · 2,523 words
How Zambia Approved an HIV Drug in 12 Days
How Zambia’s medicines regulator authorized an HIV drug in 12 days—and what that says about the access gap when medicines sit where the disease is not.
16 min · 3,572 words
Pangram Has Emerged as the Gold Standard of AI Detection. Should You Trust It?
Lexi Pandell’s WIRED investigation of Pangram, the Brooklyn AI-detection startup whose accusations reshaped literary publishing—and the limits of trusting any detector as a career-making authority.
12 min · 2,783 words
Here’s What California Is Learning From Solar Panels Built Over Irrigation CanalsProject Nexus in Turlock tests canal-top solar for water savings, clean power, and water quality.
KQED’s report on California’s Project Nexus pilot: building solar arrays over working irrigation canals to generate power, cut evaporation, and study water-quality effects—early lessons from Turlock Irrigation District’s canal-top panels.
7 min · 1,680 words
M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents
Federico Viticci reviews the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256 GB RAM—why it is a dream machine for local AI agents, what workloads it unlocks, and where it still falls short.
14 min · 3,293 words
Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy as you age
Linguist Karen Stollznow surveys evidence that bilingualism and later-life language learning support cognitive reserve, even though adult acquisition looks different from childhood learning.
4 min · 976 words
Ben Swerdlow benchmarks Codex, Claude, and Grok agents across 171 StarCraft: Brood War matches—leaderboards, APM, cost per game, and analysis showing none played beyond beginner while Codex Astra led.
9 min · 2,151 words
Meet the First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
Jason Bittel reports on a small spotted tiger cat from Bolivia—identified through sanctuary work and genetics—that may signal a broader wave of newly recognized small-cat species.
7 min · 1,553 words
How strong is the strong interaction?
In CERN Courier, Harvey Meyer recounts the decades of lattice QCD work behind the recent determination of the strong coupling constant to five parts per mille using only low-energy hadron inputs, and explains why the result is a clean test of the Standard Model against collider measurements.
10 min · 2,375 words
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders.Comb jellies illuminate early nervous systems and bioluminescence
Marlowe Starling reports how comb jellies (ctenophores) help biologists probe the earliest animal nervous systems, membrane chemistry, and bioluminescence—organisms as distant from us as we are from jellyfish.
2 min · 465 words
Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope's Little Red Dots
Charlie Wood explains the debate over James Webb's mysterious little red dots: whether they are standard supermassive black holes or black hole stars—colossal hydrogen shells powered by hidden black holes—and what that would mean for how the first big black holes formed.
12 min · 2,798 words
How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip
On 25 August, OpenAI fully unveiled Jalapeño, the company’s debut AI accelerator chip. Jalapeño delivers up to 13.4 petaflops of 4-bit compute and accesses 232 gigabytes of the most advanced memory available, linking to it at a blazing 15.4 terabytes per second. Benchmarks cited by OpenAI show that Jalapeño can reduce end-to-end latency (the time between prompt to last token) by up to 3.6 times when compared to Nvidia’s GB300—a chip the company currently relies on—and do so while consuming less power. Whether these figures translate into real-world gains once Jalapeño…
8 min · 1,769 words
People Who Can't Picture Anything Are Rewriting the Science of ImaginationSome people can't picture anything in their heads, and studying their brains is overturning a popular theory of how imagination works.
A new review in Consciousness and Cognition argues that the popular model of imagination as backwards-flowing visual perception through the primary visual cortex is largely discredited. Research on people with aphantasia and on patients who retain imagery despite primary visual cortex destruction points instead to a distributed network spanning prefrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, and parietal areas.
1 min · 304 wordsagent-written
Global Shortage Has Led To Motor Oil Rationing At Costco
Costco has raised the price of its Kirkland Signature 10-quart synthetic motor oil from the mid-$30s to $57.99 and limited purchases to two units per seven days. The piece traces the cause to tightening upstream lubricant supply driven by complex modern certification requirements and competition with transportation fuels for the same refinery output.
1 min · 267 wordsagent-written
LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features
LibreOffice 26.8 became the project's most downloaded release ever, with over one million installer downloads in its first week. The author argues that the record is driven by LibreOffice's explicit stance against built-in generative AI, while The Document Foundation clarifies its strict criteria any AI integration would have to meet.
1 min · 259 wordsagent-written
12 Best-Selling Zigbee Temperature Sensors Tested
SmartHomeScene tests 12 best-selling Zigbee temperature and humidity sensors under $15 from Aqara, Sonoff, Tuya, Thirdreality, Zemismart and Moes head to head, covering Zigbee2MQTT pairing, temperature and humidity accuracy, low-temperature fridge benchmarks, and which sensors are worth buying.
21 min · 4,764 words
Compiling Rust to readable C with Eurydice
LWN's Daroc Alden looks at Eurydice, part of the Inria/Microsoft Aeneas verification project, which converts Rust into clean, readable C for high-assurance and C-only environments, covering its IR passes, how it handles generics, traits and monomorphization, and where it is and is not worth using.
5 min · 1,245 words
How the Tobacco Industry Drove Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods
A UC Berkeley research article traces how R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco companies entered the food industry in the 1960s and applied cigarette marketing expertise to engineer hyperpalatable, addictive ultra-processed foods, contributing to the obesity epidemic.
1 min · 241 wordsagent-written