Two days before tens of thousands of migrants surged into Ceuta, one of Spain’s enclaves on Morocco’s northern coast, a newspaper there posted a video on TikTok and Instagram showing two young women walking in the city in wet suits, their hair still damp. The posts didn’t say so explicitly, but the implication was clear: The women had just swum across the border from Morocco. “Ceuta can’t take it anymore,” the newspaper, El Faro de Ceuta, declared in the posts. On the other side of the border, the video resonated very differently. Cropped and reposted in Arabic, the video seemed like an invitation. The women were smiling, flashing peace signs and thumbs up and, most of all, walking around freely. The video seemed to legitimize rumors that had percolated for weeks on social media suggesting that a recent ruling by Spain’s Supreme Court meant migrants who arrived illegally by sea could stay in the country. As one account on Facebook put it, falsely, “Ceuta is turning into an open gate,” when in fact migrants still faced expulsion after a judicial review. The responses to the posts about the swimmers were a critical part of a cascade of disinformation that experts described as one of the starkest instances in which social media contributed directly to a real-world tragedy.

Over the past two decades, researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the iron in the hemoglobin supplying oxygen to neurons, have been building up increasingly detailed maps and inventories of the mammalian cortex. Thanks to huge advances in machine-learning artificial intelligence — computer algorithms that are able to sort through enormous amounts of information and use statistical methods to make classifications and predictions — fMRI scans can now be used to identify everything from depressive thoughts to the nuanced feelings of envy and schadenfreude. Other algorithms have been able to accurately piece together reconstructions of movie clips watched by subjects, just by analyzing their brain scans; or have detected, in probing the brain activity of swing voters in the US presidential election, responding to photographs and videos of presidential candidates, which candidates provoked anxiety or even disgust, and which elicited positive responses or feelings of empathy.

In just the last few years, neuroscience researchers have progressed from decoding images and emotions as they play across the cortex to sounds, words, phrases, and even language. In 2023, in a remarkable demonstration of this emerging technology, a woman called Ann Johnson, who had been paralyzed for 18 years by a brain-stem stroke, was able to speak again through the insertion of a grid of 253 electrodes onto the surface of her brain, which translated her neuronal signals into sentences, in real time, at a rate of 78 words per minute (just about half the speed of standard conversation). The research team at the University of California, led by neurosurgeon Edward Chang, had combined this brain-computer interface with an animated avatar of Johnson’s head, which spoke in her own voice, as reconstructed from a recording of a 15-minute toast she had given at her wedding. Just as the avatar’s mouth spoke Johnson’s words as she thought them, so its expressions were similarly influenced by the nuances of her brain activity, which turned her thoughts about facial gestures into displays of emotion — from smiles to pursed lips and frowns.

[…] The more invasive the recording equipment, the richer and more detailed the data. Surgical interventions are at the vanguard of neuroscience and remain very rare — fewer than 100 people on the planet have brain-computer interfaces like Johnson’s embedded beneath their skulls. Yet almost inevitably, a concerted trickle-down effect is occurring. In the summer of 2023, a team at the University of Texas demonstrated that they could use fMRI to translate brain scans into words and sentences, after subjects listened to 16 hours of the storytelling podcasts The Moth Radio Hour and The New York Times’ Modern Love to train an AI model. When the subjects then listened to new podcasts, the algorithm was able to convert the gist of what they heard, as it manifested in their brains, into words, phrases, and sentences that roughly captured the stories. As the team’s lead computational neuroscientist, Alexander Huth, put it in an interview with Science, “Our thought when we actually had this working was, ‘Oh my God, this is kind of terrifying.’" Now noninvasive, wearable brain scanners are beginning to proliferate beyond the lab, making their way into our workplaces and, through the vast global consumer market, into our homes too.

Speaking on an episode of the science podcast Huberman Lab this week, Li talked about the fears around how students are using AI. “The absolute bad outcome is that our young generation, their agency and human-level motivation of learning and living is taken away by tools,” the ImageNet inventor warned. “It should not be taken away by humans nor should it be taken away by machines.” If we see a generation of graduates who have completely relied on AI without actively trying to learn anything for themselves, they risk leaving education without having “properly developed the brain,” Li said.

[…] Li certainly isn’t advocating for a complete ban on students using AI. She believes it can genuinely help struggling students who are already engaged in their learning. Li herself noted how she struggled with organic chemistry as a premed student, when teaching assistants and professors didn’t have enough time to answer every question. While there’s no obvious solution, Li says we need to find a way to keep children and students’ motivation and agency. “Let’s find a way to give them the access and the right way of using these tools,” she said. Li added that if AI is used properly in education, it could make the students of the future “way smarter than us because they are superpowered.”

The market emergency alleged by the CFTC is that New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi on July 31. James’ lawsuit seeks a court order to permanently enjoin Kalshi “from operating an unlawful gambling business” in the state. The lawsuit also demands that Kalshi “make full restitution to customers who have engaged in betting” and pay financial penalties.

“New York intends to make event contract derivatives waste away under its iron curtain of state gaming laws before the courts get the chance to issue final rulings,” CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said yesterday. “Congress did not intend for derivatives exchanges to be regulated under a patchwork of state gaming laws… New York has no business regulating these interstate financial markets. The commission is required by law to ensure order in these markets, and that is what we have done today.” […]

The CFTC says it alone has the power to regulate platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket under the Commodity Exchange Act, a US law that gives the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over designated contract markets (DCMs). “These are financial exchanges that offer financial instruments and operate across state lines,” Selig said yesterday. “They match the bid from a resident of one state with the offer of a resident from another state and submit the trade to a clearinghouse that backstops the transactions of customers throughout the country.”

The campaign reportedly ran for four days at the beginning of July and at times deployed as many as eight autonomous agents in parallel. Dream said the system mapped 21 government systems before compromising user accounts and extracting personnel information. The attackers subsequently expanded their activity to Taiwan’s nuclear safety agency, at least seven energy companies, government suppliers, and other government systems.

Dream says it found the evidence inside a 160-megabyte (160MB) online archive that surfaced during its broader tracking of cyberthreat actors. The archive reportedly held 1,395 files showing that the tool was built on two open-source AI agent systems — Hermes and OpenClaw — both of which can be downloaded freely and are designed to let large language models carry out multi-step tasks on their own.

Researchers could not determine which underlying model powered the agents, but the data reportedly showed the model’s safeguards had been sidestepped by presenting the intrusion as an authorized penetration test rather than a real attack. Of particular concern is that the toolkit for the hack comprised such easily available systems, neither of which was purpose-built for offense. The operators appear to have assembled a capable autonomous tool out of components any developer can pull down and run.

What the researchers describe as the tool’s most striking feature was its ability to continuously devise attacks on its own, rather than follow a preprogrammed route. The platform continuously assessed available evidence, ranked possible attack paths, and reprioritized them as circumstances changed. When one technique failed, the tool tasked another agent with searching the internet for information and developing an alternative approach.

On Monday, passengers aboard Delta flight 591 going from Las Vegas to Atlanta allegedly spoofed the onboard Wi-Fi, raising the attention of federal law enforcement. The incident came one day after the DEF CON security conference concluded in Las Vegas, and was first described on social media accounts that follow publicly available air-to-ground messages, known as ACARS.

According to the “ACARS Drama” account, a message was sent by pilots from the plane stated: “NO INFO AS OF NOW WE HAVE A BUNCH OF PAX THAT WERE AT A CYBER CONFERENCE IN LAS THEY WERE ABLE TO JAM OUR WIFI AND BROADCAST THEIR SIGNAL.” A description of the incident posted to Reddit further stated that these passengers created a fake hotspot (“Delta WiFi Fast”), with a phishing landing page “designed to harvest passengers’ personal credentials.”

This technique, sometimes known as an "evil twin" attack, has been long-known to the IT security community. It involves setting up a fake Wi-Fi network and then capturing login credentials and other data.

The Pixel Tag is a slim oblong device available in one grayish color — Fog — that weighs about 12g, or 0.4oz. Like the AirTag, it has no built-in hooks or clips for attaching to objects you want to track. There’s a single button that will trigger a sound on your phone, for the rare occasion when you’ve got the Tag but have lost your main device. It also has an IP67 rating, so it should be safe from dust and rain. As for the battery, the Pixel Tag takes CR2032 coin batteries, and says one battery should last for over a year.

Naturally, it’ll be compatible with Google’s Find Hub network, which leverages the Bluetooth capabilities of Android devices worldwide to help locate lost objects. […] Once you’re close enough to the Pixel Tag, UWB lets the Find Hub app display the distance and direction to the tracker, so long as you’re using a phone with a UWB chip. Channel Sounding is a newer development that can display the exact distance, but not direction, and it will work with any phone or tablet that includes Bluetooth 6.0. The Moto Tag 2 is the only other tracker to currently support it.

“There’s no place to escape from smart glasses. You have to expect at any moment to be filmed and then exposed on the internet,” said HateAid managing director Josephine Ballon. The organization reported the management of Meta, units of spectacles maker EssilorLuxottica including Ray-Ban, as well as retailers Fielmann, Apollo-Optik, Mister Spex and MediaMarkt to the Frankfurt-based digital crime prosecution unit ZIT. HateAid said its complaint was based on a federal digital data protection law that prohibits the sale of communication devices designed to film people without them noticing.

ZIT confirmed it received a complaint from HateAid invoking that law, saying it would routinely investigate on a preliminary basis whether there are grounds for a deeper probe. MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group said it was taking the complaint very seriously, adding that its suppliers had contractual obligations for all goods to be compliant with the law. Mister Spex said it had not been officially notified of a complaint and that it was taking protection of privacy very seriously.

Pixel 11: The standard Pixel 11 gets a redesigned camera bar that is thinner than the one on the previous generation. Google says the new camera bar is more than 40% thinner and now uses an all-glass surface that stretches across the width of the phone. Google is also increasing the base storage to 256GB, doubling the previous starting capacity. The starting price for the new model is set at $899, reflecting a $100 increase compared to the Pixel 10. This price hike comes with the decision to drop the 128GB storage option. Plus, the ongoing RAM supply shortage plays a part in this increase.

Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL: Google is making durability a bigger part of the Pro lineup. The company says the Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL have improved drop resistance and a new anti-scratch display coating that provides more than twice the scratch resistance of the Pixel 10 Pro models. The Pixel 11 Pro starts at $1,099, compared to $999 for the Pixel 10 Pro.

Pixel 11 Pro Fold: Google says the new foldable is nearly 10% lighter and almost 1mm thinner than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. It also has slimmer bezels, a 48-megapixel main camera, and 30x Super Zoom. The company is also building on the IP68 water and dust resistance introduced with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold uses a glass-fiber composite back cover designed to better withstand cracking, while a redesigned hinge offers additional protection for the inner display. Google says the changes make the model three times more durable than its predecessor.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a recent social media post that the federal agency’s recruitment campaign to recruit gamers as air traffic controllers has been a “game changer” for the Federal Aviation Administration. […] When Duffy announced the initiative in April, he acknowledged that the Transportation Department needed to extend its reach to recruit prospective air traffic controllers.

“A lot of what they do playing games … is what they do … controlling traffic in the air,” Duffy told CBS News senior transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleave in an interview on Tuesday at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport. Duffy added that many current trainees started out as gamers. Only about 25% of controllers hold a traditional college degree, while former controllers note that gaming requires many of the same skills that air traffic controllers use on the job, such as thinking quickly, staying focused and managing multiple sources of information as they guide more than 80,000 flights to their destinations daily.

Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots.

Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. “In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them,” the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples.

They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.

For more than half a century, physicists have searched for one of the strangest particles predicted by modern theory. It would be made almost entirely of gluons, the elusive subatomic particles that carry the strong nuclear force. Now, using a particle collider in Beijing, researchers say they have effectively proved the existence of such a “glueball.”

In a preprint posted last month on arXiv and in a presentation last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), the researchers argue that a particle called X(2370), which they produced by smashing electrons into positrons at high energies, has the properties expected of a glueball.

The contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl’s July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895. […] Although it was unusually cool in Alaska, hotter-than-normal conditions blanketed the Lower 48, with the most excessive heat in the Mountain West, Southwest, Northern Plains and Southeast. The heat was so widespread that every one of the Lower 48 states was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit (nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average, said Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information.

[…] The biggest driver of the record heat was nighttime lows that smashed the old mark for hottest minimums by 0.7 degrees, NOAA said. Hotter nights are a classic sign of human-caused climate change, according to scientists and several studies in peer-reviewed literature. NOAA’s calculation is based on averaging 24 hours of temperature, not just highs or lows. “If you’re talking heat waves, that nighttime low is incredibly important for determining total heat stress,” [said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections]. “So if it doesn’t cool off at night, your body doesn’t have time to readjust to all the heat.” As nighttime temperatures increase, more people die and lose sleep, studies show.

The years 2021 and 1936 tie for America’s hottest summer, which is June through August. Through July, 2026 is a shade cooler than 2021, which was powered by record heat in June. Because of climate change, Masters said, “this may be one of the coolest years we’re gonna experience for the rest of our lives.” What’s needed, Masters said, is “to stop burning so many fossil fuels. We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we’ve put in place.”

[B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to count humans rather than bots. If you include people and bots, Linux has a 9.7% market share. That proportion is similar to StatCounter’s score. By Cloudflare’s count, bots alone come to 19%.

These numbers tell us that workers are leading the way to the Linux desktop. […] However, past performance doesn’t explain present trends. So, why are we now seeing such a bump in Linux desktop growth? Experts believe this trend is largely AI developers and Linux users running AI Agents. For example, as David Linthicum, former managing director and chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting and AI and cloud influencer, recently observed, while “Windows 11 can technically run local AI workloads, but as you begin using multiple tools, managing different projects, and installing various dependencies, the friction starts to build,” it’s a different story for Linux users.

Linthicum continued: “Linux delivered what I can only describe as a true ‘AI desktop’ experience. Setup was straightforward, mainstream AI instructions matched what you’d actually see in your environment, and GPU-accelerated apps simply worked — consistently. I spent far less time troubleshooting and far more time actually executing on projects.” As for agents, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin summed up their role succinctly: “Linux is the OS of choice for AI agents.”