These will join 11 locations across the US where Amazon already offers drone deliveries, with each Prime Air site serving an area of approximately 175 square miles. The service aims to quickly deliver packages of up to 5 pounds or less […]. Amazon reiterated its drone safety features alongside these expansion plans, including Prime Air’s “industry-leading Detect-and-Avoid system.” That’s likely an attempt to minimize any concerns raised by the communities where the service is expanding, given these drones have already been scrutinized for crashing into cranes, internet cables, gardens, and an apartment building.

Round Hill is a prominent music publisher whose copyrights include the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the Kinks’ “Lola” and Dio’s “Holy Diver.” The company provided a list of 500 songs that the defendants had infringed upon. Round Hill said in the suits that the company plans to “amend to list potentially ten thousand or more of their musical compositions,” with those damages potentially exceeding $1 billion. “While in other cases for copyright infringement, Defendant has waxed poetic about the necessity of progress and AI’s value to society, there is simply no reason — other than rote expediency — to have that progress come at the cost of copyrights holders,” prominent music attorney Richard Busch, representing Round Hill, wrote in the suits.

Round Hill further argued that the latter "‘expediency’ arguments completely falter” when taking into account Suno and Anthropic’s significant cash valuations they’ve earned while “exploiting illicit copies of copyrighted works, including the Round Hill Works.” “There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing,” Round Hill said.

The three federal agencies recommended that network defenders secure their networks against the ransomware group’s attacks by mitigating security vulnerabilities to protect operating systems, software, and firmware from exploitation attempts. Security teams are also advised to segment networks to block lateral movement after compromise and to block access from untrusted origins to remote services on internal systems.

[…] “Medusa developers typically recruit initial access brokers (IABs) in cybercriminal forums and marketplaces to obtain initial access to potential victims,” the advisory says. “Potential payments between $100 USD and $1 million USD are offered to these affiliates with the opportunity to work exclusively for Medusa.”

Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widely used treatment for melanoma. […] This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient’s immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone. Similar approaches are being tested against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers.

[…] The cancer treatment combines Merck’s Keytruda with a made-to-order mRNA vaccine from Moderna that is based on an analysis of mutations found in the patients’ own tumors. The trial enrolled 1,137 high-risk patients with stage IIB-IV melanoma that had been surgically removed. Volunteers were randomized to receive up to nine doses of Keytruda plus the personalized vaccine or Keytruda alone for about one year. The companies said no new safety signals have emerged in the trial. In January, the companies announced results of a mid-stage trial of the treatment showing that it reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% after five years.

X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page. It also showed that X serves more ragebait to people who say they are Democrats, although the exact reason for that is unclear.

Twenty soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia in the Army’s 9th Brigade Engineering Battalion, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, have already chosen this incentive as part of their reenlistment, an Army spokesperson told CBS News on Wednesday. “The idea was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what Soldiers are interested in,” Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, a spokesperson for the 3rd Infantry Division, said in a statement. “The command team, in conjunction with the career counselor, wanted to get soldiers excited to reenlist.”

[…] The Army memo, which has circulated online, says any soldier who signs a reenlistment contract between Aug. 1, 2026 and Nov. 14 will be authorized for a special four-day pass designated to coincide with “the highly anticipated release of the video game Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6).” About 130 soldiers are currently eligible for the incentive, Tomko said. Eligible soldiers must reenlist for a minimum of two years and up to six years.

Unitree, officially known as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, was founded in 2016 and now plays a key role in Beijing’s ambitions to develop advanced technology. It has become a robotics industry leader, selling devices from sensors and automated arms to four-legged and human-like machines. The firm shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year as demand for the technology grows.

Unitree is one of the few companies in the sector to make money, delivering a net profit of 278 million yuan in 2025. It is a fierce rival to developers in the US as it produces robots with similar features but at lower prices. The company is based in Hangzhou, in eastern China. The region is home to a so-called golden cluster zone of robotics firms, which have benefited from huge government investments. That support helped drive a more than threefold increase in the number of Chinese robotics firms between 2020 and 2024, according to state-run China Daily.

[…] Unitree’s robot dogs start at $2,700, a fraction of the roughly $70,000 price tag for Boston Dynamics’ four-legged device, Spot. “They’re not exactly comparable because some of Unitree’s dogs are much smaller,” [said Harold Soh, a researcher from the National University of Singapore]. “But the price is a big difference.” Unitree has been selling humanoid robots since 2023, with its $13,500 child-sized G1 model hitting the market the following year. Meanwhile, major US rivals — including Elon Musk’s Tesla — have yet to start delivering rival products.

[…] Some experts expect Unitree’s market debut to be a gauge of investor appetite for the fast-growing humanoid robotics sector. The listing has given the public a rare chance to invest in a humanoid robotics company and could set a benchmark for other manufacturers, said Jack Pearson from investment firm RoboStrategy. The listing also marks a “turning point” for China’s robotics industry, as Unitree’s success comes even as the US is curbing imports of foreign-made robots, Pearson said.

After the second world war, sugar remained rationed in Britain for several years. But in September 1953, rationing ended and people started eating a lot more sugar. Consumption nearly doubled. This meant that children born just a few months apart had very different levels of sugar exposure both in the womb and during early childhood. For our study, we used data from over 64,000 people born in Britain between 1951 and 1956. Those born earlier spent a larger share of their first 1,000 days under sugar rationing, while those born later experienced progressively less of it.

[…] What is most surprising, however, is not the cancer results or the biological markers of ageing. It’s how early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people’s diets even 50 years later. We found that people who experienced sugar rationing early in life still consumed less sugar in adulthood, around age 50. They also ate less overall, and their diets were healthier and more diverse. This suggests that the level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time.

Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles — potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually be the basis of a future ‘quantum internet,’ offering a level of security and computing power beyond anything possible today. In new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Xi-Yu Luo at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei has pushed that vision further than ever, entangling two quantum memories across 420 kilometers (261 miles) of optical fiber — more than four times the previous record.

The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, [Vishal Patel, first author of the study based at Harvard Medical School] and colleagues report how they focused on the release of 10 major albums, launched between 2017 and 2022, selected for having the highest number of Spotify streams over a single day. […] The team found streaming volume for the top 200 songs in the US was 43% higher on the date of major album releases compared with the days surrounding the releases — although such data does not reveal whether the music was being streamed in a car.

[…] The researchers used data from a population-based registry of fatal US motor vehicle crashes to look at the number of traffic fatalities on the dates these albums were released, as well as for the 10 days either side. After taking into account the day of the week upon which the album was released, as well as federal holidays, and time of year, the researchers found the number of US traffic fatalities showed a relative increase of 15.1% on the date of major album releases, compared with similar days either side. “This is equivalent to approximately 182 fatalities in the US attributable to the release days of the 10 included albums,” the team writes.

Patel said the release of a new album could distract drivers because accessing music is a search task, not a single button press. “You unlock the phone, open the app, find the release, read down a tracklist, tap the right song. That’s several seconds of looking at a screen,” he said, adding unfamiliar music also demands more attention, while research has suggested listening to new, high-energy music measurably degrades driving performance. The researchers add the rise in traffic fatalities was greater among certain groups — such as younger drivers, male drivers, people who were driving alone, and people driving cars with a built-in infotainment platform. The authors say the results suggest that “online music streaming through smartphones may significantly contribute to distracted driving and traffic fatalities.”

Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning. Roughly three and a half hours later, GitHub’s status page lit up with what became a six-hour-and-forty-two-minute global degradation — error rates near 20% across pull requests, issues and the API, and near 50% on archive and raw file downloads, according to GitHub’s incident log. Enterprise single sign-on went down with it: SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning and Team Sync all failed. So did Copilot.

The developer internet did what the developer internet does. “You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel,” Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. “And unlike GitHub, it’s online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: “trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!” Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company’s launch with the day’s best line: “We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down.” A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor.

Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team’s source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again — and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.

Wi-Fi motion sensing is a technology that has been around for a while, but it’s only recently that it’s become accurate and reliable enough to catch on. Linksys launched a similar service in 2021, but discontinued it a few years later. Lighting company Wiz launched a line of Wi-Fi-sensing smart bulbs in 2023, and more recently Philips Hue deployed a similar radio-frequency sensing technology in its products (using Zigbee rather than Wi-Fi). Comcast’s motion sensing pairs with new modes in the Xfinity app — Home Watch, Away Watch, and Dark Watch (a night/sleep mode) — allowing you to turn sensing on or off based on your activities.

In a lawsuit (PDF) filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, Disney said the FCC was seeking to coerce and retaliate against “a network that refuses to bow to the administration’s demands,” calling the agency’s actions an “extraordinary assault on free speech.”

Trump has waged an aggressive series of attacks on the news media and the latest move follows a two-year-long battle between Trump and Disney. Last month, Trump again called for ABC stations to lose their licenses because the network refused to air a prime-time speech on elections. The court case will pose a key test of the free speech rights of media outlets. Disney and ABC asked the court (PDF) to quickly issue a temporary restraining order halting the license renewal proceedings and preventing the FCC from scheduling a hearing. The company said the public comment period ended earlier this month and the FCC could act at any time.

The lawsuit alleges that the administration is violating the company’s First Amendment free speech rights, saying that the FCC “is using its regulatory power to retaliate against (Disney and ABC) for programming and editorial decisions the administration dislikes.” The FCC said the move stemmed from a year-long investigation into whether Disney’s diversity policies amounted to unlawful discrimination, an allegation the company denies. U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan issued an order on Tuesday directing the company and the FCC to propose a schedule for considering the request for a temporary restraining order and told the agency to notify her if it moves to start the process of revoking the ABC licenses.

Things improve as you step down the memory capacities and speed tiers, but not as much as we’d like. You’re still looking at $392 for a memory kit that was just $72 last year. To reinforce the point, I pulled the latest average price data from PCPartPicker, comparing where we are today (August 2026) to exactly one year ago. This data is somewhat approximate, but it should be broadly accurate. […] A standard 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 kit that would have cost you under $200 last summer is now demanding over $1,100. It is a 5x multiplier on a component that used to be a fairly boring and predictable line item in a PC build budget.

If you plan to just wait it out on an older AM4 or LGA1700 motherboard with DDR4, you’d better hope your memory holds out too, because DDR4 isn’t safe from the fallout. With DDR5 entirely out of reach for most builders, the resulting scramble for older platforms running DDR4 memory has created a massive knock-on effect, and as a result, DDR4 kits are up anywhere from 120% to nearly 180% across the board. Nowhere near as bad as DDR5 pricing, but it still stings when a kit that was $105 last year is $281 this year.

This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to the US, either. German tech site ComputerBase have also been tracking this global trend, reporting just this week that average RAM prices in Europe have skyrocketed by 345% compared to September 2025. Their data shows the squeeze is bleeding into other components too, with hard drive and SSD prices both climbing over 125% in that same timeframe. In fact, the situation is so severe that hyperscale buyers have reportedly already locked in almost all of the global DRAM production capacity for 2027, handing over advance deposits to guarantee their supply of precious DRAM, which is now among the highest-value commodities in the world by weight; mainstream DRAM chips are worth over half as much per kilogram as solid gold.

Your iPhone, SamsungGalaxy, andGoogle Pixel have a 1-year warranty. Unless you cough up extra dough for an extended service plan, you’ll pay a hefty fee if you damage the screen and need a replacement (around $329 for an iPhone 17 done directly from Apple). But it doesn’t have to be this way. What if you could order the part from the manufacturer and do the repair yourself? That dream is finally being realized for American consumers, thanks to Fairphone.

The Dutch company is bringing its repairable and sustainably built Android smartphone — the Fairphone (Gen 6+) — to the US. Each one comes with a screwdriver. A replacement screen from Fairphone costs just $90. A new USB-C port is $20. A fresh battery is $40. In all, there are 12 modular elements you can swap yourself. It remains the only smartphone series with a 10/10 repairability scorefrom iFixit, not to mention an unmatched 5-year warranty and software updates through 2033.

The new Fairphone (Gen 6+) is a small upgrade over the Gen 6 that the company launched last year. It has a newer Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor and double the RAM at 12 GB, but is otherwise largely the same device (hence the “plus” in the name). It now comes in Cobalt Blue, a nod to the miners who extract the cobalt used to make phone batteries, and the company’s efforts to improve working conditions in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The new Fairphone is available on Amazon and at Fairphone.com for $650, and it’s officially certified to work on T-Mobile and AT&T’s networks.