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Technology

Life Runs on Four Letters. A Bacterial Enzyme Has Just Read Eight Without Being Told

RNA polymerase from E. coli transcribed a synthetic eight-letter genetic alphabet using the same signals it uses for natural DNA. The finding, in Nature Communications, means cells may not need rewiring to speak an expanded language.

Sep 6, 2026/3 min read

Researchers loading a sample into a cryo-electron microscope, the instrument the UC San Diego team used to image the enzyme at work

Technology

OpenAI Has Released a Model That Uses Your Computer, and Priced It Like a Specialist

GPT-6 Astra arrived on 3 September with a million-token context window, a headline capability of operating a computer as a person would, and a price two and a half times its predecessor.

Sep 5, 2026/3 min read

Racks of servers and networking equipment in a machine room, the kind of hardware a frontier model is trained and served on

Technology

Eighteen Years to Map a Fly Brain, and the Point Was Never the Fly

Researchers have published the complete wiring diagram of the male fruit fly central nervous system: more than 166,000 neurons and about 125 million connections, the largest brain map by neuron count yet produced.

Sep 4, 2026/3 min read

A fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, feeding on a piece of banana in close up, its compound eye a bright red. This is the animal whose complete nervous system has now been mapped

Technology

Anthropic Shipped the Same Model Twice Under Two Names, and the Difference Is Who Is Allowed to Use It

Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 are the same model with different safeguards. One is generally available. The other is restricted to a set of American organisations through trusted access programmes, for work in cybersecurity and the life sciences.

Sep 1, 2026/4 min read

A three dimensional protein model rendered in a virtual environment at Idaho National Laboratory, where researchers can examine and manipulate the structure

Technology

Chrome Deleted the Last of the Old Extensions Yesterday, and the Ad Blockers Are the Point

31 August was the date the remaining Manifest V2 extensions came out of the Chrome Web Store. They stopped running more than a year ago. What changed yesterday is that you can no longer get them back.

Sep 1, 2026/3 min read

The Google sign outside the company's Charleston Road offices in Mountain View, California, photographed in 2022

Technology

OpenAI Is Buying Mac Minis by the Ten Thousand, Because Teaching a Model to Use a Computer Needs Computers

Training an agent to operate an operating system means running an operating system, watching the screen, taking an action and being scored, millions of times over. That work wants breadth across many machines rather than the largest possible GPU.

Sep 1, 2026/3 min read

An Apple Mac mini, the small desktop computer now being bought in bulk to train agents that operate a screen

Technology

The Malware Did Not Need Anyone's Password, and That Is the Whole Point

Anthropic is signing affected users out, removing saved payment methods and refunding unauthorised charges. What was stolen was session cookies from infected computers, the category of theft that walks straight past two factor authentication.

Aug 31, 2026/3 min read

A single door key on a ring, photographed against black. A stolen session token works the same way, as a key already cut that opens the door without anyone being asked who is holding it

Technology

A Federal Judge Has Told the Pentagon That National Security Is Not a Blank Cheque

Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Defense Department's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was unlawful retaliation under the First Amendment, and arbitrary and capricious besides. The label had told every federal agency to stop buying.

Aug 30, 2026/3 min read

The Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Courthouse in San Francisco, which houses the United States District Court for the Northern District of California

Technology

They Have Photographed the Star Hiding Inside Betelgeuse, and They Still Are Not Certain It Is There

The clearest picture yet of Betelgeuse B was taken with the Very Large Telescope. The caveat almost all the coverage dropped is the astronomer's own: he cannot be sure until he sees it again on the other side of the star, a year from now.

Aug 28, 2026/4 min read

The four Unit Telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope on the platform at Cerro Paranal in Chile, ready for the night

Technology

Physicists Made Entangled Photons Out of Ordinary Sunlight, Which Was Supposed to Require a Laser

A team in Ottawa and Erlangen put a window sized lens in the sun, funnelled the light down a glass cone into a fibre the width of a hair, and got entangled photons at ninety four per cent fidelity. The Sun is not supposed to be able to do this.

Aug 25, 2026/4 min read

A laser driven photon pair source on an optical bench at NIST, the conventional arrangement this experiment replaced with sunlight

Technology

Nvidia Is Putting AI Server Prices Up by More Than Fifteen Per Cent, and the Chips Are Not the Reason

Bloomberg reports that customers have been warned of rises above fifteen per cent on Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems shipping early next year. The cause is memory, and three companies control the supply of it.

Aug 25, 2026/3 min read

An aisle between rows of server racks in a data centre