The August 2026 edition of "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most "AI-exposed" occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption.

Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent.

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Power grids currently rely on conventional transformer technology that is painstakingly assembled by hand and has a fundamental design dating back to the 1880s. Two copper wire coils manually wound around a steel core create electromagnetic fields that help step up voltage levels of alternating current electricity for long-distance transmission or step down voltage levels for the electricity use of homes and businesses. The largest power transformers cannot be mass-manufactured but are instead custom-built for each utility company’s electrical substations.

Manufacturing constraints, coupled with the scramble to upgrade US power infrastructure, have meant utility companies and other customers must wait up to several years for delivery of new power transformers. That is not only a problem for expanding power grid infrastructure to support growing electricity demand, but also delays the process of replacing aging power transformers.

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Kennedy has made no new rules or recommendations for the categories yet. However, he laid out ideas and possibilities in a Request for Information (RFI) posted online Friday and published in the Federal Register on Monday. In the 10-page document, Kennedy poses questions about the current categories and asks the public to weigh in on ideas for how to change or replace them. The deadline to comment on the questions and ideas is September 20.

Currently, there are three categories of vaccination recommendations granted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is informed by a panel of independent expert advisors, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The three categories are: routine, otherwise considered universal (a recommendation that everyone should get a vaccine); risk-based recommendations (only certain groups at higher risk should get a vaccine); and recommendations based on "shared clinical decision-making," or SCDM (a flexible but uncommon recommendation for vaccination based on the characteristics, values, and preferences of a patient and the judgment of their healthcare provider).

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Without more straightforward approaches from vendors, such as easily comprehensible privacy policies and avoiding inappropriate ads, monitors are dangerously encroaching into smart-TV-like territory.

LG monitors’ McAfee ads

LG lost some trust after a recent report that some of its monitors installed McAfee pop-up ads onto connected computers. Since at least 2024, some of these displays installed an app, LG Monitor App Installer, onto connected computers under the cover of driver updates installed through Windows Update.

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GM says that in the event of that happening, the car should still retain a number of critical safety features—antilock brakes, traction control, and stability control—at least until it comes to a complete stop, at which point they become inoperable. But NHTSA's ODI says that it has received many reports that contradict this behavior and allege that eBoost failures are followed by an immediate loss of braking, which obviously poses a safety risk.

Indeed, NHTSA has received 227 incident reports, a number that grows to 745 once you include the hundreds of occurrences reported to GM. Twenty-two cases resulted in crashes, and while six people have been injured in five crashes, thankfully there have been no fatal incidents.

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Researcher Matthew Callaghan said he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone stopped playing over his multipoint headphones, which accept connections from more than one device at a time. He set the headphones to play sounds from his phone except when his PC was producing audio. Each time he loaded AliExpress, the phone audio stopped. Each time he closed the tab the site was loaded into, the phone was once again audible.

Users can't hear it, but browsers can

While investigating the odd behavior, Callaghan said he found two highly obfuscated scripts. Together, they rendered a graph that analyzed the WebAudio readings of each visiting browser. This graph acted as an oscillator that measured Sawtooth waves, which are common in output from digital audio.

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Per the authors, the mummification process throughout history has relied on various toxic materials and substances to help preserve the remains—heavy metals like arsenic, mercury, and lead, for example—which is why careful handling is necessary to avoid adverse health effects. (Professionals typically don masks, gloves, and lab coats when working with such remains.) Various micro-organisms (bacteria, fungi, yeasts) can also lie dormant in the tissues for centuries and can recolonize and multiply due to a ready supply of organic material—particularly if the remains have been stored in suboptimal conditions.

A 1962 case, for example, revealed the presence of poisonous fungi spores in mummified remains that would cause respiratory inflammation and infection if inhaled, as well as fever. A 2013 study found that the hundreds of mummies on display at the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, are prone to microbial and fungal growth after years of unstable environmental conditions. Similarly, in 2012, scientists identified three species of fungi (Aspergillus, Penicillium, and Stachybotrys) on human remains, coffins, walls, and in the air in the crypts of the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Krakow, Poland.

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On Monday, Reuters reported that prosecutors in Keelung did not release any names but confirmed that the suspects were “charged with breach of trust and document forgery.” One suspect linked to a related case remains at large, accused of the “siphoning of funds from a distributor company involved” in helping China get access to restricted Nvidia chips.

Since 2022, the US has required a license to export semiconductors to China, with the intent of protecting national security by staying ahead of China in the AI race. But after the US arrested Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw in March for allegedly funneling $2.5 billion in restricted AI servers to China since 2024, Taiwan launched a separate probe to learn more about the scheme.

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Verstappen's wasn't the only contract news—Williams will keep both Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz, too. More than once I've noticed a driver having an underwhelming weekend following a freshly signed contract; in this case, all three had a weekend they'd probably rather forget. They weren't the only ones, though. Up and down the grid, we saw friction between teammates. And there's no one an F1 driver wants to beat more than the only other person to have the same car as they do.

Formula 1 returned from its summer break with this weekend's Dutch Grand Prix.

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Clean energy additions will rise by a record 45 gigawatts this year, according to S&P Global Energy—equivalent to the average electricity demand of Turkey. The increase is roughly 25 percent higher than the record set in 2024.

The US president’s war in Iran, which has driven up global energy prices, along with surging power demand from AI data centers and developers’ rush to capitalize on expiring tax credits, are driving the cleantech boom, said analysts. Trump’s administration has also been pragmatic in the face of its energy needs.

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The PC makers did start responding, thanks in part to Intel's actually new non-Ultra Core Series 3 processors (codenamed Wildcat Lake). Intel has resisted its usual compunction to serve the budget market with aging, re-labeled silicon and has created a lower-end, lower-performance processor with the same building blocks (and the same manufacturing processes) as this year's high-end, high-performance models.

The likes of Dell, Acer, Asus, and Lenovo began hopping on the Wildcat Lake train fairly quickly, announcing would-be Neo competitors. But it felt like most of them were having trouble matching the Neo's barebones specs, let alone undercutting them. Dell's XPS 13 started at $599, but only for students. It would be $699 for everyone else. Acer's Swift Air 14 was announced at $699, too. Sure, sometimes these offered features the Neo didn't have. But the point of the Neo is that it eschews frills and frippery in favor of nailing the basics.

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The agency stated: "In keeping with the principle of proceeding prudently and reliably, and ensuring absolute success, after a comprehensive assessment it has been determined that the Chang’e 7 mission does not meet the conditions for launch and therefore cannot be carried out during the planned launch window this year."

The Chinese message offered no explanation for the cause of the delay from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, located on an island in the South China Sea. Consisting of a lunar orbiter, lander, rover, and a mini-hopper of a probe, the mission was due to launch as early as Sunday on a Long March 5 rocket. It is intended to land at the South Pole of the Moon.

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Within days, the source of the destruction was known worldwide. On the morning of August 27, 1883, a volcanic eruption had obliterated two islands in the strait between Java and Sumatra, and most of a third. More than 36,000 people perished, the majority in devastating tsunamis that raced outward from the colossal explosion.

Thanks to Victorian-era telecommunications, it was the first time in history that people around the globe could begin to document, in near real time, the immediate and long-term effects of a catastrophic volcanic eruption. What they learned over the next few years laid the foundations for the modern science of volcanology. And it was an especially eye-opening lesson in how the biggest eruptions can influence climate, agriculture, and even the course of human history.

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“If you compare the arrangement of these connections on day one with the same on day four or five, it's very, very different," says Kazumasa Tanaka, a neuroscientist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan. To learn how a memory that can last for years can sit on hardware that shifts every few days, Tanaka’s team made the shift a bit more dramatic. In a recent Science study, they induced a hibernation-like state in mice, which basically erased the state of more than half of their synapses. And yet the mice apparently have kept their memories.

Hibernation on demand

Hibernation is a specialty of squirrels, hamsters, and bears, but the neural circuit that triggers it is conserved across mammals, and is present in species that never hibernate in the wild—like mice. In June 2020, a team of researchers led by Takeshi Sakurai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tsukuba and a collaborator on Tanaka’s study, developed a technique to artificially activate this hibernation circuit. This can be done by activating a population called Q neurons in a region of the hypothalamus.

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More than 4.2 million miles of public roads crisscross the lower 48 states—enough to reach the Moon and back almost nine times. This vast network of roads spiderwebs its way across the contiguous US, leaving only about 5 percent as an inventoried roadless area or wilderness.

Now, some of those last remaining lands free of roads are under threat from the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of the 2001 Roadless Rule. That includes southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, where eagles, bears, salmon, and many other species thrive in old-growth coastal forest along the Inside Passage.

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The presidential memorandum replaces a 2013 policy signed by former President Barack Obama. Both policies share an emphasis on supporting the commercial space industry and underscore the importance of assured access to space. But the launch sector has changed immensely since then. There were 176 orbital launch attempts from US soil last year, nearly 10 times the number in 2013. SpaceX led the pack last year with 165 orbital launches of its Falcon 9 rocket, plus five suborbital test flights of the much larger Starship.

"By 2030, our space transportation ranges must grow to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries every year," the policy says. "The policies set forth in this memorandum will secure America's continued superiority in space."

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In many cases, we can get this data from naturally occurring events like earthquakes. In others, we intentionally create waves using things like explosives, providing the opportunity to do imaging in specific areas without needing to wait for an earthquake. Now, a team of scientists at Penn State suggests there's a potential option that sits between waiting for an earthquake and triggering your own seismic event: thunderstorms.

Some of the energy carried by thunder enters the Earth's upper crust, triggering what are termed "thunderquakes." But, for various physical reasons, the seismic signals are extremely complex, making it difficult to extract clear signals from them. The Penn State team says it has finally constructed a model that can help make sense of this complexity and used it to reconstruct the terrain under the local campus.

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According to plaintiffs, Peter Castaneda and Haley Gelfand, Compass has bought so many brokerage firms over the past decade-plus that it maintains a monopoly, controlling “over 80 percent of the rental unit listings available for renters in Manhattan based on 2025 data.”

With that monopoly, Compass can “literally dictate pricing for as much as 80 percent of Manhattan’s rental units,” renters argued. And now, Compass is allegedly trying to manipulate prices on other platforms, as well.

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The upcoming Moto devices won't ship with GrapheneOS, but they will be fully supported by the project with help from Moto itself. So far, only Pixel phones have met GrapheneOS's strict hardware requirements to ensure the highest level of security and privacy. The software, which is based on Android, includes features like enhanced memory protection, granular network permissions, customizable app sandboxing, and a duress code that can be used to wipe your phone. (That last one got an activist charged with a felony earlier this year after he used it to delete his data during a customs interrogation.)

According to the GrapheneOS team, the upcoming Moto phones will be premium flagship devices. The team expects pricing to be even higher than Pixel phones, which is saying something. The current Pixel lineup starts at $900 for the base model Pixel 11, a $100 increase from last year. The Pixel 11 Pro XL price has gone up to a whopping $1,300 this year.

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In April 2025, Logitech raised the prices on 51 percent of its portfolio, with some prices increasing by as much as 25 percent.

The complaint seeks to “recover monies that Logitech extracted from American consumers as offset for import tariffs that the United States Supreme Court has since declared unlawful, tariffs for which Logitech now stands to be reimbursed by the federal government. This is all while Logitech retained every dollar of the corresponding price increases it charged its customers due to the illegal tariffs.”

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