Those newly supported handhelds include MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+, the extremely expensive, extremely powerful handheld built around Intel's Arc G3 processor that launched this summer. While SteamOS has long included beta support for "other AMD powered handhelds," Valve has only recently been working on offering compatibility with Intel-based handhelds like the MSI Claw line. This weekend's update suggests the company hasn't abandoned those efforts and that Intel chips aren't being left out of the SteamOS conversation.

SteamOS 3.8.25 also newly supports the controllers built into Ayaneo's Android-focused Pocket S2 and the more recently released Windows-based Konkr Fit. Valve also says the new OS offers "improved support" for older MSI Claw devices and the OneXPlayer line of portable gaming PCs.

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Forcing Google to distribute third-party app stores in Google Play was one of several remedies imposed by Judge James Donato after Epic emerged victorious in 2023. The remedies also included lowering developer fees, mirroring Google Play apps in other app stores, and allowing developers to use alternative payment systems. But it was the app store stipulation that seemed to irk Google the most.

Google almost avoided this outcome when it agreed to a settlement with Epic, which was announced early this year. Under the terms, Google would certify third-party app stores to allow users to install and use them with less friction, but it would not host them in Google Play. However, Google and Epic withdrew the settlement when it appeared the court would not approve it. This Registered App Store program is still slated to launch internationally, but in the US, Google is only doing what it must to comply with the judge's orders.

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The medium-lift rocket's payload was classified, but it was believed to be a military communications satellite. The rocket's liftoff from Wenchang Space Launch Site appeared to be nominal, but publicly captured videos (such as this one) showed that the rocket's first stage exploded about 1 minute and 20 seconds into flight.

The Long March 7A rocket was developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and is operated by the state's space agency. As of Monday night in China, state officials have not commented on the explosion.

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“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” said co-author Raúl Hernández-Pérez of the University of Vienna. “This makes dogs very interesting. By studying their brains, we can understand what adaptations have developed to support their remarkable social and emotional understanding of humans.”

Prior behavioral studies have shown that dogs are sensitive to emotion in human faces. Dogs will, for example, choose a box their human has identified with a happy expression over one the human treats with fear or disgust. Past fMRI studies found that an area in the canine left temporal cortex showed a stronger response to human faces compared to dog faces, as well as a greater response in the caudate, hippocampus, and amygdala to human faces showing emotion versus neutral faces.

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In giving birth to the Legacy Outback in 1995, Subaru more or less created the template for the modern, adventure-minded, off-road-themed crossover. By the 2000 model year, the Outback had graduated from trim level to standalone model, and it has been paying the bulk of Subaru's bills ever since.

Today, the 2026 Outback marks a new era in the model's history. The wagon silhouette that defined six generations has given way to a sharpened two-box shape that's much more at home parked next to an upright Forester or Ascent. Tall, square, and profusely SUV-like, the new edition won't win any beauty contests, but form follows function more than ever in the Outback.

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This deluge isn’t the regular flood of spam, newsletters, and unwanted deals that fill many people’s inboxes. Instead, companies and other organizations are inadvertently sending Solovewicz other people’s private information and company secrets. Over the last few years, he’s received injury reports from a city government, confirmation of people’s pizza orders, and account setup emails from a school platform. “I get service orders for people that need repairs. I get lots of test platform credentials,” says Solovewicz, a security researcher and consultant.

Solovewicz is receiving the avalanche of messages as he’s the owner of the domains noreply.us and noreply.net, which he purchased in 2020 and 2024, respectively. After originally planning to use the noreply.us domain as a catch-all email—which receives mail sent to any @ address on that domain—to filter messages and enhance his privacy, the researcher quickly noticed that other systems were sending mail to @noreply.us addresses. “I created an accidental honeypot,” Solovewicz tells WIRED. “I had no idea it was going to turn into this.”

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Semprini wrote up the study and submitted the manuscript to a journal, where it was sent out for peer review, a long-standing process through which other researchers in the field assess the validity of research and make a recommendation on whether or not it should be published. This is usually done anonymously and on a volunteer basis.

In this case, the reviewer did not share Semprini’s excitement. That may have stemmed from a misunderstanding of the study’s central message: The reviewer mistakenly thought Semprini was questioning whether the HPV vaccine itself prevents cervical cancer rather than studying the effectiveness of a policy meant to increase vaccination rates. “There’s a very big difference there,” said Semprini, who is a health economist at Des Moines University.

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Park and his colleagues went looking for the records of that catastrophe in the mud taken from the bottom of a small crater lake on the Kenya-Tanzania border. They found instead that the effects of the Mount Toba eruption lasted under two years and amounted to perhaps half a degree of cooling.

Muddy calendars

Volcanic eruptions inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it becomes a haze of tiny droplets that reflect sunlight back into space. Bigger eruptions eject more sulfur dioxide and, in principle, cause more cooling. But this trend stops working when the eruption exceeds a certain magnitude. “Bigger sulfate aerosols settle quickly, because they are heavier,” Park explains. This quick settling makes them less effective in scattering incoming solar radiation.

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The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018.

So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time?

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Hurricane Melissa was catastrophic, causing flooding and landslides across Jamaica. But the AI model helped forecasters give an earlier warning to communities in its path, so they could better prepare.

In a paper published on Thursday in Nature, researchers show that the WeatherNext AI model can predict cyclones with unprecedented accuracy. On average, it gives forecasters a day more lead time than existing models; this means its predictions three days out are as accurate as previous models’ predictions two days out. On the ground, that extra day can mean a lot.

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The Copernicus Browser provides free access to the latest satellite imagery taken by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites for the European Union’s Earth observation program. The three satellites of the Sentinel-2 mission have proven especially useful for wildfire monitoring by providing multi-spectral imaging at resolutions as granular as 10 meters in visible light and near-infrared bands—and the Copernicus Browser previously offered 10 default visualization layers using different combinations of spectral bands.

Now Copernicus Browser has also added a straightforward “wildfires” visualization layer for Sentinel-2 imagery that went live on August 4. Anyone clicking on this layer while looking at a wildfire location can see active fires in white or yellow, burning vegetation in red, and burned landscapes in dark brown or black.

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Among the 200 confirmed cases in the study, six deaths were reported. At least one of the deaths was directly caused by the fly's maggots, researchers in Mexico reported in the study.

The New World screwworm (NWS) fly was once endemic in Mexico—as well as the US. The flies lay hundreds of eggs in the wounds, inflamed tissue, mucous membranes, and orifices of warm-blooded creatures. The resulting maggots hatch within a day and begin ravenously feasting on the living flesh of their victims. While the fly's maggots generate ghastly, life-threatening wounds in a variety of warm-blooded species, including humans, they're particularly devastating to livestock.

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New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in a Santa Fe County court in 2023. A jury found in March 2026 that Meta's social media platforms do not effectively protect kids from child exploitation and ordered the company to pay civil damages for violating state consumer protections and misleading parents about the safety of its apps.

The jury trial was just phase 1 of the case involving Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. "The Phase 1 jury trial considered the State’s Unfair Practices Act claims and resulting civil penalties. The Phase 2 bench trial considered the State’s request for abatement based upon the State’s allegation that the Defendant, Meta, created a public nuisance," Judge Bryan Biedscheid wrote yesterday in the $567 million judgment. Meta reported $60.8 billion in revenue and $15.85 billion in net income in Q2 2026.

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That’s because right behind its long nose is a painted map that traces the path of a June 1973 total solar eclipse across Africa. It’s there on the Concorde 001 prototype because a group of eight scientists set a new world record of observing a total solar eclipse for 74 minutes by flying this aircraft at more than twice the speed of sound.

To put this figure into context, the maximum duration of totality on the ground is around 7.5 minutes when an eclipse is observed in the equatorial regions. For the upcoming solar eclipse of August 12, which can be seen from parts of Europe, the maximum duration of totality from the ground will be slightly more than two minutes.

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This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.

The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days.

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For example, DOGE reported savings of $49.2 billion from cutting grants, but almost none of it could be verified, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its report yesterday. The GAO is the auditing and investigating arm of Congress and issued the DOGE report in response to a June 2025 request from Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

"The Wall of Receipts did not provide sufficient information to verify the method DOGE used to calculate savings, or what the savings consisted of, for 13,553 of the 15,887 grants it reported as terminated. This corresponds to about 96 percent of the DOGE-reported grant savings," the GAO report said.

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The generative AI company has “discussed” charging up to $400, Bloomberg, which has been reporting on the yet-to-be-announced smart speaker since July, said today. The publication said that OpenAI is viewing the smart speaker as a smartphone replacement.

OpenAI has declined to comment on its product roadmap.

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Snail mucus is mostly water; it's the mucins (glycoproteins) and complex carbohydrates that give it that slimy, viscous texture. In addition to cosmetics, the mucus holds great potential for drug delivery. In 2020, scientists found that combining snail slime from a common garden snail with gold nanoparticles helped accelerate wound healing and exhibited anti-inflammatory properties in mice. Most relevant to this latest paper is a 2023 study on garden snail slime that identified three distinct types of secreted mucus: a hydrating version to protect its skin, one that acts as an adhesive glue, and a third that serves as a lubricant so the snail can more easily glide across a surface.

The team focused their research efforts on the grove snail/lemon snail (Cepaea nemoralis), which they deemed well-suited as subjects because the snails secrete five different kinds of mucus with distinct functions. As with the garden snails, there is one that acts as a lubricant to help with locomotion and an adhesive mucus to help the snail stick to various surfaces. Then there's a mucus layer known as the epiphragm that the snail secretes when it hibernates in winter, which contains calcite and effectively seals the shell to protect the snail from predators and harsh environmental conditions.

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The report is anonymously sourced, and VW declined to comment, so take the news with a pinch of salt. But it does make sense: Love it or hate it, the four-door pickup truck is the go-to for Americans who want one vehicle that can carry passengers and cargo that doesn't need to be shielded from the elements. You might think a hatchback or a station wagon would be just as good or better, but that's probably why you're reading Ars Technica in the first place.

Tariffs and an antediluvian approach to emissions controls might make the US market a haven for vehicles that are uncompetitive or unsellable elsewhere, and the pickup truck market in the US will account for almost $200 billion in sales in 2026, with projections to continue growing each year, so one can certainly see merit in the idea. The global car might be dead, but that just means you need to develop cars for each region's taste. And Americans really like pickup trucks.

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Bloomberg reported that the executive order, which is still taking shape and is subject to change, could be issued as soon as next week. The Post said the order's drafting so far is aimed at the childhood vaccine schedule, autism research, and parental choice for vaccinations.

Dozens of high-quality studies encompassing data from millions of children worldwide have already been carried out on the topic and have consistently found no link between childhood vaccines and autism. The claim of a link stems from an unethical, fraudulent study that was retracted years ago, and its author was stripped of his medical license.

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