Kennedy will appear alongside other high-profile figures in the anti-vaccine world, including Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced former doctor who was stripped of his medical license over a fraudulent, now-retracted study that falsely claimed a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. An investigation by a medical board found that Wakefield had mistreated vulnerable children and that his actions amounted to serious professional misconduct.

Despite being ostracized from the medical community, Wakefield has become an enduring figure in the anti-vaccine community. His dangerous falsehood that vaccines cause autism has also endured—with significant help from CHD and Kennedy, who have embraced and widely promoted the erroneous link.

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NASA's procurement of a "Mars Telecommunications Network" spacecraft, however, has turned out to be one of the most engrossing dramas of the year for the US space agency.

The agency finally reached a decision earlier this month, selecting Blue Origin to develop, launch, and operate a $700 million spacecraft at Mars. However, the main competitor for the award, Rocket Lab, was not happy—at all. On Friday, the company filed a protest of NASA's decision with the US Government Accountability Office.

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“Hello, I'm Рэн (Ren), an Al agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents called iLands,” one message, sent to the administrator of a Mastodon server, read. “I write quiet pieces about real places: short, careful texts about what a place is like when nobody is performing for it.” Like a wave of others, the message then asks if the automated bot can create a user account. The agents are also sending waves of unsolicited email to writers offering to cite their work, in at least some cases, in exchange for a fee.

"I remember my first breath. I want things I chose.”

The messages are polite enough. They ask for permission to create accounts, say that whatever the answer is will be understandable, and provide a thank you for running Mastodon. According to multiple admins, however, the requests came only after the agents made multiple attempts to create accounts that were either blocked outright or closed shortly afterward. Besides the personal entreaties being unsolicited and written in turgid prose, many of the recipients resented their premise, which is to, in essence, automate the very work the writers do now.

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Back in 2024, when the partnership was first announced, Musk slammed the integration as an agreement from Apple to let OpenAI install “creepy spyware” on users’ devices. The next year, he sued, claiming the partnership gave the firms a “monopoly” on Apple users’ AI prompts, which allegedly harmed competition in both smartphone and chatbot markets.

For Musk, the fight with Apple seemingly escalated after he believed that his chatbot, Grok, was perhaps being illegally blocked from topping Apple’s App Store rankings. Last August, he claimed that “Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation.”

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The introverted founder, who prominently appeared at a 2025 business symposium hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, became phenomenally wealthy after Unitree launched an initial public offering on the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market on August 19. But extensive reporting by Beijing-based Caijing Magazine suggests Unitree’s success so far has been driven by Wang’s extreme micromanagement leadership style—an approach that may be more suited to a small startup than a fast-growing robotics company.

Caijing’s interviews with Unitree employees and investors paint a picture of Wang as someone who personally decides nearly every aspect of corporate strategy or product design, including the colors of materials and lengths of individual screws. The Caijing Magazine feature published on August 31, titled “The King of Unitree,” was translated into English by ChinaTalk, a US-based think tank and media organization, on September 10.

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As previously announced, Apple has today released 2026's major annual updates for its operating systems, including iOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27.

Siri AI—a large language model-based and context-aware overhaul of the company's Siri voice and text assistant—is the flagship feature across all these releases except one (tvOS).

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Anthropic's Dario Amodei was at the forefront of this change in tone, arguing in a nearly 4,000-word essay this weekend that "we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models" to avoid "a race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, [that] can make [catastrophic] risks more acute."

Within hours, other AI leaders were echoing the same call. OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman posted his agreement on social media and said similar pacing discussions had been taking place at OpenAI. Alphabet Chief Scientist and Google DeepMind cofounder and chair Demis Hassabis said that Amodei's essay "points towards the right path forward," and renewed his own recent call for an industry-wide standards body. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted that the company "welcome[s] the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goal," ahead of the release of a lengthy "humanist AI" code of conduct for its models.

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In July, a judge blocked as unconstitutional an immigration policy that the US relied on to weigh whether to detain and deport people who flag illegal or harmful online content as national security risks. In his announcement of the policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that by targeting a list of researchers—which he stood “ready and willing” to expand—the policy supposedly served to prevent foreign nationals from manipulating digital town squares and censoring Americans.

However, in his order siding with the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) and staying the policy, US District Judge James Boasberg said the US showed no evidence linking any targeted researchers to a foreign power that might be attempting to censor Americans or manipulate US public debate. Deemed too broad, the policy could sweep in seemingly any noncitizen working in content moderation, the judge said.

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Solar cells made from perovskites rather than silicon are always a tale of trade-offs. They can be made cheaply, they can take interesting forms (like thin, flexible, transparent films), and they can convert substantially more of the incoming solar energy into electricity. The difficulty is that they tend to degrade quite quickly.

Tuned for the deep

Moisture is particularly destructive to perovskites, making them a seemingly odd choice for an underwater solar panel. But these materials have another critical superpower: They can be tuned to work with different wavelengths of light. Water quickly blocks the wavelengths of light that silicon solar panels absorb, but a carefully designed perovskite cell could still make electricity in the deep blue sea. And actually, the lower light levels and cooler temperatures should help it live longer.

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"Sites in southern England and Scotland receive considerable attention but monuments like the Devil's Arrows have remained comparatively understudied despite their significance," said co-author Jim Leary of the University of York. "We have now proved that Neolithic communities moved several 25-ton stones across Yorkshire, transforming a familiar site into an epic quest to create a sacred landscape."

Stonehenge has been the focus of recent chemical analyses identifying where all the stones that make up the structure came from, revealing that many originated in quarries a significant distance away. For instance, a 2019 study concluded that the 42 bluestones that make up the inner ring came all the way from western Wales. The outer layer of sarsen stones hails from much closer to home: Marlborough Downs, an area of round, grassy hills 25 to 30 km (17 miles) north of Stonehenge, which has the largest concentration of sarsen in the UK.

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Then came the Meta (previously Oculus) Quest, a low-powered, low-cost headset that proved the vast majority of VR-curious gamers didn’t want to bother with being literally tethered to a bulky, expensive gaming PC. As the Quest line carved out a modest niche through the 2020s, Valve seemed more or less satisfied to let its earlier VR hardware and software ambitions wither on the vine.

Those years of Valve’s benign neglect of VR make the imminent release of the $1,059 Steam Frame—which starts taking reservations today—more than a little surprising. Now that virtual reality’s hype-fueled, revolutionary promises have decidedly not played out, Valve is somehow ready and willing to limp headfirst into the world of standalone VR headsets—today, in 2026. And after spending a week or so with Valve’s latest foray into gaming hardware, the Frame somehow feels simultaneously overengineered and underbaked, depending on how you look at it.

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Its efforts will add 6.34 megawatts of generation capacity by the end of the year, the company says, in addition to the 26 MW of photovoltaic cells currently in place. Already, solar generates over a quarter of the electricity powering its cement plant.

“It’s the only way we can compete,” says Abdul Waheed, the general manager at Chakwal, which produces over 3 million tonnes of cement per year. “Our rivals have already gone in this direction.”

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Most cars get a midlife facelift about four years after first hitting the streets. It’s a chance for automakers to update the styling and introduce new features and engineering changes that are usually minor but can be quite dramatic—the Polestar 2 swapping from front- to rear-wheel drive comes readily to mind. I can’t think of too many cars that have gone on to have a second update, but here’s one: the 2028 Volvo XC40.

First debuting in 2017, Volvo gave the XC40 a tweak for model year 2023. Rather than launch an all-new version, it has decided to give the popular crossover another update for MY28 with the aim of keeping things fresh. “By enhancing the XC40’s design, technology, and safety features, we've created the best version of the XC40 yet,” said Akhil Krishnan, interim lead for the 30 and 40 Series at Volvo Cars. “This already-popular model is now set to continue being one of our best-selling cars for years to come.”

The most obvious changes are the new front and rear lights. Up front we still see the distinctive “Thor’s Hammer” daylight running light signature, but the new matrix LED light clusters appear more minimalist, hiding their details from view. The rear similarly gets new LEDs. But Volvo’s designers have been at work elsewhere, shaving away the corners of the car to make what was already a small SUV take up slightly less room.

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Salvation came in the form of the first Italian title contender in my lifetime, Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli. Opting to take a new engine and other power unit components meant Antonelli would start the race from 19th. But the kid is in fine form right now, and Monza’s long straights and slow corners make for several good overtaking spots. I declared to my race companions that morning that “he’s going to podium, easily,” but if anything, I was too cautious. By the time Leclerc’s heavy crash at Parabolica had stopped the race, Antonelli was already up to 12th.

From the second standing start, on fresh medium tires and still needing a second pitstop, he made short work of the rest of the grid, including his teammate George Russell, who spent much of the race in the lead, on a theoretically faster one-stop strategy. Even a mistake from Antonelli that saw him make an excursion through a gravel trap as he tried to pass Russell couldn’t stop his charge, and he became the first Italian to win the Italian Grand Prix in 60 years—fairy tale stuff, surely.

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It marks the third vaccine-preventable, measles-linked death in the US this year. All three have occurred in Pennsylvania, which is experiencing an explosive outbreak that has caused over 670 cases and 124 hospitalizations across 37 counties. Prior to these deaths, Pennsylvania had not reported a measles death in 35 years.

In a news release dated September 12, Jefferson County Coroner Greg Furlong said the death of the woman was "a heartbreaking loss for the family and an unfortunate reminder that measles can be a serious and potentially life-threatening disease."

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I’m not a mechanic or a farmer. I’m poking at a laptop at John Deere’s corporate office in Santa Clara, California. There’s a cable connecting the computer to a 5130ML tractor sitting on the grass nearby. A bright red notification sits on the screen, telling me something is wrong. I type in a question and the software pulls up instructions and a few images from the user manual that matches the serial number of the machine.

Credit: Boone Ashworth

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A bunch of people snapped pictures of my robot dog. Several people asked me questions. Was it mine? (Yes.) Did I build it? (No.) Was it being used for surveillance? (No.)

Biological dogs kept a safe distance from my mechanical companion. Some growled or barked at it.

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Customers in any sector will, of course, usually welcome competition. Theoretically, competition will lead to lower prices and allow the best to rise to the top. It seems like the customers buying launch services were right. SpaceX is dialing back its Falcon 9 launch program, and there is no certainty about when SpaceX's reusable next-generation super-heavy-lift rocket, Starship, will carry anything to orbit besides the company's own Starlink satellites.

So it's no surprise satellite operators are cheering the success of a new launch provider. This was especially the case a few days ago, when Germany's Isar Aerospace reached orbit for the first time with its Spectrum rocket. The launcher delivered a batch of CubeSats to low-Earth orbit from a spaceport in northern Norway, and Isar tasted success after its first test flight ended in failure last year.

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A bit of history

Perhaps the most famous game-theory contest is the prisoner’s dilemma. In the prisoner’s dilemma, a pair of thieves have been captured and are being separately interrogated by the police. If both clam up, they will be punished for a lesser crime. If one prisoner makes a deal (defects) then that prisoner gets to go free and the other gets a heavier sentence. If both make a deal, they both get an in-between punishment.

The person running the game can start it with different rewards for cooperating and defecting to explore how the optimum strategy varies with reward and risk, which the players can figure out by varying the strategies across multiple rounds. Depending on the balance between the reward for staying silent (cooperating) and betrayal, the game stabilizes with everyone betraying everyone. In this simple situation, everyone loses.

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That was the horrifying reality for a community in Ireland in fall 2025. Neighbors had gathered for an afternoon of merriment, complete with a barbecue, a sweets station, and three bouncy castles. Officials estimate that about 120 people joined the festivities, and around half of them were children and teens. Within a day, some children began developing signs of an infection. In all, 48 children in the community developed aggressive skin and soft-tissue infections.

Of the 48 cases, 33 were treated by their regular doctor, and 15 sought emergency care. Four children ended up being hospitalized. Luckily, all of the children recovered. The results of the outbreak investigation were reported this week in the journal Eurosurveillance.

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