In July, the president of the United States announced, from a NATO summit, that Ukraine would get a license to build Patriot missiles. He presented it as a settled thing, a favor, almost a joke, saying Ukraine could no longer complain that Washington was not giving it enough. Three weeks later, at Camp David, the

Taiwan asked a question this week, and the answer came back wearing the uniform of a tradition. On Tuesday, China announced that one of its frigates would hold a joint exercise with an Indonesian warship in the sea east of Taiwan. The drill happened the next morning. Taiwan's foreign ministry asked Indonesia to explain itself.

A nuclear reactor that has been switched off does not go silent. The fuel left inside its core and in the cooling pools beside it keeps decaying for months and years, and every decay releases an antineutrino, a particle so reluctant to interact with matter that it slips through steel, concrete, and water without stopping.

The war with Iran has had an official reason for six months: the bomb. On Thursday, the vice president of the United States published the real ranking. J.D. Vance, speaking on Fox News, put the aims of the war in order. He said the first goal was keeping oil and gas cheap for Americans across

The siege of Qusra has entered its second phase, and the second phase is worse than the first. For days, Jewish settlers surrounded the homes of Palestinian families in this village south of Nablus, cut them off, and held them inside. Then the American ambassador called the settlers terrorists. Then the army arrived. And the

Apple has trained a custom large language model specifically for the Chinese market, with support from Alibaba, according to three people familiar with the matter. The move breaks with Apple's earlier approach of relying on outside models for its AI features in the country, and it comes as Apple prepares to roll out its on-device

The USS George Washington is on its way to the Middle East because of a number: 241. That is how many consecutive days the USS Abraham Lincoln has now spent at sea, the longest such stretch in the modern history of the American carrier fleet. The record was set in a war, it was set

The White House is losing its most recognizable young face. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary and the youngest person ever to hold the job, will leave when August ends. President Trump announced it himself on Truth Social on Wednesday, and the reason he gave was family: she wants to be home with her two small

There is an old proverb about two elephants fighting and the grass underneath. In the climate argument, Africa is the grass, and the elephants are the United States and China. The difference now is that the elephants have stopped fighting over the same prize, and the grass is finding out what that means. For a

Aging announces itself not with damage but with absence. Long before any disease or symptom appears, the body begins quietly losing specific cells: tendon cells, kidney cells, the stem cells that maintain muscle. Two atlases assembled by Junyue Cao's laboratory at Rockefeller University, built from more than 20 million mouse cells, show that this disappearance

Liquid AI has released LFM2.5-VL-3B, its most capable vision-language model to date, built for on-device and edge deployment. The 3.1-billion-parameter model uses a non-reasoning architecture that answers directly rather than generating chains of thought, keeping latency low for real-time applications. The company says it delivers vision performance competitive with models twice its size while running

On Sunday, August 16, DeepSeek will replace its flat per-token API pricing with peak and off-peak billing, the first time-based surcharge any Chinese AI lab has introduced and a sharp reversal for the company that built its global reputation on making frontier-adjacent intelligence almost free. The new rates, published on DeepSeek's official pricing page, raise

Google announced Gemini 3.7 Flash on Thursday, three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, which followed 3.5 Flash in July. Google described the new model as its most capable workhorse for coding and agents, built on developer feedback and algorithmic improvements rather than a full architectural overhaul. The headline improvements are in software engineering. On DeepSWE

President Donald Trump has signed a national security presidential memorandum that lets private cybersecurity firms conduct offensive operations against foreign criminal networks, moving a function long reserved for the federal government into commercial hands. The memorandum, first reported by Bloomberg, directs the National Coordination Center to establish a program in which vetted US companies can

Nine PBS, the public broadcaster serving St. Louis, is suing Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover a roughly 50-terabyte archive spanning more than 70 years of the station's history, after the cloud storage vendor it had contracted with went defunct and left the data stranded in a Denver facility. The case, filed in Denver District

For a generation, the path for China's brightest science students ran west: to the United States, to Britain, to Australia. The ticket was a degree from a famous university, and the prize was a career at the frontier of technology. That path is narrowing, and a growing number of the students who would have taken

Volodymyr Zelensky did two things in one speech on Tuesday night. He told the United States that Ukraine has handed over a written plan to end the war, and he warned that Russia is preparing to draft hundreds of thousands more men behind the cover of an election. He said in his evening address to

The police chief of Gaza City is dead. A drone fired three missiles into his car on Thursday in the Sheikh Ajleen neighborhood and killed him on the spot. The state that fired the drone called him a terrorist. Who, then, is the terrorist state now? Gaza's interior ministry identified the dead man as police

More than half of UK technology leaders now consider network resilience a business-critical issue, with outages expected to hit revenue, operations, or customers, according to research from internet provider Zen Business. The survey of 500 senior technology decision-makers, conducted by Censuswide, found that 51 percent describe network resilience as business critical and 94 percent say

Virgin Galactic is inviting the public to name its next spaceship. The company opened a vote on Tuesday for one of four finalist names for the first vehicle in its Delta class, the successor to the SpaceShipTwo line that carried founder Richard Branson and 31 other people on a dozen short suborbital hops. The poll

For the same narrow stretch of water, two governments now claim the same thing: total control. Washington says the United States owns the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran says the strait was never America's to own. Both statements cannot be true. Both are being made anyway. President Donald Trump started it on Wednesday on Truth Social,

The world is watching two wars while a third is fought without an audience. Sudan's war began in April 2023. It has taken at least 59,000 lives, driven around 13 million people from their homes, pushed large parts of the country into famine, and is now closing in on a city full of the displaced.

In an interview with CNN published on Thursday, Volodymyr Zelensky reduced the air war over Ukraine to arithmetic. Five percent of America's Patriot interceptor stock would get the country through the winter. Ten percent would finish the Russian ballistic missile threat altogether. Ukraine currently has one percent. Zelensky said that if the United States sold

Vladimir Putin has done what no Russian president did before him in the one place Japan still refuses to give up: he set foot on the islands. On Thursday the Russian president visited Iturup, the largest of the four Kuril islands Japan calls the Northern Territories, in his first-ever trip to the chain the Soviet

Every living cell on Earth descends from a single population of ancestors. Biologists call it LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, and the new question about it is not whether it existed, but how complete it was. A team led by researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf argues that LUCA carried a working genetic code

Stress and poor sleep were the strongest independent predictors of emotional eating in a nationwide study of 1,297 Greek university students, outranking sex, smoking, physical activity, and weight status. The findings treat emotional eating as a measurable health pattern with identifiable drivers, and the drivers are not what diet campaigns usually target. The behavior in

The protest arrived in the usual order. First the prime minister's statement, carefully worded, released to the press in the afternoon. Then the foreign minister's summons, and the Russian ambassador standing in a ministry office in Tokyo, being told what his president had done. Japan's answer to Vladimir Putin's first-ever visit to the disputed island

Somewhere between waking and deep sleep, the brain runs a relay race it repeats every night. A slow wave of electrical silence rolls across the cortex about once a second. Close behind it, a burst of faster activity, a spindle, rises from deep inside the brain. When the two rhythms lock together in exactly the

Researchers at UCSD and Oberlin College have built a gadget roughly the size of a coin that can take control of a Boeing 737's flight management systems after just a minute of physical access to the aircraft. The work, reported by Wired on August 12, is set to be unveiled at the Usenix Security Conference.

On Tuesday, Israeli forces arrested at least 23 Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, among them two children, one with a disability, and a man taken while he was grazing livestock in the northern Jordan Valley. In the village of Tal, southwest of Nablus, the family house of Farouq Ramadan was pulled down; Ramadan was

SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 on August 12, the latest iteration of its flagship model family, aimed squarely at software development and long-running AI agents. The company, formed after SpaceX absorbed xAI in June 2026, positions the release as a response to growing demand for models that can sustain complex multi-step tasks: researching a subject, moving

One Midbrain Hub, Two Jobs: The Neurons That Run REM Sleep and Wakefulness REM sleep has always been the odd one out. The dreaming brain hums almost as loudly as a waking one, the eyes sweep beneath closed lids, and the body switches off its own muscles so completely that researchers once called it paradoxical.

A new preprint from researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shows how fragile a large language model's grasp of the truth can be when someone argues with it. The authors demonstrate that a single targeted persuasive message, even one containing factually false claims, can flip a model's answer away from the correct one, in

The dead in Zaporizhzhia were steelworkers, all of them workers at the Zaporizhstal steelworks, which closed after the attack. At least six were killed and more than a dozen wounded in the overnight strike, and Volodymyr Zelensky has said what killed them: ballistic missiles from North Korea, fired by Russia. The plant's workers went to

The sharpest words in the West Bank this week came from the man least expected to say them. Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, a longtime friend of the settler movement who has spent decades defending Israeli claims to the occupied territory, looked at a group of Jewish settlers laying siege to an American

The answer to China's near-total control of the world's rare earths is, according to Washington and Tokyo, sitting in mud six kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean, next to an island roughly the area of a few city blocks. The two governments announced plans this week to develop deep-sea mining around Minamitorishima, a flat Japanese speck

Researchers at Dream, an Israeli cybersecurity firm, say they have documented what they describe as the first publicly known near-autonomous AI cyberattack on a government target. Over four days in early July, a multi-agent system built from open source AI frameworks compromised Taiwanese government systems, exfiltrated more than 2,500 personnel records, and expanded on its

Windows 11's August update is rolling out now, and while it is mostly a routine monthly patch, it carries one performance feature that users have been waiting for: faster app launches. The update landed on Tuesday as part of Microsoft's August Patch Tuesday release. The cumulative updates are KB5121003 for versions 24H2 and 25H2, KB5120240

The adult brain was long thought to answer injury with a scar: reactive cells pile up at the edge of damaged tissue, walling it off, and the lost territory is never reclaimed. A team at the University of Zurich has now watched a different outcome in living mice. When a small patch of the cerebral

North Korea fired a ballistic missile over the sea on Wednesday morning, its second launch in less than a week, and the military exercise that Pyongyang is presumably answering has not even started. Seoul's military tracked the launch from the Wonsan area on the North's east coast at about 6 a.m., with the weapon arcing

China's Yangtze Memory Technologies accounted for 14 percent of global NAND flash shipments during the April-to-June quarter of 2026, enough to put it in the global top three by volume for the first time and to push Kioxia down a spot, according to industry research reported by Tom's Hardware and TechPowerUp. AI demand has reshaped

Israel's defense minister drove through the demolished villages of southern Lebanon on Wednesday and told the army to plan for a long occupation. Israel Katz, touring the strip of Lebanese territory his country has held since the spring, said the troops would stay, not for months but indefinitely, and that the same applied to Syria

A quarter-century-old tanker outside the world's insurance system is emptying its cargo into the Arabian Sea, and the oil has reached Oman's shore. The Caroline Bezengi, carrying about 800,000 barrels of Russian crude under international sanctions, ran aground off Oman on June 30. Satellite measurement puts its slick at more than 2,000 square kilometers (about

China's national science foundation has quietly added the one field Beijing protects most carefully to its cooperation program with Iran: the extraction and processing of rare earths. The announcement, made this week, puts the strategically sensitive metals on the agenda of the annual joint workshops the Chinese and Iranian science foundations run together, alongside such

The EU, joined by 26 governments including France, Britain and Canada, published a joint statement on Wednesday condemning the executions of protesters in Iran in the strongest terms the signatories could find. The statement was released through Canada's foreign ministry and announced by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot. The statement said the use of capital

The Y chromosome is the one piece of the mammalian genome that most people assume is indispensable for making a male. A team of Japanese researchers has now shown it can simply be deleted. In a preprint posted August 4, scientists at RIKEN, the University of Yamanashi and Asahikawa Medical University report that a single