AI opens new era in cognitive studies of wild primates
Scientists developed CapuchinAI, an AI system using facial recognition and real-time touchscreen testing to automate cognitive studies of wild capuchin monkeys. The proof-of-concept method was published in the American Journal of Primatology by researchers from Emory University and Georgia Tech.
AMD Releases Instella-MoE-16B-A3B: A Fully Open Mixture-of-Experts LLM With 2.8B Active Parameters Trained On Instinct GPUs
AMD released Instella-MoE-16B-A3B, a Mixture-of-Experts language model with 16 billion total parameters that activates only 2.8 billion per token. The model was trained on Instinct MI300X and MI325X GPUs with published weights from every training stage, data mixtures, configs, and inference code.
Yealimi Noh leads Women’s Open by three shots after Ryu Hae-ran stumbles
Yealimi Noh leads the Women's Open by three shots after Ryu Hae-ran surrendered a four-shot lead during the third round at Royal Lytham and St Annes. Ryu held her advantage through the fourth hole and again at the 7th tee before collapsing to finish three shots behind Noh.
Accelerating Transformer Training with NVIDIA Transformer Engine, Fused Kernels, BF16, FP8, and GPU Benchmarking
The NVIDIA Transformer Engine uses fused GPU kernels and FP8 delayed scaling to optimize transformer workloads. The tutorial provides PyTorch code examples for training GPT-style causal language models with BF16 and FP8 precision formats.
Four ways wildfires generate tornadoes, lightning and other extreme weather, sometimes miles from the flames
Wildfires create thick smoke that spreads across North America and Europe, generating tornadoes, lightning, and other extreme weather sometimes miles from the flames. The mechanisms behind these phenomena remain less widely recognized than the health impacts of breathing particle-filled air from massive fires.
Blowing Bubbles Allows Sperm Whales to Sleep Soundly Beneath the Waves, Reveals Study
Sperm whales blow bubbles while sleeping underwater to prevent themselves from floating to the surface. Researchers believe the whales nap for 10 to 15 minute intervals beneath the waves.
Wiebes outsprints Le Court and Vollering to win Tour de France Femmes opening stage
Lorena Wiebes won the opening stage of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes after climbing the Côte Saint-François and outsprinting Kim Le Court and Demi Vollering. Wiebes took the first yellow jersey following her sprint victory on the stage.
DeFI Exploits : Crypto Hacker Spends $4M to Drain $20M from BonkDAO’s Treasury, No Smart Contract Failed
A crypto attacker spent $4 million to acquire voting power in BonkDAO and passed a malicious governance proposal, draining $20 million from the treasury. No smart contract vulnerability was exploited; instead, the attack relied on low participation levels during the governance voting period.
Digital Assets ETFs Market Cap Tops $184 Billion
Digital assets ETFs reached a market capitalization exceeding $184 billion. The expansion has occurred steadily over the past three years.
NASA’s Curiosity rover finds a mysterious honeycomb landscape on Mars
Curiosity rover discovered a landscape on Mars covered in tiny polygon-shaped fractures forming honeycomb patterns, each measuring only a few inches wide. The patterns extend across the valley and surround a nearby 20-foot-tall butte.
Ant brains reveal how evolution turned hunger into parenting
Two chemical signals in ant brains control whether ants care for larvae or forage for food, with their balance shifting as ants age. Clonal raider ants demonstrate that the same brain systems regulating hunger in mammals may have been repurposed by evolution to drive parenting behavior.
South Korea’s 22% Crypto Tax Crashes Trading Volume
South Korea implemented a 22% cryptocurrency tax beginning in 2027 while trading volume on its five major exchanges declined nearly 55% during the first half of the year. The tax rate applies to crypto gains classified as other income under the country's tax system.
Eating one avocado a day may lower heart disease risk
Daily avocado consumption lowered LDL particle count in obese adults over six months. The reduction correlated with an estimated 4% decrease in cardiovascular risk.
Scientists may have found a way to prevent statin muscle pain
Scientists identified an immune response that may explain why statins cause muscle pain and weakness in some patients. This discovery could lead to treatments that protect muscles while preserving statins' cardiovascular benefits.
3iQ Corp Named Institutional Manager of Bhutan’s Bitcoin Reserves
3iQ Corp, a Toronto-based firm, was appointed to manage Gelephu Mindfulness City's Bitcoin reserves as its first institutional treasury manager. The appointment represents a transition from passive Bitcoin accumulation to active management of the digital asset holdings.
Zynga’s founder shares 6 mindsets for building billion-dollar products
Mark Pincus identifies six mindsets for building successful products, emphasizing that staying playful, testing ideas without attachment, and remaining grounded in purpose improve chances of creating lasting products. He describes "life at the speed of play" as a light, fun approach to turning ideas into products, enabled by advances in AI, robotics, and automation.
Superheated magma may power towering lava fountains
Superheated magma can dissolve crystal seeds that normally trigger crystallization, keeping molten rock fluid longer during eruption. This mechanism was discovered in magma from La Palma's 2021 Tajogaite eruption and may explain how extreme heat creates towering lava fountains.
XRP Ledger upgrade brings back features once pulled over critical bugs
The xrpld 3.3.0 release includes five proposed amendments with two revised features previously withdrawn due to bugs allowing unauthorized transactions or fee draining. The upgrade is expected next week and restores functionality that had been removed following critical security vulnerabilities discovered by researchers.
Can Africa Power the AI Boom?
Africa is becoming a destination for data centers due to its appeal for cloud infrastructure investment and development. Energy availability and sustainability practices will be critical factors determining whether the continent can support the digital infrastructure expansion that AI demands.
FIFA scraps World Cup sell-off plan after backlash
FIFA abandoned its proposal to sell equity stakes in the World Cup following significant opposition from member nations and European countries threatening boycotts. President Gianni Infantino withdrew the plan after internal resistance from within the organization proved substantial.
Run a free, private, offline AI on your computer to handle repetitive tasks
Desktop applications like LM Studio and Jan.ai enable users to run lightweight open-source AI models such as Llama 3.2 3B locally on Mac or Windows computers without internet connection. No data leaves the user's device while the software handles repetitive text tasks like editing, formatting, and summarization.
OpenAI Reaches 1 Billion Active Users as AI Becomes Daily Habit
OpenAI's models reached over 1 billion active users and more than 2 million businesses. Users deploy AI more frequently and deeply as they gain confidence with the technology over time.
Fed Moves to Give Mutual Banks More Flexibility to Raise Capital
The Federal Reserve proposed updating rules for mutual banks that have remained unchanged since 1993, aiming to reduce regulatory burden and increase capital-raising flexibility. The updated rules would replace regulations the Fed described as overly burdensome and complex for these banking organizations.
Superapp Review: I Built an iOS App With One Prompt
An AI tool called Superapp generates native iOS apps written in Swift and SwiftUI from text prompts describing desired functionality. The system allows users to create applications without traditional coding knowledge or development experience.
Fifa scraps proposal to sell off stakes in World Cup after widespread backlash
FIFA withdrew its proposal to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors after global backlash and threats of tournament boycotts from confederations including UEFA. President Gianni Infantino stated the plan "will not proceed" after creating divisions that no longer served FIFA's objectives.
What’s Up: August 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA
A solar eclipse, the Perseid meteor shower, bright evening Venus, and a deep partial lunar eclipse occur in August 2026. The lunar eclipse closes the month while Venus reaches peak brightness in the evening sky.
Google Rolls Back Earth AI Tool Over Concern About Fake Images
Google is rolling back an AI image generation feature in Google Earth because users created altered satellite imagery that violated company policies. The tool allowed people to generate fake images that looked like authentic satellite photographs.
DeepSeek Upgrades DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 with Major Agentic and Coding Gains
Re-post-training upgraded DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 with improved agentic and coding capabilities while maintaining unchanged architecture and size. The model moved to public beta API on July 31, 2026, as the official release superseding the preview version.
Project Agorá Cuts Cross-Border Payment Times to 80 Seconds
Project Agorá demonstrated that tokenized wholesale cross-border payments settle in approximately 80 seconds from initiation to completion. The Bank for International Settlements conducted real-value testing of this technology in July within a controlled environment.
AI Gives Cybersecurity a Backlog CFOs and CISOs Can’t Patch Away
AI systems are identifying software vulnerabilities at unprecedented speeds that human researchers cannot match, overwhelming organizations' capacity to remediate them. Companies lack sufficient resources to process and patch the massive volume of discovered flaws faster than new ones are being detected.