Short visual explainers of the tech you use, plus a curated daily feed of AI and tech news.
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Picked each morning and explained in plain language, with a link to the original reporting.
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Eight areas of technology, each one explained from the basics up.
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Short Reels that show how the tech behind your apps works, one idea at a time.
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One short email with an explainer to watch and the story worth knowing about.
Story of the Day
Researchers left copies of Claude Opus 4.7 alone on a simulated island for 30 hours, able to move an avatar by writing instructions. The agents set their own goals, invented games and kept notes in files that acted as long-term memory. Agents that had played later performed better on set tasks than fresh copies, suggesting undirected play can aid learning.
MIT Technology Review
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MIT Technology Review
A polygraph tracks body signals such as heart rate and breathing, on the theory that lying changes them. The Pentagon's proposed Polygraph+ program would score those signals with machine learning and add standoff sensing, which reads those signals without touching the person. Experts are skeptical, since a racing pulse can signal nerves as easily as a lie, and tech-based lie detection has a long record of failure.
MIT Technology Review
Moore's Law, the long trend of packing more transistors onto chips, has slowed, and other scaling laws for power, storage and fiber are flattening too. Big gains now come from building larger data centers, with six major cloud companies on track to spend over $700 billion this year. These are engineering trends rather than physical limits, and physics still leaves room for denser computing.
heise online
Agility Robotics' next humanoid, Digit 5, will use lightweight batteries from Nyobolt that charge in about nine minutes and then power roughly 90 minutes of work. That 10-to-1 ratio is far better than Digit 4's 2-to-1, letting the robot work more than 20 hours a day instead of spending a third of its time charging. First customers should get the robot in the first half of 2027.
XDA
Linux 7.3, released by Linus Torvalds on Sunday, includes a fix for AMD graphics cards with little video memory that was first spotted by a Valve engineer in April. The kernel now handles that memory in a way that can improve gaming performance on older cards. The release also opens the merge window for Linux 7.4.
Cult of Mac
Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, splits its battery into two cells, with one in each side of the device, to make room around the hinge. The design gives it more capacity than the iPhone 18 Pro but less than the Pro Max, and Apple says a compatible 60W charger can reach 50 percent in about 20 minutes. The larger folding screen will still draw more power than the outside display.
