Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today , and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. There's Microsoft Scout , an OpenClaw-based "Autopilot" agent that can hook into Microsoft 365 data to perform tasks for users; several new AI models ; an expanded preview of " Codename MDASH ," which is a "multi-model agentic scanning system" meant to detect and fix software vulnerabilities.

A few of those announcements stood out to us as particularly interesting, either for esoteric technical reasons or because they seem like they may have some utility for those who aren't spending their every waking moment using generative AI tools. (Microsoft's recent efforts to make its flagship operating system faster, more reliable, more useful, and less annoying didn't really come up, but there have been plenty of other announcements on that front lately .)

On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday's Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is "a compact developer PC" built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory.

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Microsoft has been deeply committed to the growth of generative AI technology in recent years through its now-fragmented partnership with OpenAI. At Build 2026, the company remains all-in on AI, and it's looking toward the future with a new software platform. The new Android-based OS is called Project Solara, and Microsoft says Solara is designed to run agents instead of apps.

Project Solara is not something you'll have to worry about killing your apps anytime soon. It's limited to a few pieces of concept hardware and software that are awaiting the magical agents of the future. The vision is for Solara to run on myriad specialized devices with interfaces generated on the spot, and it's all powered by the explosive intelligence of models that Microsoft and others insist will soon exist.

According to Microsoft , Solara is a chip-to-cloud platform intended to free agents from reliance on single interfaces. Much of Microsoft's messaging around AI is speculative and self-serving, but the company rightly points out that new computing form factors have always required specialization, and that process is complex and expensive. The shift to mobile computing, for example, tripped Microsoft up multiple times as it fell behind on app availability, security, and long-term support.

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A lawsuit against Amazon is seeking financial damages for millions of Americans whose faces may have been recorded by Ring cameras since the Familiar Faces feature was rolled out late last year.

Plaintiff Charles Sigwalt yesterday filed a class action suit that aims to represent all people in the US "who had their facial recognition data collected, retained, and otherwise used by the Familiar Faces feature created and implemented by Defendant." The lawsuit will seek "far" more than $5 million, but the $5 million figure was given in the complaint because US district courts have jurisdiction for civil actions seeking at least that amount.

"Here, there are millions of Americans who have walked by Ring cameras which have activated the Familiar Faces feature... the damages in this action far exceed $5,000,000.00 when calculating the statutory damages that may be owed to each Class member in addition to the actual damages caused by the aggregate loss of value of biometric information," the lawsuit said.

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One way archaeologists learn how ancient people, including Neanderthals, did things is to attempt to do those things themselves, a process called experimental archaeology. Normally, that involves making stone tools, butchering deer, or distilling birch tar. But in a new study, it meant doing very destructive things to teeth from one of the world’s most carefully protected animals.

That's because the archeologists suspected that Neanderthals once used rhino teeth as tools. By using the teeth to make stone tools, the researchers demonstrated that Neanderthals probably did the same thing, adding to what we know about the wide range of items in their toolkits.

We need to hit some rhino teeth with rocks for science

Some Neanderthal archaeological sites in Europe and Asia seem to have many more rhinoceros teeth lying around than you’d expect. We know Neanderthals hunted a now-extinct species of rhinoceros in Europe and eastern Asia, but the people who had inhabited these sites looked like they had been collecting rhino teeth for some reason.

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In December, the Trump administration abruptly announced it would shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a Boulder, Colorado-based facility that helps researchers perform studies of weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and more. The news came as a shock, given that the government had never identified serious deficiencies in the management of NCAR and its associated supercomputing center in Wyoming.

Nevertheless, the government ordered the University Consortium for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation, to help it prepare to transfer the Wyoming to a different operator. UCAR sued the government and, on Monday, won a preliminary injunction that places the transfer of the facility on hold.

Is that your final decision?

NCAR is what is termed a "Federally-Funded Research and Development Center" meant to support researchers in the academic community. Rather than having its own research agenda, it provides facilities, equipment, and expertise to support projects that are too large or complex for researchers to pursue on their own. NCAR has been around since the early 1960s and has become a critical resource for the global atmospheric science community.

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Mathematicians warned against rising tech industry influence in a declaration describing the many challenges that AI poses to mathematics research. The timing of the declaration comes two weeks after OpenAI publicized one of its AI models as having disproved an 80-year-old mathematical conjecture in geometry.

The declaration was developed by a working group of 16 researchers over eight months following a conference held at Leiden University in the Netherlands in September 2025. Published on June 2, 2026, the resulting Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics has been endorsed by the International Mathematical Union—the international non-governmental organization that hosts conferences and oversees the most prestigious prizes in mathematics such as the Fields Medal .

“Mathematicians should find it quite striking that tech companies are suddenly interested in their work,” said Kevin Buzzard , a mathematician at Imperial College London, in a statement . “The Leiden Declaration is a well-thought-through response to what is currently happening, as AI continues to disrupt this space.”

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We're expecting Android 17 to begin rolling out later this month, but first, Google has a batch of updates for the wider Android device ecosystem. As usual, some of the new features are limited to specific devices, and others require using Google's apps. But if you don't mind the latter, you can get automated protection from the growing threat of deepfake phone scams.

According to Google, "impersonation fraud" is one of the most common types of financial scams. The FTC tracked almost $3 billion in losses from such scams during 2024, and the improvements in AI voice cloning tools more recently are making the schemes easier to pull off. The voice models are becoming so capable that it can be difficult to identify a fake caller even when an AI is imitating someone you talk to every day.

Google's solution is an expansion of the system it debuted last month for verified financial calls. Now, a similar feature will work with anyone in your contacts. Many of the most effective deepfake scams involve spoofing a contact's number, which makes the call look more legitimate when your phone lights up. Victims of these scams are then greeted by an accurate re-creation of the person's voice spinning a yarn that involves an urgent need for cash.

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In April, we got a short teaser for the third season of Silo , the critically acclaimed Apple TV series based on the trilogy by novelist Hugh Howey, which hinted at a mysterious origin story dating back centuries. Apple TV just released the full trailer, and it looks like our heroine is again facing conflict and danger because she just keeps asking so many inconvenient questions.

As previously reported , Silo is set in a self-sustaining underground city inhabited by a community whose recorded history dates back only 140 years. The outside is a toxic hellscape that is only visible on big screens in the silo’s topmost level. The second season expanded Silo ‘s world to incorporate the survivors in the second Silo 17; everyone else died in a revolt to escape to the surface. We discovered that there are 50 silos in all. Meanwhile, another revolution was brewing in Juliette’s (Rebecca Ferguson) original Silo 18 against Holland (Tim Robbins). And even more secrets were revealed.

In the season finale, Juliette returned to her silo and warned the residents not to leave, but she and Holland ended up locked in the incinerator just as it was being fired up. The final scene was a flashback, showing a woman questioning a congressman in Washington, DC, about possible retaliation after the US dropped a dirty bomb on Iran. And that brings us to S3. Per the official premise:

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The estimated size of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has fallen by hundreds of cases as outbreak response efforts have ramped up and increased testing has ruled out illnesses.

On Tuesday, a representative for the World Health Organization confirmed to Reuters that Congolese authorities are now reporting 437 cases in the DRC, including 321 confirmed cases and 116 suspected. That's a significant difference from the case count the WHO relayed Friday , which totaled 1,041 cases, including 135 confirmed cases and 906 suspected. Over the weekend, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Jean Kaseya, also wrote in an op-ed that there were more than 1,100 suspected cases.

The number of deaths has also been lowered to 48 confirmed deaths. On Friday, the WHO had reported 241 deaths, including 18 confirmed and 223 suspected.

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