A BIOS update for the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040-series processors is bricking the systems, multiple users have reported online.

Framework started shipping pre-built Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 computers and compatible motherboards in 2023. In June 2026, Framework released BIOS 3.20 for the devices. The update adds mainboard support for features, including a haptic touchpad and new speakers, for the higher-end Framework Laptop 13 Pro and fixes issues, including one “where the Battery Extender status was reported incorrectly following a reboot, hibernation, or shutdown after the timer had expired," per a post on Framework’s forum from an employee.

Some users say that they installed the update successfully.

Read full article

Comments

Last Friday, Google won an auction to acquire a huge amount of Spirit Airlines data.

The data doesn’t include personal information or customer data, but instead nearly covers the airline's entire employment and workplace record.

To ensure that no individual can be identified in the dataset, Google agreed to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a process to strip any personally identifying information (PII) from the data before it’s transferred to Google. Under the deal, Google agreed to maintain the data in this de-identified form and to never intentionally re-identify the data. And if Google sells access to the data, third parties would supposedly be bound by the same terms.

Read full article

Comments

The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such speeds for years, the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not "technologically neutral," suggesting that it isn't fair to other, slower technologies.

In 2024, the FCC raised its broadband benchmark to 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream, setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely. The FCC at the time also set a long-term speed goal of 1Gbps download speeds paired with 500Mbps upload speeds, saying it would use the goal “as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment.”

Republican Brendan Carr, who is now the FCC chairman, never liked that long-term goal. He proposed abolishing it last year, and the change was finalized on August 14 in the FCC's latest broadband deployment report . The reports are mandated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act.

Read full article

Comments

It has been a little more than a month since China recovered an orbital-class rocket booster for the first time. A second launch operator accomplished a similar feat Tuesday in another sign of China's growing launch capability.

It took 10 years for a second US launch company, Blue Origin, to propulsively land an orbital-class booster after SpaceX did it with the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015. SpaceX has since added a second reusable rocket to its fleet with Starship and its Super Heavy booster. Perhaps a third American company will join SpaceX and Blue Origin's club in 2027. Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Relativity Space, and Firefly Aerospace—working in partnership with Northrop Grumman—are working on reusable rockets that could make their first flights in the next couple of years.

A similar number of launch companies are working on reusable rockets in China. Some of them operate under the auspices of the sprawling state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). Others are more commercial in nature, driven by capital investment from private industry.

Read full article

Comments

In June, we highlighted a behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of Wildwood , director Travis Knight’s forthcoming stop-motion animated fantasy film. Laika Studios released an extended teaser in May, which racked up over 90 million views. And now we've got the gorgeous full trailer, set to a haunting cover of Avicii's " Wake Me Up ."

The film is an adaptation of the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy—frontman of indie folk-rock band The Decemberists—and his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis. Meloy and Ellis live in Portland, Oregon, near Forest Park, where they often hike the trails. In Wildwood , they transformed that local landmark into a magical hidden world filled with talking animals and lurking threats, only accessible to people of The Wood—and select Outsider “half-breeds.”

Twelve-year-old Prue McKee discovers the forest while out walking with her baby brother, Mac. A murder of crows swoops down and carries him away, and Prue discovers the Wilderness while hunting for him. Her schoolmate, Curtis Mehlberg, follows her, and both are able to enter that magical world. Fantastical adventures ensue as the pair encounter a mysterious woman, Alexandra, who has lost her son, along with coyotes, bandits, and some pretty big secrets.

Read full article

Comments

Pharmaceutical partners Moderna and Merck announced on Wednesday that their novel mRNA-based vaccine—individually tailored to target a patient's unique cancer mutations—was effective in a late-stage clinical trial of patients with melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer.

The announcement was scant on details, but if the success holds, it stands to realize the high aspirations for both mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines in cancer therapy, providing a first success for both treatment types.

The Phase 3 trial included 1,137 patients who had stage IIB–IV melanoma that had been surgically removed prior to their treatment in the trial. Patients were randomized two-to-one to receive either a combination treatment of the tailored mRNA vaccine (intismeran or mRNA-4157) with Merck's established monoclonal antibody cancer treatment Keytruda, or they received treatment with Keytruda alone. Both patient groups were treated for about a year. The trial was placebo-controlled and double-blind, meaning neither the doctors nor the patients knew which treatment patients were randomly assigned to receive.

Read full article

Comments

Google's approach to making smartphones has changed a lot over the years. It started with Nexus phones aimed at the tinkerer and enthusiast niche back when there were countless companies making smartphones. Today, there are far fewer, and Google's hyper-polished Pixel lineup is seeing less competition and higher sales. So maybe Google thinks it can just keep doing what works. The new Pixel 11 series is Google's most refined yet, featuring sleek designs, smart software, and incredible screens. They're also rather boring.

Google made precious few hardware changes in its 2026 phones, shaving off a fraction of a millimeter here and dropping a gram there. The design language has been the same now for three generations, all while prices continue to inch upward. And this year, Google's hardware has actually regressed in a few key areas. Despite that, the Pixel 11 phones aren't bad—they're some of the best 2026 has to offer. But it feels like Google is forgetting that it's not just competing against Apple and Samsung. It also has to compete against the Pixels of yesteryear.

The same old (but great) design

Just like last year's Pixel 10 series , Google's 2026 lineup includes three flat phones and one foldable. The flat Pixels are the same size, and even side-by-side, it's hard to tell them apart from their predecessors. We've got almost identical aluminum and glass sandwich designs, which do admittedly look very nice. They still have Pixelsnap, too.

Read full article

Comments

Sgr A* is the name we've given to the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way. We've known about its presence since the 1970s but only managed to image it within the past few years. In the intervening time, most of our understanding of the object was obtained by watching a group of stars that orbit the black hole, helping us get a good estimate of its mass and size. In essence, those stars acted as instruments that let us peer into an environment we couldn't study any other way.

In Wednesday's issue of Nature, researchers describe a recently discovered star that is on an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it closer to Sgr A* than anything we've previously identified. It gets so close that it may help us get our first measurements of the spin of the black hole.

Reading the spin

There's an entire population of stars that orbit relatively close to Sgr A*. We can estimate their mass based on their brightness and spectral features. Using their masses and a reconstruction of their orbits using several years of data, we can figure out just how supermassive Sgr A* is (nearly 10 ³⁷ kilograms).

Read full article

Comments

Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material. It’s the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its platforms.

The tool, which is called Kromix, bills itself as an “AI image styler.” A voice-over for one of the video advertisements, viewed by WIRED, promotes the tool as having “no restrictions,” saying “all the characters are real people” and describing it as “the AI that men actually use.” In one ad, a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician is seen in front of a US flag and the flag of the president of the US above the caption “What if she moved?” She then winks, before the ad cuts to a scene of a woman with the same face performing in a pornographic video.

The Kromix app, which was hosted by Apple’s App Store prior to a request for comment from WIRED, invites paid users to upload photos so that it can use them in scenarios including “bedroom rape” and “Disney love.” Videos on the app also feature AI-generated pornographic videos of women wearing Spider-Man costumes. Requests for comment sent to a contact listed in the app went unanswered.

Read full article

Comments