FRIDAY, 06 FEBRUARY 2026, 04:46
The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams. Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission’s size, it said. The...
A team of geologists found for the first time evidence linking regions of low seismic velocity and the shape of the Earth’s magnetic field.
A federal court in California has ruled that YouTube creators who use stream-ripping tools to download clips for reaction and commentary videos may face liability under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions — a decision that could reshape how one of the platform’s most popular content genres operates. U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi of the Northern District of California denied a...
The company reported a strong holiday quarter on Thursday. But its big spending on things like artificial intelligence and satellites is starting to make investors nervous.
Founders used to be wedded to their companies. Now, anyone can be lured away for the right price.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has announced that astronauts on the upcoming Crew-12 and Artemis II missions will be allowed to carry iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and to the Moon — a reversal of long-standing agency rules that had left crews relying on a 2016 Nikon DSLR and decade-old GoPros for the historic lunar flyby. Isaacman framed the move as part of a broader push...
Despite strong support from the White House, the price of Bitcoin is now lower than when President Trump was elected in 2024.
Moscow’s forces fighting in Ukraine are experiencing outages on the front, Russian military bloggers said, days after Elon Musk said his satellite service had cut them off.
ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn’t built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules.
Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity supply: chip output is growing exponentially, and electrical output outside China is essentially flat. Solar...
Automattic and the Internet Archive have released a free, open-source WordPress plugin that automatically detects broken outbound links on a site and redirects visitors to archived Wayback Machine copies instead of serving them a 404 error. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, which launched last fall and is available on WordPress.org, runs in the background scanning posts for dead...
An ape was able to identify the location of imaginary objects in pretend scenarios, researchers find
Whether it’s playing at being doctors or hosting a toy’s tea party, children are adept at engaging in make-believe – now researchers say bonobos can do it too.
While there have been anecdotal reports of apes using imaginary objects, including apparently dragging pretend blocks across the floor,...
Brain activity suggests newborns can detect and predict patterns relating to rhythm, study says
Newborn babies can anticipate rhythm in pieces of music, researchers have discovered, offering insights into a fundamental human trait.
Babies in the womb begin to respond to music by about eight or nine months, as shown by changes in their heart rate and body movements, said Dr Roberta Bianco, the...
.png)
These swoon-worthy deals on WIRED-tested date night boxes, sex toys, and other gadgets will make your Valentine’s Day extra sweet.
A recent report found that carbon emissions caused by the Milano Cortina Olympics could lead to the loss of 5.5 square kilometers of snowpack and millions of metric tons of glacial ice.
The new book The Wall Dancers explores the uneasy relationship between Chinese internet users and a government that is always watching.
Upgrade to a full day of battery life and new health features.
Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company’s AI tools have already spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors. The new model improves on Opus 4.5’s coding abilities, the company said — it plans more carefully, sustains longer agentic tasks, handles larger codebases more...
Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the 2030s. The vertical laser, developed over six years and already working in WD’s labs, emits light straight down...
Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the creative process. Amazon plans to launch a...
‘Giveaway’ competitions on WhatsApp and Telegram for retatrutide and other drugs described as ‘extremely dangerous’
Hidden-market promoters of weight-loss drugs are running social media “giveaway” competitions that offer powerful, unlicensed medicines as prizes.
The Guardian has been monitoring WhatsApp and Telegram groups promoting substances such as retatrutide – a medicine unlicensed in...