“I don’t want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant,” Elon Musk said on the Lex Fridman podcast. “There’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes.” The wires on Neuralink’s first human brain implant retracted, resulting in fewer electrodes that could measure brain signals. 10 more implants could come before the end of this year if regulators approve.
8
Verge Score
A selfie drone that makes the case for ditching GPS, obstacle avoidance, and controllers.
Several recent studies found an association between eating “ultraprocessed foods” — made with ingredients not found in a home kitchen — and cognitive decline. New preliminary research presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference suggests that regularly eating processed meats like hot dogs, bacon, and bologna increases the risk of developing dementia later in life.
The study tracked more than 130,000 adults in the United States for up to 43 years. During that period, 11,173 people developed dementia. Those who consumed about two servings of processed red meat per week had a 14 percent greater risk of developing dementia compared to those who ate fewer than three servings per month.
Conversely, eating unprocessed red meat did not significantly increase the risk for dementia.
[The New York Times]
There’s no official confirmation, but the app — which has been abandoned before — has been delisted from the Mac App Store. It’s still functional, although it’s been increasingly buggy since the transition to X. It remains one of the last vestiges of Twitter iconography and terminology which I’ll memorialize in the grab below.
Update: The Mac app now prompts users to “upgrade” to the iPad version of X, which is a worse experience.
Following yesterday’s more colorful iPhone 16 leak, we now have the Pro “dummies” showing up in three titanium colors. It’s also rumored to come in a “rose titanium” hue, as 9to5Mac points out.
In what’s become an annual tradition, we now have the non-working iPhone 16 “dummy units” — created for case and accessory makers — from perennial leaker Sonny Dickson. In addition to showing the new colors, we can also see the camera bump aligned vertically in what should be the final size and shape of the device Apple announces this fall.
We already knew that AI chip demand was driving crazy profits for Samsung. That’s good, because its earnings report shows that smartphone revenue and profitability both declined since last quarter, even as new AI features — it claims — helped buoy demand for its latest flagship devices:
The Galaxy S24 series achieved double-digit year-on-year growth in both shipments and revenue over its predecessor for both the second quarter and the first half of the year.
In the second half of 2024, Samsung says overall demand for its smartphones is expected to increase year-on-year, alongside “ecosystem products such as tablets, smartwatches, and smart rings.”
AES has given its Atlas solar robot some AWS smarts and redubbed it “Maximo.” It helped complete an Amazon-backed solar farm in Louisiana and is now moving on to Bellefield, California, home of the largest solar-plus-storage project in the US. According to Amazon, it can “reduce solar installation timelines and costs by as much 50 percent:”
Besides automating heavy lifting, Maximo can also perform in nearly any weather or lighting condition, which is especially useful for the Bellefield project, which is located in a sandy desert area known for extreme heat. Once Maximo arrives there later this year, the robot will work alongside crews to lift hundreds of heavy solar panels into place.
The Financial Times takes a look at the latest generation of shoes with carbon-fiber plates that have helped deliver an uptick in record-smashing long-distance performances ever since the Nike Vaporfly was released in 2017. Other brands are now catching up with their own shoe tech:
Nike and Adidas are not the only brands with super shoes. Asics, New Balance, On, Puma, Saucony and Under Armour have all developed competitive models with carbon fibre and springlike foam cushioning.
The piece includes CT scans and independent analysis of the latest Nike and Adidas models worn by many of the top Olympians in Paris.
The issue impacting Safari users began late Thursday night, according to 9to5Mac, and is still impacting “some users” — myself included — globally. Try turning it off in settings if the browser seems stuck.
