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Infrasound describes sound wave frequencies below 20 Hz, which are typically imperceptible to humans. Some animals perceive and demonstrate aversion to infrasound, raising concerns about its potential adverse effects as an anthropogenic pollutant. Recent research suggests humans may also respond to infrasound, despite being below the conventional limit of human hearing. This study explored the non-auditory impact of infrasound on human mood and stress responding.
HARLINGEN, Texas (ValleyCentral) — SpaceX is one step closer to expanding operations near the Port of Brownsville after the Brownsville City Commission approved a first reading of an ordinance disannexing hundreds of acres of land in Cameron County.
SpaceX representatives have told the city of Brownsville that the land will not be used for rocket launches or testing.
“I think they want to have some proximity to the port,” said Brownsville City Manager Alan Guard. “It’s also going to be next to a property that’s being developed by Lindy Corporation, which produces gases that SpaceX use. So, there may be some collaboration with one of their suppliers. But that’s what we know.”
The grades themselves are not the sharpest part of this AI safety index. Reviewers flagged that Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta, the four highest-scoring labs, have all weakened or quietly dropped earlier public pledges to pause development if their systems approached defined risk thresholds, a shift the panel described as moving the goalposts, according to TechTimes’ reporting. Existential safety was the weakest domain across every single lab graded, with no company scoring above C-and Anthropic’s D+ representing the best result in that category industry-wide. See our analysis where we explain why the EU AI Act’s enforcement teeth arrived right as containment failures piled up this summer.
Enterprise buyers and policy teams should treat published safety frameworks as marketing.— AI Weekly, analysis of the Summer 2026 AI Safety Index
⚠ Fiction — illustrative scenario: A procurement team shortlists two AI vendors for a sensitive workload, checking that both publish a safety framework and treating the existence of one as sufficient diligence. A closer read of the published pause-pledge language reveals it now contains a competitor-contingent clause, meaning the commitment only holds if rivals make the same promise. The framework exists. What it actually guarantees turned out to be much thinner than the procurement checklist assumed.
Astronomers may have uncovered an entirely new cosmic object: a gigantic “black hole star” that could explain the mysterious red dots filling the early universe. Astronomers from MIT and other institutions have identified an exceptionally bright red object dating back to the early universe. At first glance, it resembles an enormous star with dimensions comparable to our solar system. Its energy output, however, is extraordinary. The object is producing roughly 100 billion times more energy than any known star could physically generate, putting its power much closer to the levels associated with black holes.
That unusual combination has led researchers to propose that the red object represents an entirely new kind of astrophysical source. They are calling it a “black hole star.”
A study published on August 12 in Nature describes the object and the team’s analysis of observations made with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope detected the bright red dot in the very early universe, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Among the many predictions about the future of artificial intelligence is that models will one day be able to conduct scientific research on their own, leaving humans out of the equation. Already, they can write code, run experiments and search scientific literature, but carrying out open-ended research would require a significant leap in ability.
In a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, researchers tested AI’s ability to conduct open-ended research and found that it came up short.
Putting AI to the test The study authors gave frontier agents (cutting-edge, state-of-the-art AI tools designed to carry out complex, multistep tasks autonomously) six days to conduct research and write papers based on two then-unpublished AI conference submissions. This ensured they couldn’t just find the answers online.
