Meta has filed a patent application for an AI that listens to your voice throughout the day, works out how it thinks you are feeling from the way you sound, and keeps a timestamped log of every read.
Each read gets pinned to the moment it happened: the time, your location, what you were doing, even how you were using your phone. Some versions in the filing would listen all day; others would check in only at set times.
None of these ships in a product today, and Meta has not announced one; a filing like this stakes a claim on an idea long before anyone commits to building it.
Sam Altman has repeatedly suggested that today’s smartphones are not the ideal interface for advanced AI. The ambition is to create what some observers describe as an “AI-native” device—one that could eventually become as important as the smartphone itself.
Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing trade secrets as it seeks to build its own hardware for ChatGPT, a major rupture in a partnership between the iPhone maker and the artificial intelligence company.
Apple said in the lawsuit filed in a California federal court that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees it was recruiting to share confidential information, even guiding how to avoid scrutiny when taking jobs at the other company.
“This case is about Apple’s former employees stealing Apple’s trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI,” the filing says. “Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it.”
A new study led by MIT researchers could drive the development of more energy-efficient digital displays—such as flat-screen TVs, augmented and virtual reality headsets, smartphone screens, medical imaging devices and even large-area ambient lighting surfaces—that also generate richer, brighter colors.
The MIT scientists, in collaboration with researchers at Samsung, studied the microscopic changes that occur inside LEDs that use electrically excited quantum dots, which are precisely shaped nanoscale semiconductor particles that emit extremely pure colored light. The research appears in Science Advances.
Quantum dots are currently used in some of the computer and television displays with the best picture quality available. The efficiency of these displays could be further improved, and their manufacturing process further simplified, if the quantum dots could be electrically excited, as was first demonstrated in the quantum dot LED (QD-LED) structures more than 20 years ago.
Underpinning much of modern technology, from smartphones to scanning tunneling microscopes to particle colliders, is Fermi’s Golden Rule. Named for 20th-century Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi (but actually discovered by British physicist Paul Dirac), the rule is a formula that connects what can be measured in an experiment—such as how fast atoms “jump” between energy states—to the microscopic properties of a quantum mechanical system. The formula is taught in every undergraduate quantum physics class.
Yet scientists sometimes misapply it. They either misjudge the conditions under which the formula works, or they miss the “window” for its use. A “user manual” for Fermi’s Golden Rule would be a boon to researchers, says Yale physicist Nir Navon—and now he and his lab partners have provided one.
“We put one of the most famous formulas in all of quantum mechanics to the test, and found where it works and where it fails, including ways that many physicists weren’t fully aware of,” said Navon, an associate professor of physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior author of a new study published in the journal Nature Physics. “We’re telling everyone who uses it to take a breath first and check their ingredients.”
Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have developed gallium-doped zinc oxide (GZO) nanosheets that may enhance camera resolution in compact devices, including smartphones and medical endoscopes.
These nanosheets enable a single pixel to detect the intensity of red, green and blue (RGB) light while remaining nearly transparent, unlike conventional sensors. They are ultrathin, lightweight and can withstand temperatures up to 400°C (752°F), making them suitable for extreme environments such as space hardware and automotive systems.
The findings were published in the journal ACS Nano.
Most contemporary portable electronics, including laptops, smartphones and smart watches, are powered by batteries that need to be recharged daily or every few days. Over the past decade, however, some engineers have been exploring the possibility of developing battery-free electronic devices that autonomously derive electricity from renewable sources, such as sunlight, indoor lighting or heat.
A research team at Penn State University recently developed a compact integrated circuit (IC) that harvests energy solely from ambient light, using this energy to run computations and sense chemicals in its surroundings. This new chip, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could enable the development of devices that never require charging and thus continue working uninterrupted even in environments where replacement batteries and electrical sockets are not available.
“This work grew out of a broader question we have been asking in my group: Can we build electronic systems that do not simply sense information, but also process that information locally and power themselves from their environment?” Saptarshi Das, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “Many future Internet of Things (IoT) and edge-computing systems will need to operate in remote or hard-to-access locations, where replacing batteries is impractical. We wanted to demonstrate a compact, fully integrated chip that combines energy harvesting, sensing and computation in a single monolithic three-dimensional architecture.”
On Sunday, July 5, 2026, at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time, watch a compilation stream of four additional presentations from the May 2–3, 2026, sessions at the University of California, Berkeley Conference on Aging and Longevity (BerkeleyCAL), hosted by Professor Steven A. Garan, Director of Bioinformatics at the Center for Research and Education on Aging.
These presentations focus key insights in geroscience, both from its history and in regard to promising future directions and some implications for effective advocacy; they are delivered by some of the leading researchers in longevity science – Aubrey de Grey, Brendan Hughes, Felipe Sierra, and Michael West. Three of the presentations include question-and-answer sessions.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation (LEVF) discusses the historical approaches to viewing aging and their shortcomings, as well as the damage-repair approach that he has championed and its prospects for rejuvenating the body. He also discusses implications for advocacy and which tactics could be more effective in bringing the public on board. Note: This presentation is an excerpt, captured by USTP Chairman Stolyarov on his phone camera. It is being made available due to the official recording having been lost.
Dr. Brendan Hughes from the Buck Institute discusses his thesis research on how DNA damage shapes unique, disease-relevant senescent cell states in neurons and other brain cell types. He details a methodology involving the direct differentiation of fibroblasts into neurons and oligodendrocytes to better understand aging-related cellular responses and potential therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Hughes also highlights the importance of basic research in developing future interventions, such as senescence-targeted therapies or DNA repair modulations. The question-and-answer session includes a question from USTP Chairman Stolyarov to Dr. Hughes.
Dr. Felipe Sierra advocates for a shift in geroscience from solely targeting age-related diseases to focusing on maintaining intrinsic health and functional capacity. He proposes that molecular resilience acts as the crucial link between aging biology and long-term health, suggesting that strengthening this resilience could prevent the onset of multiple morbidities. Ultimately, he calls for more robust longitudinal studies and clinical trials that prioritize health-span metrics over the traditional, disease-centered approach to geriatric medicine.
Dr. Michael West explores the biological dichotomy between mortal somatic cells and the immortal germline to explain the fundamental mechanisms of aging and cellular regeneration. He discusses the history of stem-cell research and his work on telomeres and nuclear transfer, which demonstrated that developmental aging and cellular differentiation are reversible processes. Dr. West proposes a new approach to regenerative medicine that focuses on unlocking the body’s innate potential by targeting heterochrony genes to combat chronic degenerative diseases.
A joint operation involving Google has disrupted NetNut, a residential proxy network that gave access to millions of compromised Android devices, including smart TVs and streaming boxes.
Also known as Popa, the NetNut botnet allowed cybercriminals and espionage groups to hide behind legitimate home internet addresses when launching attacks.
According to the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), the residential proxy botnet is estimated to comprise at least two million compromised devices.
Imagine opening a difficult book in a quiet room. The first page is dense. You read one paragraph, then reread it. Nothing “clicks” yet. Your brain is doing what learning often requires: spending effort before the reward arrives. Then your phone lights up. One thumb movement, and the situation changes completely. A joke, a message, a clip, a tiny social reward: all available instantly, all requiring almost no effort. The book has not become harder and, definitely, your intelligence has not disappeared. But the book now feels more expensive, because another activity nearby offers a much better bargain: reward now, effort almost zero.
That is the central idea of the paper “An Effort Recalibration Framework for Digital Media Use and Cognition” that just appeared in Nature Human Behavior. It argues that the most important effect of social media might be that repeated exposure to effortless digital rewards changes how we value effort itself. Over time, the authors suggest, digital media may recalibrate our internal sense of what effort is worth. Difficult work then begins to feel less attractive, not because we can no longer do it, but because our everyday decision system has learned to expect faster returns.
