Apple refreshes the iMac, entry-level MacBook Pro with the M6 chip

Apple refreshes the iMac, entry-level MacBook Pro with the M6 chip

fivenewscrypto    octobre 29, 2026   

Apple has announced refreshes for the iMac and the entry-level, 14-inch MacBook Pro. Both machines are getting the M6 chip, which was introduced in the Mac mini several weeks ago.

The M6 is split into two variants for the iMac. Picking the "M6 chip with two Thunderbolt ports" option gets you a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, whereas picking "M6 chip with four Thunderbolt ports" gets you 12 cores for each, instead. The two-port variant maxes out at 24 GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, whereas the four-port one maxes out at 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage.

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South Carolina's measles outbreak jumped to Washington state 5 times in 2 weeks

South Carolina's measles outbreak jumped to Washington state 5 times in 2 weeks

fivenewscrypto    octobre 29, 2026   

Since measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, the country's occasional cases have come mainly from international travelers—visitors from far-flung places where the virus still spreads freely—or unvaccinated US residents who return from abroad with a highly infectious souvenir. But as vaccination rates have slipped nationwide in recent years and outbreaks grow bigger and more frequent, domestic travel now poses a greater risk than international incursions.

In a study published this week in NEJM Evidence, Washington state health officials highlight that risk, detailing how an explosive outbreak in South Carolina reached their distant state through five distinct importation events over two weeks in January. In all, the introductions led to 26 cases among residents before officials stamped out the spread.

South Carolina's measles outbreak began on October 2, 2025, and was declared over on April 26, 2026. Officials confirmed 997 cases in the state during the outbreak. At the time, it was the largest measles outbreak recorded since the virus was declared eliminated, but Pennsylvania's ongoing outbreak has since surpassed it.

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China's top-secret spaceplane can't hide in low-Earth orbit

China's top-secret spaceplane can't hide in low-Earth orbit

fivenewscrypto    octobre 28, 2026   

A winged Chinese spacecraft bearing a strong resemblance to the US military's X-37B spaceplane was photographed in orbit by a passing US-owned commercial satellite in 2024, and we finally have the image.

The Chinese spaceplane has delta wings, payload bay doors, a dark heat shield, and a rear-mounted service module with power-generating solar arrays. In other words, the design of the winged ship is, to a great degree, a copy of the X-37B spaceplane flown by the US Space Force.

The photo was taken by a commercial imaging satellite owned by a company called Vantor, known as Maxar in 2024. Vantor is one of several companies that provide reconnaissance imagery of locations around the world to the US military and US intelligence agencies. The same Earth-imaging satellites can point their telescopes at objects in space.

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"No human at the helm": Delaware plan would let AI agents run entire businesses

"No human at the helm": Delaware plan would let AI agents run entire businesses

fivenewscrypto    octobre 28, 2026   

A Delaware proposal to let companies be operated by AI agents would help the firms' human owners evade legal responsibility for reckless and harmful actions taken by the AI, US Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told Delaware Governor Matt Meyer in a letter yesterday.

Comer, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, told Meyer that the committee "seeks assistance obtaining documents related to your state administration’s efforts to establish a new form of corporate entity to be known as an Artificial Intelligence Company (AIC)."

Comer said the proposal is ripe for abuse. "We are concerned that Delaware’s AIC proposal could be used to protect powerful AI companies and their investors from responsibility for reckless harmful actions, while also protecting non-transparent forces seeking anticompetitive regulatory capture behind state AI initiatives," Comer's letter said.

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Anthropic IPO warns its AI could blackmail people, become sentient, end humanity

Anthropic IPO warns its AI could blackmail people, become sentient, end humanity

fivenewscrypto    octobre 28, 2026   

The Securities and Exchange Commission's publication on Monday of Anthropic's S-1 form—ahead of a heavily anticipated initial public offering—has led to plenty of discussion of whether the company's quickly ballooning revenues will be able to overcome its even higher costs. But amid the numbers and forward-looking optimism about AI "rapidly transform[ing] every sector of the global economy in ways greater than the impact of industrialization, electricity, semiconductors, and the internet," Anthropic also spends an inordinate amount of time in its S-1 laying out the myriad risk factors that could bring the company down.

Across 93 pages and over 70,000 words, Anthropic's S-1 "Risk Factors" section discusses literally hundreds of potential problems that could negatively impact its business in the coming years. Many of these potential risks are the kind of standard worries about competition, costs, customer acquisition, and potential regulation that almost any business must worry about. But some risks highlight interesting potential points of failure for Anthropic specifically and the hype-filled AI bubble more generally.

After wading through Anthropic's book-length treatise on its greatest risks, we've narrowed the list to the seven most surprising, interesting, or thought-provoking potential problems. Consider this a far-from-comprehensive look at what potential Anthropic investors should keep in mind.

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Vibe genes? Natural(ish) language comes to protein, genome design software

Vibe genes? Natural(ish) language comes to protein, genome design software

fivenewscrypto    octobre 28, 2026   

Protein design tools may be getting increasingly sophisticated, but you still need a sophisticated understanding of protein structure for them to work. This can include knowing enzyme mechanisms down to the positions of specific amino acids, as well as the water molecules that also occupy the area where catalysis takes place. Once you specify these, the tools can build the rest of a protein around this target.

A large collaboration of researchers based in China, however, decided to bring protein design to the masses, making a tool that can take natural language prompts and use them to produce proteins with the function you specify. If your measure for success is a working protein, then the success rate may not be great. But they still manage to get the job done. And, in a separate announcement, Hugging Face shared that it's now hosting a tool that does similar things on the DNA level.

The equivalent of vibe coding may have come to protein design—at least if you have access to a lab where you can sort the good designs from the dozens of failed ones.

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Sculpture re-creates odd optical effects of famed Lycurgus Cup

Sculpture re-creates odd optical effects of famed Lycurgus Cup

fivenewscrypto    octobre 28, 2026   

Dating back to around 400 CE and made of dichroic glass, the Lycurgus Cup is notable for exhibiting different colors depending on the light. (It gets its name from the scene depicted on its surface, of King Lycurgus of Thrace.) Light it from the front, and the cup looks green; light it from behind, and the color changes to a deep red. University of Sheffield scientists have re-created the original recipe to produce a contemporary glass sculpture with the same optical effect.

The cup is considered one of the seven glass wonders of the world, one of just 40 glass cage cups that survived. Exactly why the unusual color effects of the Lycurgus Cup occurred was a mystery until 2007, when a team of scientists discovered the color shifts were due to the presence of nanoparticles in the glass—the result of Roman artisans adding finely ground gold and silver into the mix. Those nanoparticles change how the electrons in the cup vibrate in response to light so that the color one sees shifts with the observer’s vantage point.

As we reported in 2019, it’s a similar phenomenon to the one responsible for the shifting colors of 19th-century daguerreotypes due to the scattering properties of nanoparticles. The Romans added salt when they melted the silicon (sand) to make the glass, and those salts contained gold atoms. In the melting process, those atoms aggregate and produce nanoparticles, which in turn produce the colors. It’s how any stained glass is made. It's also similar to how the precise lattice-like structure of photonic crystals produces iridescent colors in nature, like the wings of butterflies, or opals.

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