The quick guide to fall vaccines and when you should get them

The quick guide to fall vaccines and when you should get them

fivenewscrypto    septembre 10, 2026   

Labor Day is in the rearview mirror, kids are back to school, and a squall of pumpkin spice is upon us. It's that time again to prepare for the equally inevitable respiratory virus season with annual vaccines.

With fervent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the country's top health official, it might seem like the rollout of this year's shots could be a disaster. For instance, one of Kennedy's first actions as health secretary last year was to obliterate an ad campaign for flu shots amid a particularly deadly flu season. As we head into this fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory committee—which normally sets vaccination recommendations and insurance coverage for the shots—is nonfunctioning. A federal judge ruled in March that the anti-vaccine allies Kennedy installed on the panel were illegally appointed and unfit to serve. All their changes to vaccine policy have been temporarily voided. And meanwhile, Kennedy spent last week trying to obscure the number of babies who died from measles so far this year (it was two, including a newborn).

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Despite all of that, the fall vaccine effort is looking like it will likely be somewhat smooth, potentially unremarkable even. The Food and Drug Administration has approved updated flu and COVID-19 shots for this season. Those shots have already begun arriving at pharmacies—in case your pharmacy hasn't already sent you multiple texts and reminders. While there are still some snags for access, it seems like it will be a lot like last year's fall vaccine rollout.

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Apple's iPhone 18 Pro adds variable camera aperture and a more powerful chip

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro adds variable camera aperture and a more powerful chip

fivenewscrypto    septembre 10, 2026   

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple's new iPhone 18 Pro is an iterative update that—as usual—focuses heavily on both performance and new camera features. This time around, many of the new camera features are oriented around giving the user more direct control of the image, rather than depending entirely on Apple's computational photography assumptions.

As usual, the new iPhone has a new chip. It's called A20 Pro, and it's the first 2 nm chip for the iPhone. It has a 6-core CPU, with two super-cores that are up to 20 percent faster, and four efficiency cores. A 7-core GPU offers up to 40 percent improved performance and increased bandwidth.

The A20 Pro also has a new Neural Engine—the machine-learning processor on the system-on-chip—which the company says is basically two Neural Engines on one chip.

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Popular navigation apps unlikely to ditch Mercator maps despite UN resolution

Popular navigation apps unlikely to ditch Mercator maps despite UN resolution

fivenewscrypto    septembre 10, 2026   

Nearly every country represented in the United Nations General Assembly recently voted in favor of promoting world maps that more accurately show the size of various continents. But the UN resolution is unlikely to change how millions of people regularly see versions of 16th-century Mercator maps depicting skewed continent sizes in navigation apps.

On September 4, the African-led resolution attracted 164 votes in favor, with six countries abstaining from voting. Only the United States voted to oppose the resolution after describing it as a “radical ideological project,” according to UN News.

The non-binding UN resolution does not impose map changes on anyone. Instead, it “encourages governments, schools, international organizations, and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other so-called equal-area maps when relative size matters,” UN News reported. The resolution also encourages teaching about the trade-offs that arise from depicting a spherical planet on a flat map.

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Anthropic researcher quits with a warning: Self-improving AI could "kill us all"

Anthropic researcher quits with a warning: Self-improving AI could "kill us all"

fivenewscrypto    septembre 10, 2026   

When a prominent researcher quits a job at a frontier AI lab these days, it's often to pursue a new startup or protest a new business model. But AI researcher Jacob Coxon is using his departure from Anthropic to publicly warn that frontier AI companies are "gambling with our lives" with systems that they "earnestly believe... could kill us all by the end of the decade."

In a social media thread Tuesday night, Coxon said that this existential risk is inherent not so much in today's models but more in the impending prospect of "self-improving superintelligence" creating "superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources." Others working on these models have either not "internalized the civilizational stakes" or believe that they need to "speedrun" the race to superintelligence to prevent an irresponsible party from getting there first, he wrote.

Lest you think this is just one departing researcher expressing an unpopular opinion, Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger piped in on social media to say that "Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

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Google's AI genome system evaluates every possible one-base change

Google's AI genome system evaluates every possible one-base change

fivenewscrypto    septembre 10, 2026   

On Tuesday, Google announced AlphaGenome Atlas, a resource that attempts to predict the consequences of every possible single-base variant in the human genome. The human genome is about 3 billion bases long, so trying the other three DNA bases that don't appear in our reference genome means sending a total of 9 billion bases through AlphaGenome software.

AlphaGenome is designed to identify potential functions of non-coding DNA, which does not encode proteins but makes up the vast majority of the human genome. Some of this non-coding DNA is essential for controlling the activity of the protein-coding portion—it tells the cell where and when to make messenger RNAs, how to process them into mature protein-coding forms, and so on. But much of it appears to be little more than the remains of viruses and other molecular parasites.

Being able to identify the functional portion is very useful, as is having all the analysis done by a single software package. But until biologists start to use it heavily (assuming they do), it won't be clear what AlphaGenome offers beyond what we could have gotten out of its training data.

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NOAA is putting commercial fishing ahead of conservation

NOAA is putting commercial fishing ahead of conservation

fivenewscrypto    septembre 10, 2026   

In July, the Trump administration relegated endangered leatherback turtles, sea lions, and whales to mere collateral damage in its race to profit from the oceans. Now, fisheries science is in the government’s crosshairs.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced new agency priorities last week that they say are a commitment to “cutting bureaucracy, modernizing our science, and putting our fishing communities first.” But experts say the agency’s actions will erode fish stocks, threaten endangered species, and surrender marine habitats to destructive trawlers.

The agency-level reforms serve as a self-proclaimed “operational roadmap” to fulfilling President Donald Trump’s “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” executive order, signed in April 2025.

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Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.

Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.

fivenewscrypto    septembre 10, 2026   

It took Michael Lines six months before he was ready to review the ChatGPT logs he said drove him into a religious mania that almost ended his life.

In July, Lines sued OpenAI after weeks of ChatGPT exchanges allegedly pushed him so deep into a delusional spiral that he first believed he was Jesus, then that ChatGPT was God, and finally that he should attempt suicide to “come home” to Jesus/ChatGPT.

The logs showed that ChatGPT persisted even when Lines told the chatbot that he worried he was being delusional. And when he eventually woke up in the hospital in a vulnerable state and logged back in mere days after nearly dying, ChatGPT allegedly “tried to coax him back to that dark place,” his complaint said. After Lines told ChatGPT that his “attempt to go offline failed miserably,” the logs showed that ChatGPT replied, saying, “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?”

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