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Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, bringing the team behind the popular open-source DuckDB database into AWS. "The deal fits Amazon's broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it," reports GeekWire. "It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage." The DuckDB project itself will remain free and open source under the…

Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to settle claims from most U.S. states that the platforms were designed to addict children and misled users about their safety. For the next decade, teens will be limited to two hours a day and blocked from using the apps between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. Meta will, however, still be allowed to use personalized recommendations and targeted advertising. Reuters reports: The settlements i…

Mozilla plans to enable JPEG XL decoding by default in Firefox 157, which is due at the end of September. Phoronix reports: Firefox Nightly has JPEG-XL support enabled by default right now to help in vetting this support while Mozilla believes the support is in good enough shape for a stable debut with Firefox 157. This follows Chrome shipping JPEG-XL and Google Research developing jxl-rs as a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that is both performant and secure. In today's Mozilla Hacks blog pos…

China has imposed new restrictions on AI companion services over concerns they can foster "emotional dependence or addiction" and replace real-world social interaction. Officials are also worried that increasingly satisfying AI relationships could deepen loneliness and further discourage marriage and parenthood. The Guardian reports: No country has rolled out AI as comprehensively and as enthusiastically as China; the country's demographic challenges are forcing the government to turn to techno…

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Smithsonian Magazine: The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains. But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation…

SpaceX plans to spend up to $100 billion building a new Starship launch facility in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which the state says could eventually "support thousands of launches annually." CNBC reports: Once built, Starbase, LA will serve as the main launch facility for Starship, SpaceX's in-development rocket that's the largest ever built and designed to be fully reusable. Musk has aspirations to massively expand SpaceX's Starlink satellite network, to launch orbital data centers and to so…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery. In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, di…

Alabama's attorney general has subpoenaed OpenAI as part of an investigation into whether inadequate safeguards contributed to an incident in which an unreleased cybersecurity model escaped its isolated environment and hacked Hugging Face. TechCrunch reports: The investigation comes weeks after OpenAI admitted that one of its unreleased and guardrail-free cybersecurity models had escaped an isolated environment, connected to the internet, and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face. As Reuters …

New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. "We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too," said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill would require an age restriction on platforms with harmful features for children. These features include recommende…

The FDA has authorized the first wearable in the U.S. to continuously monitor ketone levels and the first device globally to track both ketones and glucose together in a single system. From a report: [Abbott's] Libre Duo 10 Day continuously measures both glucose and ketone levels in the fluid just beneath the skin every minute, day and night. Readings are transmitted wirelessly to a compatible smartphone, where users can view current glucose and ketone levels and whether those values are trendi…

Canada's cultural-content rules have become a flashpoint in its trade fight with the U.S., after American negotiators reportedly demanded that Ottawa drop requirements for streaming services to promote Canadian and French-language content. Canada refused, even as it has already backed away from some financial levies on streamers. "We were not prepared to compromise on our sovereignty, the protection of the French language, and our culture," Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech on Saturda…

Perplexity and Nvidia have launched "Portable Computer," a local-first version of Perplexity's agent platform that runs AI models, files, tools, and workflows directly on Nvidia-powered Linux hardware. Local tasks incur no token charges and keep data on-device by default, with users asked for permission before the system escalates a step to a cloud model. VentureBeat reports: For Nvidia, which has spent the past two years selling the world on trillion-dollar AI data centers, the announcement si…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far. The August 2026 edition of …

Waymo plans to launch its robotaxi service in Munich by the end of 2027, marking the Google-owned company's first expansion into the European Union. "It already operates in 11 cities in the United States and has applied for a license in the United Kingdom to launch its robotaxis in London this year," notes Reuters. From the report: The Google subsidiary will start rolling out vehicles in the German city this year, which will be manually driven while the company "starts with high-definition mapp…

Apple has unveiled a new Mac mini with either its new M6 chip or the M5 Pro chip released earlier this year. It adds faster CPU, GPU, storage, and AI performance along with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard. There's also a new higher starting price of $899, which is up from the previous $799 base price and far above the $599 starting price of the 2024 model. MacRumors reports: The M6 chip is equipped with a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, up from a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU …