Tencia Benavidez, a Supernatural user who lives in New Mexico, started her VR workouts during the Covid pandemic. She has been a regular user in the five years since, calling the ability to work out in VR ideal, given that she lives in a rural area where it’s hard to get to a gym or work out outside during a brutal winter. She stuck with Supernatural because of the community and the eagerness of Supernatural’s coaches.

“They seem like really authentic individuals that were not talking down to you,” Benavidez says. “There's just something really special about those coaches.”

Meta bought Supernatural in 2022, folding it into its then-heavily-invested-in metaverse efforts. The purchase was not a smooth process, as it triggered a lengthy legal battle in which the US Federal Trade Commission tried to block Meta from purchasing the service due to antitrust concerns about Meta “trying to buy its way to the top” of the VR market. Meta ultimately prevailed. At the time, some Supernatural users were cautiously optimistic, hoping that big bag of Zuckerbucks could keep its workout juggernaut afloat.

Read full article

Comments

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The rocket NASA is preparing to send four astronauts on a trip around the Moon will emerge from its assembly building on Florida's Space Coast early Saturday for a slow crawl to its seaside launch pad.

Riding atop one of NASA's diesel-powered crawler transporters, the Space Launch System rocket and its mobile launch platform will exit the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center around 7:00 am EST (11:00 UTC). The massive tracked transporter, certified by Guinness as the world's heaviest self-propelled vehicle, is expected to cover the four miles between the assembly building and Launch Complex 39B in about eight to 10 hours.

The rollout marks a major step for NASA's Artemis II mission, the first human voyage to the vicinity of the Moon since the last Apollo lunar landing in December 1972. Artemis II will not land. Instead, a crew of four astronauts will travel around the far side of the Moon at a distance of several thousand miles, setting the record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth.

Read full article

Comments

Almost every technological innovation of the past several years has been laser-focused on one thing: generative AI. Many of these supposedly revolutionary systems run on big, expensive servers in a data center somewhere, but at the same time, chipmakers are crowing about the power of the neural processing units (NPU) they have brought to consumer devices. Every few months, it’s the same thing: This new NPU is 30 or 40 percent faster than the last one. That’s supposed to let you do something important, but no one really gets around to explaining what that is.

Experts envision a future of secure, personal AI tools with on-device intelligence, but does that match the reality of the AI boom? AI on the “edge” sounds great, but almost every AI tool of consequence is running in the cloud. So what’s that chip in your phone even doing?

What is an NPU?

Companies launching a new product often get bogged down in superlatives and vague marketing speak, so they do a poor job of explaining technical details. It’s not clear to most people buying a phone why they need the hardware to run AI workloads, and the supposed benefits are largely theoretical.

Read full article

Comments

Just a tiny amount of fentanyl, the equivalent of a few grains of sand, is enough to stop a person’s breathing. The synthetic opioid is tasteless, odorless, and invisible when mixed with other substances, and drug users are often unaware of its presence.

It’s why biotech entrepreneur Collin Gage is aiming to protect people against the drug’s lethal effects. In 2023, he became the cofounder and CEO of ARMR Sciences to develop a vaccine against fentanyl. Now, the company is launching a trial to test its vaccine in people for the first time. The goal: prevent deaths from overdose.

“It became very apparent to me that as I assessed the treatment landscape, everything that exists is reactionary,” Gage says. “I thought, why are we not preventing this?”

Read full article

Comments

On Friday, Vinay Prasad—the Food and Drug Administration’s chief medical and scientific officer and its top vaccine regulator—emailed a stunning memo to staff that quickly leaked to the press. Without evidence, Prasad claimed COVID-19 vaccines have killed 10 children in the US, and, as such, he announced unilateral, sweeping changes to the way the agency regulates and approves vaccines, including seasonal flu shots.

On Wednesday evening, a dozen former FDA commissioners, who collectively oversaw the agency for more than 35 years, responded to the memo with a scathing rebuke . Uniting to publish their response in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former commissioners said they were “deeply concerned” by Prasad’s memo, which they framed as a “threat” to the FDA’s work and a danger to Americans’ health.

In his memo, Prasad called for abandoning the FDA’s current framework for updating seasonal flu shots and other vaccines, such as those for COVID-19. Those updates currently involve studies that measure well-characterized immune responses (called immunobridging studies). Prasad dismissed this approach as insufficient and, instead, plans to require expensive randomized trials, which can take months to years for each vaccine update.

Read full article

Comments

Security defenders are girding themselves in response to the disclosure of a maximum-severity vulnerability disclosed Wednesday in React Server, an open source package that’s widely used by websites and in cloud environments. The vulnerability is easy to exploit and allows hackers to execute malicious code on servers that run it.

React is embedded in web apps running on servers so that remote devices render JavaScript and content more quickly and with fewer resources. React is used by an estimated 6 percent of all websites and 39 percent of cloud environments. When end users reload a page, React allows servers to re-render only parts that have changed, a feature that drastically speeds up performance and lowers the computing resources required by the server.

A perfect 10

Security firm Wiz said exploitation requires only a single HTTP request and had a “near-100% reliability” in its testing. Multiple software frameworks and libraries embed React implementations by default. As a result, even when apps don’t explicitly make use of React functionality, they can still be vulnerable, since the integration layer invokes the buggy code.

Read full article

Comments

The new BMW iX3 is an important car for the automaker. It’s the first of a new series of vehicles that BMW is calling the Neue Klasse, calling back to a range of cars that helped define the brand in the 1960s. Then, as now, propulsion is provided by the best powertrain BMW’s engineers could design and build, wrapped in styling that heralds the company’s new look. Except now, that powertrain is fully electric, and the cabin features technology that would have been scarcely believable to the driver of a new 1962 BMW 1500.

In fact, the iX3 is only half the story when it comes to BMW’s neue look for the Neue Klasse—there’s an all-electric 3 series sedan on the way, too. The sedan will surely appeal to enthusiasts, particularly the version that the M tuning arm has worked its magic upon, but you’ll have to wait until early 2026 to read about that stuff. Which makes sense: crossovers and SUVs—or “sports activity vehicles” in BMW-speak—are what the market wants these days, so that’s what comes first.

The technical stuff

As we learned earlier this summer , BMW leaned heavily into sustainability when it designed the iX3. There’s extensive use of recycled battery minerals, interior plastics, and aluminum, and the automaker has gone for a monomaterial approach where possible to make recycling the car a lot easier. There’s also an all-new EV powertrain , BMW’s sixth-generation. When it goes on sale here next summer, the launch model will be the iX3 50 xDrive, which pairs an asynchronous motor at the front axle and an electrically excited synchronous motor at the rear for a combined output of 463 hp (345 kW) and 475 lb-ft (645 Nm).

Read full article

Comments

A Donald Trump-backed push has failed to wedge a federal measure that would block states from passing AI laws for a decade into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told reporters Tuesday that a sect of Republicans is now “looking at other places” to potentially pass the measure. Other Republicans opposed including the AI preemption in the defense bill, The Hill reported , joining critics who see value in allowing states to quickly regulate AI risks as they arise.

For months, Trump has pressured the Republican-led Congress to block state AI laws that the president claims could bog down innovation as AI firms waste time and resources complying with a patchwork of state laws. But Republicans have continually failed to unite behind Trump’s command, first voting against including a similar measure in the “Big Beautiful” budget bill and then this week failing to negotiate a solution to pass the NDAA measure.

Read full article

Comments

The fossil and genetic evidence agree that modern humans originated in Africa. The most genetically diverse human populations—the groups that have had the longest time to pick up novel mutations—live there today. But the history of what went on within Africa between our origins and the present day is a bit murky.

That’s partly because DNA doesn’t survive long in the conditions typical of most of the continent, which has largely limited us to trying to reconstruct the past using data from present-day populations. The other part is that many of those present-day populations have been impacted by the vast genetic churn caused by the Bantu expansion , which left its traces across most of the populations south of the Sahara.

But a new study has managed to extract genomes from ancient samples in southern Africa. While all of these are relatively recent, dating from after the end of the most recent glacial period, they reveal a distinct southern African population that was relatively large, outside of the range of previously described human variation, and it remained isolated until only about 1,000 years ago.

Read full article

Comments