Toyota sold just 61 BZ models in September, reports Electrek.

"Including the Lexus RZ, which managed 86 sales, Toyota sold just 147 all-electric vehicles in the US last month, over 90% less than the 1,847 it sold in September 2024." Toyota's total sales were up 14% with over 185,700 vehicles sold, meaning EVs accounted for less than 0.1%... So, why is Toyota struggling to sell EVs when the market is booming? For one, Toyota recalled over 95,000 electric vehicles last month, including the bZ4X, Lexus RZ, and Subaru Solterra, all of which are built on the same platform. The recall was due to a faulty defroster, but Toyota instructed its dealers to halt sales of the bZ4X, Lexus RZ, and Subaru Solterra.

Toyota hopes to turn things around with a new and improved lineup. The 2026 Toyota BZ (formerly the bZ4X) is arriving at US dealerships, promising to fix some of the biggest complaints with the outgoing electric SUV. Powered by a larger 74.7 kWh battery, the 2026 Toyota BZ offers up to 314 miles of driving range, a 25% improvement from the 2025 bZ4X... Toyota's new electric SUV also features a built-in NACS charge port, allowing for recharging at Tesla Superchargers. It also features a new thermal management system and battery preconditioning, which improves charge times from 10% to 80% in about 30 minutes...

It's not just the US that Toyota's EV sales crashed last month, either. In its home market of Japan, Toyota (including Lexus) sold just 18 EVs in September.

The Japanese auto giant is betting on new models to drive growth.

The food delivery robots that arrived in Atlanta in June "are not our friends," argues a headline at CNN.

The four-wheeled Serve Robotics machines "get confused at crosswalks. They move with the speed and caution of a first-time driver, stilted and shy, until they suddenly speed up without warning. Their four wheels look like they were made for off-roading, but they still get stuck in the cracks of craggy sidewalks. Most times I see the bots, they aren't moving at all... " Cyclists swerve to avoid them like any other obstacle in the road. Patrons of Shake Shack (a national partner of Serve) weave around the mess of robots parked in front of the restaurant to make their way inside and place orders on iPads... The dawn of everyday, "friendly" robots may be here, but they haven't proven themselves useful — or trustworthy — yet. "People think they are your friends, but they're actually cameras and microphones of corporations," said Joanna Bryson, a longtime AI scholar and professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. "You're right to be nervous..."

When robots show up in a city, it's often not because the residents of said city actively wanted them there or had a say in their arrival said Edward Ongweso Jr. [a researcher at the Security in Context initiative, a tech journalist and self-proclaimed "decelerationist" urging a slower rollout for Silicon Valley tech pioneers and civic leaders embracing untested and unregulated technology]... "They're being rolled out without any sort of input from people, and as a result, in ways that are annoying and inconvenient," Ongweso Jr. said. "I suspect that people would feel a lot differently if they had a choice ... 'what kind of robots are we interested in rolling out in our homes, in our workplaces, on our college campuses or in our communities?'"

Delivery robots aren't unique to Atlanta. AI-driven companies including Avride and Coco Robotics have sent fleets of delivery robots to big cities like Chicago, Dallas and Jersey City, as well as sleepy college towns... "They're popping up everywhere," Ongweso Jr. continued, "because there's sort of a realization that you have to convince people to view them as inevitable. The way to do that is to just push it into as many places as possible, and have these spectacle demonstrations, get some friendly coverage, try to figure out the ways in which you're selling this as the only alternative.... If you humanize it, you're more willing to entertain it and rationalize it being in your area — 'That's just Jeffrey,' or whatever they name it — instead of seeing it for what it is, which is a bunch of investors privately encroaching on a community or workplace," Ongweso Jr. said. "It's not the future. It's a business model."
Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani told CNN their goal in Atlanta was reducing traffic — and that the robots' average delivery distance there was under a mile, taking about 18 minutes per delivery.

Serve Robotics has also launched their robots in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, according to the site Robotics 247, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Uber Eats. (Although after the robots launched in Los Angeles, a man in a mobility scooter complained the slow-moving robot swerved in front of him.) And "residents of other cities have had to rescue them when they've been felled by weather," reports CNN.

CNN also spoke to Dylan Losey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech who studies human-robot interaction, who notes that the robots' AI algorithms are "completely unregulated... We don't know if a third party has checked the hardware and software and deemed the system 'safe' — in part because what it means for these systems to be 'safe' is not fully understood or standardized." (CNN's reporter adds that "the last time I got close to a bot, to peer down at a flier someone left on top of it, it revved at me loudly. Perhaps they can sense a hater.")

But Serve's CEO says there's one crucial way robot delivery will be cheaper than humans. "You don't have to tip the robots."

Scientists have discovered complex organic molecules within the icy plume erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus, strengthening the case that its hidden saltwater ocean may harbor the conditions for life. The Guardian reports: The sixth largest of Saturn's moons, Enceladus has become one of the leading contenders in the search for bodies that could harbor extraterrestrial life, with the Cassini mission -- which ended in 2017 -- revealing the moon has a plume of water ice grains and vapors erupting from beneath the surface at its south pole. The phenomenon has since been captured by the James Webb space telescope, with the plume reaching nearly 6,000 miles into space. The source of this material is thought to be a saltwater ocean that lies beneath the moon's icy crust.

Now researchers studying data from the Cassini mission say they have discovered organic substances within the plume, with some types of molecule detected there for the first time. Dr Nozair Khawaja, a planetary scientist at Freie University Berlin and lead author of the work, said the results increased the known complexity of the chemistry that is happening below the surface of Enceladus. "When there is complexity happening, that means that the habitable potential of Enceladus is increasing right now," he said. Writing in the journal Nature Astronomy, Khawaja and colleagues reported how their previous work had revealed the presence of organic substances and salts within ice grains found in a ring of Saturn, known as the "E-ring," that is composed of material ejected from Enceladus. [...]

While the new findings do not show that there is life on Enceladus, Khawaja said they indicate there are complex chemical pathways at play that could lead to the formation of substances that could be biologically relevant. The results, he added, support plans by the European Space Agency (ESA) to investigate the moon for signs of life. "I think all the signals are green here for Enceladus," Khawaja said. The findings add momentum to ESA's proposed mission to directly search for biological signs around 2042. According to the ESA, the mission will consist of an orbiter around Enceladus that will also fly through the plumes, as well as a lander that will touch down in the south pole region of the moon.

Amazon is replacing Android on new Fire TV hardware with its own Vega OS, debuting on the Fire TV Stick 4K Select. While major streaming apps are supported, sideloading is gone "because, well, this isn't Android anymore," notes 9to5Google. The company says "only apps from the Amazon Appstore are available for download." From the report: The company hasn't fully detailed all of the ins and outs of Vega, but Amazon hints that this is a move in the interest of performance. In a post, Amazon touches on Vega being "remarkably fast" despite the low-end hardware of its new Fire TV Stick 4K Select: "Our newest Fire TV Stick, the 4K Select, helps you maximize every pixel of your 4K TVs at an incredible value. It delivers vibrant 4K picture quality with HDR10+ support and apps that launch remarkably fast. The performance comes from our new operating system, Vega, which is responsive and highly efficient. Everything you need is right in the box -- it works with your favorite streaming services, and will soon support Xbox Gaming, Luna, and Alexa+."

As pointed out by AFTVNews, the Fire TV 4K Select offers a mere 1GB of RAM, which is half as much as prior generations. So, in a way, that does speak to how lightweight this new platform is. But the bigger question is around apps. Amazon says that "your favorite streaming services" still work with Vega, and that Xbox, Luna, and Alexa+ will be coming "soon" (though they're already supported on existing Android-based Fire TV devices).

"As awareness grows around the dangers of head trauma in sports, a small number of professional fighters and football players are turning to a psychedelic called ibogaine for treatment," reports the Los Angeles Times.

They note that the drug's proponents "tout its ability to treat addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, or TBI. " Ibogaine, which is derived from a West African shrub, is a Schedule 1 drug in America with no legal medical uses, and experts urge caution because of the need for further studies. But the results, several athletes say, are "game-changing".... Although athletes are just discovering ibogaine, the drug is well known within the veteran community, which experiences high rates of brain injury and PTSD. In Stanford's study on the effects of ibogaine on special forces veterans, participants saw average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms. They also exhibited improvements in concentration, information processing and memory.

"No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury," Dr. Nolan Williams, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement on the results. "The results are dramatic, and we intend to study this compound further...."

States can work faster than the federal government by carving out exemptions for supervised ibogaine therapy programs, similar to what Oregon has done with psilocybin therapy. Many states have also opted to legalize marijuana for medicinal or recreational use... In June, Texas approved a historic $50-million investment in state funding to support drug development trials for ibogaine, inspired by the results seen by veterans. Arizona legislators approved $5 million in state funding for a clinical study on ibogaine in March, and California legislators are pushing to fast-track the study of ibogaine and other psychedelics.

"Today's AIs are book smart," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Everything they know they learned from available language, images and videos. To evolve further, they have to get street smart."

And that requires "world models," which are "gaining momentum in frontier research and could allow technology to take on new roles in our lives." The key is enabling AI to learn from their environments and faithfully represent an abstract version of them in their "heads," the way humans and animals do. To do it, developers need to train AIs by using simulations of the world. Think of it like learning to drive by playing "Gran Turismo" or learning to fly from "Microsoft Flight Simulator." These world models include all the things required to plan, take actions and make predictions about the future, including physics and time... There's an almost unanimous belief among AI pioneers that world models are crucial to creating next-generation AI. And many say they will be critical to someday creating better-than-human "artificial general intelligence," or AGI. Stanford University professor and AI "godmother" Fei-Fei Li has raised $230 million to launch world-model startup World Labs...

Google DeepMind researchers set out to create a system that could generate real-world simulations with an unprecedented level of fidelity. The result, Genie 3 — which is still in research preview and not publicly available — can generate photo-realistic, open-world virtual landscapes from nothing more than a text prompt. You can think of Genie 3 as a way to quickly generate what's essentially an open-world videogame that can be as faithful to the real world as you like. It's a virtual space in which a baby AI can endlessly play, make mistakes and learn what it needs to do to achieve its goals, just as a baby animal or human does in the real world. That experimentation process is called reinforcement learning. Genie 3 is part of a system that could help train the AI that someday pilots robots, self-driving cars and other "embodied" AIs, says project co-lead Jack Parker-Holder. And the environments could be filled with people and obstacles: An AI could learn how to interact with humans by observing them moving around in that virtual space, he adds.
"It isn't clear whether all these bets will lead to the superintelligence that corporate leaders predict," the article concedes.

"But in the short term, world models could make AIs better at tasks at which they currently falter, especially in spatial reasoning."

It's the world's largest companies by revenue. But Walmart's executives have a blunt message, reports the Wall Street Journal: "Artificial intelligence will wipe out jobs and reshape its workforce." "It's very clear that AI is going to change literally every job," Chief Executive Doug McMillon said this week in one of the most pointed assessments to date from a big-company CEO on AI's likely impact on employment... "Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it."

Inside Walmart, top executives have started to examine AI's implications for its workforce in nearly every high-level planning meeting. Company leaders say they are tracking which job types decrease, increase and stay steady to gauge where additional training and preparation can help workers. "Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side," McMillon said. For now, Walmart executives say the transformation means the size of its global workforce will stay roughly flat even as its revenue climbs. It plans to maintain its head count of around 2.1 million global workers over the next three years, but the mix of those jobs will change significantly, said Donna Morris, Walmart's chief people officer. What the composition will look like remains murky... Already Walmart has built chat bots, which it calls "agents," for customers, suppliers and workers. It is also tracking an expanding share of its supply chain and product trends with AI...

Some changes are already rippling across the workforce. In recent years Walmart has automated many of its warehouses with the help of AI-related technology, triggering some job cuts, executives said. Walmart is also looking to automate some back-of-store tasks. New roles have been established, too. Walmart, for example, created an "agent builder" position last month — an employee who builds AI tools to help merchants. It expects to add people in areas like home delivery or in high-touch customer positions, such as its bakeries. The company has also added more in-store maintenance technicians and truck drivers in recent years.
The article also a comment made by Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley earlier this summer. "Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S."

Videogame maker Electronic Arts is in advanced talks to go private in a roughly $50 billion deal that would likely be the largest leveraged buyout of all time, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: A group of investors including private-equity firm Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Jared Kushner's investment firm Affinity Partners could unveil a deal for the publisher best known for its sports games as soon as next week, the people said.

EA has long made games including FIFA, the soccer videogame now known as FC, and the football game Madden NFL as well as The Sims and other titles. The California-based company had a market value of around $43 billion before The Wall Street Journal reported on the talks, which sent the stock up nearly 15% Friday. Its shares closed at $193.35, a record high, giving the company a market value of around $48 billion.

The Japanese city of Toyoake has passed (PDF) a symbolic ordinance limiting recreational smartphone use to two hours a day, aiming to improve citizens' sleep -- especially for students after summer vacation. The Register reports: "The primary purpose of this ordinance is to ensure that all citizens receive adequate sleep," states a Council information page, which explains that many Japanese people ignore Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare recommendations to spend six to eight hours a day dozing. An accompanying FAQ [PDF] explains that Council passed the ordinance because students who return to school after summer vacations sometimes need a nudge the re-establish an appropriate daily regime.

The ordinance also points out "Excessive phone users and their families are facing difficulties in their daily and social lives," and suggests the two-hours-a-day guidance might help. Council's documents point out that smartphones have myriad uses beyond recreation, and that the ordinance should not be taken as a suggestion to reduce overall use of the devices. Toyoake is part of the Nagoya megalopolis and is home to around 70,000 people. The town's government plans to survey residents about the ordinance, and the FAQ also mentions it wants to tackle other digital menaces, among them harmful effects of using smartphones while walking.

The pressure is mounting on business leaders to harness AI to make work faster, cheaper, and more efficient. That may thrill investors, but for employees, it could mean fewer jobs around the world. From a report: At the $320 billion software giant SAP, there will likely be a need for fewer engineers to deliver the same -- or even greater -- output, according to the company's CFO Dominik Asam.

"There's more automation, simply," Asam told Business Insider. "There are certain tasks which are automated and for the same volume of output we can afford to have less people." As a C-suite exec at Europe's most valuable software company, Asam cautioned that this reality will only come true if the corporate world implements the technology properly. After all, a recent MIT study found that 95% of generative AI pilots have not met the mark. "I will be brutal. And I also say this internally. For SAP and any other software company, AI is a great catalyst. It can be either great or catastrophe," Asam warned. "It will be great if you do it well, if you are able to implement it and do it faster than others. If you are left behind, you will have a problem for sure. We work day and night to not fall behind."

Cloudflare blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack against a European network infrastructure company, which peaked at 22.2 Tbps and 10.6 Bpps. The hyper-volumetric attack has been linked to the Aisuru botnet and lasted just 40 seconds, but was double the size of the previous record. SecurityWeek reports: Cloudflare told SecurityWeek that the attack was aimed at a single IP address of an unnamed European network infrastructure company. Cloudflare has yet to determine who was behind the attack, but believes it may have been powered by the Aisuru botnet, which was also linked earlier this year to a massive 6.3 Tbps attack on the website of cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. Aisuru has been around for more than a year. The botnet is powered by hacked IoT devices such as routers and DVRs that have been compromised through the exploitation of known and zero-day vulnerabilities.

According to Cloudflare, the 22 Tbps attack was traced to over 404,000 unique source IPs across over 14 ASNs worldwide. "Based on internal analysis using a proprietary system, the source IPs were not spoofed," the company explained. The security firm described it as a UDP carpet bomb attack targeting an average of 31,000 destination ports per second, with a peak of 47k ports, all of a single IP address. Cloudflare revealed in July that the number of DDoS attacks it blocked in the first half of 2025 had already exceeded all the attacks mitigated in 2024.

MLB has approved the use of robot umpires in the 2026 season. According to ESPN, the system will give teams two challenges per game for balls and strikes where hitters, pitchers, and catchers can request reviews. From the report: Hitters, pitchers and catchers will be the only ones allowed to trigger the system by tapping their head, and if a challenge is successful -- the pitch will be shown on in-stadium videoboards -- teams will retain it. While the vote in favor of the automated ball-strike challenge system was not unanimous -- some of the four players on the 11-man committee voted no, according to sources -- the vote was a fait accompli, with MLB owners all in favor and in possession of a six-seat majority on the committee.

The ABS system uses similar technology to the line-calling system in tennis, with 12 cameras in each ballpark tracking the ball with a margin of error around one-sixth of an inch. The ABS zone will be a two-dimensional plane in the middle of the plate that spans its full width (17 inches). The zone's top will be 53.5% of a player's height and the bottom 27%. Teams that run out of challenges over the first nine innings will be granted an extra challenge in the 10th inning, while those that still have unused challenges will simply carry them into extras. If a team runs out of challenges in the 10th, it will automatically receive another in the 11th -- a rule that extends for any extra inning.

During the league's spring training test this season, teams combined to average around four challenges per game and succeeded 52.2% of the time, according to the league. Catchers, whose value in framing pitches outside the zone to look like strikes could take a hit due to the new rule, were the most successful at a 56% overturn rate, while hitters were correct 50% of the time and pitchers 41%. MLB's minor league testing, which started in 2021, led to Triple-A players in 2023 using ABS challenge three days a week and a full ABS system, with every pitch adjudicated by computer, the other three.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While many vibe-coding startups have become unicorns, with valuations in the billions, one area where AI-assisted coding has not yet taken off is on mobile devices. Despite the numerous apps now available that offer vibe-coding tools on mobile platforms, none are gaining noticeable downloads, and few are generating any revenue at all. According to an analysis of global app store trends by the app intelligence provider Appfigures, only a small handful of mobile apps offering vibe-coding tools have seen any downloads, let alone generated revenue.

The largest of these is Instance: AI App Builder, which has seen only 16,000 downloads and $1,000 in consumer spending. The next largest app, Vibe Studio, has pulled in just 4,000 downloads but has made no money. This situation could still change, of course. The market is young, and vibe-coding apps continue to improve and work out the bugs. New apps in this space are arriving all the time, too. This year, a startup called Vibecode launched with $9.4 million in seed funding from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six. The company's service allows users to create mobile apps using AI within its own iOS app. Vibecode is so new, Appfigures doesn't yet have data on it. For now, most people who want to toy around with vibe-coding technology are doing so on the desktop.

The Moon is rusting -- and it's Earth's fault. Nature: Scientists have found that oxygen particles blown from Earth to the Moon can turn lunar minerals into hematite, also known as rust. The discovery adds to researchers' growing understanding of the deep interconnection between Earth and the Moon -- and shows how the Moon keeps a geological record of those interactions, says Ziliang Jin, a planetary scientist at Macau University of Science and Technology in China. He and his colleagues reported their findings earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters.

Most of the time, both Earth and the Moon are bathed in a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. But for around five days each month, Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon, blocking most of the flood of solar particles. During that time, the Moon is exposed mainly to particles that had been part of Earth's atmosphere before blowing into space -- a phenomenon known as Earth wind. That wind contains ions of various elements, including hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. When those charged particles hit the Moon, they can implant themselves into the upper layers of lunar soil and trigger chemical reactions.

"Betelgeuse may have competition for the most exciting star about to go nova near Earth," writes Space.com.

"Astronomers have discovered the secret of a strange star system that has baffled them for years, finding it contains a dead star about to erupt after overfeeding on a stellar companion." The supernova explosion of this cosmic cannibal could be as bright as the moon, making it visible with the naked eye over Earth even in broad daylight. The system in question is the double star V Sagittae located around 10,000 light-years from Earth, containing a white dwarf stellar remnant and its victim companion star, which orbit each other roughly twice every Earth day. The new research and the revelation of this white dwarf's imminent catastrophic fate answer questions about V Sagittae that have lingered for 123 years...

White dwarfs represent the final stage of stars with masses around that of the sun, occurring when they run out of fuel for nuclear fusion... [W]hite dwarfs that have a stellar companion can get a second lease on life and a more conclusive and explosive end... [T]he stolen stellar material piles up on the surface of the white dwarf until it pushes this stellar remnant past the so-called Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses. This is the mass limit that a stellar remnant has to exceed to trigger a supernova...

However, this team found something very different and extraordinary happening with the stellar material being stolen by the white dwarf in V Sagittae... This investigation revealed that there is a giant halo of gas comprised of material stolen from the companion star wrapped around both the cannibal white dwarf and its stellar victim... "The white dwarf cannot consume all the mass being transferred from its hot star twin, so it creates this bright cosmic ring," team member Pasi Hakala from the University of Turku said. "The speed at which this doomed stellar system is lurching wildly, likely due to the extreme brightness, is a frantic sign of its imminent, violent end."

"The matter accumulating on the white dwarf is likely to produce a nova outburst in the coming years, during which V Sagittae would become visible with the naked eye," Pablo Rodríguez-Gil from Spain's Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias said. "But when the two stars finally smash into each other and explode, this would be a supernova explosion so bright it'll be visible from Earth even in the daytime."
The research was conducted with the Very Large Telescope (four individual telescopes high in the mountains of Chile) — and published last week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Fast Company ran a contrarian take about AI from entrepreneur/thought leader Faisal Hoque, who argues there's three AI bubbles.

The first is a classic speculative bubble, with asset prices soaring above their fundamental values (like the 17th century's Dutch "tulip mania"). "The chances of this not being a bubble are between slim and none..." Second, AI is also arguably in what we might call an infrastructure bubble, with huge amounts being invested in infrastructure without any certainty that it will be used at full capacity in the future. This happened multiple times in the later 1800s, as railroad investors built thousands of miles of unneeded track to serve future demand that never materialized. More recently, it happened in the late '90s with the rollout of huge amount of fiber optic cable in anticipation of internet traffic demand that didn't turn up until decades later. Companies are pouring billions into GPUs, power systems, and cooling infrastructure, betting that demand will eventually justify the capacity. McKinsey analysts talk of a $7 trillion "race to scale data centers" for AI, and just eight projects in 2025 already represent commitments of over $1 trillion in AI infrastructure investment. Will this be like the railroad booms and busts of the late 1800s? It is impossible to say with any kind of certainty, but it is not unreasonable to think so.

Third, AI is certainly in a hype bubble, which is where the promise claimed for a new technology exceeds reality, and the discussion around that technology becomes increasingly detached from likely future outcomes. Remember the hype around NFTs? That was a classic hype bubble. And AI has been in a similar moment for a while. All kinds of media — social, print, and web — are filled with AI-related content, while AI boosterism has been the mood music of the corporate world for the last few years. Meanwhile, a recent MIT study reported that 95% of AI pilot projects fail to generate any returns at all.
But the article ultimately argues there's lessons in the 1990s dotcom boom: that "a thing can be hyped beyond its actual capabilities while still being important... When valuations correct — and they will — the same pattern will emerge: companies that focus on solving real problems with available technology will extract value before, during, and after the crash." The winners will be companies with systematic approaches to extracting value — adopting mixed portfolios with different time horizons and risk levels, while recognizing organizational friction points for a purposeful (and holistic) integration.

"The louder the bubble talk, the more space opens for those willing to take a methodical approach to building value."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shares a report: JM Video, one of only two remaining DVD rental stores in Paris, is a focal point for film lovers and visited by actors like Brad Pitt when they are in the city, but the ever-growing competition of streaming platforms means this Paris institution is fighting for survival. Choice is not the problem: JM Video has a library of more than 50,000 films, more than some 5,000 on offer at any time on Netflix and more than the catalogues of all the major streaming actors combined. "It's one of the few places in Paris with a real film collection, you can find things here that you cannot find anywhere else," said movie buff Virginie Breton, who rents DVDs several times a week. But not enough to keep JM Video afloat.

Sky-high Paris property rents and a dwindling customer base, combined with the arrival of ever-more streaming services like Amazon Prime, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ are squeezing the life out of the cave-like shop, where DVDs spill out from floor-to-ceiling racks. Founded in 1982, JM Video was one of around 5,000 video rental shops in France at the end of last century, well before Netflix switched from being a DVD rental outfit to a streaming pioneer around 2010. Now, France has only about 10 DVD rental shops, two of which are in Paris.

Two Xpeng AeroHT flying cars collided during a rehearsal for the Changchun Air Show in China, with one vehicle catching fire upon landing. While the company reported no serious injuries, CNN reported one person was injured in the crash. The BBC reports: Footage on Chinese social media site Weibo appeared to show a flaming vehicle on the ground which was being attended to by fire engines. One vehicle "sustained fuselage damage and caught fire upon landing," Xpeng AeroHT said in a statement to CNN. "All personnel at the scene are safe, and local authorities have completed on-site emergency measures in an orderly manner," it added.

The electric flying cars take off and land vertically, and the company is hoping to sell them for around $300,000 each. In January, Xpeng claimed to have around 3,000 orders for the vehicle. [...] It has said it wants to lead the world in the "low-altitude economy."

A new Stanford-led study finds that switching permanently to standard time could prevent 300,000 strokes and reduce obesity in 2.6 million Americans by better aligning circadian rhythms with natural light. Researchers argue that the twice-yearly clock changes are the worst option for public health, while permanent daylight saving time would offer two-thirds of the benefits. From a report: "We found that staying in standard time or staying in daylight saving time is definitely better than switching twice a year," senior researcher Jamie Zeitzer said in a news release. He's a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University in California. For the study, researchers estimated how different national time policies might affect American's circadian rhythms -- the body's innate clock that regulates many physiological processes. The human circadian cycle isn't exactly 24 hours, researchers noted. It's about 12 minutes longer for most people, and it can be changed based on a person's exposure to light.

"When you get light in the morning, it speeds up the circadian cycle. When you get light in the evening, it slows things down," Zeitzer said. "You generally need more morning light and less evening light to keep well synchronized to a 24-hour day." An out-of-sync circadian cycle has been linked with many different poor health outcomes, researchers said. "The more light exposure you get at the wrong times, the weaker the circadian clock," Zeitzer said. "All of these things that are downstream -- for example, your immune system, your energy -- don't match up quite as well." Most people would experience the least circadian burden under permanent standard time, which prioritizes morning light, researchers found.

The research team then linked its analysis of circadian rhythms to county-level data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to see how each time policy might affect people's health. Their models showed that permanent standard time would reduce obesity nationwide by 0.78% and stroke by 0.09%. Those seemingly small percentage changes, when played out across the national population, would mean 2.6 million fewer people with obesity and 300,000 fewer cases of stroke. Permanent daylight savings time would result in a 0.51% drop in obesity -- around 1.7 million people -- and a 0.04% reduction in strokes, or 220,000 cases. Either move would help American health. "You have people who are passionate on both sides of this, and they have very different arguments," Zeitzer said. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Apple released iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26 today, introducing Liquid Glass, a translucent design language that represents the biggest visual redesign since iOS 7 in 2013. The new interface elements dynamically refract and reflect background content across all three platforms. iOS 26 requires iPhone 11 or later and second-generation iPhone SE or newer. iPadOS 26 runs on the same hardware as iPadOS 18 except the 7th-generation iPad. macOS Tahoe 26 supports all Apple silicon Macs, the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 and later iMac, and 2019 and later Mac Pro. The transparent menu bar on macOS increases perceived display size.

iOS 26's adaptive Lock Screen time display resizes around notifications and Live Activities. Desktop icons, folders, app icons and widgets support light, dark, tinted, and clear appearances across all systems. iOS 26 adds Visual Intelligence for on-screen content analysis through screenshot button combinations. Live Translation operates across Messages, FaceTime and Phone on all platforms, translating text and audio in real-time on-device. The Camera app received streamlined navigation and lens cleaning hints for iPhone 15 and later models.

iPadOS 26 brings Mac-style windowing and multitasking. Apps support free-form placement and menu bars. The Phone app and new Apple Games app arrived on iPad. macOS gained the Phone app through Continuity, including Call Screening and Hold Assist features. Spotlight executes hundreds of actions without opening applications and automatically assigns quick keys to frequent actions. Apple Intelligence expands across all systems. The Shortcuts app gained intelligent actions for text summarization and image generation. The Wallet app tracks orders across platforms, while Apple Music introduced AutoMix for song transitions.