05 Sci-Tech

‘Funflation’ is back and hitting gaming and streaming services– www.cnbc.com

pgnewser July 13, 2026 0

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For decades, video games have been a go-to hobby for Alyx Green. But in recent years, Green has felt priced out.

Instead of buying the biggest releases, the Illinois graduate student has opted for cheaper alternatives from smaller studios or turned to board and card games. In some cases, the 31-year-old watches videos of others playing hot games on YouTube in lieu of actually playing.

“The price has been going up,” Green said. “It’s just hard to keep up.”

U.S. consumers have for years grappled with “funflation,” used to describe the sharply higher prices for live experiences like concerts or sporting events that were halted during pandemic lockdowns.

Buried for 5,300 years beneath a Stone Age tomb, a skull discovered in Spain has revealed the world’s earliest known ear surgery |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser July 13, 2026 0

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For more than 5,300 years, it lay undisturbed beneath a Stone Age tomb in northern Spain, hidden among the remains of nearly 100 people. When archaeologists finally uncovered the ancient skull, they expected another glimpse into prehistoric life. Instead, they found evidence of something far more extraordinary. Careful examination revealed that the woman had undergone not one but two complex ear surgeries thousands of years before modern medicine existed. Even more astonishing, signs of new bone growth showed she survived both procedures, making the discovery the world’s earliest known physical evidence of ear surgery and rewriting what scientists know about prehistoric healthcare.The skull was unearthed in 2018 from the Dolmen of El Pendón, a large Neolithic burial monument near Reinoso in Spain’s Burgos province. The tomb, which dates back to between 3800 BCE and 3000 BCE, served as a collective burial site for around 100 individuals. Among them was the skull of an elderly woman, believed to have been around 65 years old, whose remains would become the focus of an extraordinary scientific investigation.

New method aims to keep kids safe from illegal AI-generated content | MIT News– news.mit.edu

pgnewser July 13, 2026 0

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With the exploding popularity of generative artificial intelligence, many open-source models are now available online for anyone to adapt for their task, such as generating product renderings in a certain artistic style.

But these models also find their way into the hands of nefarious actors who may optimize them to produce illegal content, like hate speech or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This is a growing problem — the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 1.5 million reports of AI-generated CSAM in 2025, an increase from 67,000 in 2024.

Scientists just created a Black Hole-like energy system in a lab without moving anything, recreating a 50-year-old theory that could transform future communication and quantum technology– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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Artistic rendering of Penrose super-radiance: electromagnetic waves with selected rotation patterns are amplified as they interact with a system that appears to rotate at superluminal speeds. (Credit: Dalila Pasotti and Hadiseh Nasari)

Physicists have successfully recreated some of the extreme physics of black holes inside a laboratory by building a stationary device that can copy the effects of impossible rotational speeds.The achievement confirms a theoretical idea suggested more than half a century ago by Sir Roger Penrose, who proposed that energy could be taken from a rapidly spinning black hole. Instead of using moving parts, researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) used artificial rotation to recreate this cosmic energy process in a controlled laboratory setting.The discovery, published in the journal Nature, takes a long-standing idea from science fiction into practical physics. The laboratory model avoids the physical limits of mechanical machines and could help create new technologies in wireless communication, advanced optics and quantum computing.

AI in Science Research Boosts Speed, Limits Scope– spectrum.ieee.org

pgnewser July 12, 2026 0

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AI is turning scientists into publishing machines—and quietly funneling them into the same crowded corners of research.

That’s the conclusion of an analysis of more than 40 million academic papers, which found that scientists who use AI tools in their research publish more papers, accumulate more citations, and reach leadership roles sooner than peers who don’t.

But there’s a catch. As individual scholars soar through the academic ranks, science as a whole shrinks its curiosity. AI-heavy research covers less topical ground, clusters around the same data-rich problems, and sparks less follow-on engagement between studies.

Scientists warn invasive Asian mantises are threatening Europe’s wildlife– www.sciencedaily.com

pgnewser July 12, 2026 0

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Praying mantises have fascinated people for centuries. Across different cultures, they have been viewed as everything from mystical guides that help lost travelers find their way home to ominous creatures associated with bad luck. Beyond the legends, native mantises also play an important ecological role by serving as indicators of healthy, biodiverse ecosystems.

Now, however, scientists say two Asian mantis species are becoming a growing threat to Europe’s native wildlife.

Humanoid robot performs surgery for the first time in major robotics breakthrough | The Post Millennial– thepostmillennial.com

pgnewser July 12, 2026 0

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The researchers behind the breakthrough say these humanoid robots could offer several advantages over the complex surgical systems currently in use.

Humanoid-style robot performs surgery for the first time, marking a potential turning point in the relationship between robotics and healthcare. Working alongside surgeons from the University of California San Diego, a robot named Surgie successfully removed a gallbladder. In another operation, “Surgie” was joined by another robot also dubbed “Surgie” to work alongside one another to perform a laparoscopic gallbladder removal. Both procedures were performed on non-primate mammals, The Independent reports.

“This study shows that humanoid robots have a viable future in the field of surgery,” said Michael Yip, a faculty member in the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.,” said to The Independent. “Remotely operated and autonomous humanoid robots have real potential for amplifying access to critical surgeries to which patients would otherwise not have access. This can help address the healthcare crisis not only in the United States, but also worldwide.”

Anthropic Free to Export – scitechwire.com

pgnewser July 7, 2026 0

President Trump has lifted his export ban on Anthropic’s AI product. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced “… The controls … are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.”

Go Deeper

4K Jobs Gone to AI at Microsoft – scitechwire.com

pgnewser July 7, 2026 0

The software giant Microsoft announced it was laying off 4,000 people, primarily its X-box division. The move is designed to optimize X-box and other divisions using AI. The layoffs amount to 2.1% of its workforce. 1,600 of those layoffs are already happening, and they’re all in the X-box division.

Go Deeper

AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood to appear in feature film set in the ‘Tillyverse’ – National– globalnews.ca

pgnewser July 7, 2026 0

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The AI “actor” known as Tilly Norwood will be used in a new feature film entitled Misaligned, its first lead role as a digitally generated persona.

Particle6, the AI production studio that built Norwood, is developing and producing the film, the company told Global News in an email statement. The company is led by comedian and writer Eline Van der Velden.

 

AI just supercharged the race to find room temperature superconductors– www.sciencedaily.com

pgnewser July 7, 2026 0

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Machine learning is giving scientists a powerful new way to search for superconductors, materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance. An international team has demonstrated that AI can rapidly narrow an almost limitless number of possible material combinations to identify the most promising candidates. According to Aalto University Professor Päivi Törmä, who leads the SuperC consortium, the approach could dramatically speed the discovery of new superconductors.

Superconductors allow electric current to flow without losing energy, but only when cooled to extremely low temperatures where quantum effects emerge. These remarkable materials are already used in technologies ranging from quantum computers and medical neuroimaging systems to fusion reactors and maglev trains.

Counterpoint: China’s 618 smartphone sales fall 13% year-on-year– technode.com

pgnewser July 7, 2026 0

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According to market research firm Counterpoint Research, smartphone sales in China fell 13% year over year during the month-long 618 shopping festival, as major brands raised prices to offset higher memory costs. Between May 26 and June 21, all major Chinese smartphone brands except Huawei posted double-digit sales declines. Promotions were less aggressive than last year, dampening consumer demand. Honor’s sales dropped 33%, while Xiaomi’s fell 24%.

Ivan Lam, Senior Analyst at Counterpoint Research, said: “Some Chinese smartphone brands priced both their new and existing models higher than comparable devices a year ago. Discounts during this year’s 618 shopping festival were also generally less aggressive, both in terms of price reductions and the range of products included in promotions.” [Jiwei, in Chinese]

NASA Chief says China can soon outsmart US in space exploration: But could shape the future of space |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser July 7, 2026 0

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Among the many industries that China and the USA are competing in, space is a rising battleground. The two countries that have tried their best to form a bond in trade and truth but remain contentious in spirit. China is rapidly advancing its lunar exploration program and is expected to eventually send taikonauts to the Moon, as per media reports.

Search Beyond What Can Be Taught: Evolving the Knowledge Boundary in Agentic Visual Generation– arxiv.org

pgnewser July 7, 2026 0

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arXiv:2607.05382v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Visual generators excel at rendering, but they confidently fabricate what they do not know. User requests are unbounded, evolving, and deeply long-tailed: new characters, trending entities, post-cutoff events, and more. This world-knowledge bottleneck is structural: generators are trained on fixed corpora, but the visual world is open-ended. We construct SearchGen-20K and SearchGen-Bench, with 20,839 prompts spanning twelve failure categories and twenty-two domains, paired with a pre-executed multimodal SearchGen-Corpus-1M to support offline, reproducible research. On SearchGen-Bench, frontier open generators score only 21 to 28 out of 100, a 40-point collapse invisible to existing benchmarks.

The business logic of asteroid mining– www.americanthinker.com

pgnewser July 7, 2026 0

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Beyond Earth, there are abundant resources on the Moon and, more significantly, on asteroids. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter alone is estimated to contain between 700,000 and 1,700,000 asteroids with diameters of at least 0.6 miles. In addition, there are over 30,000 known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and about 2,000 to 3,000 more are discovered each year.

A common objection to asteroid mining is that it would cost too much to transport raw materials from an asteroid to Earth, rendering mining economically unviable. The fact that transporting materials is expensive is partly true, but the argument still misses the point. Experts such as John S. Lewis, who raised the issue as early as 1997 in his book Mining the Sky, argued above all that the raw materials extracted from asteroids should primarily be used in space.