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This is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s also kind of cool. I didn’t type a word of what you are about to read. I dictated everything in this text into Wispr Flow, a cool dictation keyboard I have been trying for a few weeks. Here’s how it did: warts and all, with no hand-made corrections.
A boomerang carved from a mammoth tusk is one of the oldest in the world, and it may be even older than archaeologists originally thought, according to a recent round of radiocarbon dating.
Archaeologists unearthed the mammoth-tusk boomerang in Poland’s Oblazowa Cave in the 1990s, and they originally dated it to around 18,000 years old, which made it one of the world’s oldest intact boomerangs. But according to recent analysis by University of Bologna researcher Sahra Talamo and her colleagues, the boomerang may have been made around 40,000 years ago. If they’re right, it offers tantalizing clues about how people lived on the harsh tundra of what’s now Poland during the last Ice Age.
A boomerang carved from mammoth tusk
The mammoth-tusk boomerang is about 72 centimeters long, gently curved, and shaped so that one end is slightly more rounded than the other. It still bears scratches and scuffs from the mammoth’s life, along with fine, parallel grooves that mark where some ancient craftsperson shaped and smoothed the boomerang. On the rounded end, a series of diagonal marks would have made the weapon easier to grip. It’s smoothed and worn from frequent handling: the last traces of the life of some Paleolithic hunter.
Apple is about to break one of its golden rules: building everything itself. According to a new Bloomberg report, Apple is now seriously considering offloading some of Siri’s brainpower to external partners like Anthropic or OpenAI. It’s a bold shift for […]
Back in April, Sundar Pichai said over 30% of code at Google is now generated by AI. The company today released guidance for all Google software engineers on how to best adopt AI for coding and their work.
Your Monday afternoon lineup of the day’s best Android game and app deals are waiting for you below. Just be sure to go secure your FREE $50 reserve credit ahead of the upcoming Galaxy Z Flip/Fold 7 launch, the up to $300 in credit coming with the new Smart Monitors, and the up to $600 off Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro and Book4 Edge/Ultra models. Today’s deals are headlined by apps like The House of Da Vinci, No More Buttons, Bright Memory, and more. Everything awaits below.
Despite near-consensus that memory has a physical basis, neuroscientists are split on whether we might someday be able to extract memories from a preserved brain or upload them into a computer.
Apple's Vision Pro hasn't made huge waves in the market, partly due to its steep price and "everything including the kitchen sink" feature set. But Apple hasn't given up on the platform yet; a prominent analyst with a strong record of accurate projections for Apple's product lineup, Ming-Chi Kuo, published a roadmap that shows Apple beginning to roll out a new wave of mixed reality devices in 2027.
Kuo says Apple still "views head-mounted devices as the next major trend in consumer electronics." We already knew Apple CEO Tim Cook felt that way before the Vision Pro came out, but continued investment seems to indicate that Apple hasn't been dissuaded by the relatively low sales of the Vision Pro as a niche product. However, Kuo notes that "Apple is not expected to launch any new head-mounted devices in 2026."
Launches are planned for 2027 and 2028, though. You might expect a sort of Vision Pro 2, and Kuo believes that's coming—but not until at least mid-2028. When it arrives, it's expected to jump from Apple's M2 system-on-a-chip to the M5, which should offer a significant performance leap. Based on his supply line sources, Kuo believes the new headset will feature a completely new design that is "significantly" lighter than the first Vision Pro and a lower price point.
It's a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. June's list includes the final results from the Muon g-2 experiment, re-creating the recipe for Egyptian blue, embedding coded messages in ice bubbles, and why cats seem to have a marked preference for sleeping on their left sides.
Re-creating Egyptian blues
Close-up image of an ancient wooden Egyptian falcon. Researchers have found a way to reproduce the blue pigment visible on the artifact.
Credit:
Matt Unger, Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Artists in ancient Egypt were particularly fond of the color known as Egyptian blue—deemed the world's oldest synthetic pigment—since it was a cheap substitute for pricier materials like lapis lazuli or turquoise. But archaeologists have puzzled over exactly how it was made, particularly given the wide range of hues, from deep blue to gray or green. That knowledge had long been forgotten. However, scientists at Washington State University have finally succeeded in recreating the recipe, according to a paper published in the journal npj Heritage Science.
The interdisciplinary team came up with 12 different potential recipes using varying percentages of silicon dioxide, copper, calcium, and sodium carbonate. They heated the samples to 1,000° Celsius (about what ancient artists could have achieved), varying the time between one and 11 hours. They also cooled the samples at different rates. Then they analyzed the samples using microscopy and other modern techniques and compared them to the Egyptian blue on actual Egyptian artifacts to find the best match.
Apple is considering enlisting the help of OpenAI or Anthropic to power its AI-upgraded Siri, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. As Apple continues to struggle with the development of an upgraded “LLM Siri,” it reportedly asked OpenAI and Anthropic to create versions of their large-language models to test on the company’s private cloud infrastructure.
As reported by Bloomberg, Rockwell asked his team to test whether Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Google’s Gemini performs better at handling basic requests compared to its own models, with Anthropic’s apparently seen as the most promising. While Google has Gemini AI features for Android and its Pixel lineup, Samsung licenses Google’s AI model for its phones. It is also reportedly close to cutting a deal with Perplexity, which already has a tie-up with Motorola. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported Apple executives had considered acquiring Perplexity to help boost its AI ambitions.
LLM Siri was largely absent from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, where SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak admitted that the technology “didn’t hit our quality standard.” Bloomberg notes that Apple’s plans to incorporate a third-party AI model into Siri are still at an “early stage” and that it’s still considering using in-house models.
Apple TV+ has so far had its most successful year ever. Severance was a big part of that, but so too were several hit new series. For example, Jon Hamm’s Your Friends & Neighbors was Apple’s most watched new drama ever, and now season 2 is in the works. Here’s what we know so far.
