The iPhone Duo status icon introduces a new approach to information that has occupied the top edge of the iPhone display for nearly two decades. Instead of treating Wi-Fi, cellular signal, battery status, and other indicators as a conventional horizontal row, Apple has created a flexible circular system that sits in the corner of the foldable iPhone’s display.
Apple officially describes the feature as a “circular, flexible system” within the status bar rather than one fixed icon containing every piece of information at all times. The distinction is useful: the area can adapt according to context while consolidating status information into a smaller visual region.
It is part of a much larger rethink of iOS 27 specifically for iPhone Duo. The foldable device changes the proportions available to software, particularly when its 7.6-inch inner display is open, forcing Apple to reconsider interface elements that have traditionally stretched horizontally across an iPhone screen.
The status system is one of the smallest changes visually, but it illustrates how extensively Apple has adapted iOS around the new hardware.
Conventional iPhones distribute system information across the upper portion of the display. Cellular strength, network type, Wi-Fi connectivity, and battery status typically occupy space around the camera hardware and Dynamic Island.
iPhone Duo approaches that area differently.
Apple says its circular status system nestles into the corner of the screen and presents relevant information including Wi-Fi, cellular strength, battery status, and more. Rather than requiring a long horizontal strip, those indicators can occupy a compact area that works with the device’s unusual screen geometry.
The change is closely connected to the way iPhone Duo handles controls throughout iOS 27.
Apple has moved several interface elements to the side of the display. App navigation, toolbars, the Home Screen Dock, and some Lock Screen controls can use vertical space instead of occupying the familiar horizontal regions found on other iPhones.
The status system therefore becomes part of a vertical interface column rather than an isolated redesign.
This arrangement lets content use more of the display’s height while keeping frequently referenced system information visible. It also creates a consistent location for status details as users change how they hold or fold the device.
A foldable phone presents an interface problem that a traditional slab-shaped iPhone does not have.
iPhone Duo can operate through its 5.4-inch outer display or its substantially larger 7.6-inch inner screen. The device can be opened completely, partially folded, rotated, or positioned like a small book.
A static status bar designed around one screen size and orientation would be less effective across those configurations.
Apple instead built iOS 27 so that interface elements can move as the physical device changes. Content reacts to folding, controls relocate, and layouts adjust around the hinge and available screen area.
Apple’s developer guidance provides additional detail about this philosophy. On iPhone Duo, navigation and toolbar controls share vertical space with system elements such as the status bar and Live Activities. When available room becomes limited, application controls can collapse into an overflow menu.
That makes the circular status area part of an adaptive system rather than a cosmetic flourish.
Developers do not need to manually reproduce the status treatment inside their apps. Apple’s standard interface frameworks handle much of the adaptation, especially when applications use native navigation, toolbar, and tab-bar components.
The status area is not the only familiar piece of iPhone interface that changes position on iPhone Duo.
Apple has redesigned Dynamic Island so that it can sit vertically along the side of both the outer and inner displays. It can expand from that position to present alerts and Live Activities.
The relationship between Dynamic Island and the new circular status system is particularly interesting because Apple now has two dynamic interface areas operating along the same side of the screen.
One communicates persistent device information such as network and battery status. The other handles temporary activity, alerts, and live information.
Apple’s developer documentation refers to this section as shared vertical space. Application controls may also occupy it, meaning iOS has to continuously decide how much room is available and which elements deserve priority.
That is a major departure from the long-standing assumption that the upper corners of an iPhone screen simply contain a predictable row of small status symbols.
On Duo, those regions have become active parts of the interface layout.
Consolidating status information creates a design challenge: efficiency cannot come at the expense of readability.
Users have spent years learning the meanings of Apple’s individual status symbols. Cellular bars indicate signal strength, the Wi-Fi symbol communicates wireless connectivity, and the battery icon provides an immediate indication of remaining power.
Apple has not discarded those familiar concepts.
Instead, the circular system changes how and where information is presented. The familiar status categories remain present while the container around them becomes more adaptable.
This is particularly useful on a device with two displays. Users should not need to relearn the meaning of basic connectivity information when moving from the outer screen to the inner display.
The same reasoning applies when iPhone Duo changes orientation. Apple can reorganize the status area without changing the fundamental visual vocabulary behind Wi-Fi, cellular, or battery information.
The new design suggests a different direction for one of the oldest pieces of smartphone interface.
Status bars traditionally behave like reserved strips of screen space. Applications work around them, and their icons occupy predictable positions regardless of what is happening elsewhere.
iPhone Duo turns that space into something more fluid.
The circular system can coexist with a vertical Dynamic Island, changing application controls, Live Activities, and layouts that respond to the physical position of the foldable display. It becomes another component that iOS can arrange rather than a fixed row placed permanently along an edge.
There is no indication that Apple plans to bring the same circular status treatment unchanged to conventional iPhones. Its current implementation is specifically tied to iPhone Duo and the interface requirements created by the foldable hardware.
Still, the design provides a glimpse at how Apple can rethink even deeply established iPhone conventions when the shape of the device changes. When iPhone Duo reaches customers on October 23, the small circular area in the corner will be one of the most immediately visible examples: cellular strength, Wi-Fi, battery information, and other system details occupying a shared adaptive space instead of stretching across the display.
The post iPhone Duo status icon combines Wi-Fi, cellular, and battery information appeared first on AppleMagazine.
The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack.
“We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.”
In the meantime, the IMO said it’s prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, which can be reported here. The organization is also providing some information on its Facebook page.
© Interntional Meteor Organization
The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack.
“We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.”
In the meantime, the IMO said it’s prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, which can be reported here. The organization is also providing some information on its Facebook page.
© Interntional Meteor Organization
The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack.
“We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.”
In the meantime, the IMO said it’s prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, which can be reported here. The organization is also providing some information on its Facebook page.
© Interntional Meteor Organization
The U.S. military must be ready to engage the enemy farther from home than ever before, according to its highest-ranking officer.
"Today's modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space," Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday (Sept. 16) during a keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
Cislunar space extends from Earth all the way out to the orbit of the moon and includes the lunar surface. For several years now, military officials have been stressing the strategic importance of this huge region, which could get quite a bit busier in the next decade or so.
For example, both the United States and China plan to build bases near the moon's south pole, which is thought to harbor large amounts of water ice. Winning this new moon race is critical, U.S. officials have stressed, because whoever does so will be able to establish norms of behavior on and around Earth's nearest neighbor.
China has already demonstrated impressive capabilities in the lunar sphere. In 2019, the nation's robotic Chang'e 4 mission pulled off the first-ever soft landing on the moon's mysterious far side. In 2024, Chang'e 6 returned far-side samples to Earth — another first.
Caine didn't cite such missions or even mention China by name. And he provided no details about what conflict on the cislunar battlefield might look like (though presumably it would be entirely robotic, with satellites seeking to take out adversary craft via jamming or blinding).
But he invoked the cislunar battlefield twice and noted that U.S. military branches cannot assume continued dominance of their various domains.
"Future conflicts will demand that we operate without the assumptions of uncontested access, secure rare areas or uninterrupted or uncontested sustainment," Caine said. "Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the joint force is prepared to fight, endure and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space."
The United States' long-held advantage in the final frontier will be key to securing such victories, he added.
"We must continue to ensure that the United States of America can strike anywhere on the globe at the time and place of our choosing, and sustain that force," Caine said. "Our United States Space Force must provide unrivaled space superiority and sustain the associated networks, domain awareness [and] data advantage that the joint force needs to win in space, both now and in the future."
We now know that part of the Space Force's strategy for maintaining that crucial superiority is the operation of weapons in Earth orbit. The branch's chief, Gen. Douglas Schiess, admitted as much during an address at the same conference on Tuesday (Sept. 15).
"Let me be crystal clear: Today, guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks,” Schiess said during his speech. ("Guardian" is the official name for a member of the Space Force, just as members of the U.S. Navy are called sailors and members of the Army are soldiers.)
Schiess provided few details about these weapons but, later in the speech, implied that they are electromagnetic rather than kinetic in nature. That is, they're probably designed to knock out key systems of adversary satellites rather than destroy the entire spacecraft (which would create a cloud of potentially troublesome debris).
It's no surprise the U.S. possesses and employs such technology; the newsworthy bit is that a top official said it so openly. The nation's chief rivals in the space domain, China and Russia, possess advanced counterspace technologies as well. For example, both have destroyed defunct satellites with missiles and conducted close approaches of spacecraft with "inspector" vehicles.
These tiny instabilities could play an outsized role in energizing the Sun’s corona.A new brain-computer interface (BCI) is the first to translate both speech and movement with a single device that reads data from implanted electrodes.
In a recent paper published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers revealed how their new BCI simultaneously communicates verbal and non-verbal information in seconds.
This is a major step forward in BCI research, as human communication relies on body language as much as spoken words to convey meaning. For the first time, one implant marries these two separate elements of communication, offering a breakthrough for individuals with severe paralysis.
The team’s new BCI translates electrical signals from the brain into text using artificial intelligence. The decoded information can then be used to control a digital avatar, guiding both its speech and movements.
The BCI field has made significant strides in recent years, allowing humans to control cursors and robotic arms or even communicate through synthesized speech. However, those projects have generally focused on a single mode of communication, whereas this new system is multifunctional, allowing it to capture more of the rich nuance of human communication.
“This gives us hope for neural prosthesis that will enter day-to-day usage,” said Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
Since both are related to communication, it should be no surprise that the neural signals responsible for speech can overlap. That can make the business of separating them for two different functions at the same time extremely challenging. Additionally, when the brain commands the body to speak and move at the same time, the neural activity coordinating those activities can vary from what it would be if only one were occurring at a time.
Two volunteers worked with the researchers to test the new BCI, which involved surgically implanted arrays comprising 253 electrodes on the surface of the cortex. By covering portions of the sensorimotor cortex with so many electrodes, the team captured a large number of signals associated with attempted speech and movement.
Following a brainstem stroke, one volunteer experienced impaired speech and movement capabilities. The team instructed him to wave, shake his hands, clap, and nod. Additionally, they gave him five phrases to attempt to speak silently.
The other volunteer had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease that causes progressive motor impairment and can lead to loss of speech. Although he could only move his facial muscles, he was capable of typing messages. Researchers gave him ten phrases to imagine vocalizing and ten gestures to imagine performing.
Using the electrode implants, the BCI recorded neural activity generated by each attempt, including when participants attempted movement and speech separately or simultaneously. The team then trained AI models to translate those signals, finding that including data from simultaneous activities improved decoding performance.
With this neural activity mapped, the team then had the volunteers attempt to control a digital avatar using the BCI. Again, testing involved isolated and combined verbal and gestural communication. However, this time, instead of relying exclusively on preselected responses, the participants were asked questions in real time.
Accuracy varied between the volunteers, with the first achieving perfect BCI decoding of the tested movements and speech, while the second recorded 75% speech accuracy and 85% gesture accuracy.
While achieving such promising results for combined speech and gesture signals represents a major step forward in BCI research, more work is needed to continue refining the technology. Higher levels of speech accuracy have been achieved with speech-only devices, and this test was limited to individual sentences rather than continuous speech. Additionally, the device captured gestures rather than steady hand positions.
These limitations were partly intentional, as the team initially simplified its decoding tasks while making the jump to simultaneous actions. Further research could expand the system to recognize movements involving additional parts of the body and enable finer control of the many joints in the hands.
The paper, “Simultaneous Speech and Gesture Decoding for Multimodal Communication in Paralysis,” appeared in Nature Neuroscience on September 14, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
Astronomers found 84 powerful cosmic objects hiding in a kind of light our telescopes can barely detect.
A lunar city sounds possible until you calculate how fast it would use its water
Maarten Roelfs, fundador da Office EU, diz que a Europa não pode continuar dependente das "big tech" americanas e está a construir uma alternativa europeia ao Microsoft 365, que conta já com mais de um milhão de utilizadores em lista de espera.
The post “Os americanos cruzaram o Rubicão”: Fundador do Office EU quer destronar a Microsoft e Google na Europa appeared first on Tek Notícias.
Scientists have discovered that the weather on a distant world may be far more organized than it first appears. The object, known as SIMP 0136, is a brown dwarf located about 20 light-years from Earth. It is larger and hotter than a gas giant planet such as Jupiter, but it is not massive enough to […]
The post Scientists Discover Jupiter-Like Weather Just 20 Light-Years Away appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.
Aplicativos que utilizam uma premissa simples e a transformam em uma experiência interessante são, particularmente, meus favoritos. Exemplo disso é o Farwave, um app para iPhone e iPad desenvolvido pelo brasileiro Fernando Bunn que permite encontrar estações de rádio de todo o mundo girando um globo 3D até uma determinada região e tocando em uma estação.
A interação baseia-se na localização geográfica, e não em pesquisas por texto. Ou seja, os usuários giram o globo, selecionam uma região e tocam em uma estação, tudo pela mesma interface.
Há, ainda, um botão chamado “Take me anywhere” (“Leve-me a qualquer lugar”, em tradução direta) que seleciona uma opção aleatória para ouvintes que não querem procurar um local específico; além disso, o aplicativo salva o histórico de reprodução para que as pessoas possam retornar a uma estação mais tarde.
Além do rádio, o app também organiza podcasts e músicas utilizando a mesma metáfora do globo. Diferentemente das estações de rádio, assinantes Pro podem pesquisar programas ou adicionar manualmente um feed RSS. O aplicativo também oferece suporte a filas de reprodução, velocidade de reprodução ajustável e downloads para ouvir offline.
Assinantes do plano Pro também podem importar seus próprios arquivos de áudio de um computador ou do aplicativo Arquivos. Cada artista aparece como um “sinal” próprio, e as faixas importadas permanecem no dispositivo para reprodução offline.
O Farwave está disponível gratuitamente na App Store, mas alguns recursos (como supracitado) exigem o Farwave Pro, que custa R$20/mês ou R$100/ano.
via 9to5Mac
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is gliding toward its distant observation post on a pinpoint trajectory so precise that engineers estimate the spacecraft's fuel load will last twice as long as their initial expectations, the space agency confirmed Monday.
The $4.3 billion observatory's designers originally planned to load enough propellant into Roman's four fuel tanks for a minimum lifetime of five years, plus a potential five-year mission extension. That was a conservative estimate. NASA officials knew an on-target launch and perfect execution of the observatory's first post-launch course correction maneuver would leave Roman with a hearty fuel reserve.
"As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations," Jamie Dunn, center director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release.
© SpaceX
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is gliding toward its distant observation post on a pinpoint trajectory so precise that engineers estimate the spacecraft's fuel load will last twice as long as their initial expectations, the space agency confirmed Monday.
The $4.3 billion observatory's designers originally planned to load enough propellant into Roman's four fuel tanks for a minimum lifetime of five years, plus a potential five-year mission extension. That was a conservative estimate. NASA officials knew an on-target launch and perfect execution of the observatory's first post-launch course correction maneuver would leave Roman with a hearty fuel reserve.
"As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations," Jamie Dunn, center director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release.
© SpaceX
The rings around a strange small body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus look mysteriously different from previous views, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest.
The rings encircle Chariklo, which is a centaur, a strange type of object that shows characteristics of both asteroids and comets. Chariklo is only about 400 miles (250 kilometers) in diameter and is part of a large group of tiny objects in the distant solar system.
Scientists first discovered Chariklo's rings in 2013 — making it the first small solar system body found to have rings — and studied them with ground-based telescopes again in 2014 and 2017. When JWST took another look at Chariklo in 2022, a decade had brought a lot of difference, according to a study published Sept. 9 in the journal Science Advances.
"By comparing JWST observations with those obtained … over the last decade, we discovered opposite changes in the two rings: while the inner ring shows significantly higher opacity, the outer ring shows lower opacity, " Pablo Santos-Sanz, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia and first author of the study, said in a statement.
Researchers don't know exactly how the changes took place, but the study authors offered three suggestions. The first is that JWST, which has a fine resolution, was able to see both denser and sparser zones of the rings than previous observations showed. The second is that there were changes in the rings' material or in the grains themselves. Finally, a third possibility is that JWST could see "grains with wavelength-dependent optical properties," meaning the telescope saw effects in composition and grain size that explain the variability.
Santos-Sanz said the research suggests that small bodies with rings — even those orbiting far away from the gravitational influences of planets — may have more changes in their systems than scientists previously thought. "Our results force us to rethink how they form, how they evolve, and what mechanisms maintain their stability," he said.
A theoretical follow-up observation, taken the next time Chariklo passes in front of a star, would help to confirm the new JWST results, the researchers added — especially the apparent decreased opacity of one of the rings and the increased opacity of the other.
"These observations would help disentangle temporal evolution from wavelength-dependent scattering effects, and clarify the physical processes shaping Chariklo’s rings," the researchers stated in the study.
The new observations of Chariklo also mark the first time that scientists have planned a JWST viewing campaign specifically around a stellar occultation — that is, the researchers timed the viewing precisely to when Chariklo passed in front of a distant star from the telescope's point of view.
All observations of Chariklo's rings, on the ground and in space, have used stellar occultations. That's because the rings are too faint to be imaged directly, so astronomers must instead learn more about the rings by measuring the dips and increases in brightness as Chariklo passes in front of the background star. Scientists use a similar method to study the atmospheres of alien planets with JWST's infrared instruments.
Chariklo's speed relative to JWST was low, at 1.5 miles per second (2.5 kilometers per second), allowing for fine imaging of the rings. To time the occultation, the researchers used info from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which precisely charts the locations and movements of more than 2 billion stars, as well as calculated the orbit of JWST at a location roughly 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth in the opposite direction of the sun. According to the researchers, the planning and execution of the mission required "extreme precision."
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