President Donald Trump on Saturday said he was creating a new “AI Force,” that would be similar to his Space Force—the arm of the Defense Department focused on space combat started by Trump during his first administration—and he planned to appoint a new AI czar to lead it.

On his Truth Social ...

OpenAI has told some investors that it expects to burn $278 billion by the end of 2030, the Financial Times reported, as it spends more on cloud computing and chips to run and train its AI. The forecast, based on a recent presentation, is higher than the one it gave investors early this year, ...

This week, we and others reported that OpenAI has been in early talks with investors about a new private round that could value it at $1.2 trillion or more. That follows CEO Sam Altman’s recent statement that an initial public offering wouldn’t happen this year, not that anyone was actually expecting that!

There are plenty of unanswered questions about the recent turn of events. But the biggest—why stay private?—seems obvious. It buys the company more time to rev up sales without the pressure of disclosing on how much it’s paying for that growth, such as offering margin-crushing discounts to lure business from rival Anthropic. 

While the AI industry ties itself in knots over models it thinks will pose security threats to the internet and perhaps to humanity itself, researchers are warning about flaws in AI coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft that pose immediate risk to businesses.

For instance, a recently discovered (and now largely fixed) software flaw in Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and GitHub Copilot would have let attackers hijack other people’s coding agents without them noticing, according to new research shared exclusively with The Information.

The research, published by Sequoia Capital-backed cybersecurity startup Air, discovered the same flaws in the way all four of those coding agents handle “skills” that direct agents to refer to a set of instructions and files to execute specific tasks.

OpenAI has held early conversations with investors about a new funding round that could lift its valuation to $1.2 trillion or higher, according to people familiar with the conversations. The conversations come as OpenAI has pushed off a planned initial public offering to next year or later.

The ...

Major Anthropic customers are still waiting to get “zero data retention” for the newest Fable AI models, meaning the AI firm would not store data related to their usage of its models. In the meantime, some are turning to OpenAI. 

Palantir and Booz Allen, for instance, are expanding their use of OpenAI’s Astra model, which they’ve been able to secure with zero data retention. Both have restricted their use of Fable models because Anthropic said in June it would store customer data for those using Fable models for 30 days, for security reasons.

Before that June announcement, Anthropic offered zero data retention policies in deals negotiated with individual customers. Starting later this fall, the AI firm plans to roll out a new program called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, which effectively gives “eligible” customers zero data retention. 

To the untrained eye, two female brown bears (Ursus arctos) in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve look like any other bears. But Bear #609 (Bean) and Bear #620 were raised in Katmai’s historic Brady Bunch-esque blended family.

Between mid-August and October 2022, Bear #910 blended her family with her sister Bear #909’s family. In the process, she adopted her sister’s 2.5-year-old female yearling cub (a one- to two-year-old cub still with its mother), while she herself had a spring cub (a first-year cub that was born over the winter and emerges in the spring). Adoptions like these are exceptionally rare in the wild, and it is believed to be only the second such adoption at Katmai. The behavior has also been observed in polar bears. 

The sisters were frequently seen fishing together with their cubs, teaching them how to fish throughout 2023. That same year, Bear #909’s ovulation cycle began again, and she separated from her offspring Bear #609 (Bean). A study on their family was published in the journal BioOne in 2025. 

The adopted Bear #609 (Bean) is a female bear, with large oval-shaped ears with slight blonde tips. She has a dark coat with blonde grizzling, and has a fluffy headband by the fall. Bear #690 (Bean) won the Fat Bear Week Junior competition in 2022, and is now considered a fully independent bear.

Bear #620 is Bear #609’s biological cousin and believed to be the daughter of Bear #910 who blended their families. She is identified by a slightly upturned narrow muzzle, tall oval ears, and a semi-prominent hump on her back. During the early summer, her head and mane are a light brown with a reddish blonde and a white chin. By the fall, she sports a more fluffy grizzled fur headband around her head.

According to Katmai naturalist Mike Fitz, it is unclear how being raised with two strong maternal figures will affect their adulthood. Brown bears will often establish a home range that overlaps with their mothers, and a hierarchy in the region develops among related bears along their mother’s line. Those bears within the same matriline may have more tolerance for each other. 

“If #609 and #620 continue to make Brooks River part of their home range, then we will have a special opportunity to watch the growth and maturation of two especially social young female bears in the same place that their mothers make a living,” Fitz explained in a recent video. “Familiarity with each other and the river and other bears who make it their home as well, sharing space with their large, successful mothers, may very well prove to be keys to their survival, longevity, and success.”

We also do not know just yet if members of this historic bear family will be contestants in Fat Bear Week 2026. The bracket will be announced on Friday, September 18.

Most bear mothers generally keep their litters separated, and this year was an example of why they tend to stick to themselves. On Tuesday, July 28, the live-cams captured a young brown bear cub being killed and eaten by an unrelated mother bear (Bear #806). The deceased cub was born this spring, and was one of Bear #909’s cubs. Bear 909 started this season with two cubs, but has now lost both. 

On Sunday, August 2, one of Bear #335’s (also known as Jolly) cubs died, after following three unrelated cubs up a tree. The mother of the cubs already in the tree attacked Bear #335’s cub, who did not survive the encounter. The identity of the mother bear who killed the spring cub was not confirmed. 

Following the first cub’s death, Fitz and park rangers Christine Loberg and Sarah Bruce said that while infanticide by female adults does occur, this is likely the first documented case occurring at Brooks River. While there is no single answer as to why mother bears are killing cubs, some experts suspect bear adoption, food scarcity, and fights for dominance all play a role. 

The post The cubs from Katmai’s ‘Brady Bunch’ blended family are all grown up appeared first on Popular Science.

Salesforce seems unafraid of a future in which people use an AI chatbot like Claude to access Salesforce enterprise apps and underlying databases to get work done, rather than visiting those apps themselves. Figma, an enterprise design app, naturally wants a different future.

Dylan Field, Figma’s CEO, said Wednesday that as the company’s in-house AI tools for designing apps and other user interfaces get better, “we'll see more and more of that work happening in Figma directly,” rather than using Claude or other prominent AI assistants to do such work.

The salmon? Eaten. The days? Shorter. The bears? Fatter. 

After spending the summer eating the fatty pink salmon swimming through Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, it’s time to celebrate the park’s iconic brown bears (Ursus arctos). Fat Bear Week begins on Tuesday, September 22, and here is everything you need to know. 

What is Fat Bear Week?

Think March Madness, just without the basketball and significantly more bears. Fat Bear Week is a single-elimination tournament, where bear enthusiasts from around the world can vote online for their favorite chunky bear. After each round, the bear with the most votes advances until the winner is announced on September 29. According to the Katmai Conservancy, the event began as a one-day event in 2014 with 1,700 votes cast. Only 10 years later, 1.2 million votes were cast from over 100 countries.

The brown bears return to Brooks Falls for the salmon migration every year in late June, where viewers can watch them on explore.org’s livestream. There, they will feast to fatten up for the long winter ahead. By late summer, the nutritious fish will spawn and then begin to die. The bears will then move to the lower Brooks River in September and October to eat the dead and dying salmon near the river’s mouth.

Eating all of this salmon is important because the heftier the bear, the better chance they will survive their long winter hibernation. Despite being the poster species for winter hibernation, bears are not “deep hibernators,” they way that squirrels, bats, and bees are. Bears enter a state called torpor, which is an involuntary state primarily triggered by lack of food. During this time, the bears rely on stored fat reserves for energy. A torpid bear’s eating, drinking, and waste functions will cease, as its body metabolizes these stores it put on over the summer. 

When is Fat Bear Week 2026?

This year, Fat Bear Week begins on Tuesday, September 22, and a winner will be crowned on Tuesday, September 29. 

How can I vote?

Votes may be cast from noon to 9 p.m. EDT (9 a.m. to 6 p.m. PDT and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ADT)

from September 22 and 29 at fatbearweek.org.

Photographs comparing the bears from earlier in the summer and later in the summer will be shown, so voters can get an idea of just how much weight the bears put on during their salmon fest. An adult male bear can go from roughly 700 pounds in the early summer to over 1,200 pounds by fall. 

Voters are also encouraged to get familiar with each bear’s life history and the unique challenges they face to survive.

Which bears are competing this year?

The 2026 Fat Bear Week Bracket will be released on Friday, September 18. 

In 2025, Bear #32 (Chunk) took the crown, despite beginning the salmon run with a freshly broken jaw. He was likely injured while fighting with another bear for a mate, but he still managed to catch plenty of fish. Chunk is known for his dominance and size, but also narrow-set eyes, dark fur, a prominent brow ridge, and a distinctive scar across his muzzle. 

How can I support Katmai’s bears?

Donations can be made to Katmai Conservancy’s Otis Fund. The Otis Fund is named after Bear #480 (Otis), who won four Fat Bear Week titles before his death around 2024.  All donations made between September 22 and October 3 will be matched by explore.org. 

What happened with the bears this summer?

This year’s livestream featured an example of how wild (and upsetting to humans) nature can be. On Tuesday, July 28, the live-cams captured a young brown bear cub being killed and eaten by an unrelated mother bear (Bear #806). The deceased cub was born this spring and the child of Bear #909, a 10-year-old brown bear. Bear #909 started the season with two cubs, but now lost both. 

On Sunday, August 2, one of Bear #335’s (Jolly) cubs died, after following three unrelated cubs up a tree. The mother of the cubs already in the tree attacked Bear #335’s cub, who did not survive the encounter. The identity of the mother bear who killed the spring cub was not confirmed. 

Following the first cub’s death, naturalist Mike Fitz and park rangers Christine Loberg and Sarah Bruce said this likely the first documented case occurring at Brooks River. While there is no one answer as to why mother bears are killing cubs, some experts suspect bear adoption, food scarcity, and fights for dominance all play a role. 

Additionally, this year also saw the cub with silver-hued fur, a cub who hopefully learned important lesson about porcupine quill safety, the unique fishing stylings of Bear #164 (Bucky Dent), and Bear #284’s (Electra) family who can “walk on water.”

The post Fat Bear Week kicks off September 22 appeared first on Popular Science.

In the wild, mimicry is an important tool for survival. Some baby hummingbirds disguise themselves as caterpillars with stinging hairs to avoid predators, while octopus, squid, and cuttlefish use camouflage to blend in with their surroundings and hide. Even plants get in on the mimicry fun, with some mimicking the small of rotten meat to attract flies and others using their petals to trick flies into pollinating on them.

True to its name, Iran’s spider-tailed horned viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) has a rather novel strategy. It uses a tail that looks like a spider to lure birds trying to eat the decoy spider. When the time is right, the snake jumps into action and eats the bird. 

The spider-tailed horned viper is a relatively new species to science, and a study published today in the journal The Anatomical Record is peeling back the layers of this master mimic. A team from the Field Museum in Chicago used X-ray computed tomography (XCT) scanners to take a look inside of the snake’s spidery tail and found that their tailbones appear rather normal. 

“Scientists first collected a specimen of this snake in 1968, and when they brought it back to the Field Museum, people thought that it had some sort of deformity at the tip of its tail, like a tumor,” Sara Ruane, a study co-author and the Field’s Associate Curator of Herpetology and Director of the Core Laboratories, said in a statement. “It sat on the shelves of the museum for decades, but it wasn’t until another specimen with a similar tail was found in 2003 that people revisited it.”

Scientists described the snake as a new species in 2006, using the specimen housed in the Field Museum’s collections as the holotype. Holotype specimens serve as a main standard-bearer and reference point for the physical characteristics of a species, so that scientists can compare and contrast them to see if a specimen belongs to one species or another.

Shortly after naming the spider-tailed horned viper, researchers recorded video of the snake using the spider-like appendage at the tip of its tail as a way to lure in unsuspecting birds. 

“I remember being a PhD student in about 2008 and first seeing the videos of this snake in the wild,” says Ruane. “The appendage at the end of its tail is so outrageous, I remember thinking it was so cool. It’s truly unique among snakes.”

In 2023, Ruane attended a conference with Georgios Georgalis, an associate professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków. Georgalis mentioned that he was interested in studying the Field Museum’s spider-tailed horned viper holotype specimen. 

“I am primarily a paleontologist, so I try to use modern snake species to make sense of fossil remains,” said Georgalis, who is also a co-author on the new study. “In vipers, the vertebral column unfortunately doesn’t give us very many clues about what kind of snake we’re looking at. When we find fossils, we often just find individual bones rather than the entire skeleton, and the individual vertebrae are so different from each other along the snake’s body that it’s hard to use them to identify a species.”

The spider-tailed horned viper offered a unique opportunity to study snake vertebrae. Georgalis said that viper vertebrae in particular have not been very well studied. They also wanted to know more about this species’ unusual tail.

To take a closer look, they used the Field Museum’s XCT lab. With XCT, scientists can scan objects and take thousands of X-ray images. These images are then stacked together to produce a 3D rendering of the object’s interior. It essentially allows scientists to study rare or one-of-a-kind specimens in detail without cutting them open or and risking damage. 

“With the spider-tailed horned viper, we were particularly interested in seeing what the vertebrae at the tip of the tail look like, because the exterior of this snake’s tail is so unusual, and because it’s used for this unusual bird-luring behavior,” says Georgalis. “In some other snakes, like sand boas and rubber boas, the vertebrae at the tip of the tail have extreme shapes that look really alien. We wanted to investigate if the spider-tailed horn viper’s tail was similarly strange inside.”

Surprisingly, the scans revealed that the inside of the viper’s tail looked quite normal. The spider-tip tail is only visible on the outside of the snake and the vertebrae were the same as they would be in other vipers. 

“There was nothing in the snake’s skeleton that would suggest how extreme its tail looks on the outside,” said Georgalis.

Findings like these show how fossil skeletons only tell one part of the story of what an animal looked like and how it behaved. Nothing in the spider-tailed horned viper’s skeleton would suggest it has such a unique tail, or that the tail twitches in a way that tricks birds. 

“It’s one of the, let’s say, frustrations of the life of a paleontologist,” says Georgalis. “We work with beautiful animals, but most of the time, we’re trying to put together puzzles with some of the pieces missing, and in the end, we can’t be 100% sure of what the animal actually looked like.”

It’s also a reminder that prehistoric life may be even stranger than we can imagine by looking at bones alone. These findings also lay some groundwork for scientists studying how tissues evolve and develop and underscores the value of museum collections.

“Specimens that were collected 50, 100, 200 years ago are still being used all the time to learn new things,” said Ruane.

The post Snake that hunts with fake spider on its tail shocks scientists appeared first on Popular Science.

As the 2026-2027 NFL season kicks off, the Philadelphia Eagles are giving new meaning to their signature “Fly, Eagles, Fly” fight song. The football team is partnering with the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation for Birds Supporting Birds, an initiative to support seabirds off the coast of Massachusetts (and in New England Patriots’ territory) this fall. 

The team is supporting NOAA’s Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary Shearwater Tagging Project, an ongoing initiative dedicated to studying the great shearwater (Ardenna gravis) and their migration. Great shearwaters are large, white-and-grey seabirds known for their epic journeys. They travel thousands of miles every year from their remote South Atlantic breeding grounds up to the cooler North Atlantic waters during the nonbreeding season. According to the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, they fly the equivalent of over 200,000 football fields across the Atlantic Ocean every single year.

Birds Supporting Birds will help support researchers in Stellwagen Bank, an 842-square-mile marine sanctuary east of Boston, to tag great shearwaters and track their migratory routes across the Atlantic. 

“The Eagles are directly funding researchers to attach lightweight, solar-powered satellite transmitters to great shearwaters,” Joel R. Johnson, President and CEO of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, tells Popular Science. “These tags track the birds’ migration patterns around the Eastern Seaboard and down to the Southern Atlantic Ocean in real time.”

Lovingly known as “The Birds” by their incredibly devoted fanbase, the football team is leveraging their platform to bring attention to ocean conservation and highlight environmental stewardship. 

A major 2015 study found that the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99 percent of the ocean due to climate change. While the water has slightly cooled since 2021, a report published by NOAA in July found that the environment in the Gulf of Maine still remains unstable. These changes in ocean temperature, currents, and other conditions can impact the seabirds’ food supply. 

Great shearwaters are reliable indicators of an ecosystem’s health, who rely on small fish called sand lance in their diets. Whales, dolphins, bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), and other key Gulf of Maine species also rely on these fish belonging to the family Ammodytidae in their diets. By studying great shearwaters and their health, researchers can better understand what is happening in the local ecosystem as a whole. 

Researchers at Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary used satellite tracking technology in 2013. These tags are lightweight and attached to the birds with degradable thread. They have small solar panels so scientists can monitor the birds’ routes over extended periods. 

Researchers have now deployed tags on Phil, Franklin, Hoagie, and Liberty, four great shearwaters with very Philly-appropriate names.

“We are thrilled to invite the public to follow Phil, Franklin, Hoagie, and Liberty in real time on our interactive maps and social channels, bringing everyone along on our shared mission to protect our ocean waters and marine life,” says Johnson, who lists bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), great blue herons (Ardea herodias), and great shearwaters among his favorite birds. 

Live interactive maps will be available soon on the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and National Marine Sanctuary Foundation’s website, so you can follow the great shearwater’s epic journey, while the Eagles (or your favorite team) compete on the gridiron.

The post ‘Birds Supporting Birds’ connects the Philadelphia Eagles with migrating seabirds appeared first on Popular Science.

Nature, Published online: 09 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02658-3

If it feels like you are wishing people a happy birthday more often than usual once September begins, it is not in your head. September is the most common birth month of the whole year, and one day stands above them all—September 9. 

In 2016, statistics organization FiveThirtyEight and data journalist Matt Styles analyzed data on the average number of births per year from 1994 to 2014. In that 10-year-period, September tops the with nine out of the 10 most common birthdays falling on September. Based on this analysis, the ninth day of the ninth month is the most popular birthday.

The reasons behind this surge of September babies are likely couples spending more time indoors during the colder months of the year and holiday season. Some people tend to work less as the holidays approach, so there is more time to party-hop, drink a few more cocktails than usual, and the rest is clear. Pregnancies are supposed to last 38 weeks from conception, so babies born on September 9 would have likely been conceived on December 17. 

Source: birthdayrank.com

For a September 19 birthday, conception date should technically be December 27. All of those September 22 to 26 babies are generally conceived around New Years Eve and New Years Day. December is also a romantic season in general. According to data collected from the wedding planning website The Knot, December is the most popular month to get engaged globally.

Some other hypotheses behind this surge in cold weather conceptions are that the shorter days may affect hormones and that sperm may be less potent in the warmer summer months. 

As far as rare birthdays go, Leap Day (February 29) is the clear winner, but the rest of the rare birthdays are those on major holidays. This is likely because scheduled inductions and C-sections are avoided on days like Christmas (December 25) and Fourth of July. 

To see how common your birthday is, plug it into birthdayrank.com.

The post Why September 9 is the most common birthday appeared first on Popular Science.

Nature Energy, Published online: 08 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41560-026-02134-2