The tiny godwit stayed in the air for 11 days, breaking all previously known records of nonstop flight.New experiments reveal a sophisticated posture-control system hidden inside living wood.
MacRumors‘ Joe Rossignol reports that Apple is preparing to add iPhone Car Key support in the Wallet app to three more automakers: Lincoln, Lucid Motors, and China’s Freelander.
The finding comes from backend code first spotted by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris, who posted that Apple’s systems now list the three brands for Car Key support. No launch window or specific models are included in the code.
Car Key lets owners lock, unlock, and start a compatible vehicle with an iPhone or Apple Watch instead of a traditional fob. The latest version of the industry standard, Digital Key 3.0 from the Car Connectivity Consortium, uses Bluetooth LE, NFC, and Ultra Wideband for secure, proximity-based access. Express Mode can work without unlocking the iPhone.
The feature already works with vehicles from Audi, BMW, Hyundai, Kia, Genesis, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Cadillac, Lexus, MINI, Polestar, Porsche, RAM, Rivian, Toyota, and others. Availability and exact capabilities still vary by brand and model. Some manufacturers tie the digital key to a connected-services subscription.
Lucid had previously been named by Apple among brands expected to add Car Key support. Lincoln’s addition would bring Ford’s luxury division into the fold. Freelander, a Chinese brand, would further expand the feature in that market. Apple has not confirmed which vehicles will actually ship with the capability or when drivers will be able to add a key to Wallet.
MacDailyNews Take: Backend references of this kind have preceded other Car Key rollouts, but they are not a guarantee of immediate availability. Owners of current Lincoln, Lucid, or Freelander vehicles should not expect the feature until the automakers and Apple formally enable it on supported models.
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The post Apple Car Keys expanding to Lincoln, Lucid, and Freelander appeared first on MacDailyNews.
A million-person study points to repeated heat injury in the oesophagus.A lunar city sounds possible until you calculate how fast it would use its waterA new stretchable quantum-dot light-emitting diode (QLED) delivers incredibly high resolution while producing record brightness that can be clearly viewed even outside in direct sunlight.
In a recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, Korean researchers unveiled a new QLED material with applications far beyond televisions, stretching into many future daily-use technologies.
This new QLED can stretch in every direction, just like organic skin, making it extremely useful in future wearable applications and as a covering for soft robots. Unlike earlier attempts to make a stretchable QLED, this one doesn’t lose picture quality when it stretches, delivering high resolution and extreme brightness under tension.
For most of us, QLEDs are familiar as one of the technologies available in modern televisions. Conventional QLED TVs use quantum dots—nanoscale semiconductor crystals—to help produce exceptionally bright and vivid colors. OLED displays, by comparison, use self-emissive pixels that can switch off individually, allowing them to produce deeper blacks. While OLEDs perform particularly well in dark viewing environments, the high brightness achievable with quantum-dot displays can make them especially well-suited for brightly lit environments.
Despite the technology’s suitability for the bright world around us rather than just darkened environments, major challenges remained in producing a stretchable version. Early attempts addressed the problem by allowing the wiring to stretch while the light-emitting pixels remained unchanged in size. This meant that as the material expanded, its effective resolution dropped because the same number of pixels became spread across a wider area, much like enlarging a low-resolution digital image.
Building on these efforts, some researchers attempted to replace conventional materials with more stretchable alternatives, but these tended to make achieving high resolutions and efficiently moving electrical charge through the material difficult. As a result, these systems produced dimmer, lower-resolution images, limiting their utility.
The researchers developed a new fabrication approach to address some of the major problems facing stretchable QLED technology. Central to their innovation is the use of an elastic polymer incorporating MPA as a ligand, or bonding molecule. This approach improves charge injection efficiency while helping eliminate the image stretching and smearing that have affected previous stretchable displays.
Using this new process, the researchers produced a display with a resolution of about 16,000 pixels per inch, with features spaced at roughly 700 nanometers. Red, green, and blue emissive layers can also be precisely arranged, allowing the stretchable material to produce full-color images.
In tests, the team’s new QLED proved to be a major advance. They successfully stretched the material to 1.65 times its original size with no damage to its light-emitting performance. Additionally, their stretchable QLEDs were the brightest ever tested at 53,300 nits, more than triple the brilliance of prior attempts.
Based on these tests, the researchers see numerous future applications for their material in extended reality devices, soft robots, electronic skin, wearable technologies, health care, and automotive displays.
“We resolved both the drop in resolution and the limits on light-emitting performance, which had been the biggest challenges for stretchable displays, and secured core technology for commercialization,” concluded co-author Professor Moon Kee Choi of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea. “It will be used widely as a manufacturing platform for various next-generation soft devices, including wearables and electronic skin.”
The paper, “High-Resolution Intrinsically Stretchable Quantum-Dot Displays Through Thermally Assisted Intaglio Transfer Printing,” appeared in Nature Nanotechnology 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.
Two high-profile computer scientists from Princeton University, and coauthors of the book AI Snake Oil, have weighed in on the question of whether AI will kill us all by the end of the decade.
The pair have become well known for their work in separating fact from fiction in the AI world, and have now responded to an admission by Anthropic that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next ten years …
more…Rivian spin-off ALSO is finally getting its futuristic TM-B electric bikes out across the United States.
Unfortunately for the customers who ordered them nearly a year ago, those bikes aren’t headed to their garages. They’re headed on tour.
more…The iPhone 18 Pro is Apple doubling down on what it thinks a “Pro” iPhone should be. It’s faster, heavier, has longer-lasting battery life, and more capable. Plus, there’s a new variable aperture camera leading the way.
I’ve spent the last week using the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Here’s everything you need to know.
more…A truck wedged under a bridge, its roof peeled back like a sardine can, is such a familiar sight that the Australian city of Melbourne turned one bridge into a folk legend. The Montague Street rail bridge has claimed so many trucks that someone built a website tracking how many days since it was last hit. Bridge strikes are not exotic. They are one of the most repetitive failures in road transport.
Which brings us to a stretch of Central New York in the spring of 2026, and a load that never should have been on the road at the height it was.
On March 18, 2026, a tractor-trailer hauling an over-height excavator on a flatbed struck multiple overpasses as it traveled west on the Thruway.
The scope is what makes it notable: more than a dozen overpasses hit across roughly 60 miles between Exits 30 and 36.
The driver, 38-year-old Oleksander Tarakanovskyi of North Carolina, was apparently unaware that his load had struck the bridges. After the Thruway Authority alerted State Police, troopers found the truck and stopped it at the Mattydale tandem lot in the town of Salina.
Tarakanovskyi was charged with reckless endangerment in the second degree and issued more than 20 traffic tickets, including violations of federal commercial motor vehicle safety regulations. He was released with an appearance ticket returnable to Salina Town Court on April 8.
The reaction from officials was blunt. Frank G. Hoare, executive director of the Thruway Authority, said, “How a tractor trailer driver could be unaware that his load hit more than a dozen bridges is beyond comprehension.” State Police Major Brian T. Ferrone added, “Reckless, egregious behavior will not be tolerated.”
The public record does not explain how Tarakanovskyi failed to notice the impacts. But the larger bridge-strike problem often starts before a truck reaches the bridge: with the vehicle’s height and route.
A Network Rail survey in the UK, part of its “Wise Up, Size Up” campaign, found that 43 per cent of lorry drivers admitted they did not measure their vehicle before setting off, while 52 per cent said they did not take low bridges into account. That’s UK data, not a direct explanation for this New York incident, but it shows why height checks and route planning are central to bridge-strike prevention.
In the US, there is no single federal vehicle-height limit; state limits for standard commercial vehicles commonly run from 13 feet 6 inches to 14 feet. On the New York State Thruway, loads 13 feet 7 inches or higher require a special hauling permit.
Permits, approved routes, escorts and height poles are all meant to move the moment of discovery to before the trip, rather than after a bridge is hit.
Take the King Street Bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County. It was
The wider problem has been documented for years. A 2013 City College of New York study found that bridges in the state were experiencing roughly 200 strikes annually at the time, with many concentrated on a much smaller group of repeatedly hit bridges.
At a 2018 meeting about bridge strikes on the Hutchinson River Parkway, Westchester County Executive George Latimer captured the exasperation. “This is a solvable problem,” he said, adding, “If government can’t solve a problem like this, then government can’t do anything.”
The engineering measures are familiar: know the vehicle’s height, plan a legal route, use permits and escorts where required, and install detection systems where repeated strikes justify them. The hard part is making those checks work consistently across a large road network.
The 2026 Thruway incident stands out because one over-height load allegedly produced a 60-mile trail of damage before police stopped it. But the underlying failure was not new. Bridge strikes are repetitive precisely because the safeguards depend on measurements, route choices and warnings being acted on before the truck reaches the bridge.
The post A driver hauling an excavator struck more than a dozen overpasses along 60 miles of the New York State Thruway. The driver did not stop or report it, only realizing the damage when troopers flagged him down at a tandem lot. appeared first on Space Daily.
MSPs vote for strict environmental impact assessments and will delay decisions until national strategy is developed
Holyrood has voted to pause planning applications for all new AI datacentres for up to a year until the Scottish government has developed a national strategy.
On Wednesday, MSPs backed a Scottish Labour motion to halt new schemes for up to 12 months while rules on hyperscale datacentres are developed in what could be a blow to the British government’s AI strategy.
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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Reach, which also owns Express, makes decision because of ‘mammoth shift’ in how audiences seek out content
The publisher of the Mirror and Express newspapers is to cut a further 220 editorial jobs as it adapts to a dramatic fall in online traffic while readers increasingly turn to summaries generated by artificial intelligence.
Reach, which also owns scores of online brands and regional titles including the Manchester Evening News, the Birmingham Mail and the Liverpool Echo, said the latest cuts were necessary to cope with a “mammoth shift” in how audiences seek out content.
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© Photograph: PA Images/Alamy
© Photograph: PA Images/Alamy
© Photograph: PA Images/Alamy
It was already clear that Samsung was worried about the impact of the iPhone Duo on its foldable phone range, and there’s now further evidence of the Korean company’s concern.
A blogger who aggregates reports from Chinese social media says there are signs that the company is bringing forward the launch of its Galaxy Z Trifold 2, despite the seeming failure of its predecessor …
more…US vice-president’s comments come as former Anthropic researcher revisits recent claim AI could destroy humanity
The US vice-president has dismissed calls for global regulation of AI safety risks, telling companies creating the most advanced models: “If you’re building Frankenstein, stop.”
In remarks addressed towards Dario Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic who has called on Washington DC to coordinate control of AI systems, including with China, JD Vance said: “If you’re gonna create Frankenstein, don’t come to the government and say we need regulation.”
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© Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Reuters
© Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Reuters
© Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Reuters
Ex-Googler Jeff Dean shares insights from Gemini's development and the approach he uses to discover promising new ideas.
The post Ex-Googler Jeff Dean Explains Design Choices Behind Gemini appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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