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How snails engineer their slime

Jennifer Ouellette • August 7, 2026 Snails are well-known for their mucus. The slime is highly valued as an anti-inflammatory and anti-aging ingredient in certain skin care products, and snails can secrete different kinds of mucus with properties tailored to specific functions. A team of German scientists has determined a recipe for how snails achieve

Judge rules Meta caused “public nuisance” and must fund mental health treatment

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Jon Brodkin • August 7, 2026 A New Mexico judge yesterday ordered Meta to pay $567 million for a fund that would alleviate the “public nuisance” created by its social media services. The order to pay for youth mental health care is in addition to $375 million in civil penalties that a jury ordered Meta

DeepMind’s hurricane breakthrough has surprised weather scientists

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Victoria Turk, wired.com • August 8, 2026 In October 2025, a storm brewed over the Caribbean Sea. Weather models differed on its trajectory. Would it remain weak and end up in Haiti, or would it intensify and head to Jamaica? Artificial intelligence model WeatherNext, developed by Google’s DeepMind and Google Research, went with the latter.

Europe’s free satellite service just made it easier to track wildfires

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Jeremy Hsu • August 7, 2026 The wildfires afflicting communities across the world can now be tracked more easily by anyone using Europe’s free and open satellite imagery service—all thanks to a wildfire visualization script originating from nearly a decade ago. The Copernicus Browser provides free access to the latest satellite imagery taken by the

Flesh-eating screwworms feast on humans in Mexico; human cases top 500

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Beth Mole • August 7, 2026 Since the flesh-eating screwworm fly reinvaded Mexico in 2024, human cases of the voracious parasite have been mounting. According to a July surveillance report from Mexico’s Ministry of Health, there have been over 500 human cases in 2025 and 2026. A study this week in the journal Emerging Infectious

The ultimate eclipse chase: A Concorde raced against the Moon’s shadow

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Dhananjay Khadilkar • August 7, 2026 A walk down the tarmac at the National Air and Space Museum of France is guaranteed to thrill aviation enthusiasts. Several civilian and military aircraft of the past and the present are showcased in this museum, located at the Paris-Le Bourget airport. One of them is the legendary Concorde

What’s behind the Google AI shake-up

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David Pierce • August 7, 2026 Some of the biggest names on Google’s AI team got new jobs this week. In some cases, including for legendary Googler Jeff Dean, those jobs are no longer at Google. Given that Google’s models seem to be behind the best of what’s coming out of anthropic and OpenAI, is

The first self-driving vehicle on Mars has proven to be a smashing success

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Eric Berger • August 8, 2026 Sometime next week, NASA’s newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world. The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it

Grab the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on 4K Blu-ray for $50

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Brad Bourque • August 7, 2026 “One ring to rule them all” | Image: Warner Bros. Looking to spend a weekend inside with a good binge? Gruv has The Lord of the Rings trilogy on 4K Blu-ray marked down to $49.99, just below Amazon’s price and only a little bit higher than the all-time low

Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did

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Stevie Bonifield • August 7, 2026 Microsoft Edge is ending support for the Manifest V2 extensions platform, which will cut off the uBlock Origin adblocker and others like it, just like Google Chrome did earlier this year. According to Microsoft, there are only 58 extensions on the Edge Add-On Store “with any meaningful usage” that