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• Unitree A2 is a new quadruped robot
• It's super fast
• The A2 can hold up to a 220lb load

If someone were casting a robot action hero movie and they didn't want a humanoid (or Arnold Schwarzenegger), they might hire the all-new Unitree A2. This quadruped robot can run, jump, climb, scamper down hills, tumble, carry a heavy load, and, yes, as depicted in the promo video, smash through a plate of glass. All that's missing here is the blockbuster action movie soundtrack.

With a max speed of 11.2mph, the new A2 is something of a landmark in quadrupeds, outrunning the standard Robo Dynamics Spot robot by almost 8 miles per hour.

The A2 Stellar Explorer model depicted in the video is built for all kinds of rugged and uneven terrain. Its 30cm step height helps it step over rocks and mount stairs with abandon. It's also comfortable with a 45-degree incline up or downhill.

While it lacks a head or any features that might help you easily anthropomorphize it, it can "see". The odd-looking quaduped uses front and rear-mounted LiDAR to monitor its environment and make on-the-fly adjustments.

In the video, the A2 doesn't get every step right, but even a trip, fall, or tumble doesn't appear to stop the propulsive A2's 12 high-density motors.

It's also ready to carry significant loads. In the video, an adult man stands on the A2's back, demonstrating its max standing load capabilities of 220 lbs. In motion, it can carry a 25lb pack.

While Unitree is not specifying battery life, the A2 does come equipped with a 9,000mAh battery and the option of an 18,000mAh dual battery pack. In the video, it carries a 30kg payload for over 3 hours across almost 13km.

As for its readiness for the great outdoors, the A2 is rated IP56, which means it can withstand a jet of water, and we would assume that also means a rainstorm. It does not sound like it can handle any kind of water submersion, though.

Pricing and availability have not been set, but Unitree has been coming in below the industry average when it comes to price. We'll see if the A2 fits that model.

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Fights over Congressional maps never used to be this intense. On Tuesday, Texas Republicans voted to issue civil arrest warrants for Democrats who fled the state.

The GOP is trying to redraw house districts, and the proposed new map could give Republicans as many as five more House seats. That change could easily decide control of Congress.

This fight is rippling out to other states too with President Trump urging Republicans to follow the lead of Texas. And Democratic governors saying they might follow the same path.

Trump can be this transparent because there are no federal restrictions on redrawing districts for purely partisan gain. The Supreme Court said so in 2019.

Gerrymandering has been part of U.S. politics for hundreds of years. How did it become a bloodsport?

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

(Image credit: Scott Olson)

• A starling has recreated a digital image from sound hours after hearing it
• Reconstructing a PNG file using birdsong raises more questions than it answers about data fidelity
• Claiming 2MB/s from a bird vocalization system stretches credibility well beyond its natural limit

In a bizarre yet intriguing experiment, musician and science enthusiast Benn Jordan has explored whether birds could act as a living storage medium.

The bird in question, a young starling, had been rescued as a chick and raised by humans after apparently being abandoned near a noisy train track.

As it turns out, such early exposure made the starling unusually receptive to sounds not typically found in nature - including reverb-heavy speech and mechanical noises.

Turning images into sound, then back again

The starling’s vocal learning abilities were central to the experiment, as unlike parrots, which were dismissed for this trial, songbirds possess a complex vocal organ called a syrinx, capable of highly refined modulation.

Jordan believed this could make them ideal candidates for reproducing complex audio waveforms.

His goal was to see whether the bird could retain and reproduce a sound-based version of an image - specifically, a line drawing of a bird encoded as an audio waveform.

The experiment involved encoding a PNG image into a waveform using a spectral synthesizer.

Jordan played this to the bird repeatedly, attempting to ‘upload’ the image into its memory.

While this may sound far-fetched, something unexpected happened during post-analysis of the recorded sessions.

Amid hours of playback data, a familiar waveform emerged - one resembling the original image - and it appeared later in the session, after Jordan had stopped feeding the sound to the bird.

This suggests the starling itself may have recreated the image waveform vocally.

Jordan estimated the bird reproduced the signal in the same frequency range in which it was originally encoded, transferring roughly “176 kilobytes of uncompressed information.”

Using speculative math and assuming compression, he suggested the bird might have delivered data at around “2 megabytes per second.”

That rate exceeds typical DNA storage readout speeds, though obviously lacks the permanence or reliability of more established media like an external SSD or even a portable HDD.

While the experiment is undeniably creative, it invites skepticism.

Songbirds may imitate sounds, but equating that with consistent, structured data retrieval feels premature.

Unlike an SSD, which offers fast and repeatable access to stored information, a starling cannot guarantee stable performance or retention.

Even if the bird stores the data, how do you get it to sing when you need the data? What about security? The bird can give the data to whoever it deems fit.

The idea of using birds to hold digital data lacks not only scalability but also control - it can even literally fly away with your data.

Although the starling reproduced a sound resembling the encoded image, whether this truly constitutes data storage in any usable sense remains debatable.

At best, this unusual case offers a poetic intersection of biology and computation and at worst, it’s a fleeting curiosity unlikely to replace DNA storage, let alone your external HDD.

Via TomsHardware

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OpenAI just dropped two new open-weights models. Here's why that isn't the same as being fully open.

A Palestinian activist who helped make the Oscar-winning documentary "No Other Land" was shot dead in a suspected Israeli settler attack in the occupied West Bank. We go to his community to hear about the man and the incident that lead to his death.

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NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report about the impact redistricting efforts will have on the 2026 midterms and beyond.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Aug. 6 No. 521.

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• Over 5,000 fake pharmacy websites found secretly harvesting data while pushing counterfeit drugs
• Fake pharmacies often skip prescriptions and demand cryptocurrency, exposing users to fraud and dangerous products
• AI-generated articles and fake reviews trick users into trusting scam drug platforms every day

A global network of more than 5,000 fake pharmacy websites has been uncovered by security experts.

Designed to mimic legitimate drug retailers, the platforms sell counterfeit or unregulated medications while harvesting sensitive personal and financial data.

In many cases, they target buyers searching for discreet access to treatments like erectile dysfunction pills, antibiotics, steroids, and weight-loss drugs.

The blurred line between help and harm

According to a recent threat report by Gen, the “PharmaFraud” operation relies on a combination of deceptive site design and technical manipulation.

The sites often use AI-generated health articles, falsified reviews, and misleading ads to gain visibility and credibility.

Many of them are structured to bypass basic trust indicators, omitting business credentials and using insecure payment methods such as cryptocurrency.

The danger is not limited to the quality of the drugs sold, as these websites often prompt users to enter private medical details, upload documents, or provide payment information, all of which can be exploited in secondary fraud campaigns.

Even when a product is delivered, there is no guarantee it is safe or effective - some may be expired, contaminated, or simply fake, posing risks well beyond financial loss.

The report also noted a broader rise in cyber threats targeting individuals and small businesses. Financial scams increased by 340% in just three months, often using fake ads and chatbot forms to impersonate legal or investment services.

Tech support scams - frequently appearing as browser popups - rose sharply as well, with many users lured into calling fake help lines.

Staying safe from fake pharmacy scams and related cyber threats requires a combination of awareness and practical digital precautions.

How to stay safe

• If a website offers prescription drugs without asking for a valid prescription, then avoid it.
• Ensure that the contact information and business registration details of the store are clear
• There should be a verifiable physical address before you trust any online pharmacy with sensitive or financial data.
• If the prices are unusually low, be careful. Do not also fall for limited-time offers and payment requests via cryptocurrency is a big red flag.
• Verify that the website uses a secure checkout process (HTTPS) and trusted payment gateways.
• Use antivirus software to detect hidden malware that may be embedded in fraudulent medical sites or malicious pop-up windows.
• Enable a firewall to block suspicious traffic from known scam domains, reducing the chances of interacting with harmful websites or receiving deceptive push notifications.
• Install endpoint protection across multiple devices if you're managing a small business or handling sensitive data.
• Be skeptical of unsolicited health advice, product reviews, or miracle cure claims found through ads, emails, or social media links.

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• OpenAI has released gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b as open-weight models
• The gpt-oss-20b model can run locally on a consumer PC
• These models let users see each step of the AI's thinking process, making them more transparent in how they function

OpenAI has just dropped two new AI models, gpt‑oss‑120b and gpt‑oss‑20b. Not only are they new, but they're the first open‑weight models from ChatGPT's creator since GPT‑2.

The smaller of the two – gpt-oss-20b – is especially notable for being light enough to run on a decently specced consumer PC. If you’ve got about 16GB of RAM and some patience, you can load it up, ask it questions, and actually see how it arrives at answers. The larger 120b model still requires serious hardware or cloud support.

Both models are part of OpenAI's new push to encourage developers to play around with the models and even commercialize them for the average user. For the first time in years, developers and curious individuals alike can download and run OpenAI models on their own machines, inspect how they think, and build on them freely. They're available via Hugging Face and AWS under the Apache 2.0 license.

Being open weight means the models provide a level of transparency and independence that most people haven’t had since ChatGPT first went viral. The real-time reasoning is visible throughout, and you can see how the 'logic' of the model leads to its final options for how to respond and how it makes that decision.

That’s a big shift for OpenAI. The company has spent several years restricting access to its most powerful tools, offering only API endpoints and paid tiers. Now it’s returning a little bit to the GPT-2 era, but with far more capable models. Even so, the lighter model isn't something everyone will rush to as a replacement for the ChatGPT app.

gpt-oss is out!we made an open model that performs at the level of o4-mini and runs on a high-end laptop (WTF!!)(and a smaller one that runs on a phone).super proud of the team; big triumph of technology.August 5, 2025

Open weight access

The flexibility provided by the new models could be a boon for OpenAI as the open-weight approach becomes more popular. DeepSeek, Meta, and Mistral have all released open models in some fashion recently. But most have turned out to be semi-open, meaning they are trained on undisclosed data or have constricted terms and usage limits.

The gpt-oss models are straightforward in offering the weights and license, though the training data remains proprietary. And OpenAI’s gpt-oss models bring compatibility with OpenAI’s widely used interface, as well as a bigger window into how the model makes decisions that stand out.

So, where DeepSeek models tend to emphasize the raw power and relatively low-cost performance of their models, OpenAI is more interested in explaining how the models work. That will pique the interest of many developers trying to learn or experiment. You can literally pause and look at what’s going on inside the model.

It’s also a signal to the developer community: OpenAI is inviting people to build with its tech in a way that hasn’t been possible for years. These models don’t just output chat completions; they offer a foundation. With the Apache license, you can fine-tune, distill, embed, or wrap them into entirely new products. And you don’t need to send data to a third party to do it. Those hoping for a more decentralized AI ecosystem are likely to be pleased.

For those of us who are less technical, the main point is that you might see AI apps that run very well without needing a subscription price from you, or personalized tools that don't send your data to the cloud. With this release, OpenAI can claim to be willing to share more with developers, if not quite everything.

For a company that’s spent much of the past two years building closed systems and premium subscriptions, releasing a pair of models this capable under open licenses feels like a major philosophical change, or at least the desire to make such a change seem real.

And while these two models don't represent the push into the era of GPT-5, OpenAI chief Sam Altman has teased that even more announcements are on the horizon, so it's likely that the next-generation model is still being readied.

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Amazon says its Project Kuiper satellite internet service will be available to 300,000 rural Aussies in mid-2026.

Much of the public health agency's $9 billion budget had been in limbo but funds are finally flowing, according to CDC staffers, including for a key overdose prevention program.

(Image credit: Ben Hendren/Bloomberg)

Microsoft is bringing a few more games to Game Pass Standard, too.

The weapons include U.S. missiles for Patriot air defense systems already in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said he had a "productive" call with President Trump.

(Image credit: Roman Pilipey)

It's that time again: each of the best streaming services have a limited-time that you can watch some films, and that means every licensed movie will eventually face the final curtain – or at least, the final one until the rights are renewed and it reappears in a new catalog.

Some of this month's movie exits from HBO Max will be missed more than others – for me, it's a sad goodbye to Detective Pikachu and a 'don't let the door hit your ass on the way out' to Ted 2 – but some of this month's departures include films that are as watchable as any of the best Max movies.

I've chosen three very different movies for you to catch while you can. One's a family-friendly animation, one's a surprisingly dark 80s actioner with a Shane Black script and one is a drama featuring one of the world's biggest movie stars in front of and behind the camera. But while all three are different kinds of movie I think there's something in all of them that makes them worth watching.

Two of the movies here are also interesting because of their influences and influence: while Lethal Weapon wasn't the first buddy-cop movie it set the template for the decade and beyond, and without the clearly Hitchcock-inspired Play Misty For Me there would be no Fatal Attraction. To the movies!

Lethal Weapon

Multiple Lethal Weapon movies are on their way out from Max this month, but if you're tight for time then only the first two are must-watch action flicks: after that the quality nosedives, with Lethal Weapon 3 struggling to get a 60% rating and the utterly inessential fourth movie garnering a frankly rotten 52% from the critics.

There's some argument over which of the first two Lethal Weapons are superior. Many people plump for the sequel, but for me the first movie is the best. In this film Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) isn't movie-crazy; he's crazy-crazy, Mel-Gibson-stopped-by-a-cop scary: he's going out of his mind with grief and that makes him incredibly dangerous to others and to himself. That gives the first movie a weight that the more conventional buddy sequels don't carry.

"Lethal Weapon is a film teetering on the brink of absurdity when it gets serious," Variety wrote, but "thanks to its unrelenting energy and insistent drive, it never quite falls." Reviewing the 4K re-release, Starburst said that it "stands out as the epitome of 1980s shoot-'em-ups, set in a bygone Hollywood fantasy world where cops and guns are great and an action star like Gibson flexing his pecs and martial arts skills would fill up cinemas. It’s not difficult to see why it’s considered a classic – the action is bloody fun and the buddy cop chemistry strong."

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

One of the things I really love about animation is that it makes the impossible possible, and this cute kids' film – which is fun for adults too – is a great example of that: you'll believe a man can fry (sorry).

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs has a great premise and a great cast too: "Where else can you find the varied likes of Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, Bruce Campbell, and – yes – Mr. T together and all on their A game?" says The Movie Report. It's about an eccentric inventor (Hader) whose machine makes it rain all kinds of food, saving a struggling fishing town from its sardine-based sadness. But then the machine goes out of control with often hilarious consequences.

Reviews were mixed, and it's definitely not up there with the likes of DreamWorks' or Pixar's best. But as Empire put it, it's "no Pixar, but a lot of fun." The film is "bright, silly and a good shout to entertain the whole family."

Play Misty For Me

Let's deal with the elephant in the room first: this film was made in 1971 and that means its sexual politics, its understanding of mental illness and director and lead actor Clint Eastwood's sideburns and flares have all aged terribly. But it's an effective potboiler about a late-night DJ whose one night stand with a troubled woman (Jessica Walter) turns into something sinister.

"Eastwood... has obviously seen Psycho and Repulsion more than once," TIME Magazine said, "but those are excellent texts and he has learned his lessons passing well." The Chicago Reader agreed: "Clint Eastwood wisely chose a strong, simple thriller for his first film as a director, and the project is remarkable in its self-effacing dedication to getting the craft right."

The film enabled Eastwood, by then a huge movie star, "to be unsympathetic, selfish and – in the words of the title song – as helpless as a kitten up a tree," Empire wrote, describing it as "thrilling" and giving the film four out of five stars.

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• The 6600 ION delivers up to 88PB per rack, and at 122TB, Micron is scaling SSDs far beyond typical limits
• With 36 SSDs in 2U, Micron enables 4.42PB in a compact server configuration
• Micron projects daily energy savings equivalent to powering 124 U.S. homes with 2EB installations

Micron has announced a major expansion of its storage lineup with a new entry in the high-capacity SSD space, the 6600 ION.

The company says this PCIe Gen5-based SSD is now available in a 122TB configuration and is expected to scale up to 245TB in early 2026.

The company is positioning its new model as a direct challenge to hard disk drives in hyperscale and enterprise data centers, aiming to offer greater efficiency in terms of power consumption, physical space, and storage density.

Hard drive alternative for data-heavy environments

The 6600 ION is part of a broader portfolio that also includes the 9650 PCIe Gen6 and the 7600 SSD for low-latency tasks.

All three products are built on Micron's G9 NAND, which the company claims enable significant performance and capacity gains.

“With the industry’s first PCIe Gen6 SSD, industry-leading capacities and the lowest latency mainstream SSD—all powered by our first-to-market G9 NAND—Micron is not just setting the pace; we are redefining the frontier of data center innovation,” said Jeremy Werner, senior vice president and general manager of Micron’s Core Data Center Business Unit

Micron claims the 6600 ION can deliver up to 88PB per rack which is huge considering that many of its rivals are still below 40PB per rack.

With support for up to 36 E3.S SSDs in a 2U server, the design enables up to 4.42PB per server.

“With Supermicro’s broadest selection of Petascale storage optimized servers supporting up to 36 E3.S SSDs, the Micron 6600 ION enables up to 4.42PB per 2U server delivering the highest density and power efficiency for large capacity AI workloads,” said Michael McNerney, senior vice president, Marketing and Network Security at Supermicro.

The 6600 ION reportedly delivers a 67% density improvement over previous alternatives.

Micron suggests this could become the largest SSD available commercially, allowing data centers to store exabytes of information with improved energy efficiency.

However, its role in actually replacing hard drives will depend on long-term endurance, cost-per-terabyte economics, and compatibility across platforms.

That said, the 6600 ION reportedly uses only 1 watt per 4.9TB, a figure that undercuts the power draw of traditional HDD arrays.

Micron projects that installations scaling to 2 exabytes could result in daily energy savings equivalent to powering 124 U.S. homes.

These claims point to significant operational savings, but large-scale deployment will depend on more than just power metrics.

As Micron eyes leadership in fastest SSD and largest SSD categories, the actual shift from HDDs will rely on sustained performance under pressure and meaningful cost advantages across the board.

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• Consumers given until January 2026 to update Office to retain support for voice tools
• A backend update means older versions will no longer be supported
• A broader Office/Windows update push is ongoing

Microsoft is warning users of older versions of Office that they will soon be losing access to certain voice tools, including transcription, dictation and read aloud, as of January 2026.

The dropped features include systems to read documents and emails aloud, speech-to-text conversions and voice-to-text input, but those who fail to update to Office version 16.0.18827.20202 or newer will lose out.

This is for most casual users, however Government Cloud users including GCC, GCC High and DoD environments will have an additional two months to apply the change.

Older Microsoft Office versions losing voice tools soon

"To ensure continued high-quality performance of the Read Aloud, Transcription, and Dictation features in Microsoft 365 Office apps, we're upgrading the backend service that powers these capabilities," the notice warned.

Microsoft justified the change by adding it is upgrading the backend service which powers these voice features, therefore older versions must lose support to ensure ongoing compatibility with newer versions.

Word, Outlook, OneNote and PowerPoint are among the most commonly used apps to lose support for voice tools, and there will be no local fallback once the deadline is passed. Perpetual license holders will already be used to limited functionality, lacking most cloud-powered voice tools already.

This isn't the only change that Office users are facing in the coming months – by October 14, 2025, Office 2016 and 2019 will reach end of extended support. Office apps on Windows 10 also lose support later this year, with Windows 10 itself going out of date in October too.

With numerous Microsoft-related deadlines all approaching at rapid speed, the company is finally seeing an uptick in adoption of its latest software. Windows 11 installs finally overtook Windows 10 installs for the first time in July 2025, after a moment of crossover in June.

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A good multivitamin is a great way to fill nutritional gaps and help you look and feel your best.

The statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general and Freemason leader, was vandalized and taken down on Juneteenth in 2020. It is the only statue of a Confederate general in Washington, D.C.

(Image credit: Eric Baradat)

• A new overview trailer for Kirby and the Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Star-Crossed World has been released
• The trailer offers a new look at Switch 2 enhancements, new stages, Mouth Mode Transformations, and more
• A new boss rush challenge called The Ultimate Cup Z EX has also been revealed

Nintendo has released a new overview trailer for Kirby and the Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Star-Crossed World ahead of the game's release later this month.

The Switch 2 version was first revealed during the console's reveal, which confirmed enhancements, additional features, and the announcement of the Star-Crossed World downloadable content (DLC)

In this new trailer, we got a fresh look at brand new Starry Stages, which will be added alongside the story DLC. After a meteor crashed into the Forgotten Land, aspects of the world and familiar locations have been altered, creating new paths and areas to discover.

During the Switch 2 Edition reveal, the first look at Spring Mouth was shared, but the latest trailer has also confirmed that two additional Mouth Mode Transformations will also be featured: Gear Mouth and Sign Mouth.

With Gear Mouth, players can latch onto walls and roll vertically. Sign Mouth allows players to slide along slopes, jump in the air to reach things, and execute a spin attack on enemies, while Spring Mouth lets Kirby "Smash Down" on enemies.

New activities are also on the way. Players will be able to collect Starry Coins in each stage and spend them on the Gotcha Machine EX from Astronomer Waddle Deeto to unlock new figures.

A new challenge at the Colosseum called The Ultimate Cup Z EX will also be available, where players can "test your mettle and might in an even tougher boss rush".

The Switch 2 Edition also arrives with all-new improvements, including improved graphics and faster frame rates for both the base game and the DLC.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Star-Crossed World launches on August 28.

Players who already own Kirby and the Forgotten Land on Nintendo Switch can purchase a digital upgrade pack to access Star-Crossed World and the new enhancements on Switch 2.

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