New research reveals the Tasmanian tiger had a unique skull structure, suggesting it likely never threatened livestock as previously believed.
Mazama Energy announced a superhot rock drilling performance milestone that the company says signals a turning point for the economics of engineered geothermal systems.
In a company engineering publication dated 25 Aug 2026, OpenAI released the first measured performance results for Jalapeño, described as "OpenAI's first custom inference chip". Tested on InferenceX, "a public benchmark from SemiAnalysis", across GPT-OSS 120B, DeepSeek R1 670B and Kimi K2.5 1T, OpenAI reports Jalapeño "delivered 1.5 to 1.9 times more AI work per watt at peak throughput and 1.7 to 3.6 times lower end-to-end latency than the comparison systems", and 2.1 to 4.1 times higher performance on highly interactive workloads. OpenAI states it plans "to begin deploying Jalapeño within OpenAI's compute infrastructure by the end of the year" and that it is "the first generation of a multigenerational roadmap" with Gen 2 "deep in development". The chip was co-developed with Broadcom per OpenAI's earlier unveil publication. Material because it is working first-party silicon with measured third-party-benchmark results from the largest buyer of merchant AI accelerators, landing the day before Nvidia's quarterly print.
Anthropic published a study in which Claude Opus 4.8 and a Mythos Preview model autonomously ran de novo protein-binder design campaigns, producing 1,320 designs of which 354 binders were confirmed against 14 of 15 targets, independently produced and tested by Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience. Anthropic reported overall hit rates of 22.6% (Opus 4.8) and 26.7% (Mythos Preview), rising to 35.1% in single-target mode, versus the 10-15% it says is typical today.
Skild AI introduced S1, described on its own site as its flagship robotic foundation model "built from the ground up as an in-context learner": shown a single video demonstration of a task, it can attempt previously unseen tasks over roughly 10-minute horizons with no task-specific post-training. Skild frames the advance by analogy to language models — arguing robotics has been "stuck in the BERT era", where each new task still requires collecting hours of data and fine-tuning a specialist policy, and that in-context learning is the transition that turned capable models into general-purpose tools. The stated capability set is: unseen tasks, 10-minute horizons, one video prompt, no post-training.
OpenAI officially named its next major model family 'Astra' via a math report stating an internal version solved ten open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science that had seen no progress for at least a decade (spanning high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, group theory, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography and extremal combinatorics — including establishing the existence of non-sofic groups). Each proof was formalized in Lean for machine-checkable correctness; OpenAI says the tokens for all ten solutions would cost ~$2,000 at API rates. Astra is designed to coordinate multiple agents on problems for hours or days, and is expected to be the first model submitted under the US administration's planned pre-release AI review framework.
On July 24, 2026, SpaceX's 13th Starship integrated flight test launched from Starbase, Texas, deploying 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites (its first operational payload deploy, vs prior mass simulators), relighting a Raptor engine in space, and achieving what SpaceX called its 'softest splashdown ever' for the upper stage in the Indian Ocean. The Super Heavy booster was lost after several engines failed to reignite during the landing burn. It was the first Starship flight since SpaceX's June 2026 Nasdaq IPO (SPCX) and a material step toward the reusable heavy-lift architecture underpinning future Starlink, NASA Artemis, and Mars plans.
Northrop Grumman's SpaceLogistics Mission Robotic Vehicle launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 into geostationary transfer orbit on 21 July 2026 (21:15 UTC), alongside Mission Extension Pods. MRV is the nation's first multi-mission robotic in-space servicer, carrying the DARPA-provided Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) robotic arm assembly for satellite life extension, inspection, repair and upgrades. Northrop is the first and only company to have extended the life of commercial satellites running low on fuel: its two on-orbit Mission Extension Vehicles have docked with three commercial GEO communications satellites and delivered more than ten years of combined mission extension. Ryan Tintner, VP and GM space superiority: 'The MRV is a whole new class of advanced autonomous space robotics... These are not demonstrations.'
Pacific Fusion announced that Sirius, a pulsed-power prototype designed and built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the company, has surpassed 3,000 full-power shots. Sirius is an impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG) — a pulsed-power architecture that synchronises electromagnetic waves directly onto a common transmission line in a single step rather than inductively stacking voltage through conventional Marx banks, making it simpler, more efficient and easier to scale. It is the same core technology Pacific Fusion is scaling for its own system. CTO and co-founder Keith LeChien framed the campaign as evidence that national-lab technology can be validated by repeated testing and scaled quickly by industry, supporting both surging AI and electrification demand and high-yield experimental capability for stockpile stewardship.
1X announced 25 degree-of-freedom, tendon-driven hands for the NEO humanoid, which it frames as 'an API to the physical world' and claims approaches human-level dexterity, strength, safety and reliability. Hands are the long-standing bottleneck for general-purpose home manipulation, so this is a component milestone on the critical path rather than a product launch.