2026-09-23 Discoveries

OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005

OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev

Claude Opus 5.5

Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding and knowledge work, and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads.

GPT-6 Sol and Luna

Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)

Analysis of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) and comparison to other AI models across key metrics including quality, price, performance (tokens per second & time to first token), context…

Show HN: Training a model to identify AI web content from structure alone

Word-level detectors identify unedited AI-generated text almost perfectly, but the literature documents their brittleness under rewording, and a word-level score neither characterizes a text nor identifies which AI model wrote it. We ask…

Turn text input into actions with Needle, a 14MB function-calling LLM

Cactus Compute's Needle 2 model runs entirely offline on a Raspberry Pi 5's CPU.

ESP32 Replacement for Lighting Display Controller

As a company, NanoLeaf has been producing modular lights that can be easily snapped together into various geometric shapes for around a decade. Similar to the addressable LED light strips …

Google and the Gates Foundation to bring AI resources to 200 million farmers across the…

Smallholder farmers produce nearly 35% of the world’s food across more than 500 million farms, yet they often lack access to the satellite data, financial services, and …

How Alan Turing and His Fellow Codebreakers Broke the Nazis’ “Unbreakable” Enigma Code

There was a time when you could just go out and buy an Enigma machine. In the early nineteen-twenties, any organization with a need to keep its communications secret could order a few of those brand-new devices from Germany and rest assured that any messages encoded using them would be safe from…

Dumpster-dived Window A/C becomes Ground-Source Heat Pump

Heat pumps are great, because they pump heat around, and we often don’t want heat where it is. Need it somewhere else? Pump it! It’s great. It’s also a bit …

Why Activating Brown Fat to Treat Obesity is So Hard

And why the failures are just as important

Unreal Agent

We’re sharing Unreal Agent — an agent harness that delivers up to 40% cost savings compared to Codex on production workloads and coding/science benchmarks, without any negative performance impact.

Googlebook

The laptop your Android phone has been waiting for

Investing in global talent and AI literacy

Google is providing 100,000 scholarships to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) through the AI Skills Coalition.

Microscopic Universes Come Alive in Nikon’s Small World in Motion Contest

This year's cycle received more than 340 video entries from 40 different countries. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Microscopic Universes Come Alive in Nikon’s Small…

The Digital Dada Library: Discover the Archive That Preserves the Original Publications…

Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status quo. But that doesn’t mean they were entirely wrong. Over and over we see even the most subversive art, literature, film, and music has a way…

The Mysterious Migrant Potters of Ancient Tampa Bay

Another archaeological cold case solved

Determining the Body Temperature of Tyrannosaurus rex

One of the most fun challenges in paleontology is determining characteristics of long-dead species like their behavior and body temperature based on nothing but some fossils and traces that are …

Using AI to help local governments connect with constituents

We’re supporting Jigsaw’s collaborative Sensemaking AI fund — and calling on leaders around the world to join us.

Emmy Star Brown’s Vivid Murals Channel Youthfulness and Play

Brown's work is currently on view in 'The Peace of Wild Things' at Joy Machine. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Emmy Star Brown’s Vivid Murals Channel Youthfulness and…

thestory.run

A writing coach for corporate influencers.

'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees

A sample of 5,000 alleged agents seen by 404 Media includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and details on FBI employees' spouses.

4 ways to fix your attention span - Shannon Odell

Explore 4 strategies to build a better attention span, manage distractions, and help your brain stay focused on its tasks. -- Check out our 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, created in partnership with Ravensburger and featuring art from this very…

This Is What a Godlike Civilization Would Look Like

Want to restore the planet’s ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 100 people to join Planet Wild with my code KURZGESAGT9 will get the first month paid for by me: https://planetwild.com/r/kurzgesagt/join/9 If you…

How To Fix ROCK HARD Brown Sugar

Can AI “Feel” Pain?

Simulated pain can make some AI models override instructions and put their own welfare ahead of humans

Diverse and Dramatic Behaviors Top the 2026 Bird Photographer of the Year Contest

This year, the competition welcomed more than 24,000 entries from photographers around the globe. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Diverse and Dramatic Behaviors Top the…

Freebuff Ads

Advertise to 500k developers in our coding agent