Techopedia

In an unexpected twist that few saw coming, the old-school mapping service MapQuest took the No. 1 spot on Apple’s free app charts in both the United States and Canada this week. The app’s popularity surged after it refused to replace Lake Ontario with “Lake America.” What may seem like a small decision breathed new life into a mapping brand many associate with dial-up internet and printed driving directions.

The Trump administration has waded into the copyright battle over OpenAI with a 20-page argument that training large language models on copyrighted writing is not just potentially lawful, but extraordinarily transformative. Creators are less enchanted.

The Tim Cook era at Apple is over. John Ternus has taken command of one of the world’s most valuable companies and, as his first public statement as CEO, delivered a masterclass in corporate brevity. “hello.” That was it. No manifesto. No 14-part thread on leadership. Not even a capital letter.

A tiny flash of light deep underground in South Dakota may be the first evidence scientists have found of so-called WIMPs — one possible answer to the dark matter problem. Or, it could have been nothing at all. For nearly a century, astronomers have puzzled over the fact that the apparent mutual gravitation of distant galaxies is much stronger than can be explained by their visible mass.

On August 27, Google launched Expert Intelligence, which the company describes as “a new way for you to engage with trusted content.” The new tool lets readers add eligible books they bought through Google Play Books to Gemini Notebook, where they can use them as sources along with other material they’ve already added to the notebook. However, you can’t just upload any old ebook you have lying around to your Gemini Notebook.

You can now track flight prices, see what flights and hotels cost in points or miles, and book your hotel, all through Google’s AI Mode in Search. With the new update, Google is positioning its conversational AI tool to play a much bigger role in how we plan our travel. The new features, which the search giant announced on August 27, bring Google Flights’ popular price-tracking tech directly into AI Mode.

Move over, Hubble, astronomers are about to get a new favorite toy for exploring the galaxy. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch this Sunday and promises to catalog the cosmos at a much faster rate than its predecessor. NASA says it expects that Roman could end up observing as many as a billion galaxies over the course of its service life, thanks to its wider field of view. No matter how big we make them, ground-based telescopes will always be limited by the planet’s atmosphere.

Meta has agreed to pay up to $17 billion and impose new restrictions on how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram as part of a historic settlement. California calls it transformative. One litigator calls it a toll booth. Somewhere in Menlo Park, the infinite scroll keeps scrolling. The tech giant has promised billions of dollars and a substantial new collection of guardrails for teenagers on Facebook and Instagram.

Apple unveiled its new Mac mini on August 25, updating it with the M6 and M5 Pro chips for a significant performance boost. But the company is selling much more than just faster speeds. The tech giant is also positioning its tiniest desktop as a machine that can stay on and keep AI agents working even when there’s nobody sitting in front of it. The M6 model delivers up to 4x faster AI performance than the M4 Mac mini that came before it, according to Apple.

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission rolled out its most pro-business crypto regulatory framework proposal to date. The SEC has called for comment on its proposal. If implemented as-is, it would remove scores of barriers for US crypto startups, including scrapping audited financial statement requirements. Experts say the SEC’s proposals are Washington’s response to the likely failure of the Clarity Act to pass the Senate before November’s midterms.