WIRED Middle East

The best back-to-school tech of 2026 isn’t just for students. September is a reset whether you’re returning to school, heading to university or confronting another relentless quarter at work—and the right upgrade can make it all feel marginally more manageable. This year’s productivity gear is unusually convincing.

At Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial in Massachusetts, the central dispute is not whether she killed her three children, which she does not deny, but whether she was criminally responsible at the time. Clancy, a former labour and delivery nurse, killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan at their family home in January 2023. Her defence argues that postpartum psychosis left her unable to understand or control her actions.

Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it’s not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they’re building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root of the problem by CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei indicate they don’t understand what’s actually driving society’s disdain for AI.

Back-to-school scams can hide among the fee requests, shopping offers and registration messages arriving before the first day of class. Parents are buying uniforms and textbooks, paying tuition fees and registering children for classes – often under considerable time pressure. Fraudsters exploit that distraction by impersonating schools, retailers and popular technology platforms.

I’ve never used Apple’s built-in Shortcuts app before, despite owning an iPhone for years. While automating tedious tasks sounded nice, the necessary scripting to trigger actions and thread them together felt overwhelming when I first opened the app. But my experience with the iOS 27 beta has completely changed my perspective on Shortcuts. What was previously clunky and forgotten now feels streamlined and essential.

Across the UAE, medical AI is moving from research labs towards hospitals, promising earlier autism screening and faster cancer diagnosis. But the closer these tools get to patients, the harder they become to test, trust and deploy. Researchers at the University of Dubai, working with clinicians and researchers in the UAE and abroad, recently reviewed 90 international studies exploring whether eye-tracking could help flag autism earlier.

Suhail, the star known internationally as Canopus, is expected to become visible in the UAE’s predawn sky on Monday, 24 August, according to the Emirates News Agency (WAM), citing the Emirates Astronomy Society. Across the Arabian Peninsula, its annual return traditionally signals that peak summer is beginning to recede and temperatures will gradually start to fall. The change will not happen overnight.

For many watching Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the primary takeaway has been how the deaths of her three small children – Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callen, eight months – were tragically preventable. Lawyers for the Massachusetts nurse are arguing that she’s not criminally responsible for strangling her children, because she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis, a rare mental health condition that causes new mothers to experience delusions and intrusive thoughts.

Water is supposed to be the simplest thing we consume. The premium bottled water industry has transformed it into something that requires a backstory. Supermarket shelves now distinguish between glacial, iceberg, volcanic, spring, mineral and alkaline water. Restaurants are introducing water menus, while trained water sommeliers assess bottles by their mineral composition, mouthfeel and provenance.

Within four hours of Anthropic confirming that Claude models would globally embed invisible, machine-readable watermarks into any AI-generated content, developer Guillaume Meyer had published his override. His code to remove watermarks from Claude-generated text has since gone viral on GitHub, has been bookmarked more than 20,000 times on X and has drawn more than 100 contributors, with many more incorporating the technology into their own projects.