Here are today’s 7 verified tech & science stories, covering Tech & Apps and Science & Space.
Table of Contents
Every item below links to its original source.
The TLDR
- Tech & Apps: Fired Georgia officer shared her police surveillance login with her ICE agent husband
- Science & Space: Japan targets launch of its MMX mission to bring back the first samples from a Mars moon
Tech & Apps
Fired Georgia officer shared her police surveillance login with her ICE agent husband
A Savannah, Georgia police officer was fired in August after an internal investigation found she had given her login for the Flock license-plate camera network to her husband, an ICE agent, violating department security rules, according to The Verge. Newly public investigation findings show her account was used for nearly 1,000 license-plate searches across six states between January and July, most involving vehicles tied to Hispanic drivers. Savannah police said they don’t share Flock data with ICE, and that sharing login credentials broke policy. It’s a reminder that license-plate camera networks many cities use carry real privacy risks when login access isn’t tightly controlled.
iPhone Duo’s actual battery size revealed in an EU filing
Apple’s iPhone Duo pre-orders opened October 16, and a regulatory filing submitted to the European Union has now revealed its real battery capacity: 4,883mAh, split across two separate cells, according to 9to5Mac. That’s ahead of the iPhone 18 Pro’s 4,288mAh battery but behind the iPhone 18 Pro Max’s 5,567mAh cell. Apple doesn’t publish battery numbers on its spec sheets, so EU disclosure rules are often the only way buyers find out before a phone ships. If you’re weighing an upgrade, it’s worth clearing out iCloud storage before you trade in your old phone.
Can a laser pointer actually damage a security camera?
Laser pointers are often rumored to fry smart home security cameras, and Engadget found there’s some truth to it, but only under narrow conditions — a fitting fact-check for any tech news roundup. Permanent damage, like dead pixels or dark spots, generally requires a high-powered laser (above 5mW) held perfectly steady on an older camera’s sensor for roughly 10 seconds, something hand tremors make hard to pull off from a few feet away. Lower-powered pointers mostly just cause temporary glare or whiteout in footage. Newer cameras include sensor protections that make lasting damage even less likely.
What Apple’s Image Playground app does, and how to use it
Apple’s on-device AI image generator, Image Playground, picked up new features with this fall’s Apple Intelligence update, including an “Any Style” option that lets you describe a visual style in plain language instead of picking from presets, according to Engadget. It also now supports touch-based editing, so you can tap an element in a generated image and type a prompt to change just that part. It works inside Messages, Keynote, and Freeform on iPhone 15 Pro or newer, recent iPads, and Apple Silicon Macs with Apple Intelligence enabled.
Anthropic gives an outside AI safety group the same access as its own staff
Anthropic has started giving six evaluators from the nonprofit METR “employee-like access” to its internal systems, including company hardware and office space, so they can independently test unreleased Claude models before release, according to Ars Technica. Crucially, METR can publish its findings without Anthropic’s sign-off, aside from narrow, pre-agreed redactions — reportedly the first time a major AI lab has granted this level of outside access. The move follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s September call for more independent oversight of frontier AI labs.
Science & Space
Japan targets launch of its MMX mission to bring back the first samples from a Mars moon
JAXA is targeting October 19 for the launch of its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft, which will attempt to land on Phobos and become the first mission to bring samples back from the Mars system, according to Space.com. The spacecraft is expected to take about a year to reach Mars, then spend roughly three years studying Phobos and Deimos before heading home, with sample return targeted for 2031. NASA is contributing science instruments, while France and Germany built a small rover called IDEFIX that will ride along to explore Phobos’s surface directly.
Is this the biggest El Niño ever? Depends which weather agency you ask
Britain’s Met Office has called this year’s El Niño “unprecedented” and Japan’s weather agency says it’s the strongest on record, but U.S. forecasters say it still trails the biggest events in their own historical data, according to Phys.org. The disagreement comes down to methodology — agencies track different patches of the Pacific Ocean and use different temperature baselines to rank events. NOAA now uses a newer index comparing central Pacific warming against broader ocean trends and says there’s a good, but not certain, chance this event becomes the strongest in its own records dating to 1950.
Explore more: clearing out iCloud storage, building a capsule wardrobe with ChatGPT.
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