Here are today’s 8 verified tech & science stories, covering Tech & Apps, AI Tools and Science & Space.
Table of Contents
Every item below links to its original source.
The TLDR
- Tech & Apps: Google Lets You Turn Off Gemini’s Visible AI Watermark
- AI Tools: Meta Releases Open-Weight ‘Glimmer’ Model as Zuckerberg Pitches AI ‘For Everyone’
- Science & Space: SpaceX Rocket’s Moon Crash Highlights Lunar Debris Risk
Tech & Apps
Google Lets You Turn Off Gemini’s Visible AI Watermark
Google now lets Gemini and Flow users turn off the visible watermark stamped on AI-generated images, video, and music. The new toggle lives under Settings > Media Watermark in the Gemini app and covers content made with the Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models, according to The Verge. Turning it off only removes the visible mark in the corner — the invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA metadata that identify a file as AI-made stay embedded regardless, per TechCrunch. The change began rolling out Friday, with support in Google Search to follow.
Samsung May Be Building Its Own Over-Ear Headphones
Code strings and icon graphics inside Samsung’s Galaxy Wearable app point to an unannounced pair of over-ear headphones internally referred to as “Galaxy H1,” according to a leak covered by The Verge. Samsung hasn’t confirmed the product, and the leaked design cues reportedly borrow from both the AirPods Max and Sony’s WH-1000XM6. If the rumor holds, reports suggest the headphones wouldn’t arrive until 2027.
tvOS 27 Could Push Apple TV Owners to Upgrade
tvOS 27, due next month, could give Apple TV owners a reason to finally upgrade their hardware. The update brings a more capable AI-powered Siri that’s expected to require newer hardware, and tvOS 27 is also dropping support for the Apple TV HD and the first-generation Apple TV 4K, according to 9to5Mac.
AI Tools
Meta Releases Open-Weight ‘Glimmer’ Model as Zuckerberg Pitches AI ‘For Everyone’
Meta released Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight AI model that can run locally on a single consumer graphics card instead of a data center. The release landed alongside a lengthy essay from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be built for everyone rather than controlled by a handful of labs, contrasting Glimmer with Meta’s more powerful Muse Spark model, which stays locked behind Meta’s own APIs, according to TechCrunch.
Science & Space
SpaceX Rocket’s Moon Crash Highlights Lunar Debris Risk
The spent upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the moon near Einstein Crater on August 5, after drifting unplanned since delivering lunar landers in 2025. South Korea’s Danuri orbiter captured images of the impact site, and the event highlights a growing operational risk as more hardware from Earth ends up near the moon, according to Space.com.
Scientists May Finally Know Why Fairy Ring Mushrooms Grow in Circles
Scientists studying fairy-ring mushrooms in two cemeteries believe they’ve found a clue to why the fungi grow in perfect circles. DNA testing showed the underground fungal network is densest at the ring’s outer edge and nearly absent at the center, supporting a “transient-escape hypothesis” where the fungus keeps growing outward to avoid temporarily unfavorable soil conditions left behind it, according to ScienceAlert. When researchers replanted fungus from the ring’s center after 14 months, it started growing again, suggesting the effect is temporary rather than permanent — not unlike why bees perform their waggle dance to signal each other.
13th-Century Homework Shows Kids Have Always Doodled Battles and Monsters
A set of birch-bark scraps from 13th-century Russia shows that doodling instead of doing schoolwork isn’t a new phenomenon. The writings belonged to a boy named Onfim, roughly 6 or 7 years old, who mixed psalm and alphabet exercises with drawings of battles, horses, and a self-portrait as a warrior slaying an enemy, according to ScienceAlert. The scraps are considered some of the earliest known examples of child-made artwork.
Researchers Control the Spin of Light Without New Materials
Researchers in South Korea found a new way to control which direction circularly polarized light spins, without designing complex new chiral materials. A KAIST team led by professor Dong Ki Yoon arranged ordinary symmetric liquid crystal molecules into microscopic pinwheel structures using an electric field, then added less than 1% of a chiral additive to line the pinwheels up in one direction, according to Phys.org. The technique could be useful for next-generation displays, optical communications, and anti-counterfeiting security tech.
Explore more: yesterday’s tech news roundup, why bees perform their waggle dance.
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Photo: Imagen 2 via Gemini; prompted by Adi Robertson / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.