Elon Musk appears to be grasping at straws in a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of poaching eight xAI employees in an allegedly unlawful bid to access xAI trade secrets connected to its data centers and chatbot, Grok.

In a Tuesday order granting OpenAI's motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita F. Lin said that xAI failed to provide evidence of any misconduct from OpenAI.

Instead, xAI seemed fixated on a range of alleged conduct of former employees. But in assessing xAI's claims, Lin said that xAI failed to show proof that OpenAI induced any of these employees to steal trade secrets "or that these former xAI employees used any stolen trade secrets once employed by OpenAI."

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There used to be countless companies making flagship Android phones, but a combination of factors has narrowed the field over time. Today, Samsung is the undisputed king of the Android device ecosystem with its Galaxy S line. So we can safely assume today's Unpacked has revealed the most popular Android phones for the next year—the Galaxy S26 Ultra, Galaxy S26+, and Galaxy S26.

Samsung didn't swing for the fences this time around, producing phones with a few cosmetic tweaks and upgraded internals. Meanwhile, Samsung is investing even more in AI, saying the S26 series includes the first "Agentic AI phones." Despite limited hardware upgrades, the realities of component prices in the age of AI mean the prices of the two cheaper models have gone up by $100 this year. The Ultra remains at an already eye-watering $1,300.

Faster and more private

Looking at the Galaxy S26 family, you'd be hard-pressed to tell them apart from last year's phones. The camera surround is different, and the measurements of the smallest and largest phone are ever so slightly different. You probably won't be able to tell just by looking, but the S26 Ultra has regressed from titanium to aluminum, a reversion Apple also made with its latest high-end phones. This phone also retains its S Pen stylus.

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A federal court will conduct a search of devices seized from a Washington Post reporter after a magistrate judge decided yesterday that the Department of Justice cannot be trusted to perform the search on its own.

US Magistrate Judge William Porter criticized government prosecutors for not including key information in a search warrant application. The court wasn't aware of a 1980 law that limits searches and seizures of journalists' work materials when it approved the warrant, Porter acknowledged.

The decision came six weeks after the FBI executed the search warrant at the Virginia home of reporter Hannah Natanson. Porter declined the Post and Natanson's request to return the devices immediately but decided on a court-led process to ensure that the search is limited to materials that may aid a criminal case against an alleged leaker who was in contact with Natanson. He also rescinded the portion of the search warrant that authorized the government to open, access, review, or otherwise examine the seized data.

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While lifesaving vaccines face a relentless onslaught from the Trump administration—with fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the charge—scientific literature is building a wondrous story: A vaccine appears to prevent dementia, including Alzheimer's, and may even slow biological aging.

For years, study after study has noted that older adults vaccinated against shingles seemed to have a lower risk of dementia . A study last month suggested the same vaccine appears to slow biological aging, including lowering markers of inflammation.

"Our study adds to a growing body of work suggesting that vaccines may play a role in healthy aging strategies beyond solely preventing acute illness," study author Eileen Crimmins, of the University of Southern California, said.

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Sometimes you drive a car you just don't gel with.

The original Lexus RZ was such a case. It was Lexus' first battery EV, and I was less than impressed when I drove it in 2023. In fact, I compared it negatively to the extremely not-good Vinfast VF8. Lexus knew there was room for improvement, too, so it reworked the RZ with new motors , a new battery, and NACS charging for North America, among other tweaks, for model year 2026. A front-wheel drive RZ 350e is now the range's entry point at $47,295, and there's also a $58,295 all-wheel drive RZ 550e F Sport that tops the range. We spent a week with the latter.

Mindful of how little I liked the first RZ I drove, I made sure to approach the 550e F Sport with an open mind. And despite a number of the car's shortcomings, I find I have warm feelings for the electric Lexus.

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In an illustration of the severity of the current memory shortage , HP Inc. CFO Karen Parkhill said that RAM has gone from accounting for “roughly 15 percent to 18 percent” of HP PCs’ bill of materials in its fiscal Q4 2025 to “roughly 35 percent” for the rest of the year.

Parkhill was speaking during HP’s Q1 2026 earnings call, where the company said it expects the total addressable market for its Personal Systems business to decline by double digits this calendar year, as higher prices hurt customer demand.

“We have seen memory costs increase roughly 100 percent sequentially, and we do forecast that to further increase as we move into the fiscal year,” Parkhill said, per a transcript of the call by Seeking Alpha .

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Casey Means, President Trump's nominee for surgeon general, will appear before the Senate Health Committee on Wednesday and is likely to face scrutiny over her qualifications for becoming the country's top doctor.

Though Means holds a medical degree from Stanford Medical School, she dropped out of her medical residency and holds no active medical license. Instead, she has pursued a career as a wellness influencer, embracing "functional" medicine, an ill-defined form of alternative medicine. She co-founded a company called Levels , which promotes intensive health tracking, including the use of continuous glucose monitoring for people without diabetes or prediabetes, which is not backed by evidence.

Last year, an analysis by The Washington Post found that Means earned over half a million dollars between 2024 and 2025 from making deals with companies described as selling "diagnostic testing," "herbal remedies and wellness products," and "teas, supplements, and elixirs."

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The urine of chimpanzees contains high levels of alcohol byproduct, most likely because the chimps regularly gorge themselves on fermented fruit, according to a new paper published in the journal Biology Letters. It's the latest evidence in support of a hotly debated theory regarding the evolutionary origins of human fondness for alcohol.

As previously reported , in 2014, University of California, Berkeley (UCB) biologist Robert Dudley wrote a book called The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol . His controversial “ drunken monkey hypothesis ” proposed that the human attraction to alcohol goes back about 18 million years, to the origin of the great apes, and that social communication and sharing food evolved to better identify the presence of fruit from a distance. At the time, skeptical scientists insisted that this was unlikely because chimpanzees and other primates just don’t eat fermented fruit or nectar.

But reports of primates doing just that have grown over the ensuing two decades. Earlier this year, we reported that researchers had caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. That observational data was the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild. The authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume).

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Paramount Skydance increased its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) from $30 per share to $31 per share, WBD said today. Amid a competing offer from Netflix for WBD’s movie studios and streaming businesses, WBD said that Paramount’s new bid “could reasonably be expected to lead to a ‘Company Superior Proposal.’”

Under its revamped offer, Paramount would also pay the $7 billion regulatory termination fee that would arise should a Paramount-WBD merger fail to close due to antitrust regulation.

The company owned by David Ellison also said it would pay $0.25 per share for every day the deal doesn’t close, starting on September 30, rather than the previous start date of December 31.

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