A single particle interaction recorded nearly a mile underground in South Dakota has survived three years of scrutiny. It sits at 2.6 sigma, well short of a discovery, and a Coimbra team has been in the collaboration since it was founded.

One day in June 2023, a xenon atom inside a tank buried nearly a mile down in a disused South Dakota gold mine was nudged by something. It left a faint flash of ultraviolet light and a recoiling nucleus. Three years on, the collaboration that runs the detector still cannot pin that event on any known background. The announcement came this week at a conference in Japan. It is the strongest hint LUX-ZEPLIN has ever put forward, and the thing to say straight…

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Portugal's telecoms regulator ruled on 7 July and published on 31 August: the change went through without 30 days' written notice and without telling subscribers they could leave free. NOS is appealing.

If at some point over the past year an advert started appearing whenever you opened an automatic recording on NOS television, and you do not remember being warned, you were not being careless. So were 821,641 other subscribers, and the regulator has now said the way it was done broke the rules. The fine is €350,000. ANACOM took the decision on 7 July and only made it public on 31 August. An operator that wants to change contract terms cannot simply change…

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REPMUS 2026 has brought 36 navies, 1,500 people, 14 ships and more than 300 unmanned maritime systems to Tróia and Sesimbra, across 1,370 square kilometres of water.

The 16th edition of REPMUS started on Monday at Tróia and Sesimbra, and the scale still takes a moment to absorb. More than 300 unmanned maritime systems, 14 ships supporting them, and 1,500 people from 36 navies. It runs until 25 September. The Portuguese Navy has hosted it since 2010 and calls it, without much modesty, the largest robotics and unmanned-vehicle experimentation exercise in the world. The name is entirely literal: Robotic Experimentation…

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In a California court, Sony argues no reasonable consumer thinks they own the games they buy on the PS Store. In Europe the fight was never about ownership, and the Commission's answer to 1.29 million signatures was still no.

The button says buy. The contract says licence. For twenty years almost nobody cared about the gap, and now it is being argued in two places at once: a federal courtroom in California and a Commission document in Brussels. The courtroom first. Four players sued Sony Interactive Entertainment in June, claiming the PS Store checkout breaches a Californian law in force since the start of 2025 that bars sellers from advertising digital content as a purchase…

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The filing lodged with the Massachusetts regulator names 14 September as the effective date and carries no price at all. Reports put it somewhere between 200 and 300 million dollars.

A company that started in Porto is about to buy one of the best-known meditation apps in the world. Sword Health is taking over Headspace, and the deal surfaced where these things usually surface first: in a form handed to a regulator. The notice of material change was filed with the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission in July and only spotted afterwards. It says OrangeDot, Headspace's parent, will merge with an entity created for the purpose and…

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Invitations went out on 26 August under the line Surprise and Shine. The keynote runs from the Steve Jobs Theater at 6pm Lisbon time, eight days after John Ternus takes over from Tim Cook.

The date has moved from the rumour calendar to the real one. Apple has booked its September keynote for Wednesday the 9th, 10am in California, which is 6pm in Lisbon and 5pm in London. A reasonable hour, for once. The invitation carries the line Surprise and Shine. The venue is the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, and it streams live on Apple's site, the Apple TV app and YouTube. The thing that sets this keynote apart from the previous ten is not on the…

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Meta has upgraded two-step verification from a numeric PIN to an alphanumeric password, added caller context on Android for numbers you have not saved, and started letting you register more than one passkey per account.

WhatsApp has made three changes to how accounts are protected. None of them is a shiny new button, which is rather the point. They all sit at the door a stolen account normally walks through. The one that matters most is two-step verification. Until now that extra layer was a six-digit PIN. It is now a proper password: longer, alphanumeric, special characters allowed. Six digits give you a million combinations, which is not much of a wall in 2026. An…

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The council waved through a preliminary application from the Hyperion group at the Alvega roundabout, next to an EDC ONE site already approved at Pego. At full load the pair would use about 2.8 TWh a year against the municipality's 148.8 GWh in 2024.

Abrantes council has given a unanimous favourable opinion to a preliminary application for a second large data centre in the municipality. The developer is the Hyperion group, the site sits beside the Alvega roundabout, and the footprint runs to roughly 151,000 square metres of ground area and 287,000 square metres of built space. It carries Project of National Interest status, which shortens the administrative clock. It will have company. Since September…

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The Council of Ministers approved a legislative authorisation making the iAP platform compulsory for data sharing between public bodies. What passed is permission to legislate, not the rule itself.

If you live in Portugal you have done this. Queued for a certificate at one counter in order to hand it in at another. Printed a proof of address the state itself issued, so you could give it back to the state. Carried a tax clearance certificate across town to a service that could have looked it up in seconds. On 20 August the Council of Ministers approved a legislative authorisation bill creating a legal regime for the interoperability of data and…

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The Romanian challenger closed June with 960,000 active services, up from 789,000, and revenue of €37.2 million. Mobile did almost all the work.

DIGI arrived in Portugal in 2022 selling tariffs the incumbents would not match. The accounts now show what that bought. The operator ended the first half of 2026 with 960,000 active services, against 789,000 a year earlier — 171,000 new contracts in twelve months, or growth of 21.7%. Mobile is the engine. Of that total, 545,000 are mobile services, nearly 30% up on a year ago. Fixed internet and data reached 186,000 customers, a 29.2% jump, and 147,000…

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Rural Portugal already beats the EU average on 5G and very-high-capacity networks. The gap is the half a million homes with no fibre at all, and a €172.3 million contract now aims at them.

The same table supports an optimistic reading and an impatient one, and both are fair. The optimistic one first. In rural Portugal, 5G now reaches 95.3% of homes and very-high-capacity networks reach 81.6% — a figure the regulator puts 8.9% above the EU average. Fibre to the home covers 73.1% of rural territory, also ahead of the European average. The numbers come from the Connectivity Coverage in Europe 2025 study, and ANACOM sets them out on its facts…

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Any connected product placed on the European market from that date must be built so the user can reach the data it generates. The right has existed since 2025 — what changes is that it stops depending on the manufacturer's goodwill.

Your car logs how hard you brake, where you park, how often the driver's door opens and the moment a sensor started misbehaving. A tractor counts engine hours. A watch counts steps. For years all of that sat somewhere the owner of the machine could not reach. The manufacturer could reach it. So could whoever the manufacturer let in. That changes status on 12 September. From that date, the part of Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 known as the Data Act requires…

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On 20 August in Macaíba, the Brazilian government announced a R$1bn tender for PAX RN, a machine targeting 7,200 petaflops. Alongside it, a second supercomputing hub in Rio with Huawei and iFlytek, dedicated to Portuguese-language models.

There is a quiet race happening on the other side of the Atlantic, and it is about the language spoken in Portugal. On Thursday, at the Augusto Severo science and technology park in Macaíba, the Brazilian government announced a public tender worth one billion reais for PAX RN, a supercomputer targeting 7,200 petaflops — roughly 7.2 quintillion operations a second, which would put it among the ten most powerful machines in the world. The interesting part…

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Adam Mosseri unveiled the first change to Instagram's written logo in ten years on 13 August. The script stays, the serifs are flattened and detached, the app icon is untouched, and the internet has decided it now reads as Instagzam.

Instagram has changed its written logo for the first time since 2016. Head of app Adam Mosseri announced it on 13 August across the official Instagram and Threads accounts, and it is reaching phones worldwide over the following days. What changed is subtle and, once you have seen it, impossible to unsee. The script survived, because it is the part anyone recognises from across a room. But the stroke is more compact and heavier, the serifs have been…

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Active Space Technologies has confirmed it is taking part in EnVision, the European Space Agency mission to Venus. The spacecraft was selected in 2021 and is due to launch in the early 2030s.

Founded in 2004 and based in Coimbra, Active Space Technologies does one fairly narrow thing: bespoke electro-mechanical systems for extreme environments. Instruments, mechanisms, actuators, wireless sensing. Hardware that has to keep working where nothing was designed to work. Which is how it comes to be taking part in EnVision, Europe's mission to Venus. This is not the company's first trip out of the atmosphere. Over two decades it has contributed to…

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S301 hits 25,000 km per second at its closest pass, more than 8% of light speed, and comes nearer to Sagittarius A* than any star ever tracked. It is the first that could let astronomers measure the black hole's spin directly.

There is a black hole four million times the mass of the Sun at the centre of our galaxy, and something has been skimming past it. The star is called S301, it was announced on Wednesday, and it is the fastest star known in the Milky Way, touching about 25,000 kilometres per second at its closest approach. That is more than 8% of the speed of light, or roughly a hundred thousand times the speed of an airliner. It took four telescopes behaving as one. The…

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Anacom would renew Meo, Nos and Vodafone's frequencies to somewhere between 2033 and 2042 depending on the band. The operators wanted 40 years. The public consultation closes on 27 August.

The licences Meo, Nos and Vodafone built their mobile networks on expire at the end of 2027, and Portugal's telecoms regulator has now set out what it intends to do about them. It will renew. Just not for as long as the operators hoped, and not for every frequency at once: Anacom's draft decision stretches some bands to 2041 and 2042 and stops others in April 2033. The split follows what each frequency is for. The 800 MHz band, the one that carries…

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France's Constitutional Council struck the ban down on 14 August. It accepted that minors' access can be limited — what it rejected was a blanket ban and an age check with no rules attached.

The ban was supposed to start when French schools went back in September. It won't. On 14 August the Constitutional Council struck down article 1 of the law barring under-15s from social media, and the headline that travelled the world — France can't ban it — is close to the opposite of what the court actually wrote. The nine members said, near the top of the ruling, that protecting the best interests of the child and preventing threats to public order…

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Tekever is in talks to raise around €500m from existing and new backers, in a round that would value the company at €5.5bn — close to five times its 2025 mark.

Tekever is in talks over a funding round of roughly €500m that would value the Portuguese drone maker at €5.5bn. If it closes on those terms, that is close to five times what the company was worth in May 2025, when it joined Portugal's unicorn club at a valuation above £1bn, or about €1.18bn. The money is earmarked for acquisitions and expansion, and is being sought from existing shareholders as well as new investors. Tekever grew in the right place at…

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Apple's latest wave of threat notifications reached users in 110 countries. The alert is real, it is aimed at named individuals, and it always arrives through the same three channels — which is also how you spot a fake.

Apple sent another wave of threat notifications this week, and this time they landed with users in 110 countries. This is not the generic security prompt that asks you to update your software. It is a message telling one specific person that Apple's systems saw activity consistent with a mercenary spyware attack aimed at that account. The distinction matters because it changes the right response. An ordinary security warning applies to millions. This one…

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Google has confirmed Portuguese prices and a 20 August release date for the Pixel 11, Pro and Pro XL. The AI features doing most of the selling are marked in Google's own announcement as limited to selected countries and languages, and no language list has been published.

Google unveiled the Pixel 11 in New York on 12 August, and Portugal is in the first wave. All three phones, Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL, go on sale on Thursday 20 August. We covered the event back in July, when all there was to report was a date. Now there are numbers. The Pixel 11 starts at 1,019 euros with 256 GB, the 128 GB tier having been dropped entirely. The 512 GB version is 1,149 euros. The Pro starts at 1,219 euros, the Pro XL at…

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The entry bar doubles for newcomers, but existing partners are untouched by it. The change that actually bites them is a 10 million view floor on Shorts revenue, and Premium Lite is now rolling out to every country with Premium.

YouTube has changed its Partner Program for the first time since 2018, and the headline everyone reached for was the easy one: the bar to get in has doubled. That is accurate. It is also the part fewest people will feel. Read properly, the announcement YouTube published on 10 August contains three changes, and only one of them is about getting in. From 1 February 2027, a new channel applying to the programme needs 8,000 qualified watch hours over the…

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Samsung unveiled zHBM at the FMS 2026 conference, claiming four times HBM4's transfer speed at a quarter of the power. SK hynix and Sandisk used the same stage to publish the first open High-Bandwidth Flash spec.

The thing slowing AI down right now is not the processor. It is the distance data travels between the processor and its memory, and that distance exists because in current designs the memory sits next to the chip rather than on top of it. Samsung's answer, shown on 4 August at the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara, is called zHBM: stack the high-bandwidth memory vertically, directly above the AI accelerator. The company says zHBM…

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That is about US$14.5 billion for a single month, 5.6% more than June, with January to July running 37.0% ahead of last year. High-performance computing, where AI chips sit, was 66% of second-quarter revenue.

If you want to know whether the money pouring into artificial intelligence is still pouring, the most useful company to watch is not Nvidia or OpenAI. It is the Taiwanese contract manufacturer that makes almost everybody else's chips. TSMC reported July revenue of NT$467.58 billion, roughly US$14.5 billion, in the monthly figures it publishes on its investor relations monthly revenue page. That is a record month: up 44.7% on July 2025 and 5.6% on June.…

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Novels, school textbooks and audiobooks are passed around as files inside closed messaging groups. Portugal's book trade will publish an impact study before the end of the year to size the losses properly.

Book piracy has stopped living on obscure websites and moved to where everyone already is. In Portugal, novels, school textbooks and audiobooks now circulate as files inside Telegram and WhatsApp groups, and the trade puts the loss to publishers at more than €75 million. The mechanics are simple, which is exactly why they are hard to stop. Someone buys or scans a title, drops the PDF or EPUB into a group with hundreds of members, and the file chains…

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The watermark is inaudible, sits inside the waveform itself and is meant to let platforms recognise a Suno-made track. It lands with record labels suing the company and Europe's AI transparency rules already in force.

Suno said on 6 August that it will start marking the tracks its AI produces. The watermark is embedded in the audio, nobody hears it, and the point is that a partner platform can look at a song and tell it came from there. The announcement came in a post signed by co-founder and chief executive Mikey Shulman, which describes the mark as durable and resistant to tampering without affecting the listening experience. One line is worth holding onto: the…

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MEO has finished upgrading 5G infrastructure along the whole Blue Line and expects the Red Line done by September. Vodafone says its own network is modernised across 95% of Metro stations.

Anyone who rides the Lisbon Metro knows the rhythm: signal on the platform, nothing in the tunnel, back again three stops later. That is being fixed line by line. MEO has completed the 5G infrastructure upgrade along the entire Blue Line, and expects the Red Line reinforcement to be finished in September. Vodafone, separately, says its own network is now modernised across 95% of Metro stations. A tunnel is close to the worst case for a radio signal. There…

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The PRR-funded ION platform can navigate to peripheral lung nodules that conventional bronchoscopes struggle to reach. It is the second such unit on the Iberian Peninsula.

A man of about 70 with suspected lung cancer became the first patient in Portugal to undergo a robotic bronchoscopy. The procedure took place at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology in Lisbon and lasted a little over 40 minutes. The technology is called ION, and it solves a specific problem in respiratory oncology. Nodules that show up in the outer reaches of the lung, far from the main airways, are hard to get to with a conventional bronchoscope.…

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Apple has asked a California court for early discovery against two OpenAI staff, claiming new evidence about unannounced products. OpenAI's answer, filed 6 August, calls the suit rotten at the root.

OpenAI has answered, and answered hard. On 6 August it asked a California court to throw out Apple's trade-secrets suit in full, calling the case rotten at the root. Pulling the other way in the same docket, Apple asked for early production of evidence involving two OpenAI employees, senior systems engineer Chang Liu and hardware director Tang Yew Tan, saying it has gathered fresh indications that proprietary information about unannounced products was…

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Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over day-to-day running of the lab and reports directly to Sundar Pichai. The change lands alongside Jeff Dean's departure from Google after 27 years to found a new company.

Demis Hassabis is no longer chief executive of Google DeepMind. He becomes chairman of the lab and chief scientist of Alphabet, and continues to run Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery company spun out of DeepMind itself. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the protein-structure prediction work behind AlphaFold. The day-to-day passes to Koray Kavukcuoglu, until now DeepMind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect. He takes…

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