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.

By Oliver Grant

Image: Justin Ormont / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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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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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