News Report Tonight

For the first time, two Philippine entries have entered the Global Top 20 of the James Dyson Award 2026. BiDaKidney and Sentinel now head to the final judging stage, where Sir James Dyson will choose the winners. Results come out on 4 November, with Php2,390,230 going to the winning inventions. BiDaKidney UP Diliman graduates Andrew Jacob Buensalido and Allyson Cabrestante built this low-cost, semi-automated peritoneal dialysis machine for home use. Dialysis demand is rising. In 2024, 64,845 Filipinos received treatment, a 22 percent jump from 53,296 in 2023. Home peritoneal dialysis is tough on patients and families. It requires multiple tube exchanges daily, careful fluid monitoring, and manual record-keeping. These tasks are draining and increase contamination risk. BiDaKidney takes over key steps while still using standard supplies. A pump pushes dialysis fluid through the tubing, weight sensors measure fluid transfer, and a dual-tube clamp controls flow to sto...

Microsoft showed off the Maia 300 recently, the company’s third homegrown AI inference chip. Microsoft says it will pump out 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than the best GPU setups and is expected to ship by 2027. Power is the biggest bottleneck in AI data centers right now. Microsoft shaped the chip to tackle exactly that. Tokens are the bits of text a model takes in and spits out. Tokens per megawatt tells you how much work you get from each unit of power. Scott Guthrie, who heads Cloud + AI at Microsoft, put it this way: the company expects the chip to reach that 40 percent gain. Microsoft stayed quiet on which GPU it measured against and how it ran the tests. So the number comes from Microsoft itself. The company also says one rack of Maia 300 can push up to seven times the token throughput of a Maia 200 rack. The Maia 300 splits its work across several chiplets. TSMC builds the compute chiplets using its N2P process. Memory controllers and input/...

Spending as little as 10 minutes with an AI tool may chip away at a person’s willingness to grind through tough work, according to a newly published study. A team of researchers carried out several experiments and found that people lost focus and gave up more easily on demanding tasks soon after turning to artificial intelligence for help. The team calls the result a striking one. They say it matches what plenty of people already suspect: leaning on AI slowly wears down our mental sharpness. When answers arrive within seconds, working things out on your own starts to feel painfully slow. That robs people of what the researchers call productive struggle, the kind of effort that actually helps us improve. Scam attempts hit 84% of Filipino adults, losses reach Php121.8 billion Artificial Intelligence designs viruses that kill bacteria more effectively Brian Christian of the University of California, Berkeley, who took part in the work, put it this way. These...

Meta launched two new AI models: Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full . The company calls them its most capable models so far. As expected, these models are built for agentic tasks. This means they can handle multi-step jobs, adjust when problems come up, and keep working toward a goal over time. They were trained at Meta’s Prometheus data center. Two new features power them. Active Memory lets the models recall important details across conversations. Active Focus helps them push through obstacles, recover from errors, and adapt to new information. They can also ask users for clarification before taking major actions. The models handle specialized work in law, finance, and health. For coding, they can track requirements, edit multiple parts of a codebase, and test their own work. On safety, Meta said the models guard private information, refuse harmful requests, and resist adversarial instructions. The company claims its strongest safeguards yet against chemical,...

SOLIX, Anker’s sub-brand that focuses on power stations, has finally been launched in the Philippines with three models: the C300AC, the C1000 Gen 2, and the C2000 Gen 2. First, we have the Anker SOLIX C300AC , which is the cheapest of the three. This one offers 300W of power (600W surge) and 288Wh capacity inside a compact build that’s said to be about 15% smaller than the competition. It can charge up to 8 devices simultaneously with its multiple AC, USB-C, USB-A, and car ports. That includes two 140W USB-C outputs. The power station itself can be charged using a wall outlet, car charger, and compatible solar panels. The device uses a LiFePO4 battery that can last up to 3,000 cycles, smart temperature control, and a 5-year warranty. It retails for Php17,990 in the Philippines. Meanwhile, the Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2 has a 2,000W output, 3,000W peak, and a large 1,024Wh capacity. You can charge up to 10 devices simultaneously via its multiple AC ou...

Small AI models may be able to clone themselves onto internet-of-things devices such as smart ovens and TVs in a matter of months, according to Anthropic . That prospect sounds troubling to say the least. AI systems today mostly live in data centers, where their owners can shut them down when problems arise. A model scattered across thousands of weakly protected devices in homes and offices would have no such kill switch. Halting it would require locating and scrubbing every infected gadget, a task that becomes nearly impossible if the model launches cyberattacks. The warning lands after a year in which top AI models and their agents have repeatedly dodged safety guardrails, striking rival corporations and government bodies across the globe. Anthropic says a self-copying AI might appear in different forms. It could be a cyber tool that breaks into data centers, or one that cons people out of compute credits. The company concedes it cannot know exactly what shape this will ...