The 4.1-billion-year-old meteorite is a "Rosetta Stone for Mars," preserving clues about how the Martian environment has changed since the solar system formed. The Red Planet's surface has changed radically over time, and this ancient Martian meteorite is providing clues as to how. In 2022, a strange rock was found in the Sahara Desert, and now a new analysis reveals that it's even more valuable to science than it first appeared. This fragment, weighing about two pounds, came from Mars' crust . It was likely ejected by an impact, flying through space until it eventually reached Earth . The rock is one of the oldest known samples from our neighboring planet, estimated to be at least 4.1 billion years old.

Companies have spent the past several weeks trying to reassure investors that Muse and other AI agents pose more of an opportunity than a threat. Meta's Muse was among the hottest topics on corporate earnings calls in recent weeks. Meta has claimed that the agentic AI tool, which lets users automate various online tasks, is becoming a major force in shopping, with millions of people using it to make purchases of more than $200 on average. Wall Street fears that proactive shopping assistants like Muse will erode brand loyalty, ignite price wars, and squeeze corporate profits. Yet on the earnings calls and in conversations with WIRED, executives across roughly 50 companies--spanning travel, internet providers, food, and self-storage--shrugged off immediate disruption.

Mistral Says Its AI Model'Le Chonk' Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity. A few weeks ago, French company Mistral released an early version of its new artificial intelligence model, nicknamed Le Chonk. At the time, the company said it was the most advanced open-weight offering outside of China. After further refinement, Mistral now says Le Chonk is the "world's best" open-weight model for automated coding and cybersecurity. The advances, Mistral says, were made possible by feeding the model increasingly difficult cybersecurity and coding problems, which allowed the trillion-parameter Le Chonk to match or surpass models from leading Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Z.ai .

Get $100 Off WIRED's Favorite Automatic Litter Boxes As WIRED's resident pet tech tester, I have lots of opinions on what's worth your money. Petkit's automatic litter boxes are my top picks--and my favorite models are $100 off right now. An automatic cat litter box will change your life. It's the product I recommend every cat parent invest in above all else. These nifty machines do the work for you, using internal sensors to detect a cat and automatically start cleaning after they leave.

An AI Breakthrough Has Made Decades of Computer Science Research'Irrelevant' Anthropic and OpenAI say they've disproved a key tenet of computer science. Researchers are struggling with the fall but also feel like "overexcited bunnies" as they look at new questions to explore. Linköping University professor Peter Jonsson is set to have his work presented in two weeks' time at one of the most prestigious conferences in theoretical computer science. As of Monday, much of that work is "dead," he says, after AI showed that a 27-year-old hypothesis underpinning it is wrong. Both OpenAI and Anthropic claimed this week to have disproved the exponential time hypothesis (ETH).

The leaked records include the locations of ICE and CBP facilities, workers' cellphone numbers, and the members of groups tied to wiretap programs, Palantir software, and xAI's Grok chatbot. An unprecedented leak of Department of Homeland Security records has exposed details of more than 41,000 employees or contractors who work for the department and its constituent agencies. The records include email addresses, phone numbers, and office addresses, but also references to internal systems and sensitive information on undercover and surveillance programs. In all, the leak provides a map of how DHS is organized and how it operates. The records, which span DHS itself as well as seven component agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Customs and Border Protection, were last updated on August 19, 2026.

For $1,999, you could own an M6 Mac Mini and an M5 MacBook Air instead, both of which are on sale right now. This is the first MacBook to get the chip (but certainly not the last), and I look forward to testing this thing out myself. But I do already have a good sense of how well it'll perform, as I already tested this same chip in the latest Mac Mini . And it points to an issue with the current state of the Mac lineup . The 14-inch M6 MacBook Pro currently costs $1,999.

I Put a Bunch of AI Agents in Charge of a Fantasy Soccer Team. To experiment with AI's predictive skills, I let Codex loose on a fantasy team. It tried to bench Erling Haaland at first, but it soon learned the error of its ways. I have consulted my AI-powered crystal ball, and it's telling me that frontier models are going to get a lot better at making predictions in the near future. Just ask my Premier League fantasy team .

An exclusive early look at Apple's new touchscreen MacBook Pro--the computer Apple said would never happen. Apple's new CEO strolls to an outdoor seating area within the company's otherworldly ring-shaped headquarters and pulls up a chair. An employee notes the angle and asks if he minds the sun. Nearly two months into his tenure, he's been busy. While the tech world buzzes about AI agents and the upcoming IPO of a company reporting spectacular losses, Ternus' leadership of a ridiculously profitable firm has so far been defined by a sequence of significant launches--the long-awaited foldable iPhone, a household device that can control digital appliances, new Mac Minis, and AirPods. Intentionally or not, all that activity sends a message that, even as AI dominates the public imagination, hardware products still rule.

The base model--without thrusters or the flight system--will likely cost several times that amount to buy. "I'm going to do everything in my power to get the flying one," says one customer. In mid-October, CEO Elon Musk sort of made good on a long-standing promise: Tesla's new second-gen Roadster flew through the air . Technically, the vehicle used compressed air to "thrust" itself --the "flying" lasted mere seconds, and the system takes six to seven hours to refill . Never mind, though--some buyers were eager to unsheath their credit cards to reserve one of the cars. "I was freaking out," says Alex Lawrence, the owner of used-electric-vehicle dealership EVAuto, who already had one reservation for a second-gen Roadster and watched the demonstration live online.