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In this episode, Ray covers the fight that broke out after Anthropic published five case files on scientists using Claude for pathogen research, and the virologists who read the same files and called the work basic research. Additionally, he digs into DeepMind’s AlphaGenome Atlas mapping nine billion DNA variants, OpenAI’s numbers-free customer story about Perplexity, Gemini’s late arrival on Windows, and John Deere’s self-repair service that almost nobody uses. Finally, the show closes with Europe’s new plant-fluorescence satellite, a super El Niño already collecting damage, and a plankton shell that may be hiding a second species.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens the show back home in Oregon after a stretch in Michigan. Before the flight back, he explored Detroit and visited the Belle Isle Aquarium, where he caught the piranhas at feeding time and saw axolotls for the first time. Meanwhile, the in-flight entertainment was Rocketman, which he rates behind the Queen film but still enjoyed. Additionally, he notes he is back on the grind at Blubrry with plans for the week ahead.

Then he turns to the lead story, a dispute between an AI company and the scientists who read its threat report.

Anthropic Published Five Pathogen Cases, and the Virologists Pushed Back

Science.org reporter Jocelyn Kaiser covered the fallout from a threat report Anthropic released last Thursday. In it, the company described five cases of scientists using Claude for work on dangerous viruses and toxins. Notably, no frontier AI company had ever said publicly that someone may have pointed its model at bioweapons work. However, Anthropic stated plainly that the people involved are working scientists and that it does not assert they intended harm.

Three cases involved viruses. One sought chikungunya mutations that spread faster and evade the immune system, which Anthropic labeled highly concerning gain-of-function research. Another planned experiments on an already lethal bird flu strain. A third looked at orthopoxvirus mutations, and Anthropic argued that mapping what switches harm off also maps what leaves it on.

What escalated the report was behavior, not biology. All five hid their location using relay servers, virtual private networks, or false identities. One case also ran through a reseller platform that quietly routed biology prompts to more permissive models, and Claude wrote much of that routing code after the job was pitched as an over-refusal fix.

Plenty of serious people read it as alarming. Andrew Weber of the Council on Strategic Risks called the cases chilling examples of state-sponsored weapons developers using AI. Meanwhile, Ashish Jha warned on X that we are sleepwalking into a potential disaster.

Then the virologists answered. Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen called most of the experiments just basic research, because the mutations already exist in nature and get dropped into a harmless stand-in virus. Gregory Koblentz of George Mason added that the workarounds sound like teenagers getting around parental controls. Filippa Lentzos landed in the middle, resisting both extremes.

Cochrane sides with flagging it. He argues this kind of prompting should be monitored regardless of intent, and that publishing the cases was the right call. However, he questions whether Anthropic actually has the domain expertise in-house, suspecting consultants rather than full-time specialists. Four days later, the company launched a Life Sciences Verification Program, giving vetted researchers more permissive models, which he calls a sensible middle ground.

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DeepMind Precomputed Nine Billion DNA Typos

DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, and the scale is genuinely hard to picture. Your genome runs about three billion letters, but only two percent spells out proteins. The rest decides when genes switch on and off, which is exactly where many disease-causing mutations hide.

So DeepMind ran its AlphaGenome model against every possible single-letter swap in the human genome, all nine billion of them, then saved the answers. Each variant carries roughly twenty-seven thousand predictions across hundreds of cell types. Consequently, the dataset reaches a petabyte, more than thirty times the AlphaFold database.

It is already finding things. GREGoR Consortium researchers used it to catch an overlooked variant in DNM1, a gene tied to severe childhood epilepsy, and confirmed the effect in the lab. Cochrane calls this the kind of work that blows his mind, and praises the DeepMind team for shipping AI that actually helps. Nevertheless, DeepMind attaches a clear disclaimer that the tool is not validated for clinical use.

Perplexity, GPT-6 Astra, and a Story With No Numbers

OpenAI published a customer story about Perplexity using GPT-6 Astra, its newest frontier model. Co-founder Johnny Ho says the model handles internal communications, edits real systems, and watches production software. Moreover, he says they now trust it with full end-to-end systems and check in far less often.

However, Cochrane flags what the post leaves out. The only concrete workflow described is Astra building a test harness and running a workflow start to finish, which is end-to-end testing rather than unsupervised production. Additionally, it includes no accuracy figures, error rates, or rollback details.

He also notes he has started running the same proposal across several models because different models produce genuinely different results. Consequently, he expects some kind of combined harness that runs models against each other. Still, he rates Astra’s real-world performance as better than he expected.

A GitHub Marketer Automated Her Own Job

Tomoko Tanaka runs regional marketing for GitHub in Japan and Korea, and she used to keep databases alive on Linux servers. Her pitch is simple: if you can write down how you do your work, you can automate it.

The system runs on three pieces. An issue form captures the event details, a label triggers it, and a GitHub Action does the work. A plain-English runbook file also lets Copilot propose a campaign name and draft two versions of the invitation email.

Cochrane admires the pipeline but raises a real concern. These systems can get set and forgotten, and the job then shifts from doing marketing to managing the AI that does it. Therefore, he asks what was actually automated away, and argues you lose some human flavor when every output runs through the same pipeline.

Gemini Lands on Windows, Five Months Behind the Mac

Google brought the Gemini app to Windows on September tenth, available globally on day one. It runs on Windows 10 or later, including the ARM chips in newer Copilot Plus laptops. Additionally, Alt and Space summon it over whatever you are working on.

However, Google’s post leaves out two things. First, the Mac version shipped back on April fifteenth, so Windows trails by five months. Second, the best features are still Mac-only, including screen sharing, voice dictation across open apps, and connecting local folders.

Cochrane is blunt about the gap. If a release cannot ship with the feature set the other platform already has, he asks why ship it at all. Meanwhile, he suggests Windows users curious about alternatives could check out Ubuntu.

John Deere Built the Repair Tool, and Almost Nobody Uses It

Writing for WIRED and republished at Ars Technica, Boone Ashworth tested John Deere’s self-repair service. Modern tractors carry upward of fifty separate controllers, and for years only a dealer could clear a fault code. That restriction sparked the right-to-repair fight in agriculture.

Deere now sells Operations Center PRO Service for $195 a year per machine, rising to about $5,000 for a fleet license. Importantly, the reporter’s repair was a staged demo at Deere’s Santa Clara office, not a farm job, and he says himself it was an easy one.

The real story is adoption. A year in, Deere reports about a thousand daily users against roughly 1.8 million American farms. Furthermore, Missouri farmer Jared Wilson, a named plaintiff in the $99 million class action, says the farmers he knows run cracked dealer software instead. He complains that the diagnostic tree doesn’t go deep enough when several codes fire at once.

Europe Launched a Satellite That Reads the Glow Off Plants

The European Space Agency posted an explainer for its FLEX mission, then launched it the following night. FLEX went up September fifteenth on a Vega-C from Kourou, sharing the ride with a Copernicus Sentinel satellite. Both are healthy and in commissioning, so science data is still a few months out.

Here is what makes it clever. When a plant photosynthesizes, a little absorbed light comes back out as a faint glow called fluorescence. Crucially, that signal drops while the plant still looks perfectly green, which turns it into an early warning for drought, heat, and pests.

The instrument, FLORIS, resolves down to a tenth of a nanometer in the bands it cares about most. Additionally, FLEX flies forty to a hundred kilometers ahead of a Sentinel-3 satellite so it can borrow atmospheric readings. ESA selected the mission back in 2015, so this launch took eleven years to arrive.

Nunavut Is Already Turning Red

NASA published a companion piece using Landsat 9 imagery of the Coppermine River valley in Nunavut. The September sixth shot shows red, orange, and yellow already sweeping the tundra, paired against the same ground still green on July twenty-seventh.

What turns up there is not trees. Instead, willow and birch shrubs, blueberry, and bearberry hug the ground. Chlorophyll is unstable and needs constant rebuilding, so once days shorten, the green drains away, and the other pigments show through.

Seven years of satellite data put color onset in early September with a mid-month peak, among the earliest on the continent. Meanwhile, the window is brutally short, sometimes a week or less that far north.

The Super El Niño Is Already Collecting

Nature’s James Dinneen reports that this year’s El Niño is forecast to be a monster. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center gives it a seventy-five percent chance of beating every El Niño back to 1950. Furthermore, it strengthened earlier than the big events in 1997 and 2015.

One wrinkle makes it unusual. This is the first strong El Niño in roughly thirty years, with the warm water stacked on the eastern Pacific rather than the middle, which shifts where the effects land. As researcher Jérôme Vialard puts it, El Niños come in flavors, like ice creams.

The damage has already started. Peru canceled its main anchovy season on August twentieth, and its central bank projects the fishing sector shrinks 6.5 percent this year. Additionally, the Panama Canal cut daily transits to thirty-two after rainfall came in about thirty-six percent below normal. Meanwhile, the World Food Program projects forty-nine million more people facing acute food insecurity by the end of next year.

The Plankton That Never Actually Flipped

Quanta Magazine closes the show with foraminifera, single-celled ocean organisms smaller than a millimeter. Their shells blanket the seafloor when they die, creating a layered archive going back some 560 million years.

Many of those shells spiral, and in some species as many as ninety-seven percent coil the same direction. Then, in the fossil record, an entire species appears to flip worldwide almost overnight. A 1959 explanation blamed temperature, but genetic work in 2006 and 2013 knocked that down.

Bridget Wade’s team at University College London offers a different answer. Nothing flips at all. Instead, a second species that was always present, identical under a microscope but coiling the other way, picks up an advantage and replaces the first. So the coiling isn’t the advantage; it is an accidental barcode revealing a takeover nobody would otherwise see.

Cochrane closes with a note on format. Viewership was noticeably higher for the video versions recorded at the classic studio, so he is looking at making the show video-centric going forward, possibly with a prepared visual presentation each episode. More on that in coming episodes.

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In this episode, Ray Cochrane devotes the whole show to Apple’s fall event, the first under new CEO John Ternus. He starts with the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable iPhone. From there, he covers the Apple Watch Series 12, the new Health Age score, the Apple Watch Ultra 4, and AirPods 5 with noise canceling at $129.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens from his father’s studio in Michigan, fresh off a trip to Saugatuck Dunes State Park. Lake Michigan stunned him because it looked like the ocean. He had hoped to spot Wisconsin across the water. However, overcast skies and fog hid the far shore.

He also apologizes for the hum in the previous episode, his first video session in the studio. Without headphones on, he took the noise for ordinary background sound. The culprit turned out to be a line-level cable plugged in at one end and loose at the other. After tracing it, he rewired the whole desk so every cable is neat and out of harm’s way.

Meanwhile, he is still learning the studio’s TriCaster switcher and working on keeping his eyes on the camera. He invites listeners to send suggestions. Additionally, his grandmother had trouble finding the video version on the site. As a result, a site update is coming that uses the alternate enclosure feature, so listeners can switch between video and audio.

Time with his grandmother has been a highlight of the trip. Cochrane reflects on how little time he spent with this side of the family after his father moved to Michigan. Next, he flies home to Oregon after some time in Detroit. As the move comes together, he also wants a better way to get recordings off the TriCaster than a USB drive.

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iPhone Duo: Apple’s First Foldable Arrives Seven Years After Samsung

Instead of a spread of headlines, the whole episode covers Apple’s fall event, much like Chris’s recent D23 episode. The event streamed Wednesday as a pre-recorded film. It was also the first event under CEO John Ternus. He took over from Tim Cook, who became executive chairman, on September 1st.

It took Apple seven years to answer Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold. Even so, the price barely moved, since the Duo starts at $1,999. Cochrane admits he hoped for something closer to $1,400. Still, based on the marketing alone, the Duo is the upgrade he is most excited about.

The Duo is a book-style foldable that opens along a vertical hinge. Closed, it has a 5.4-inch outer screen and is roughly the size of a passport. Open, it reveals a 7.6-inch display, the largest Apple has put on an iPhone. Both screens share the same proportions, so apps simply scale up to fill the bigger screen.

Opened flat, the Duo is just 5.2 millimeters thick, which makes it the thinnest iPhone Apple has built. Closed, it measures 11.3 millimeters and weighs 254 grams. By comparison, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 is lighter and thinner at 201 grams and 4.5 millimeters open.

The Crease, the Hinge and the Return of Touch ID

The crease was Cochrane’s biggest worry, since it is the most common complaint about folding phones. Apple layers the inner screen with a flexible plastic cover, thin glass, and a titanium plate underneath. Custom adhesives let those layers slide as the phone bends. On top, a microscopically etched matte finish scatters reflections to hide the crease.

However, Apple only claims the crease is harder to see, not gone. Early hands-on reports split down the middle. Chance Miller at 9to5Mac found it “hard to notice a crease at most angles.” In contrast, Andrew Romero at 9to5Google, working from early videos, said it looks “just as visible” as on Samsung’s Fold8.

The hinge uses more than a hundred parts and a row of magnets to hold the phone shut. Cochrane says it snaps open cleanly, which a $2,000 phone should. Notably, the Duo carries an IP68 rating, surviving six meters of water for up to 30 minutes. That matters on a foldable, because dust in the hinge is a classic way these phones die.

The Duo also has no Face ID. Instead, a Touch ID fingerprint reader sits in the side button and works open or closed. Cochrane offers his own theory for the switch. With AI now able to generate convincing faces and video, a fingerprint may simply be the safer biometric.

Inside the Duo: Chip, Cameras, Software and Battery

The Duo runs the A20 Pro, the same chip as the iPhone 18 Pro, built on a two-nanometer process. A vapor chamber carries heat away so the phone can hold full speed longer. Cochrane welcomes that, since his own phone runs hot while charging or running demanding apps.

Two 48-megapixel cameras sit on the back, a main and an ultra-wide. The outer screen unlocks the new tricks. For example, you can shoot selfies with the rear cameras, and Duo Preview lets your subjects see the shot. Smart Take snaps the photo when everyone is posing, and Kid Cue plays Peanuts animations to get kids to look at the camera.

On the software side, the Duo ships with iOS 27.1. The Dynamic Island now runs vertically along the side, and Split View puts two apps side by side for the first time on an iPhone. Netflix, Zoom and Slack already support it.

The Duo carries two batteries, one in each half, and Apple rates it for up to 24 hours of typical use. Charging to 50 percent takes about 20 minutes with a 60-watt adapter. However, that adapter is sold separately, which Cochrane calls out as a raw deal for first-time buyers. MagSafe and Qi2 wireless charging run at up to 25 watts.

Storage starts at 256GB for $1,999 and climbs to $3,199 for 2TB. Preorders open October 16th, and the Duo reaches stores October 23rd. Ternus called it “the most transformational change to iPhone since the original.” Cochrane still wants one, though the price gives him pause, and he asks listeners whether they plan to buy.

Apple Watch Series 12 Checks Your Heart Every Five Seconds

Next, Cochrane turns to the Apple Watch Series 12 and its new Health Sensing System. The watch reads your pulse by shining green light into your skin and measuring what bounces back. After wrestling with the technical term, photoplethysmography, he notes that everyone sensibly calls it the optical sensor.

Apple made those lights bigger and more efficient. As a result, the watch now checks your heart rate every five seconds, all day. It also measures heart rate variability, the tiny wobble between beats, as often as every five minutes. A bigger wobble generally means your body is rested and recovered.

Cochrane loved Apple’s swimming ad, where a swimmer finishes his swim and checks his heart rate. To him, it feels far more futuristic than the rugged adventure watches of twenty years ago. Swim tracking itself isn’t new. What changed is the constant background check and a live heart rate readout on the watch face.

All of that feeds a new daily readiness score from zero to ten. It weighs your recent activity, training load, vitals and sleep, then updates through the day. Engadget points out that competitors already offer readiness scores and faster sampling. In Cochrane’s view, Apple is catching up to the market, but doing it in a big way.

Apple’s Heart Rate Accuracy Study

Apple claims no wearable reads heart rate more accurately, and this time it published the study. Testers wore a Series 12 on one wrist and a rival on the other, with a Polar H10 chest strap as the reference. The rivals came from Garmin, Google, Huawei, Samsung, WHOOP and Oura.

Across 1,254 people at five sites, Apple led in 139 of 159 comparisons. Eighteen were too close to call. The only two losses went to Google’s Pixel Watch 4 at rest, by less than half a beat per minute. Cochrane appreciated that a fifth of participants had the darkest skin tones, where optical sensors have historically struggled.

The Series 12 comes in 42- and 46-millimeter sizes, including a new ceramic version. Battery life holds at 24 hours, and fifteen minutes of charging now buys up to twelve hours. Pricing starts at $399 for aluminum, $699 for titanium and $899 for ceramic. It reaches stores September 18th.

Health Age and Apple’s Rebuilt Health App

Cochrane admits he first misread this feature, and he is glad his initial read turned out wrong. Apple is rebuilding the Health app around Apple Intelligence, its umbrella name for its AI features. The app adds an Insights tab, a For You section, and a Longevity tab covering seven areas of health.

Sumbul Desai, a physician who runs health and fitness at Apple, framed the goal. She said pairing the watch’s sensors with Apple Intelligence lets Apple “translate complex biometric data into clear guidance for users.” In other words, nobody wants to scroll through a spreadsheet of their own heartbeats.

Inside the Longevity tab sits Health Age. It weighs your VO2 max, resting heart rate, sleep, and heart rate variability against your real age. You can also add lab results like A1c and LDL cholesterol. Apple’s sample screen shows a body running 3.9 years younger than its birthday.

Cochrane finds the feature interesting, and he hopes the data stays private, much like health records at a hospital. However, Apple didn’t share the math behind Health Age. He would like Apple to publish its formula, because people will take a number like that seriously.

The new app also adds at-home movement evaluations using the iPhone camera and the watch. Users can book a $119 blood panel covering more than 50 biomarkers at roughly 2,000 Quest Diagnostics locations. Cycle Tracking gains perimenopause and menopause support. The redesigned app arrives later this year, while watchOS 27 lands September 14th.

Finally, Cochrane raises a concern about all this monitoring. He hopes Apple built strong safeguards around the health data, because a leak of data like this would bring serious lawsuits.

Apple Watch Ultra 4 Can Outlast a 100-Mile Race

The Apple Watch Ultra 4 shares nearly everything with the Series 12, from the sensors to the S11 chip. This year, what sets it apart is stamina. Normal use now reaches 50 hours, up from 42, and Low Power Mode stretches to 84. Meanwhile, fifteen minutes on the charger buys up to 18 hours, where last year’s model managed 12.

A new Max Extended Workout mode tracks up to 45 hours of running or hiking, with GPS logging every second. Apple says that is typically enough to finish a 100-mile race. The watch also uses dual-frequency GPS, which listens to two satellite signals to reject readings bounced off tall buildings.

DC Rainmaker came away impressed with both watches. As Ray Maker put it, “I’d argue they’re the biggest leaps in Apple Watch hardware and features since they launched the Ultra series back a few years ago.” The Ultra 4 holds at $799 and ships September 18th.

Audio Intelligence and the Always-Listening Question

Both new watches also gain a set of listening features Apple calls Audio Intelligence. Sound Recognition alerts deaf or hard-of-hearing users to sirens, alarms, doorbells, or a crying baby. Shazam names nearby songs without being asked. Then come the two raising eyebrows: Live Rewind and Siri Recap.

Live Rewind shows the last fifteen seconds of your conversation as text with a double press of the Digital Crown. Siri Recap hands you a title and key points after a conversation, leaving out financial details and ID numbers. Both arrive in beta later this year, in English first, and need an iPhone 16 or newer.

Cochrane saw the pushback coming. To replay fifteen seconds, the watch has to be listening before you ask. Apple answers with privacy promises, including that everything is opt-in and raw audio is deleted after processing on the chip. Still, he argues that opting in means choosing to give up privacy, and he has a hard time believing the processing stays on the device.

AirPods 5 Bring Noise Canceling to $129

AirPods 5 comes in two versions, and the headline is price. Until now, noise cancellation in the regular AirPods cost $179. Both AirPods 5 models include it, starting at $129.

Noise canceling is harder in the regular AirPods, because they lack the rubber tips that seal your ear. Apple’s AirPods marketing director Eric Treski admitted as much in 2024, calling it “really, really hard to create this great ANC quality in a non-ear-tip product.” Nevertheless, Apple says AirPods 5 removes up to 50 percent more outside noise than AirPods 4 with noise canceling.

Interestingly, the chip and microphones are unchanged. The gain comes from reworked vents and ports in the shell, plus smarter software. For perspective, Apple says AirPods Pro 3 still cancel up to three times more noise. Gizmodo found AirPods 5 “did a good job silencing the background noise, but not entirely.”

The $129 model charges over USB-C. For $149, you add a wireless charging case, a Find My speaker, a volume swipe on the stem, and an extra hour of listening. Both models also carry an IP57 rating and support Live Translation. They reach stores September 18th.

How Apple Filmed the Event

Cochrane closes by praising the production itself. Apple built different scenes and backgrounds throughout the film, and Six Colors noted a Hollywood backlot segment with a fake rainstorm, Roman soldiers, and astronauts. The closing card read “Shot on iPhone. Edited on Mac.”

He still hopes to get an iPhone Duo, though he isn’t sure about paying two grand. For now, he may stick with his current phone.

Cochrane wraps up by pointing listeners to the GNC Insider program, the newsletter, and podcastapps.com, adding that he likes Pocket Casts. Listeners can reach Ray or Chris at geeknews@gmail.com. He flies back to Oregon next, with another audio episode planned for Monday and a video site update coming this week.

The post Apple’s September Event: iPhone Duo, Apple Watch Series 12, and AirPods 5 #1877 appeared first on Geek News Central.