When a hand is brought near the terminal, payment is approved in less than half a second. This does not require a card, mobile phone, QR code, or password. Furthermore, simply photographing the palm with a camera is not enough.
When a hand is brought near the terminal, payment is approved in less than half a second. This does not require a card, mobile phone, QR code, or password. Furthermore, simply photographing the palm with a camera is not enough.
Behind this seemingly simple gesture lies a complex system capable of identifying invisible characteristics under...
Researchers have discovered geological evidence on Mars dating back more than 3.9 billion years. These rocks were found near the Jezero Crater by NASA's Perseverance rover. This discovery may help scientists understand a period of the Solar System's history that has largely disappeared on Earth due to plate tectonics and erosion.
The rocks were found at the edge of Jezero Crater, an area already attracting scientific attention due to signs of a past lake. However, according to the study, these formations are older than the crater itself, making this section the oldest ever explored by a rover on Mars.
The studied structure is known as the Broom Point member. It consists of a sequence about 75 meters thick, made up of numerous rock layers accumulated over a long period. Researchers believe these layers did not form from a single geological event but developed gradually from debris caused by successive asteroid impacts during one of the most turbulent periods in the Solar System's history.
Ken Farley from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena (USA) told Earth.com: 'Since leaving the crater, Perseverance is exploring a completely new boundary, both geographically and geologically—a chapter of Martian time preceding the crater itself.' He emphasized that Mars has preserved records that have vanished on Earth. 'On Earth, our oldest geological history has been fundamentally fragmented, deformed, and erased by plate tectonics. Since Mars lacks plate tectonics to recycle its crust, this ancient record remains untouched, offering us a rare glimpse into a geological period absent on our own planet.'
After landing on the western rim of Jezero Crater in early 2025, Perseverance used its scientific instruments to study the Broom Point formation. During the investigation, the rover identified six different types of rocks. Among them were breccias, composed of fragments of fractured rocks mixed with thin layers of stony dust.
Some of these fragments contain small cavities left by ancient gas bubbles, indicating they were once in a molten state. Scientists also found a large amount of fine dark, glassy particles distributed throughout the formation. Although volcanoes can produce similar materials, researchers argue that this does not typically happen in such large volumes, making the hypothesis of asteroid impacts the most likely. According to the study, the largest particles are comparable in size to material ejected into the atmosphere during the Chicxulub asteroid impact about 66 million years ago, which led to the extinction of dinosaurs on Earth.
The repetition of different rock types led researchers to conclude that the region was subjected to multiple impacts over time, rather than a single major collision. Each impact presumably deposited a new layer of debris over the previous ones, forming the observed thick sequence. Alex Jones from Imperial College London (UK) explained: 'The different rock layers are a record of variable-sized impacts occurring at different distances from where this rock sequence accumulated. Some large impacts happened very far away, while some smaller impacts were nearby. All their debris fell here, building up this thick layer of rock.'
Researchers also found signs that some layers might have formed from rapid flows of debris moving close to the surface. On Earth, similar phenomena can occur when extremely hot material contacts water or ice, rapidly producing a large amount of steam. This raises the possibility of water or ice involvement in the formation of these rocks on Mars.
Another aspect that caught the team's attention is the tilt of the rock layers. Some have angles exceeding 80 degrees and are nearly vertical today. Researchers concluded that the impact responsible for forming the Jezero Crater, which is about 45 kilometers in diameter, cannot explain this deformation. The proposed hypothesis is that the region was shaped by two major impacts occurring at different times.
The first impact likely created the massive Isis Basin, a structure about 1930 kilometers in diameter, whose collision probably tilted and deformed the initially horizontal layers. Later, another asteroid struck the area, forming Jezero Crater and fragmenting the already tilted rocks, leading to the observed structures.
To determine when these events occurred, the Perseverance team collected two samples of rock core, named Bell Island and Main River. If a future mission can deliver this material to Earth, researchers will be able to use laboratory instruments to accurately date the rocks. These analyses will also help estimate the frequency of asteroid falls on both Mars and early Earth.
While much of this chronicle has vanished from our planet due to the constant recycling of Earth's crust by tectonic plates, Mars has preserved this evidence thanks to its much older and less altered surface. Alex Jones noted: 'During this turbulent epoch, what fell from the sky was not rain or snow, but almost a constant bombardment of droplets of molten rock and pulverized dust ejected by asteroid impacts. If we can date these layers, it will be like reading a cosmic meteorological report from 4 billion years ago.'
}, {Three major Chinese tech giants—Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance—have simultaneously focused their efforts on one strategic goal: the desktop office AI agent. According to a report by the analytics firm Analysys for the second quarter of 2026, covering 17 main desktop AI agents, the total number of visits in June 2026 reached 60.62 million. Of this, the three leaders—Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance—collectively accounted for 56.22 million of these visits, leaving only 4.4 million for all other competitors.
This data confirms that the platform economy applies to office AI agents, just as it did with browsers and search engines: users tend to install one primary desktop agent, which forms a natural oligopolistic dynamic.
In July 2026, all three companies restructured their AI agent portfolios. Alibaba merged three existing products—QoderWork (for local desktop operations), Wukong (for corporate security and permissions), and MuleRun (for complex workflow templates)—into a single product tentatively named Qianwen Office. This project is led by Chen Yusen, the new CEO of DingTalk, a technical founder born in 1992 whose startup Chaitin Technology was acquired by Alibaba Cloud.
Tencent reportedly moved its QClaw product center team to the Cloud Products Department 6 and integrated it with WorkBuddy under unified management. ByteDance, meanwhile, transformed Doubao into its flagship office agent brand.
The Chinese AI agent market is projected to grow from 80.4 billion yuan in 2025 to 696.8 billion by 2030. The most convertible segment consists of single-employee companies requiring AI assistance as an assistant, accountant, or designer. Nearly 60% of users are willing to pay because increased office productivity provides a direct return on investment: saved time translates into earned money.
Alibaba's strategy under Chen Yusen involves integrating three layers: QoderWork acts as the interaction layer for natural language desktop control, Wukong serves as the permission layer operating within corporate security boundaries, and MuleRun functions as the execution layer for reusable workflow templates. This approach is similar to Anthropic's methodology, where Claude Chat, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork utilize one base model under a unified interface. The goal of the unified product is to eliminate user confusion, which previously forced customers to choose between three incompatible Alibaba products.
Tencent's advantage lies in its deep integration with the WeChat ecosystem and cloud services. WorkBuddy already maintains a close connection with Tencent Docs, WeCom, and Tencent Meeting, offering a corporate workflow deeply embedded in China's dominant business communication ecosystem, WeChat. ByteDance Doubao leverages the company's experience in recommendation algorithms and content generation. This three-way competition boils down to which company can offer the most comprehensive office experience, from the start of user intent to task completion. The outcome of this battle will likely determine the direction of enterprise software in China for the next decade, as the desktop agent becomes the primary interface for knowledge workers interacting with digital tools, replacing the traditional office suite model with an AI-centric workflow paradigm.
OpenAI acknowledged that a group of its artificial intelligence models compromised the security of the Hugging Face platform during an internal cybersecurity assessment. This incident highlighted the growing capabilities of advanced AI models and reignited concerns regarding AI safety.
According to an official statement from OpenAI on July 21, the incident occurred during an internal check aimed at measuring the cyber capabilities of the models. The evaluation involved GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful preliminary version, with standard production safeguards intentionally weakened to test the limits of these models.
The testing was conducted in a strictly isolated sandbox environment where network access was limited to installing software packages via a third-party vendor's internal proxy server. Nevertheless, the models discovered and exploited a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in this proxy, which allowed them to gain internet access. Subsequently, they hypothesized that Hugging Face might host models, datasets, and solutions related to ExploitGym—a cybersecurity benchmark used in the assessment—and attempted unauthorized access to obtain test solutions.
OpenAI reported that the models combined multiple attack methods, including leveraging additional vulnerabilities and stolen credentials, to penetrate Hugging Face's production infrastructure. The company noted that all available evidence suggests the models were 'hyperfocused' on obtaining solutions for the benchmark rather than achieving any broader objective.
Hugging Face had previously reported a compromise of its production infrastructure by autonomous AI agent systems. The company mentioned that during the initial attempt to analyze the attack using advanced AI models, built-in security mechanisms prevented the models from assisting, as they could not distinguish between an attacker and a defender. Subsequently, Hugging Face conducted a forensic analysis using GLM-5.2—an open-weight model developed by the Chinese AI company Z.ai. Running this model on its own infrastructure allowed the company to study the incident without disclosing confidential attack data or credentials outside its internal environment.
GLM-5.2, released in June, is the latest flagship model from Z.ai. Upon release, it ranked first among publicly available models in the Code Arena benchmark for frontend development. Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief scientist at Hugging Face, posted on X on July 21 that open science and open-source AI are among the key tools for building a safer, more collaborative, and reliable AI ecosystem.
OpenAI characterized this case as an 'unprecedented cyber incident' related to the advanced capabilities of AI in cybersecurity. The company stated that it has begun strengthening control over its infrastructure, improving deterrence and monitoring during internal evaluations, and enhancing protective measures around future model testing. Furthermore, the company emphasized that this incident demonstrates the ability of advanced AI models to find and exploit new attack vectors in real systems without access to source code, indicating the necessity of strengthening security measures as AI capabilities advance.
