The Red Ferret Journal - The Red Ferret - gadgets, freeware, cool sites, tech news and triviaThe Red Ferret - gadgets, freeware, cool sites, tech news and trivia

A.I. August 30, 2026

OpenAI Shows Off Astra: 16 AI Agents, ‘Super-Human’ Desktop Control

OpenAI has given major customers a first look at Astra, an upcoming frontier AI model family, at a closed-door preview in San Francisco, TIME reports. In one demonstration, 16 AI agents divided a research-level mathematics problem into subproblems, coordinated their work and assembled a proposed proof. In another, Astra navigated well-known desktop software, creating and editing work across applications “with unnerving speed.” CEO Sam Altman told the visitors that watching Astra use a computer in a “super-human, very fast kind…

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A.I. August 25, 2026

Alibaba’s new Qwen3.8-27B: A game changing AI Model That Fits on a Laptop

Alibaba recently released Qwen3.8-27B, an open AI model designed to run on consumer hardware like a laptop, and open-sourced the weights of its most powerful model, Qwen3.8 Max. It was a direct answer to Meta’s return to open, locally-run AI. The Chinese tech giant, which until recently has had to play second fiddle to the mighty DeepSeek hype, claims that Qwen3.8-27B has “excellent capabilities” in coding, professional work, research and long-horizon agentic tasks, matching the performance of a model ten…

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cool tech August 22, 2026

Moderna and Merck’s Personalized mRNA Cancer Vaccine Succeeds in Landmark Phase 3 Melanoma Trial

Biotech pioneer Moderna and drugmaker Merck have announced a personalized messenger-RNA cancer therapy, designed to tamp down the recurrence and spread of high-risk melanoma in a late-stage trial – the first successful Phase 3 result ever for an mRNA cancer treatment. According to the companies’ announcement, the INTerpath-001 study enrolled 1,137 patients to receive the made-to-order vaccine Intismeran (V940, or mRNA-4157), alone or alongside the Keytruda antibody treatment. The combination met its primary endpoint, recurrence-free survival, and a key secondary…

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Eco Friendly August 20, 2026

El Niño Could Be the Strongest on Record, China’s Climate Center Warns

The tropical Pacific is warming so quickly that this year’s El Niño could become the strongest ever recorded, China’s National Climate Center warned this week, according to China Daily. Sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific have risen sharply since El Niño conditions emerged in May, with the three-month running average reaching 2.09 C above normal in July, up 0.49 C from June, and climbing to 2.64 C in the first half of August. At the current pace, forecasters expect…

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cool tech August 18, 2026

AI Memory-Price Boom Shows Signs of Peaking, Analysts Warn

Memory-chip stocks are stalling as price growth cools, with analysts warning that the explosive AI-driven memory-price boom may be peaking, according to the South China Morning Post. Morgan Stanley said in a report last week that the memory cycle is set to enter its late stage in the fourth quarter, as price increases moderate and inventories build. Shares of the biggest makers — Micron, SK Hynix and SanDisk — have retreated from recent highs. Bernstein Research said conventional DRAM contract…

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A.I. August 17, 2026

AI News – August 17, 2026

Quick Brief Featured story today: “Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things” And more models & releases news from the AI universe –

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