… but impressive, boundary-pushing device is priced so far out of reach for most that it isn’t yet the next big thing

On a sweltering summer’s day in London, I sat working in the middle of a snow-covered Yosemite national park surrounded by an array of floating apps and browser windows. Later I stared across a windswept Oregon beach reliving a holiday from years ago, and spent an evening sitting in a speeder on Tatooine watching Rogue One in 3D, before retiring for the night with some guided meditation.

These are the sorts of immersive experiences that Apple’s latest, most expensive gadget offers by blending the real and virtual world, all controlled by your eyes and hands. The Vision Pro may resemble virtual reality headsets such as Meta’s Quest series but it is attempting to be so much more.

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Study using machine learning correctly identified almost 80% of participating children with or without the disorder

Artificial intelligence may help experts identify toddlers at risk of autism, researchers have said, after developing a screening system they say has an accuracy of about 80% for children under the age of two.

The researchers say their approach, which is based on a type of AI called machine learning, could bring benefits.

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Boredom is linked to attention – so switching content or skipping forwards and backwards feels more tedious than watching one video

Browsing videos on TikTok or YouTube can be a hit-and-miss affair, with gems lurking amid mediocre efforts. But researchers have found that switching to another video, or skipping forwards and backwards in the same one, actually makes people more bored.

Dr Katy Tam at the University of Toronto Scarborough, the lead author of the research, said boredom was closely linked to attention.

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Judge Alexandre de Moraes had ordered X to block certain accounts as he investigated fake news and hate messages

Elon Musk announced on Saturday that the social media platform X would close its operations in Brazil “effective immediately” due to what it called “censorship orders” from the Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes.

X claims Moraes secretly threatened one of its legal representatives in the South American country with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform. Brazil’s supreme court, where Moraes has a seat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The tech giant pays billions so that its search engine is the default on our screens, but a US judge has ruled this illegal. Perhaps now we will see innovation

Earlier this month, a district court in Washington DC handed down a judgment in an antitrust case that has shaken up the tech industry. In a 286-page opinion , Judge Amit Mehta announced his conclusion. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

Now I know that for normal, well-adjusted people, antitrust cases are an excellent antidote to insomnia, but stay tuned for a moment because this is a really big deal. Apart from anything else, it shows that an ancient legal warhorse, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 , still has teeth. And to see it successfully deployed to bring an overbearing tech company to heel is a delight. After all, it was the statute that in 1911 broke up John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as well as American Tobacco, and AT&T in 1982. It was also used to prosecute Microsoft in 1998.

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Startups around the world are engaging in clinical trials in a sector that could change lives – and be worth more than £15bn by the 2030s

Oran Knowlson, a British teenager with a severe type of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, became the first person in the world to trial a new brain implant last October, with phenomenal results – his daytime seizures were reduced by 80%.

“It’s had a huge impact on his life and has prevented him from having the falls and injuring himself that he was having before,” says Martin Tisdall, a consultant paediatric neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital (Gosh) in London, who implanted the device. “His mother was talking about how he’s had such a improvement in his quality of life, but also in his cognition: he’s more alert and more engaged.”

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As the ‘civic hacker’ who became Taiwan’s first transgender cabinet minister, she is used to breaking boundaries. What can the rest of the world learn from her vision of a happy and inclusive web?

Audrey Tang didn’t have the easiest of starts in life. The Taiwanese hacker turned government minister was told at the age of four that she had a 50-50 chance of dying unless she had a major operation to fix a hole in her heart. Her doctor told her she could drop down dead at any moment if she got overexcited – and she had to wait eight more years for the op. This kind of news might bring out someone’s selfish side – if your life is going to be so truncated, live for yourself. Not Tang, though. She was a tiny child with a whopping IQ and a precocious capacity to think. She decided she wanted to learn everything she could and share it with the world. At five, living with her family in Taipei, she started reading prodigiously – mainly classical Chinese literature. Huge tomes. Then she’d recount her own version of the stories to her classmates. “I liked storytelling. When I was seven I’d speak to the entire school about stories I’d learned from a book and retell them in a way I found more interesting.” Did she realise she was super bright back then? She shakes her head. “No, I realised I was super ill.”

By six Tang was studying advanced mathematics; at eight she started writing code for video games, using pencil and paper because she didn’t yet own a computer. And whatever she learned, it was with the intention of sharing her knowledge. Before long it became apparent she was a digital genius. Tang, 43, is roughly the same age as the internet (1 January 1983 is considered its birthday). She grew up alongside the world wide web; it was her playmate. In her teens, Tang believed the internet was there to bring her vision to fruition: to democratise knowledge, to make everything accessible, to make the world a better place. But then she saw it changing, being used to spread falsehoods and generate all-powerful companies that made digital capitalism’s founding fathers unfeasibly rich while creating unimagined levels of inequality.

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There is method to the apparent madness of the tycoon’s prolific 24-hour output

Elon Musk doesn’t stop tweeting. Over just seven days last week, he made nearly 650 posts to the social network he bought in November 2022 and half-heartedly rebranded as X. In addition, he spent nearly three hours battling through technical problems he would later attribute to an unproved hacking attack in order to host a “conversation” with Donald Trump, as well as livestreaming himself playing a couple of hours of Blizzard’s swords-and-sorcery game Diablo IV.

The sheer volume of his content would be impressive enough on its own, but even as someone so addicted to posting that he spent more than the budget of the Manhattan project to buy the site, Musk’s consistency is alarming.

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AI company bans accounts and says operation did not appear to have meaningful audience engagement

OpenAI said on Friday it had taken down accounts of an Iranian group for using its ChatGPT chatbot to generate content meant for influencing the US presidential election and other issues.

The operation, identified as Storm-2035, used ChatGPT to generate content focused on topics such as commentary on the candidates on both sides in the US elections, the conflict in Gaza and Israel’s presence at the Olympic Games and then shared it via social media accounts and websites, Open AI said.

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