The 2026 astronomical calendar features only four eclipses. But August is a bounty of riches, with two set to occur.

They include a full solar eclipse on August 12 and a partial lunar eclipse on August 27 and 28. Catch one—or both—of these eclipses if you can: They’ll be the last ones of 2026, as the other two have already taken place.

We’ve got all the details on what to expect, the path of each August eclipse, and how to watch the celestial happenings.

Solar Eclipse on August 12

The first eclipse of the month will be a total solar eclipse. This occurs when the moon passes between Earth and the sun. The August solar eclipse will be visible in the northern hemisphere.

Path: The moon’s shadow will travel from west to east, beginning in the Arctic. Parts of Alaska will be treated to a partial view of the eclipse, as well as other northerly locations including Canada, Iceland, and parts of the North Atlantic. Some locations in Europe and the eastern US will also get a glimpse of the eclipse.

Only a few areas on land will get to see totality, though. Sparsely populated stretches of eastern Greenland will see the sun completely obscured, as will the far western edge of Iceland. Spain is the most populated region in the path of totality. It’s the first time the Iberian Peninsula will be treated to a full solar eclipse in more than a century.

How to view it: For one, not with your naked eye! For areas in the path of totality, the eclipse will reach its peak in the late afternoon. That’s an idea and dramatic time for viewing, when the sun is low on the horizon. Again, just not with your naked eye!

Animation: courtesy of NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Times vary slightly by city, but in almost all of Spain the eclipse will occur at sunset, with totality around 8:30 pm Central European Time. From start to finish, the eclipse will last about an hour; totality is expected to last about two minutes.

Lunar Eclipse on August 27–28

The second eclipse of the month will be a partial lunar eclipse, which occurs when the Earth comes between the sun and the moon. A portion of the lunar surface will remain lit while the rest of the disk darkens or takes on a reddish hue.

Path: Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse does not follow a narrow path across the Earth. The partial lunar eclipse will be visible simultaneously across a vast region of the planet. However, the eclipse will be best viewed across the Americas, primarily in eastern and central Canada, the US, and Mexico, as well as throughout Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

While the eclipse is partial, up to 96 percent of the lunar disk will be in the Earth’s shadow, making for a dramatic view.

HeroTech just timed a perfect release. As Spider-Man: Brand New Day tore through opening weekend with the second-highest domestic haul on record, the channel posted a full functional replica of the film’s new wrist-mounted web shooters. Stainless steel housings, electronic retraction, and a compact shape that matches the trailers sit right there on the bench.

Five basic goals guided the construction from the start. He wanted to get the exact appearance from the film. He needed the shot to be as realistic as possible. The reload needed to be rapid and computerized. The entire thing had to clip over conventional clothes with no fuss, and to be honest, he was hoping that anyone with a 3D printer and some basic knowledge could create their own.

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The early trailer frames showed a clunky-looking wrist piece that was far from ideal, but going through the CAD files rapidly resolved that issue. In the end, the completed housing fits snugly against the arm, low and tight. He chose a stainless steel outer shell, and after hours of hand polishing, it has a very sleek surface that appears both industrial and deliberate. Everything else had to fit into that tight space, so he had to be inventive.

The main breakthrough here was a compact retraction system. It does all of the heavy lifting, no pun intended. Essentially, it’s a system in which webbing winds onto a revolving spool, and behind that is a coreless motor, a lithium polymer battery, a limit switch, and some injection-molded gears that all work together to move the spool in either direction. Press the control, and the line shoots out. Press again, and the motor will quickly pull it back in. The reload cycle is noticeably faster than our previous designs while still allowing for thicker line.

To produce the webbing, he braided three strands of 20-pound SpiderWire together. On paper, that’s enough to sustain roughly sixty pounds, but in reality, that figure is reduced slightly; however, the line snaps off neatly and lands well. The spool provides enough line for multiple shoots, so you don’t have to rewind by hand.

He completed the full design process on Onshape, where version history logged all changes and collaborative capabilities allowed the builder to work together without losing any past work. He had to try out several prototypes before the mechanism was fully established, as gears kept slipping, limit switches needed to be repositioned, and clearances in the housing had to be modified repeatedly. Only after going through all of that did he feel sure about the final assembly. It’s also simple to put on and take off because the simple over-clothing mount eliminates the need for intricate straps or hidden underlayers. Simply slip the shooter on, lock it, and the controls are directly beneath your fingertips. The same approacah also helps keep the profile low enough that it appears to be worn on the arm rather than slung over it.

As soon as the video was live, he posted all of the project files and a detailed tutorial online. As you read this, the CAD models, print files, parts list, and step-by-step instructions are available on the website and on Patreon. They were previously free to access, but are now only available to subscribers. As an added bonus, the package includes a few safety instructions, as these are functional gadgets with motors and batteries, so use them with caution.

KRAFTON India has introduced the new Druvaen X-Suit Collection for BATTLEGROUNDS MOBILE INDIA (BGMI) as part of the 4.5 season. The update introduces three new 7-Star X-Suits, including Verdant Druvaen, Pyre Druvaen, and Frost Druvaen. Despite their unique themes, all three belong to the same Druvaen bloodline.

New Upgrade System Lets Players Earn Progress

The latest BGMI update introduces a new way to upgrade X-Suits. Players now earn a special upgrade material by playing matches instead of buying it. This material cannot be purchased, traded, or obtained anywhere else in the game. The new system rewards players for spending more time in matches.

Players who unlock a single X-Suit automatically enter the new upgrade path with that suit. Those who unlock two or all three X-Suits must choose one suit for gameplay-based progression. This choice is permanent and cannot be changed later. Gamers can always upgrade the rest of the X-Suits from the BGMI X-Suit Upgrade Program.

The new set also includes the Naturespirit Growth ACE32, which is an upgradable Level 7 weapon skin. The weapon skin has the same design concept as the X-Suits and allows the user to match both the suit and the weapon in battle.

Availability of Three New Druvaen X-Suits

Players will get access to the whole Druvaen X-Suit Collection between August 1 and September 30, 2026. The new X-Suits can be unlocked, and players will have the chance to try out the gameplay-upgrade feature as well as receive the Naturespirit Growth ACE32. These changes will be announced by BGMI through YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook channels.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

public sector

PLUS: DeepSeek to double peak hour prices for new model; Australia hikes fines for Big Tech; Japan’s next moonshot to ride local rocket; and more!

ASIA IN BRIEF Meta last week briefly took down an unremarkable video posted by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, earning itself days of criticism and regulatory trouble.

The video featured Modi announcing a new task force that will reform the exams required to secure places in many Indian universities. Those exams have become a major factor in the sudden development of a major youth protest movement in India, after the cancellation of one test amid claims that questions had leaked.

As part of his attempts to quell protests, Modi posted his first-ever selfie-style Instagram reel last week and followed it up with others –including the one Meta took down and replaced with a placeholder saying the vid was the subject of a legal complaint.

The social networking giant said that was a mistake, apologized, and restored the video.

That error gave India’s government the chance to beat up Meta in public.

S. Krishnan, the secretary of India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), said he asked Meta “to come in at the highest level and explain what is happening and why.”

“They have agreed to come – well, they have to – and explain what the situation is,” Krishnan said. “We want to have both a policy level understanding and a technical understanding of the issues, and also adaptation to the kind of concerns India has.”

Krishnan said Meta has written to India’s government to express regret over the incident and established new protocols governing moderation of accounts run by prominent people to avoid future messes of this sort.

India has a complex relationship with Big Tech companies, sometimes celebrating their role in assisting the nation’s development, but often also lamenting their monopolistic tendencies and role in spreading content the Modi government would rather netizens don’t see.

DeepSeek teases ‘peak/valley’ pricing for new models which hit beta last week

Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek last week released a beta API for its next model, deepseek-v4-flash, and revealed a new pricing policy for its APIs.

The company says the new policy will apply “soon” and will see the cost of its services double between 09:00 and 12:00, then again from 14:00 to 18:00 – in China’s single official timezone UTC+8.

DeepSeek startled the AI market last year by releasing models that it claimed to have trained without vast fleets of Nvidia accelerators. Those claims didn’t stand up to close scrutiny, but the company is considered a significant challenger to western AI outfits such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

deepseek-v4-flash is likely to reach general availability within weeks. DeepSeek already claims it outperforms its last model, V4-Pro.

Australia proposes new tax on Big Tech – and a new out

Australia’s government has tweaked its plans to tax Big Tech companies unless they pay local media for the right to share links to their work.

The Land Down Under previously threatened tech companies with a 2.25 percent tax if they don’t fund local media. On Monday, that plan changed to a 2.5 percent levy on advertising revenue only and expanded incentives to fund small and regional publications.

Meta has previously slammed the idea as “A discriminatory tax built on a false premise.”

Also in Australia, regulators last week decided to sue Telegram after it failed to take down violent and terrorism-related content.

Kioxia profits jump by billions, as you’d expect from a memory-maker

Japanese memory-maker Kioxia last week announced [PDF] its quarterly revenue grew 451 percent year over year to reach $11.1 billion, plus profit of $5.3 billion – a massive turnaround from the $287,000 loss for the same quarter last year.

According to Japanese outlet Nikkei, CFO Yoshihiko Kawamura said the company expects even better days ahead because he believes demand for NAND storage is “still in the early stages.”

Japan’s next moonshot to ride local rocket

Japanese space startup iSpace last week announced its next mission will ride a Japanese rocket to the moon.

iSpace has launched two moon lander missions, but both failed. The company’s plan for its third mission involves new lander design called ULTRA that is capable of carrying payloads weighing several hundred kilograms to Luna.

This time around, iSpace plans to use the H3 rocket built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, instead of the SpaceX Falcon 9 that carried its first two missions. ®

AI slop, the colloquial term for low-effort AI-generated content, has emerged as a huge problem across different industries. Music labels are fighting streaming services to put an AI label on such tra/cks. Publishing houses are wary of AI-written drafts. Research journals are buried under a deluge of AI-generated papers. The software industry is reeling under the pressure of vibe-coded apps brimming with security flaws. Even Apple is struggling against a tide of bug reports created using AI. Of course, the disdain against AI is pretty obvious, but there’s now a new dimension to it.

Boomers are gifting AI-generated books to their grandkids.

“She is creating these storylines based on experiences with my kid and modeling her characters to have similar attributes as my kid, and us[ing] our family’s first names so that they represent us and my kid will ‘see her family reflected,’” an individual wrote on Reddit, detailing how their mother was using AI to make stories for their grandkids, influenced by real-life events.

Multiple parents told WIRED that their kids have received AI-generated story books from grand parents or other senior family members, labelling the trend as “morally reprehensible.” The trend is horrific. I have seen numerous AI-generated books targeted at kids selling on online marketplaces, and even advertisements for tools that use AI to write notes and tributes for real humans.

The whole well is polluted

Ironically, the support for such behaviour comes from AI giants that also own the world’s biggest channels for distrubuting digital content in all shapes and forms. One such source is Amazon, which also runs Kindle as one of the world’s largest digital books platforms.

As far back as 2024, it was reported that Amazon’s store has an AI slop book problem. Poor, AI-written copies of popular books have flooded the ecommerce platform. In the most recent incident that got plenty of coverage in online circles just three weeks ago, Kashmir Hill, a technology journalist at The New York Times, wrote an account of how someone used AI to write her biography and put it for sale on Amazon.

Here is the fun part. You would think that Amazon must be drafting harsh anti-AI policies by now. Well, Amazon is actually adding more fuel to the fire. All the way back in 2022, Amazon released an AI feature called “Create with Alexa,” which lets users create bedtime stories for kids, complete with visuals and animations. In 2026, Amazon rolled out a similar feature that lets you create podcasts on any topic using the Alexa AI assistant.

Platforms like YouTube are also seeing a tsunami of AI-generated brainrot content targeted at kids. It’s pretty odd (and disheartening) to see that the biggest platforms for digital content in varied forms are also owned by companies that are doing cutting-edge work and pushing AI into our lives from every direction.

Amazon should be the guardian of books (on Kindle and its eponymous store for physical books), films and TV shows (through Prime Video) and songs (via Amazon Music). Google and Meta are in a similar position, but once again, they are likely not going to take these AI problems hitting close to home as responsibly as they should.

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.