The significance of residual hormone production may decrease over time. Still, says Walter Rocca, a professor of epidemiology and neurology at the Mayo Clinic, that doesn’t mean the ovary has become unimportant.

“I am convinced until proven otherwise that removing ovaries even after menopause is not advisable,” he says, with a caveat for women at an increased risk of ovarian cancer.

Just how long that importance persists after menopause is still an open question, says Stephanie Faubion, medical director of the Menopause Society. It’s also unclear, she says, how much the answer may vary from woman to woman. “We just have huge gaps,” she says.

Duncan’s work suggests one reason the importance of the postmenopausal ovary may change over time. In analyzing human ovaries, the team found that protein patterns in older ovaries suggested that the ovary becomes a more inflammatory environment. To better understand what may be driving those changes, they looked more closely at the ovaries of mice. The research, published in June in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, suggests that the ovary may eventually take on a completely new identity after menopause.

The team compared the ovaries of two-month-old mice, reproductively old 18-month-old mice, and post-reproductive 24-month-old mice, and found that over time, the genes linked to inflammation and immune activity became far more active. The number of immune cells in the ovary also increased. While research on mice does not always translate to humans, it could help to explain the molecular changes Duncan observed in human ovaries.

“We think that a lot of those changes may make the ovary more prone to age-related diseases like ovarian cancer,” says Birgit Schilling, an aging researcher at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging who collaborated with Duncan on the human ovary work, which has been published as a preprint. After menopause, the risk of a host of conditions goes up, including stroke, heart disease, and osteoporosis.

Other organs undergo immune remodeling with time, but the ovary ages long before most other organs. Duncan’s work raises the question of whether at some point, the benefits of keeping the ovaries may be outstripped by the risk: As the aging ovary becomes more inflammatory, she wonders whether it may begin broadcasting inflammatory signals to other parts of the body.

David Pépin is probing another possibility: that as follicles that house growing eggs disappear, the ovary may also reorganize to preserve hormone production. Pépin, a reproductive biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, found that years after cats were given an experimental birth-control gene therapy that prevented their follicles from maturing, the cats were still producing the hormones estrogen, testosterone, and inhibin at completely normal levels.

Follicles drive much of the hormone production during a reproductive cycle; without them, hormone levels should have fallen. In preliminary work he has publicly presented but not yet published, Pépin’s team found that when the ovaries were eventually removed, other cells in the ovary—the stroma—appeared to have taken over hormone production. Pilot studies in mice suggest a similar effect. Pépin thinks he may have tapped into a natural mechanism that helps maintain hormone production as follicles wane. It’s long been hypothesized that the stroma may be responsible for some of the human ovary’s postmenopausal hormone production.

Estrogen, he says, is not the only hormone that plays a role in menopause. “We know so little about how the other ovarian hormones that are disrupted at menopause may contribute to health,” he says. “It is not a dead organ.”

The AI amulet has become a bit of a cliché in the tech industry — devices like Friend have turned the idea of physical AI into little more than an exercise in eye-rolling for many consumers.

But that hasn’t stopped Meta from jumping into the arena with its own AI wearable, called Muse Charm, which is designed to give consumers another way to stay connected to its recently launched, and already popular, personal AI agent, Muse.

The device, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a “one more thing” moment during the company’s annual Connect event, isn’t ready to ship just yet. Zuckerberg said his team had to “finalize laying out the components” and promised the devices would be “ready to ship in time for the holidays in December.”

The Muse agent, which is now embodied by a cute digital avatar known within the company as Jolly, lives inside the palm-sized totem that users can carry in their pockets or attach to a keychain. The device comes with a tiny screen that displays the avatar representing the agent. Users can talk to the device, which can then presumably carry out tasks on their behalf.

“We packed the whole Muse experience, including the whole real-time voice and avatar stack, into something that fits on a keychain and is always available to talk to,” Zuckerberg said during Wednesday’s keynote. “You just go ahead and tap here in the fingerprint sensor in the corner, and you can start talking without having to unlock a phone or open an app.”

Zuckerberg added: “So if you’re not wearing glasses, this is going to be by far the fastest way to talk to your Muse and to show what’s going on around you.”

Appropriate for what it offers, the gadget has a quasi-Tamagotchi feel to it — a lightweight, personality-filled device designed to keep users always connected to Meta’s software. It also feels like a relatviely low-stakes way for the social media giant to experiment with AI wearables while also offering yet another way to distribute its AI agent to the masses.

The free VPN built into Opera is getting a small but useful upgrade. Instead of relying on you to remember to switch it on before joining airport, café, or hotel Wi-Fi, the browser can now detect a public or unsecured network and activate the VPN automatically.

Opera has offered its built-in VPN since 2016. It is free, does not require an account, and has no fixed bandwidth cap. The new automatic protection is still opt-in, so users will have to enable it first in settings. The feature is rolling out to desktop users in the U.S. and France starting today.

The free VPN does not cover your whole device

Opera’s existing free VPN only protects traffic inside the browser. Websites opened in Opera can be routed through an encrypted connection to one of the company’s VPN servers, while apps such as Spotify, Steam, or a standalone email client continue using the regular network. Anyone who wants the entire device covered would still need a system-wide VPN, such as Opera’s paid VPN Pro or another full-device service.

A VPN helps on public Wi-Fi, but it is not a force field

Public Wi-Fi also is not quite the disaster zone it was years ago. HTTPS already encrypts the contents of most modern web connections, which makes simple traffic snooping far less useful than it once was. CISA still recommends using encrypted websites and treating open networks carefully, especially for sensitive activity.

A VPN still cannot protect you from every threat on an open network. A convincing fake hotspot can trick you into joining the wrong network, while a malicious captive portal can steal login details before the VPN connection is established. Attackers on the same network may also target exposed services such as file sharing or device discovery, which sit outside the encrypted VPN tunnel. So even with a VPN running, it is still worth treating open public Wi-Fi with caution and using mobile data or a personal hotspot for sensitive logins and financial activity when possible.

Growing sales and popularity of smart glasses are despite public backlash against the technology over privacy concerns.

Meta is to introduce smart glasses without cameras amid ongoing public concerns over privacy violations made possible by the use of its camera-equipped variants.

The new ‘Ray-Ban Meta Audio’ models will be without a previously standard feature for all of the company’s smart glasses, enabling better battery life and a slimmer form factor, according to Meta.

The camera-free audio glasses had been in the works for about two years, Bloomberg reported Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth as saying. He added that the company was “a little bit fortunate” to already have an audio-only product in development, given the “privacy narrative playing out around glasses globally”.

He told the publication that Meta takes privacy concerns “seriously”, and would continue to do so.

Last week, French prosecutors launched a criminal probe into suspected sexual harassment committed using smart glasses.

Reuters reported that at least one investigation was underway in Paris following complaints over the filming of women nonconsensually using smart glasses to be posted to social media.

Specific brands or company names were not mentioned by officials.

AI-equipped smart glasses accounted for 88pc of total shipments in the sector as of H2 last year, while Meta held more than 80pc of total global smart glasses shipments.

The sharp growth in sales and popularity of these types of glasses comes despite public backlash against the technology, with people highlighting issues around covert recording and sexual harassment.

“My lived experience walking around with [smart glasses] has been people pretty enthusiastic about the product,” Bosworth told Bloomberg. “Then there’s an extremely online concern. I’m not saying it’s not a real concern.”

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the camera-free glasses in a keynote presentation at the company’s annual Meta Connect showcase in California yesterday (23 September). He said the new audio-focused glasses also qualify as US FDA-certified hearing aids, designed for people with mild to moderate hearing loss.

Other product updates focused on VR-geared smart glasses and the customisable agentic AI avatar Muse.

In an analysis of the keynote presentation, principal analyst at Forrester Kate Winick said: “Despite user privacy concerns, the introduction of audio glasses barely acknowledged the problem that drove their creation. Instead, Meta focused on the fact that Meta glasses are now an FDA-cleared hearing enhancement device and highlighted the positive features of the glasses, including longer battery life, slimmer profile and Muse functionality.”

She noted that Meta “introduced no new features that support privacy for the public”, and suggested that the company “is hoping that a feature-rich product environment and user-friendly experience will simply drown privacy concerns”.

Earlier this week, Dutch deep-tech company Morphotonics raised more than €40m in Series B funding for scaling its technology that helps build AI glasses.

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