The G-Shock development team responsible for the new collection tells WIRED the fundamental challenge was building a “near-unbreakable” watch using an inherently brittle material. Making watch cases from sapphire is not new in the high-end watch world, and many distinguished makers, including Richard Mille and Hublot, have released pieces made of the crystal.

To make the sapphire case work for a G-Shock, however, Casio had to develop a brand-new, dedicated shock-resistant structure, with the Multi-Guard construction using virtually invisible seams, alongside a completely screwless assembly method to hit the required shock performance. To do this, the outer case assembly required the development of completely new, dedicated jigs and fixtures, a process apparently so demanding that only one person at Yamagata Casio (the primary “mother factory” for Casio) can currently perform it.

All three new watches, along with the proper G-Shock resistance to knocks and drops, are water-resistant to 200 meters, solar-powered, and feature radio-controlled timekeeping, world time, stopwatch, countdown timer, five daily alarms, and a full-auto LED backlight.

If the $80K G-Shock is too steep an investment, the MRG-B5000SA-2 with two two-carat facet-cut blue sapphires and a grade-5 titanium exterior is limited to 500 pieces. The cheapest GMW-B5000SB-1A2 marries a full-metal black exterior with four round brilliant-cut blue sapphires.

If you were hoping memory prices would cool down soon, I have some bad news. Micron, one of the world’s biggest memory makers, has warned that the RAM shortage isn’t going anywhere, and it might even get worse.

According to The Register, Micron CEO and chair Sanjay Mehrotra told investors on the company’s FY 2026 earnings call that it has already sold most of next year’s memory output. Buyers will also pay “much higher prices” than they did this year.

How long will the RAM shortage last?

It will last longer than any of us would like. “In calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply,” Mehrotra said, adding that the crunch in those two years will be worse than what we’re seeing in 2026. Even more worrying, Micron doesn’t know when the situation will improve. “We do not have a line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance,” he admitted.

Micron is building new factories that should start production in 2028, backed by $25 billion in planned spending for the first half of its new financial year. Sadly, don’t expect relief the moment they open, as Micron’s executives cautioned that the new plants won’t fix availability or pricing right away.

Blame it on AI. The high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that powers AI hardware is in such demand that it’s outpacing demand for the standard DRAM servers use.

What does it mean for you?

For regular users like us, the takeaway is simple. With most of Micron’s memory already sold and AI gobbling up supply, cheaper laptops, PCs, and RAM upgrades seem unlikely anytime soon. If you were waiting for prices to drop before upgrading, you might be waiting a long time.

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It has been unavailable since the afternoon of September 30.

The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) says that the breach of its network was possible by exploiting a chain of two zero-day vulnerabilities in the open-source Zammad ticketing system.

Previously, the nonprofit organization of volunteer security researchers said the attack was “loud and very, very messy,” driven by an AI agent that moved autonomously and decided its next steps without external intervention or direction.

DIVD retrieved extensive details about the attack because the AI agent left behind clear explanations of its decisions, allowing the organization to reconstruct the incident.

According to the cybersecurity nonprofit, the two flaws, now identified as CVE-2026-102489 and CVE-2026-102490, enabled session hijacking, remote code execution, and escalation to root privileges.

After exploiting the vulnerabilities, the attacker was able to access other services, read and exfiltrate data from DIVD’s systems, all actions performed in a matter of seconds, thanks to AI automation.

“Used together, they allowed the attackers to hijack sessions, run code remotely, and escalate privileges from the Zammad user to root, in seconds, due to the agentic part of this hack,” DIVD says.

Due to network segmentation and incident response actions, the threat actor did not move deeper into the network. However, the investigation is still underway.

Zammad is an open-source AI-powered helpdesk and support ticketing platform used to manage customer inquiries, IT support requests, and internal ticketing.

The solution is available as a self-hosted or hosted service, and Zammad claims on its website that it has over 2,000 customers and 55,000 users, including De’Longhi, Amnesty International, and NextCloud.

DIVD discovered the zero-day vulnerabilities in collaboration with Merlon Security. The organization notified Zammad about the issue and is alerting other users of vulnerable instances.

The nonprofit recommends that Zammad users upgrade to version 7, which is considered safe, or take the instance offline as soon as possible.

DIVD has promised to share additional updates about the incident tomorrow.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

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Google parent company Alphabet has launched Gemini 4 Argon, a new AI model built to handle a variety of tasks such as coding, research, and writing. But it’s cybersecurity that Gemini 4 Argon is supposed to have a particular knack for, according to Google.

Argon is only being rolled out to a select group of the company’s cyber partners through its Fairwind Program, Google’s security initiative. The model was trained specifically for defensive cyber work, and the company says it can “autonomously find, validate, and patch critical software vulnerabilities.”

Argon is also said to be good at coding and engineering, with the company noting that its own staff have already been using the model for their daily work, including debugging and codebase migrations. Google also touts Argon’s ability to parse visuals — whether that’s analyzing the contents of long videos or charts.

“Built to sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows, Argon is fundamentally changing the way we work and build at Google,” the company said in a blog post Wednesday.

Top AI labs have rushed to release increasingly powerful models, attempting to outdo each other even as those very same firms warn that AI could spin out of control. Not long ago, OpenAI released Astra — which it hailed as its best model yet. Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Fable was also released with similar rhetoric from the company.

Firms have done their best to market their services as superior to their competitors. In its blog, Google claims that Argon scored significantly higher than OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic’s Fable and Opus models across a variety of AI benchmarks. It cites Vals — an increasingly popular AI benchmarking startup — to show that Argon is currently the leading model on the company’s AI model index.

Once considered “behind” in the AI race, Google has recently enjoyed success with Gemini. The company announced in August that its app had over a billion users per month, a metric that makes it competitive with OpenAI, which also recently announced that ChatGPT had reached a billion monthly users.

Singapore’s starting salaries may be on the rise, but the number of entry-level roles is shrinking, reported global professional services firm Aon in its latest 2026 Salary Increase and Turnover Study.

The report, released on Sept 23, surveyed over 1,200 organisations in more than 20 industries across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

It showed a 2.5% year-on-year salary increase for entry-level employees, alongside a 3.2% drop in entry-level headcount from 2025, indicating an increasingly tough job market for those just entering the workforce.

The report is in line with a broader softening in Singapore’s graduate job market.

A joint survey by the country’s six autonomous universities released earlier in Mar found that 83.4% of recent graduates who sought jobs were employed within six months of their final exams. This was down from 87.1% in 2024, continuing a downward trend since 2022.

Aon’s findings also point to a shift in employer expectations for new workforce entrants. This comes as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on an increasingly prominent role in the workplace.

“AI is changing the first rung of the career ladder, but it does not remove the need to build future talent,” said Rahul Chawla, partner and Head of Talent Solutions for Southeast Asia at Aon.

“Companies should redesign graduate roles around problem solving, judgment, human skills and the ability to work effectively with AI, rather than reduce entry opportunities and risk creating a capability gap in the future.”

Singapore salaries showed slowest growth in SEA

The broader salary picture was more muted in Singapore.

Overall, wages in the city-state grew by 4.1% in 2026, down from 4.3% in 2025, marking the slowest growth among its Southeast Asian peers. Meanwhile, Vietnam saw the highest salary increase at 6.6%, followed by Indonesia’s 5.4%.

In Singapore, Retail & Hospitality saw the highest salary increase at 4.5%, followed by Life Sciences & Medical Devices at 4.3%, and Technology at 4.2%.

Regarding attrition, Singapore’s financial services sector saw the highest involuntary turnover rate at 8.1%. Technology saw the second highest at 5.7%, and then came Consulting, Business & Community Services at 4.9%.

Amid advancements in AI, several banks, including DBS and Standard Chartered, had earlier announced job cuts.

For Aon’s study, organisations were also asked which skills were most in demand. Leadership and people management skills were most in demand, chosen by 49% of organisations, followed jointly by data and analytical skills, as well as AI and automation skills, at 48% each.

“The organisations gaining a competitive edge are investing in continuous and targeted upskilling now, before a skills gap becomes a hiring crisis,” said Evon Lock, Director of Talent Solutions in Southeast Asia at Aon.

“They are building capabilities and infrastructure internally so employees can grow into the new roles AI is creating.”

More layoffs and fewer jobs

Aon’s findings come amid a broader slowdown in Singapore’s labour market.

On Sept 21, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) reported that retrenchments rose to 4,620 in Q2 2026, up from 3,830 in the first quarter. This was the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Job vacancies, meanwhile, fell to 68,600 in Jun from 73,300 in Mar.

The ministry said this mainly reflected fewer vacancies for professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs) in sectors such as financial services and information and communications. Entry-level PMET vacancies, however, remained “broadly stable and sizeable,” making up 45.3% of all job openings in June.

Despite the overall decline, vacancies still outnumbered unemployed people, at 1.48 per unemployed person as of Jun.

The Government has also introduced measures to help fresh graduates gain work experience and move into full-time employment.

Nearly half of the graduates who completed the Government’s Graduate Industry Traineeships (GRIT) programme by end-Jul 2026 went on to secure employment, MOM said in Sept.

More than 590 of the programme’s 800 places had been filled as of end Jun and the scheme will be extended to the 2026 graduating cohort.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.

Earlier today, Figure posted a short film called F.02 Decommission and treated fleet retirement like a closing shot from Terminator 2. A humanoid hangs from a chain over a glowing electric arc furnace, gets lowered toward liquid steel, and holds a thumbs-up as the heat takes the frame. Viewers waiting for Figure CEO Brett Adcock or a newer robot under a mask instead get Arnold Schwarzenegger, who later signed off the whole affair with four words: “Hasta la vista, F.02.”

Figure 02 was sent off in a grueling yet painless manner. It was the company’s first foray onto a BMW line, a platform that not only gave birth to Helix but also became the first Figure to take on domestic tasks and experiment with logistics. Down at Plant Spartanburg, it was working 10-hour days, loading over 90,000 parts, recording over 1,250 hours, and assisting in the assembly of over 30,000 X3s. F.03 had taken over as the operation’s workhorses, with F.04 close behind, and the storage warehouse was bursting at the seams with a slew of expensive and highly proprietary specialized actuators and other locked-down equipment. Ripping the old equipment apart by hand would have been a nightmare and would have taken weeks, leaving you lacking on the new one and way out of budget, so holding an auction was also out of the question, as it would have released those cherished bits, now outdated, into the wild.

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Headquarters was the first to run out of room. Adcock asked the internet for a proper goodbye in August. A poll of 1,422 votes put “blow them up” on top at 46.3 percent. Schwarzenegger ignored the tally and wrote, “You should melt them.” Figure messaged him. He wanted in. That reply, dated August 19, is why a retirement meeting turned into a foundry job instead of a demolition reel.

Every foundry in the United States and Mexico said no; a lithium-ion humanoid couldn’t handle that much heat. Even the old Mythbusters crew joined in the fun, attempting to find one, but suddenly, out of nowhere, a place in Imatra, Finland, just shrugged and said “hey, come on in, Imatra’s OK,” since the water is fantastic there. So training resumed at Figure’s San Jose facility, where these robots were jumping up onto these large airbags on the second level, with stunt professionals providing on-camera action to perfect the maneuvers. Next thing you know, a new model is learning the exact same leaping move in simulation, allowing a robot that has never seen the Finnish floor to fall on top of a pail of molten steel. Later on, the corporation was quick to stress out that those jumps were entirely on their own, and the film you saw was truly shot on-site, not cobbled together by a computer.

Imatra gave the crew only 24 hours to complete the job, or six melts as they are known. A gigantic 75-ton furnace chomps through scrap steel, fuelled by three graphite electrodes, which are practically all the fuel it requires to keep going. Each melt lasts around 20 minutes, but once a protective crust forms, the furnace simply stops and restarts. The heat and electromagnetic waves vaporized any cameras that attempted to take a look, but the robots continued to go forward. Bonus footage shows them flipping and diving on their own, which is rather impressive to behold.

The bars they were able to save are currently being transported back to the United States, where they will be carved into extremely rare F.02 head relics. A one-third scale sells for $500, while a two-thirds scale costs $1900. And, while the majority of the fleet is long gone, a few units remain in storage at headquarters. It took a movie star, a Finnish furnace, and a full crew of robots to deliver the next machine on schedule, and now the leftover steel is for sale.

• Opera’s browser now solves one of the biggest problems travelers face abroad
• The built-in eSIM connects the entire phone rather than Opera alone
• Travelers can activate connectivity without buying another eSIM application first

Opera has added a built-in eSIM to its Android browser, giving travelers 3GB of complimentary mobile data for three days across supported destinations.

Travelers who arrive in a new country can skip the hunt for public Wi-Fi, because the free data requires no card details, purchasing a plan or entering an email.