Apple’s upcoming iPhone 17e might be positioned as the more affordable entry in the iPhone 17 lineup. Up until now, we didn’t know how much memory the phone would have – but now it’s been revealed and it’s exactly as we expected.

According to data uncovered in Apple’s developer tool Xcode, the iPhone 17e comes with 8GB of RAM. This is the same amount found in the iPhone 16e and the baseline configuration we expected for this generation.

The Chinese tech firm OPPO unveiled new on-device AI advancements at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona. It presented these innovations in collaboration with MediaTek. At the event, the duo emphasized the significance of their collaboration, which is helping the world embrace the latest developments in the field of artificial intelligence through the latest smartphones. The focus of the event was the development of the latest AI phones, which will have the ability to process information quickly on the device itself.

New On-Device AI Features

The Chinese tech firm OPPO unveiled AI features powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9500 chip at the event. Among the notable features is the AI Translate, which enables the user to translate information directly from the device. This offers better accuracy and smoother results, even when the network is poor. Another notable feature is the AI Portrait Glow, which helps the user to achieve sharper portrait photos in low-light conditions. These features are expected to arrive with the latest OPPO Find X9 Series via the upcoming ColorOS 16 update.

Omni Full-Modal AI Model

OPPO and MediaTek previewed Omni, the first full-modal AI model designed to run directly on smartphones. This technology allows the device to read its surroundings using voice, video, and text, making it easier to interact with the device.

The Find X9 Pro was also shown at the event, with the device’s camera with Hasselblad support and AI capabilities. The OPPO Reno15 Pro showed the AI capabilities of the device in terms of its camera.

Improved Cross-Device Connectivity with Quick Share

To improve connectivity between different platforms, OPPO introduced support for Android Quick Share. With this feature, users will be able to easily share files between OPPO devices and other devices running the operating systems iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, without the need for any other app. OPPO announced that the feature will begin rolling out to compatible devices via a software update in March.

Industry Recognition and Future AI Plans

The OPPO Find X9 Pro was recognized as one of the finalists in the GLOMO Awards under the “Best Smartphone” category. This shows the capabilities of the device in terms of performance, camera, and the presence of AI features. This also shows the kind of innovation that OPPO is bringing to the device. In the future, OPPO and MediaTek will continue to collaborate in the development of the AI features of the device in order to take smartphones to the next level in terms of speed.

Infinix has thrown its hat firmly into the flagship ring with the Note 60 Ultra, a new top-tier phone unveiled at MWC 2026 in Barcelona. It’s aiming far higher than the brand’s usual mid-range territory.

The headline feature is a 200MP camera system, but the phone is also packing satellite connectivity, a massive battery and a striking design developed with Italian automotive design house Pininfarina.

Taken together, it looks like Infinix’s most serious attempt yet to compete with the big names in the premium phone space.

from the here-comes-the-synergies dept

You might recall that Paramount and CBS had only just started to lay off workers in the wake of the merger with David Ellison’s Skydance. Now, after Ellison (or more accurately his dad and the Saudis) dramatically overpaid for Warner Brothers ($111 billion plus numerous incentives), the overall debt load at the company is so massive, it could make past Warner Brothers chaos seem somewhat charming:

“The deal is tied up with so much debt that it virtually guarantees layoffs the likes of which Hollywood hasn’t seen before. That’s going to mean far less output from the suite of properties under Paramount and Warner’s control. And it will mean that the production apocalypse which has been brewing since the pandemic, the end of Peak TV, and the contraction of runaway green lights for streaming networks will grow still more apocalyptic.”

The real world costs of this kind of pointless consolidation is always borne by consumers and labor. Executives get disproportionate compensation, tax breaks, and a brief stock bump. Workers get shitcanned and consumers get higher prices and shittier overall product in a bid to pay doubt debt. We have seen this happen over and over and over again in U.S. media. It’s not subtle or up for debate.

Keep in mind Warner Brothers has seen nothing but this kind of operational chaos over the last two decades as it bounced between pointless mergers with AOL, AT&T, and Discovery, all of which promised vast synergies and new innovation, but instead resulted in oceans of layoffs, higher prices, and consistently shittier product.

Now comes the granddaddy deal of them all to try and cement Larry Ellison’s obvious desire to try and dominate what’s left of U.S. media. Run by his son David, whose operational judgement (if Bari Weiss’ start at CBS is any indication) is arguably worse than all the terrible, fail upward, trust-fund brunchlord types that preceded him.

All of the debt from past deals just keeps piling up and being kicked down the road in a lazy, pseudo-innovative shell game (and this doesn’t; include CBS!):

“In its initial $30-a-share bid for Warner Bros., Paramount was financing the purchase with up to $84 billion in pro forma debt. That has now risen to $31 a share, tacking on roughly another $2.5 billion, plus a “ticking fee” of 25 cents per share per quarter for every quarter the deal doesn’t close after September 30 of this year. Paramount is also paying Netflix’s breakup fee of $2.8 billion. Paramount has not released the financing details for the new deal, but it’s likely to be an even higher debt load.”

Ellison is pretty broadly also leveraged in the AI investment hype cycle, and if that bubble pops (or pops worse, as the case may be), this entire gambit could go wrong very, very quickly. Even the ongoing Saudi cash infusions may not be enough to save them. Larry Ellison’s nepobaby son will of course be fine; the employees, consumers, and broader U.S. media market, not so much.

Filed Under: consolidation, crash, david ellison, hype, larry ellison, layoffs, media, merger, nepobabies

Companies: cbs, oracle, paramount, warner bros. discovery

As the 2026 Formula 1 season kicks off in Melbourne, Lego has unveiled two new display sets celebrating Ferrari drivers Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton.

The new Lego Editions Scuderia Ferrari HP helmet sets recreate the drivers’ 2025 helmet designs in detailed brick form. They come complete with signature plaques and for the first time minifigures of both drivers in Ferrari colours.

Inside a cavernous hall at the Swiss-French border, the air hums with high voltage and possibility. From his perch on the wraparound observation deck, physicist Walter Wuensch surveys a multimillion-dollar array of accelerating cavities, klystrons, modulators, and pulse compressors—hardware being readied to drive a new generation of linear particle accelerators.

Wuensch has spent decades working with these machines to crack the deepest mysteries of the universe. Now he and his colleagues are aiming at a new target: cancer. Here at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and other particle-physics labs, scientists and engineers are applying the tools of fundamental physics to develop a technique called FLASH radiotherapy that offers a radical and counterintuitive vision for treating the disease.

CERN researcher Walter Wuensch says the particle physics lab’s work on FLASH radiotherapy is “generating a lot of excitement.”CERN

Radiation therapy has been a cornerstone of cancer treatment since shortly after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895. Today, more than half of all cancer patients receive it as part of their care, typically in relatively low doses of X-rays delivered over dozens of sessions. Although this approach often kills the tumor, it also wreaks havoc on nearby healthy tissue. Even with modern precision targeting, the potential for collateral damage limits how much radiation doctors can safely deliver.

FLASH radiotherapy flips the conventional approach on its head, delivering a single dose of ultrahigh-power radiation in a burst that typically lasts less than one-tenth of a second. In study after study, this technique causes significantly less injury to normal tissue than conventional radiation does, without compromising its antitumor effect.

At CERN, which I visited last July, the approach is being tested and refined on accelerators that were never intended for medicine. If ongoing experiments here and around the world continue to bear out results, FLASH could transform radiotherapy—delivering stronger treatments, fewer side effects, and broader access to lifesaving care.

“It’s generating a lot of excitement,” says Wuensch, a researcher at CERN’s Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR) facility. “We accelerator people are thinking, Oh, wow, here’s an application of our technology that has a societal impact which is more immediate than most high-energy physics.”

The Unlikely Birth of FLASH Therapy

The breakthrough that led to FLASH emerged from a line of experiments that began in the 1990s at Institut Curie in Orsay, near Paris. Researcher Vincent Favaudon was using a low-energy electron accelerator to study radiation chemistry. Targeting the accelerator at mouse lungs, Favaudon expected the radiation to produce scar tissue, or fibrosis. But when he exposed the lungs to ultrafast blasts of radiation, at doses a thousand times as high as what’s used in conventional radiation therapy, the expected fibrosis never appeared.

Puzzled, Favaudon turned to Marie-Catherine Vozenin, a radiation biologist at Curie who specialized in radiation-induced fibrosis. “When I looked at the slides, there was indeed no fibrosis, which was very, very surprising for this type of dose,” recalls Vozenin, who now works at Geneva University Hospitals, in Switzerland.

Although many cancer experts were skeptical about the FLASH effect on healthy tissue when it was first announced in 2014, numerous studies have since confirmed and expanded on those results. In a 2020 paper, a lung tissue sample taken 4 months after being exposed to conventional radiotherapy [center] shows many more dark spots indicating scarring than a sample exposed to FLASH [right]. The nonirradiated sample [left] is the control.

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Vincent Favaudon/American Association for Cancer Research

Many cancer experts were skeptical. The FLASH effect seemed almost too good to be true. “It didn’t get a lot of traction at first,” recalls Billy Loo, a Stanford radiation oncologist specializing in lung cancer. “They described a phenomenon that ran counter to decades of established radiobiology dogma.”

But in the years since then, researchers have observed the effect across a wide range of tumor types and animals—beyond mice to zebra fish, fruit flies, and even a few human subjects, with the same protective effect in the brain, lungs, skin, muscle, heart, and bone.

Why this happens remains a mystery. “We have investigated a lot of hypotheses, and all of them have been wrong,” says Vozenin. Currently, the most plausible theory emerging from her team’s research points to metabolism: Healthy and cancerous cells may process reactive oxygen species—unstable oxygen-containing molecules generated during radiation—in very different ways.

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Adapting Accelerators for FLASH

At the time of the first FLASH publication, Loo and his team at Stanford were also focused on dramatically speeding up radiation delivery. But Loo wasn’t chasing a radiobiological breakthrough. He was trying to solve a different problem: motion.

“The tumors that we treat are always moving targets,” he says. “That’s particularly true in the lung, where because of breathing motion, the tumors are constantly moving.”

To bring FLASH therapy out of the lab and into clinical use, researchers like Vozenin and Loo needed machines capable of delivering fast, high doses with pinpoint precision deep inside the body. Most early studies relied on low-energy electron beams like Favaudon’s 4.5-megaelectron-volt Kinetron—sufficient for surface tumors, but unable to reach more than a few centimeters into a human body. Treating deep-seated cancers in the lung, brain, or abdomen would require far higher particle energies.

At CERN, researchers working on FLASH are developing this hardware to boost electrons to ultrahigh power within a short distance.

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CERN

They also needed an alternative to conventional X-rays. In a clinical linac, X-ray photons are produced by dumping high-energy electrons into a bremsstrahlung target, which is made of a material with a high atomic number, like tungsten or copper. The target slows the electrons, converting their kinetic energy into X-ray photons. It’s an inherently inefficient process that wastes most of the beam power as heat and makes it extremely difficult to reach the ultrahigh dose rates required for FLASH. High-energy electrons, by contrast, can be switched on and off within milliseconds. And because they have a charge and can be steered by magnets, electrons can be precisely guided to reach tumors deep within the body. (Researchers are also investigating protons and carbon ions; see the sidebar, “What’s the Best Particle for FLASH Therapy?”)

Loo turned to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., where physicist Sami Gamal-Eldin Tantawi was redefining how electromagnetic waves move through linear accelerators. Tantawi’s findings allowed scientists to precisely control how energy is delivered to particles—paving the way for compact, efficient, and finely tunable machines. It was exactly the kind of technology FLASH therapy would need to target tumors deep inside the body.

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Meanwhile, Vozenin and other European researchers turned to CERN, best known for its 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the “God particle” that gives other particles their mass.

RELATED: AI Hunts for the Next Big Thing in Physics

CERN is also home to a range of smaller linear accelerators—including CLEAR, where Wuensch and his team are adapting high-energy physics tools for medicine.

Unlike the LHC, which loops particles around a massive ring to build up energy before smashing them together, linear accelerators like CLEAR send particles along a straight, one-time path. That setup allows for greater precision and compactness, making it ideal for applications like FLASH.

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At the heart of the CLEAR facility, Wuensch points out the 200-MeV linear accelerator with its 20-meter beamline. This is “a playground of creativity,” he says, for the physicists and engineers who arrive from all over the world to run experiments.

The process begins when a laser pulse hits a photocathode, releasing a burst of electrons that form the initial beam. These electrons travel through a series of precisely machined copper cavities, where high-frequency microwaves push them forward. The electrons then move through a network of magnets, monitors, and focusing elements that shape and steer them toward the experimental target with submillimeter precision.

Instead of a continuous stream, the electron beam is divided into nanosecond-long bunches—billions of electrons riding the radio-frequency field like surfers. Inside the accelerator’s cavities, the field flips polarity 12 billion times per second, so timing is everything: Only electrons that arrive perfectly in phase with the accelerating wave will gain energy. That process repeats through a chain of cavities, each giving the bunches another push, until the beam reaches its final energy of 200 MeV.

Physicist Marçà Boronat inspects one of the high-precision components used to accelerate the electrons for FLASH radiotherapy.

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CERN

Much of this architecture draws directly from the Compact Linear Collider study, a decades-long CERN project aimed at building a next-generation collider. The proposed CLIC machine would stretch 11 kilometers and collide electrons and positrons at 380 gigaelectron volts. To do that in a linear configuration—without the multiple passes around a ring like the LHC—CERN engineers have had to push for extremely high acceleration gradients to boost the electrons to high energies over relatively short distances—up to 100 megavolts per meter.

Wuensch leads me to a large experimental hall housing prototype structures from the CLIC effort, and points out the microwave devices that now help drive FLASH research. Though the future of CLIC as a collider remains uncertain, its infrastructure is already yielding dividends: smaller, high-gradient accelerators that may one day be as suited for curing cancer as they are for smashing particles.

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RELATED: Four Ways Engineers Are Trying to Break Physics

The power behind the high gradients comes from CERN’s Xboxes, the X-band RF systems that dominate the experimental hall. Each Xbox houses a klystron, modulator, pulse compressor, and waveguide network to generate and shape the microwave pulses. The pulse compressors store energy in resonant cavities and then release it in a microsecond burst, producing peaks of up to 200 megawatts; if it were continuous, that’s enough to power at least 40,000 homes. The Xboxes let researchers fine-tune the power, timing, and pulse shape.

According to Wuensch, many of the recent accelerator developments were enabled by advances in computer simulation and high-precision three-dimensional machining. These tools allow the team to iterate quickly, designing new accelerator components and improving beam control with each generation.

Still, real-world challenges remain. The power demands are formidable, as are the space requirements; for all the talk of its “compact” design, the original CLIC was meant to span kilometers. Obviously, a hospital needs something that’s actually compact.

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“A big challenge of the project,” says Wuensch, “is to transform this kind of technology and these kinds of components into something that you can imagine installing in a hospital, and it will run every day reliably.”

To that end, CERN researchers have teamed up with the Lausanne University Hospital (known by its French acronym, CHUV) and the French medical technology company Theryq to design a hospital facility capable of treating large and deep-seated tumors with the very short time scales needed for FLASH and scaled down to fit in a clinical setting.

Theryq’s Approach to FLASH

Theryq’s research center and factory are located in southern France, near the base of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, a jagged spine of limestone that Paul Cézanne painted dozens of times, capturing its shifting light and form.

“The solution that we are trying to develop here is something which is extremely versatile,” says Ludovic Le Meunier, CEO of the expanding company. “The ultimate goal is to be able to treat any solid tumor anywhere in the body, which is about 90 percent of the cancer these days.”

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Theryq’s FLASHDEEP system, under development with CERN and the company’s clinical partners, has a 13.5-meter-long, 140-MeV linear accelerator. That’s strong enough to treat tumors at depths of up to about 20 centimeters in the body. The patient will remain in a supported standing position during the split-second irradiation.THERYQ

Theryq’s push to bring FLASH radiotherapy from the lab to clinic has followed a three-pronged rollout, with each device engineered for a specific depth and clinical use. The first machine, FLASHKNiFE, was unveiled in 2020. Designed for superficial tumors and intraoperative use, the system delivers electron beams at 6 or 9 MeV. A prototype installed that same year at CHUV is conducting a phase-two trial for patients with localized skin cancer.

More recently, Theryq launched FLASHLAB, a compact, 7-MeV platform for radiobiology research.

The company’s most ambitious system, FLASHDEEP, is still under development. The 13.5-meter-long electron source will deliver very high-energy electrons of as much as 140 MeV up to 20 centimeters inside the body in less than 100 milliseconds. An integrated CT scanner, built into a patient-positioning system developed by Leo Cancer Care, captures images that stream directly into the treatment-planning software, enabling precise calculation of the radiation dose. “Before we actually trigger the beam or the treatment, we make stereo images to verify at the very last second that the tumor is exactly where it should be,” says Theryq technical manager Philippe Liger.

FLASH Therapy Moves to Animal Tests

While CERN’s CLEAR accelerator has been instrumental in characterizing FLASH parameters, researchers seeking to study FLASH in living organisms must look elsewhere: CERN doesn’t allow animal experiments on-site. That’s one reason why a growing number of scientists are turning to PITZ, the Photo Injector Test Facility in Zeuthen, a leafy lakeside suburb of Berlin.

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PITZ is part of Germany’s national accelerator lab and is responsible for developing the electron source for the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser. Now PITZ is emerging as a hub for FLASH research, with an unusually tunable accelerator and a dedicated biomedical lab to ensure controlled conditions for preclinical studies.

At Germany’s Photo Injector Test Facility in Zeuthen (PITZ), the electron-beam accelerator [top] is used to irradiate biological targets in early-stage animal tests of FLASH radiotherapy [bottom].Top: Frieder Mueller; Bottom: MWFK

“The biggest advantage of our facility is that we can do a very stepwise, very defined and systematic study of dose rates,” says Anna Grebinyk, a biochemist who heads the new biomedical lab, “and systematically optimize the FLASH effect to see where it gets the best properties.”

The experiments begin with zebra-fish embryos, prized for early-stage studies because they’re transparent and develop rapidly. After the embryos, researchers test the most promising parameters in mice. To do that, the PITZ team uses a small-animal radiation research platform, complete with CT imaging and a robotic positioning system adapted from CERN’s CLEAR facility.

What sets PITZ apart is the flexibility of its beamline. The 30-meter accelerator system steers electrons with micrometer precision, producing electron bunches with exceptional brightness and emittance—a metric of beam quality. “We can dial in any distribution of bunches we want,” says Frank Stephan, group leader at PITZ. “That gives us tremendous control over time structure.”

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Timing matters. At PITZ, the laser-struck photocathode generates electron bunches that are accelerated immediately, at up to 60 million volts per meter. A fast electromagnetic kicker system acts as a high-speed gatekeeper, selectively deflecting individual electron bunches from a high-repetition beam and steering them according to researchers’ needs. This precise, bunch-by-bunch control is essential for fine-tuning beam properties for FLASH experiments and other radiation therapy studies.

“The idea is to make the complete treatment within one millisecond,” says Stephan. “But of course, you have to [trust] that within this millisecond, everything works fine. There is not a chance to stop [during] this millisecond. It has to work.”

Regulating the dose remains one of the biggest technical hurdles in FLASH. The ionization chambers used in standard radiotherapy can’t respond accurately when dose rates spike hundreds of times higher in a matter of microseconds. So researchers are developing new detector systems to precisely measure these bursts and keep pace with the extreme speed of FLASH delivery.

FLASH as a Research Tool

Beyond its therapeutic potential, FLASH may also open new windows to illuminate cancer biology. “What is really, really superinteresting, in my opinion,” says Vozenin, “is that we can use FLASH as a tool to understand the difference between normal tissue and tumors. There must be something we’re not aware of that really distinguishes the two—and FLASH can help us find it.” Identifying those differences, she says, could lead to entirely new interventions, not just with radiation, but also with drugs.

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Vozenin’s team is currently testing a hypothesis involving long-lived proteins present in healthy tissue but absent in tumors. If those proteins prove to be key, she says, “we’re going to find a way to manipulate them—and perhaps reverse the phenomenon, even [turn] a tumor back into a normal tissue.”

Proponents of FLASH believe it could help close the cancer care gap worldwide; in low-income countries, only about 10 percent of patients have access to radiotherapy, and in middle-income countries, only about 60 percent of patients do, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Because FLASH treatment can often be delivered in a single brief session, it could spare patients from traveling long distances for weeks of treatment and allow clinics to treat many more people.

High-income countries stand to benefit as well. Fewer sessions mean lower costs, less strain on radiotherapy facilities, and fewer side effects and disruptions for patients.

The big question now is, How long will it take? Researchers I spoke with estimate that FLASH could become a routine clinical option in about 10 years—after the completion of remaining preclinical studies and multiphase human trials, and as machines become more compact, affordable, and efficient. Much of the momentum comes from a growing field of startups competing to build devices, but the broader scientific community remains remarkably open and collaborative.

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“Everyone has a relative who knows about cancer because of their own experience,” says Stephan. “My mother died of it. In the end, we want to do something good for mankind. That’s why people work together.”

This article appears in the March 2026 print issue.

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