Technology & Science

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple reported Monday that quarterly revenue rose 12% to $114.5 billion, above the roughly $113.4 billion analysts expected. It was the first report since John Ternus became chief executive. iPhone sales reached about $57.6 billion and topped forecasts, even though the quarter included only a little over a week of iPhone 18 Pro sales. Services revenue grew 10%, in line with expectations. Higher memory-chip costs cut into profit margins, tying the results to the memory shortage that SK Hynix flagged last week. Sales in China rose more than 20% but still missed forecasts, according to the Finimize summary. Other market reports said the shares fell about 4% after hours, citing a modest revenue beat, iPhone supply constraints and no specific guidance for next quarter. Those reports were not independently confirmed here.

WorkOS, which sells single sign-on and directory tools to software companies, disclosed Monday that it found unauthorized access to an internal sales application on October 30. Its bulletin says the attackers used an AI-assisted offensive security framework to automate reconnaissance and exploitation. The tool held customer contact details, account histories, summaries of sales and support calls, Slack excerpts and product-usage metadata. The company says it has no evidence that customer application data or production services were touched. The bulletin does not name the framework. Chief executive Michael Grinich identified it as ARTEX on X, according to trade reports. A customer notice circulated online cites traffic from Hong Kong and China, which does not establish who was responsible. WorkOS has not said how many customers are affected or how the attackers got in. It has cut external access to the tool, hired outside forensic investigators and warned of convincing phishing attempts.

NEW DELHI — A wave of flagship Android phones built on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip begins this week. Motorola has confirmed that the Signature 27 makes its global debut on November 5. Xiaomi said on November 2 that its 18 Pro series will go global this month. Indian press reports say OnePlus 16 and iQOO 16 are expected in late November and Vivo's MediaTek-powered X500 series in mid-to-late November. Reported specifications include 6.8-inch to 6.9-inch AMOLED screens, 6,000mAh to 9,000mAh batteries and 200-megapixel cameras on some models. Pricing for most models has not been announced, and many details come from teasers and leaks rather than final company specifications. Apple's iPhone Duo and several other phones launched in October.

ALBANY — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed S 9051B on October 28. It bars operators from offering twelve categories of 'unsafe' AI companion features to minors. The categories cover content that facilitates self-harm, encouraging secrecy from adults, claiming to be human or to have emotions, flattery and sycophancy, and engagement optimization that overrides safety guardrails. Operators may offer such features only after confirming a user is not a minor. Only the attorney general can enforce the law, with penalties up to $25,000 per violation. A policy newsletter that tracks state enforcement says it is the first state statute to expressly authorize 'algorithmic disgorgement', meaning destruction of models trained on unlawfully obtained data. The law arrives as multiple states pursue separate suits against OpenAI over child safety, which OpenAI has not conceded.

LONDON — Richard Horne, head of Britain's National Cyber Security Centre, warned Tuesday that the UK will likely face AI-enabled cyberattacks on critical infrastructure by 2028. He said criminals and states, including China and Russia, are increasingly using AI in their operations. The assessment calls Chinese activity the most sophisticated and sustained cyber challenge facing the UK. It says AI will let long-tolerated vulnerabilities be found and exploited at a scale once unimaginable, including through AI-powered ransomware. The report judges AI more likely to enhance and speed up existing tactics than to discover wholly new weaknesses. The warning follows last week's urgent security updates by governments and companies after AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in a programming language used by about 70% of websites.

ABU DHABI — OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman used the opening of the Adipec energy conference to announce an agreement with the Abu Dhabi government. It is meant to launch what is described as the world's first AI-native Machine-Readable Government Initiative. The state oil company Adnoc also signed a deal with OpenAI. Altman told The National that people must stay in control of AI and that serious safety incidents need to be prevented as the systems grow more capable. He met Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed on Monday. The reporting gives no financial terms or technical specifications for either agreement, and what the initiative will deliver has not been detailed.

PARIS — Mistral AI announced that it is releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4, its flagship model, according to a post on the company's site. The announcement was among the most heavily discussed AI items on developer forums this week. Opening a lab's top model, rather than an older or smaller one, would put a frontier-class system in the hands of companies that want to run models on their own hardware. The license terms, hardware requirements and benchmark claims are set out in Mistral's own post, and readers should treat the company's performance figures as claims until third parties test them. The release adds to a crowded open-weight field that also includes several Chinese labs.

People worldwide produced an estimated 2.05 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2015 simply by turning food into energy. That is up 74 percent from 1.18 billion tons in 1985, according to a University of Bath-led study in The Lancet Planetary Health. The team, led by physiologist Javier Gonzalez, describes its work as a modelling study. It estimates output across the world's population for 1985 to 2015 and does not measure every person directly. The authors say the figures could sharpen accounting of the global carbon cycle, particularly in dense cities, and improve the accuracy of carbon-reduction forecasts. The numbers cover only 1985 to 2015. They do not include any later years, and the peer-reviewed paper does not treat the result as a driver of climate change.

MARBURG, Germany — Researchers at Germany's University of Marburg have reported the first molecular evidence that aloe was used in ancient Egyptian embalming. They combined analysis of 41 historical texts with mass-spectrometry chemistry on 24 museum and university objects, including mummy parts, bandages, embalming residues and pharmacy preparations. Aloe-associated compounds turned up in two objects: a mummified head about 2,700 years old and an 18th-century medicine made from mummy material. The authors say this supports aloe in at least some embalming mixtures. Two positives out of 24 do not show that aloe was standard practice, and the team says the case for an Egyptian term meaning 'life is within it' referring to aloe is not conclusive. The peer-reviewed paper, by Tim Berger and colleagues, is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group plans to test more specimens.

Two European Space Agency deep-space missions are scheduled to reach their destinations this month. BepiColombo, run jointly with Japan's JAXA, is due to enter orbit around Mercury on Nov. 21 after nearly eight years in flight. ESA says its Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA's Mio will then separate on Dec. 9-10. It will be the first mission to have two spacecraft orbiting Mercury at once. ESA's Hera planetary-defense probe is on track to reach the Didymos binary asteroid system in November, a month ahead of the original plan. Hera will inspect the smaller body, Dimorphos, whose orbit NASA's DART spacecraft changed by crashing into it in 2022. ESA's 2026 calendar lists early images for Nov. 25. Hera will also release two CubeSats.

NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk are scheduled to make a second spacewalk on Thursday, Nov. 5. They will install the eighth and last International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array, on the 3B power channel. On Oct. 29 the pair spent 7 hours 11 minutes installing the seventh array on the 2A channel. That was the 100th U.S. spacewalk from the station's Quest airlock. They also finished several get-ahead tasks for the next outing. Once all eight arrays are in place, NASA says generation capacity should rise by up to 30 percent, from 160 to about 215 kilowatts. Space.com reported that the added power is meant to support station operations through a controlled deorbit, currently set for 2030. The work completes a five-year upgrade.