Nadine Wehida & Ahmed Elbediwy, Kingston University/The Conversation

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Nearly three years on from deploying ground-penetrating radar technology to "spy" on the underground lives of one of Australia's most critical endangered species, scientists have learnt that northern hairy-nose wombats will build elaborate burrows regardless of the material they're working with. And that one of the females has a baby on board.

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Category: Environment, Science

Tags: Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Australia, Endangered, Animal science, Species, Radar

Frequent travelers know the feeling of opening a suitcase in a hotel room only to find that their shirts, trousers, and dresses look like they've already been worn. A steamer or hotel iron (if there is one at all) can solve this problem, but if you're tired or in a rush, it’s probably the last thing you want to spend time on. Aironox is aiming to address this issue with its new product that's designed specifically for travelers and is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter.

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Category: Good Thinking, Technology

Tags: Kickstarter, Clothing, Travel

The United States military is plunging into the robotic future of aerial warfare with both feet as awards are issued to General Atomics and Anduril for not just the development, but the mass production of hundreds of autonomous combat aircraft.

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Category: Military, Engineering

Tags: General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Anduril, US Air Force, Fighter

The newly-revamped Sentra is boring, sensible, comfortable, and easy to live with. Today’s market is full of splash headlines and flashy LEDs. The Sentra is just a sedan. That’s it. And that’s weird.

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Category: Automotive, Transport

Tags: Nissan, Sedan, Reviews

We're hard at work at finishing our review of the Panasonic L10, and, in the process, have been taking quite a few pictures with it. We've updated our sample gallery with some of the best ones, including a few taken with flash, and some Raw conversions that exploit its dynamic range capabilities.

If you want to dive deeper into the L10's image quality, we've also added it to our studio scene, and you can read our writeup about it here.

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing; we do so in good faith, so please don't abuse it.

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“Less is more.” How often have we heard that? CFMoto’s latest motorcycle embodies that philosophy, especially in a class that has not just been growing in popularity, but also in the size of the motorcycles themselves. This one’s simple and straightforward … and I like that.

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Category: Motorcycles, Transport

Tags: CFMoto, Enduro, Off-road, Dirt Bikes, Honda Motorcycles, Kawasaki

This week’s technology agreement announced between Stellantis, Wayve and Uber is another big step forward in the race to provide – and profit from – driverless taxis.

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Category: Automotive, Transport

Tags: stellantis, Uber, Taxis, Self-Driving, Autonomy, Autonomous Vehicles, Artificial Intelligence

Sold under brand names like Wegovy and Ozempic, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) have become a popular way to curb appetite and lose weight.

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Category: Mental Health, Brain Health, Body and Mind

Tags: GLP-1 receptor agonists, Crime, Weight Loss, Pharmaceuticals

It's one thing having a large, complex base tent to set up. I mean, we don't really like that either, but sometimes you have to deal with it. But the last thing you want to do after setting up your primary tent is spend another small lifetime setting up a bathroom tent. Gazelle provides the latest solution, slimming its tried-and-true hub-frame formula into a tall, sturdy Privacy Tent that sets up in a minute and a half, letting you get to what really counts: collapsing into a camp chair and enjoying the view.

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Category: Tents, Gear, Outdoors

Tags: Tent, Toilet, Bathroom, Camping, Outdoors and Camping

Nvidia is fundamentally rethinking the portable PC, treating its new RTX Spark platform not as a traditional gaming silicon upgrade, but as a blueprint for a high-end, on-device AI powerhouse.

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Category: Consumer Tech, Technology

Tags: NVIDIA, Chips, Artificial Intelligence, Platform, Gaming, Laptop, PC, Graphics

A lot of people would commute by bicycle, but don't do so because they're afraid of traffic. Well, those folks might like Canyon's prototype Predict bike, which is laden with tech to keep its rider safe from cars and other road hazards.

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Category: Bicycles, Transport

Tags: Cycling, concept, Road Safety, Canyon Bicycles, Artificial Intelligence

A new 3D camera inspired by jumping spiders' eyes may well be found in the next generation of battery-operated wearable tech, assistive devices, robots and drones. The technology utilizes “less energy than a nightlight.”

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Category: Technology

Tags: Northwestern University, 3D Cameras, Biomimicry, Spiders

Adobe has announced that it's bringing its AI "creative agent" to the desktop version of Photoshop, after it debuted on the web version of the app earlier this year. While the software is still in beta, it shows that the company is moving forward with its plans to add an increasing number of AI-powered features into its photo editing software.

The goal of the assistant is to provide a chat interface that lets you ask the software to carry out various tasks for you. These could be relatively simple menial tasks – adjusting a photo's brightness, organizing layers, applying edits to make the subject stand out – or relatively complex tasks, like figuring out error messages, coming up with captions for your photo for social media, or identifying fonts in an image.

When we spoke to a Photoshop project manager at Adobe's Max conference last year after the feature's announcement, they made it clear the company viewed the AI tool as a way to automate tasks, rather than a guide to teach you the software. And while it can act as one – it describes the edits it makes, which are often applied as layers and effects that you can then tweak – the company is clearly continuing along that line, pitching it as a way to let you focus on your craft, rather than the boring parts of editing.

Of course being an AI system, and a beta one at that, there are still plenty of warnings that results may be inaccurate, and that it can make mistakes. We found that to be true when we tried out the version of the tool available on the web earlier this year, though we wouldn't be surprised if Adobe has made some progress on that front since then.

The AI assistant is currently available in Photoshop Beta for Creative Cloud subscribers.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — June 18, 2026 — Today, Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) — the global technology leader that unleashes creativity, productivity and customer experiences through innovative tools and platforms — announced a major expansion of its creative agent across Firefly and Creative Cloud. Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creative AI studio, now delivers expanded agentic capabilities with new creative skills and tools, and previewed a unified experience that brings every stage of creative work together from ideation to creation to production. Adobe is also introducing its creative agent across Creative Cloud apps including Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and more, enabling creators to describe their desired outcome while the assistant orchestrates multi-step workflows. Together, these advancements establish Adobe’s creative agent as the connective layer across every stage of creative work, letting creatives focus on the craft, taste and judgment that make the work distinctly theirs.

Adobe's creative agent puts creators in the director's chair, handling the orchestration and execution of complex, repetitive workflows so the creative vision stays theirs from start to finish. Built on four decades of understanding how creative work gets made, it scales to support every type of creator from individual creators to enterprise creative and marketing teams. And with Adobe’s pro-grade creative tools now expanding to platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Slack, that reach grows to hundreds of millions of people wherever they create and work.

"Adobe has always been at the center of how the best creative work comes to life, and this is a major expansion of that promise," said David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Creativity & Productivity business. "Every creative now has an agent capable of helping them execute across every app and platform where they work so they can set the vision, apply their taste and make the calls that only they can.”

Adobe Firefly expands agentic capabilities and advances its creative AI studio experience

Since launching in public beta recently, AI Assistant in Firefly has rapidly gained traction with creators who have embraced it as a faster, more intuitive way to bring their ideas to life. Today’s expansion builds on that momentum with new creative skills and tools designed for creators and solopreneurs building their brands on social media, along with customization upgrades that can be tailored to each creator’s preferences. Powered by Adobe’s creative agent, AI Assistant in Firefly brings pro-grade tools from across Adobe's Creative Cloud applications into a single conversational interface in Firefly, allowing creators to describe the outcome they want, while the assistant orchestrates multistep workflows behind the scenes.

New creative skills and tools include:

• Brand kit creation: Describe your style, brand name and color palette; AI Assistant in Firefly generates and saves a complete logo, brand identity and color palette, ready to apply across every piece of content you create.
• Short product video creation: Turn product photos into polished, cinematic short-form videos with premium lighting, motion, audio and brand styling — ready to publish.
• Create a Quick Cut: Automatically assemble video clips into a polished first cut, edited around dialogue, narration or visual content.
• Create storyboards and generate video from storyboards: Turn an idea into a visual scene sequence, then use those storyboard frames to generate video.

AI Assistant in Firefly also delivers new customization upgrades that better understand a creator’s intent, surface any asset they describe in their own words and learn their preferences over time. Creators can now also invite collaborators to review and provide feedback on work directly inside AI Assistant in Firefly before publishing.

Firefly creative AI studio: from idea to finished content in one seamless workflow

Adobe Firefly gives every creator the speed, control and creative freedom to move from idea to high-quality content. Today, Adobe is previewing an upgraded Firefly creative AI studio experience that connects generation and editing in one place, so creators can seamlessly move projects from ideation to creation to production without breaking their flow.

The upgraded Firefly creative AI studio experience, now in private beta, is designed to give creators persistent context, reusable assets and organized workflows so they can maintain continuity, style and creative vision across every iteration and format, at every stage of production:

• Elements: Save characters, locations and objects you've already created and reuse them across generations, helping maintain consistency at scale as stories, campaigns and projects evolve in Firefly.
• Projects: Keep your assets, generations and creative context organized across Firefly and Creative Cloud, making it easier to pick up where you left off and build on previous work.

The announcement comes as creative AI becomes increasingly central to how creators work. According to Adobe’s recent Creators’ Toolkit Report, which surveyed more than 16,000 creators globally, 75% of creators describe creative AI as integrated or essential to how they work, but 85% also say the final creative decision should always remain theirs — a principle at the heart of how Adobe is building its creative agent.

Adobe brings its creative agent to Creative Cloud app

Adobe is bringing AI Assistants, powered by Adobe’s creative agent, to its category-leading Creative Cloud apps as public betas, starting with Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io. The creative agent powers AI Assistant in each application, orchestrating multi-step workflows so creative professionals can stay focused on their craft: choosing what to hand off to the assistant, what to own and how best to apply their taste, expertise and judgment to shape every editable outcome.

AI Assistant in each Creative Cloud app operates as a specialist enabling:

• Premiere: The tedious set-up work is taken care of for you: sorting assets into bins, batch renaming clips, identifying interview questions, adding markers or even assembling a working starting point. If you can do it in the Project panel or Timeline, AI Assistant can help.
• Photoshop: Describe the desired outcome, such as swapping out a background, resizing assets for every platform or organizing layers, and the assistant executes across the entire composite, applying intelligent adjustments that can continue to be adjusted further.
• Illustrator: Ask the AI Assistant to support multi-step production jobs such as generating 50 versioned files from a spreadsheet, reorganizing layers across a document or running a pre-flight check to flag color mode errors or missing fonts before anything goes to print.
• InDesign: Drop in a new brand PDF or open an existing template, then let the assistant apply updates across every layout including copy, styling and print-readiness checks.
• Frame.io: Provide creative direction and the AI Assistant helps organize shoot assets, surface feedback across revisions, and generate B-roll, all within the project.

AI Assistant is available in After Effects in private beta and Adobe is working to extend its agentic capabilities to other Creative Cloud apps for more photography, video and motion design workflows.

Bringing Adobe’s industry leading creative tools everywhere

Today's announcement builds on Adobe's strategy to bring its pro-grade creative tools to surfaces where people already work, making it easier for people to create standout content wherever inspiration strikes. Beyond the applications, Adobe’s tools are available across a number of third-party platforms that reach hundreds of millions of people worldwide, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Adobe also recently announced plans to bring its connector to Google Gemini and Slack, further expanding the reach of its creative tools across the AI ecosystem.

Pricing and availability

The latest capabilities for AI Assistant in Firefly (beta) are available today in the Firefly web app. The upgraded Firefly creative AI studio experience — including the unified generation and editing space, as well as Elements and Projects features — is available in private beta through a waitlist. For more details, review the blog post.

AI Assistant is available today in public beta across Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, Frame.io and InDesign. AI Assistant is available in private beta in After Effects. For more details, review the blog post.

David Michaels, George Washington University & Robert Harrison, University of California, San Francisco/The Conversation

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Category: Society & Community, Wellness and Healthy Living, Body and Mind

Tags: Lung disease, Kitchen, Public health, George Washington University, Chronic, Lung, Respiratory health

History is filled with stories of the great being felled by the puny. Goliath and a pebble, Achilles and his heel, the ultra-fast 6G network and … walls. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have now invented a cheap, 3D-printed solution that could help future wireless signals bend around the barriers that currently stop them in their tracks.

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Category: Telecommunications, Technology

Tags: Wi-Fi, Wireless, Aalto University, 6G, Metamaterials, 3D Printing

Picture a tiny house in your mind and it probably looks a little like a cottage on wheels. However, La Ruche takes a different approach and, rather than spreading its limited floorspace across a conventional layout, stacks its living spaces vertically like a tower.

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Category: Tiny Houses, Outdoors

Tags: Building and Construction, Tiny Footprint, Micro-House, House, Home

The name Phaos comes from the ancient Greek word for light, and the logo is made to represent the interaction between a photon and a silver halide crystal.

Logo and photo: Danielle Honan

Ask a photographer how they feel about Instagram, and you're likely to get groans. Many of us, at best, have a love-hate relationship with the app, especially since the CEO announced in 2021 that the platform would focus on video going forward. Now, the photographs you're proud of may not even be shown to everyone who's chosen to follow you, thanks to the opaque and increasingly mutable algorithm.

For film photographers, the frustration with social media platforms like Instagram is compounded by the challenges associated with the medium. Managing scans of rolls of film can be quite difficult and requires lots of organization or time, or you're left with camera rolls and hard drives filled with images without any clear information or context.

While there have been social media apps meant for film photographers in the past, few have taken off, and none have really stuck. Danielle Honan hopes to change that with Phaos – a platform built not around the logic of social media, but around the logic of film. I sat down with Honan to find out what drove her to build it, and where she sees it going.

In terms of design, every decision in Phaos reflects how film actually works, rather than how general social media works. For Honan, having the roll as an integrated unit was very important, and so she designed the app to allow users to upload an entire roll at once. "It has inspired me to shoot more film," she said. "When I get a roll, I'm super excited to have the pictures together in one place."

When you upload an entire roll, it is formatted as a contact sheet with specific looks for 35mm, 120 and large format. It also gives you the opportunity to add information such as the camera, film stock, development lab, if it was expired, any pushing or pulling information, development date and general notes. You can choose to publish the roll to your profile for public view, or simply keep it as part of your personal archive.

There are more traditional social media app features, too. You can still post individual photos without uploading an entire roll, and can like and comment on individual images. There's also a feed of people you follow, with photos shared chronologically, and a feed to discover new photographers whom you don't follow. "I like the idea of seeing pictures in the order they were posted," said Honan. "That's how Instagram started, and now I don't even know how I'm seeing things on my feed. It's really nice to see it when someone posts a new picture."

That focus on discovery is an important one for Honan. When I asked her how she wants users to feel as they scroll through the feed compared to Instagram, she focused on inspiration. "I definitely want them to be inspired and to engage with other photographers, to learn from them and connect with them," she explained. "For example, someone posted a fantastic photo with Harman Red film stock and I was like, 'Oh, I have to try this.' So finding inspiration to shoot film more, try different things, and learn."

Creating a slower pace was also a critical feature for Honan as she developed Phaos. "I wanted to create a space that appreciated the intentional, slow process of film and where I could look back at what I did," she said. Honan explained that she sees the chronological feed as a way to create that slower pace. "You're only posting when you have pictures, so you're not generating new content all the time," she said. "You're not going to get stuck doomscrolling like you would on Instagram." There are also no ads or videos in Phaos, giving a much different experience from today's Instagram.

Honan has found that the ability to see an entire roll has a similar slowing-down effect. Taking the time to look at all 36 exposures from a roll makes you move a bit slower than quickly scrolling through disparate images, and it gives you a new perspective on someone's work. She also purposefully didn't include a carousel-like feature. "I got rid of the carousel; on the iOS app, you scroll through it more like a gallery to create a more intentional experience," she said.

A view of the profile page in the iOS app.
Image: Danielle Honan

Hona's decisions about the design and functionality of Phaos are inspired by film, but they also come from experience with other apps. Like many of us, she took to Instagram to share her photographs, but it became increasingly frustrating. She explained how, unless you're a giant account, your work simply doesn't get seen. The app's move to video was a tipping point. "When I started attempting to create Reels on Instagram, I was like, 'I'm spending way too much time trying to share my work on a platform that is not making it possible,'" she said.

In 2022, she discovered a web app called Grainery, which became quite popular with film photographers. There was a premium version that cost $3 a month, and Honan (and others) liked it enough that they were paying that fee. The solo developer released a beta for the iOS app, but then they basically disappeared, and no final version was ever released. The web app isn't receiving any updates, either.

Since then, other apps have appeared, some of which seem to copy Grainery quite closely. But with all of those, Honan felt like they were missing the mark. She wanted something that went beyond a typical social platform for film, and instead added useful features tailored specifically to film photographers. In her mind, there should be an app that looks at the roll as a unit, a personal archive you can look back through.

Managing files is a challenge for all photographers, but film photographers have some added layers of complexity. Honan described the process of getting a WeTransfer link back from a lab and dumping all the images into her camera roll. Unless you take the time to set up a specific organizational structure, those images end up buried, with no metadata to help you remember information like camera, lens and lab.

"I feel like the gap is putting your rolls together, not just single posts, but posting an entire roll of photos together and being able to look back at those as your own personal digital archive, like a contact sheet," she explained. "I felt like I would get the most value out of that personally because I don't have a way to track or organize my rolls in my camera roll. I was actually shocked that didn't exist in another film social media platform yet."

Phaos is still very much in its early days. Honan started building the platform in March, and she has big plans for it. So much so that she decided to take some time off from her economic consulting job. "I think part of why I left was that I just wanted to create things and build things, and working full-time, I wasn't able to do all the stuff I wanted to do," she told me.

Thanks to previous platform development time, Honan said it took roughly two weeks to build the initial version of Phaos. She has been iterating ever since and now has both a web platform and an iOS app with around 100 users at the time of writing. She also plans to start work on an Android version soon.

The next primary feature that she's working on is a forum. "It'll be a place for things like 'film versus digital' or 'film versus iPhone' comparisons and more in-depth discussion about your work," she explained. "It gives you a way to recycle your work, like adding your photos to a communal album of 'red tone' photos and seeing what others uploaded."

She's also focused on the experience of using Phaos and how she can make it easier to use than other apps. "I hate the effort required to post on Instagram. One thing I'm considering is having a separate gallery within Phaos of all your film once you upload a roll, making it easier to select from that to create posts," she said.

As with any app, there's always the question of how it can be financially sustainable. It's still so early that Honan hasn't solved that, but she is clear that she wants it to remain free. "I've intentionally avoided monetizing for now," she explained. "Film is already so expensive; I'm not trying to profit off people like me. Maybe in the future, it could be a way for photographers to sell prints or host a portfolio. I really believe the core product should be free."

Honan says she wants to make the platform strong enough to serve as a full replacement for other social media apps. "I want to make it feel like the only platform you need," she told me. Even more important, though, Honan wants Phaos to be the landing spot for film photographers of all types and levels. "I want to build a strong, robust community around film that's eager to engage and be genuine," she said.

From a personal standpoint, an app tailored to film photography, with a better way to organize and revisit my rolls, is exactly what I've been looking for. Finding community around a shared passion is never easy, and if Phaos can be that place for film photographers, it's worth keeping an eye on.

If you're interested in checking it out, head over to the Phaos website or download the iOS app.

Back in February, when the first Tesla Cybercab rolled off the line at Tesla Gigafactory Texas, there was plenty of talk in media circles about what was to come. Now, Tesla’s certification documents submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reveal all that was previously under wraps.

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Category: Automotive, Transport

Tags: Tesla Motors, Tesla, Taxis, Autonomous Vehicles, urban transport, Self-Driving, Cabs, Tesla Model 3, Electric Vehicles

We may be on the cusp of understanding whether we can turn back time for our cells to stave off age-related disease, with the first human receiving experimental gene therapy as part of a landmark trial.

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Category: Aging Well, Wellness and Healthy Living, Body and Mind

Tags: Harvard, Age-Related, Aging, anti-aging, Glaucoma, clinical trials, gene therapy, molecular biology