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Apple is reportedly preparing a new iPad mini with an OLED display for release in October.

The OLED model could be the iPad mini’s biggest upgrade since its 2021 redesign.

Updated entry-level iPad and iPad Air models are also reportedly planned for 2027.

Not many compact Android tablets have really taken the market by storm, which is one reason the iPad mini continues to stand out. The small tablet has been something of the forgotten child of Apple’s lineup in recent years, but that may finally change this fall with what is reportedly its biggest upgrade since 2021.

Bloomberg reports that Apple is preparing a new iPad mini with an OLED display, citing people with knowledge of the company’s plans who asked not to be identified. The model is reportedly codenamed J510 and could be unveiled as early as this fall, with a release planned for October.

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Genshin Impact's free 5-star selector, To Temper Thyself and Journey Far, will begin its fifth cycle on August 10, loosely coinciding with the expected release date of update 7.0 and the Snezhnaya region. The milestone, tucked away in the game's new event timeline , is significant, as it marks the end of the giveaway's four-part debut cycle and could open it up to changes including new characters being added into the rotation.

To Temper Thyself and Journey Far lets Genshin Impact players obtain free Constellations for 5-star characters they already own by repeatedly completing in-game tasks. Each cycle is 12 weeks long, and you have to log eight completed weeks in that time to earn a Constellation (among other rewards), completing at least five days of tasks each week.

The other catch is that you can't redeem the same character multiple times to stack up Constellations. Most people use the event to take a character with no Constellations to "C1," unlocking the first passive ability normally acquired by pulling duplicates of that character. But if you had a character at C1, you could also use a freebie to upgrade them to C2, and so on.

With the next cycle of To Temper Thyself and Journey Far beginning, players will seemingly be able to claim another four free Constellations in the year ahead. The question is whether the selection of characters will be updated in the Snezhnaya era – either expanded, with more characters becoming redeemable, or edited, with some characters rotating out.

(Image credit: miHoYo) Many players have expressed hopes that more and better characters will be added to this event following Snezhnaya's release. Yumemizuki Mizuki is a notable absentee as the only standard-banner character not available, though she is included in the dedicated standard 5-star selector that comes around with Genshin Impact's anniversary.

The timing of the event could leave the door open to more Sumeru or even some Fontaine-era characters becoming available, though I wouldn't expect the strongest of the lot to be given free Constellations like this. As one of the 11 people who pulled Chiori and Emilie, I don't think adding them to the list would be a threat to characters like Zibai or Nefer.

The original roster mostly consisted of old and outdated characters, like Kamisato Ayato and Eula, but some found new life with free Constellations. A C1 Shenhe is a more compelling teammate for the meta-relevant Cryo DPS Skirk, and a C1 Hu Tao isn't an unreasonable Pyro partner for modern support character packages like Columbina and Ineffa.

The value of the characters in the event has changed in the past year, which has seen the power level of new characters rise considerably alongside buffs to older units. For example, recent changes to Yae Miko have made her probably the best C1 pick in the entire game for her synergy with the Stellar Conduct reaction which much of the Snezhnaya cast will evidently be built around. Cyno, another Stellar Conduct target, is in a similar position. Likewise, characters like Albedo and Klee benefited from buffs to units with the Hexerei faction tag, making their early Constellations more appealing.

Valve has "a nice thing going on on PC," Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney says, but "they're missing out on a lot of opportunity" without the likes of Fortnite and Genshin Impact .

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Two physicists have used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to solve a stubborn mathematical problem in physics that had vexed researchers for more than a decade.

Their solution, described July 1 in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment , came about when the physicists chose to revisit a problem they thought they had attempted to solve exhaustively within a topic they knew intimately. This concept, known as jamming, refers to the sudden transition from a fluid system to a rigid-but-disordered one.

The simplest way to understand this idea is to imagine a pool table covered with billiard balls. If you keep adding balls, eventually the table becomes so congested that there is no space for any more and each ball on the table is securely held in place by its neighbors. This is a disordered, completely frozen situation known as a jammed state.

The study authors —‬ ‪ Giorgio Parisi , winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics , and Francesco Zamponi , ‪both physicists at the Sapienza University of Rome ‪—‬ and collaborators had mathematically described jamming and offered numerical solutions in a 2014 paper . In the process, they noticed that two parameters — $a$ and $b$ — would mysteriously always add up to 1.

"The parameters $a$ and $b$ dictate exactly how the distribution of contact forces and small gaps [between balls] scales as the physical system hits that critical jamming point," Zamponi told Live Science in an email. "We were quite bothered by the fact that we had never been able to mathematically prove the relation $a+b=1$."

Moreover, separate work by Matthieu Wyart , a physicist at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute (EPFL), took a completely different approach but yielded the same relation. For Zamponi and colleagues, this suggested "entirely new physical concepts" were needed to link their and Wyart's work and simultaneously explain why $a+b=1$.

Fast-forward a decade, and no progress had been made in finding these new concepts nor a reason for why $a+b=1$. Stuck in a rut, Parisi had a thought: perhaps generative AI could offer a fresh perspective. For this, he turned to Anthropic's Claude. After Claude successfully reproduced the 2014 numerical result, Parisi prompted the AI to prove why $a+b=1$.

The researchers prompted Claude 40 times in order to get a publishable solution to the jamming problem. (Image credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images) "Giorgio initially sent me Claude's output while I was traveling, so I ended up reviewing it on an airplane," Zamponi recalled. "As I read through the LaTeX file Claude generated, it became immediately clear that the core idea was correct … That moment significantly shifted my perspective on what these models can achieve in theoretical physics."

Though the initial output contained some errors that required revision, the fundamental idea was correct. And in a total of just 40 prompts, the researchers had a verified publishable analytical solution. To their surprise, this solution was hidden directly within the equations themselves; they didn't need any external physical assumptions or deep connections between functions.

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"It is entirely possible that a pure mathematician who works full time on such kind[s] of equations might have spotted the solution," Zamponi told Live Science. "But this is a particularly interesting point for us, as it highlights how Claude gave us instant access to a vast repository of mathematical training and formal skills that lay just outside our usual domain."

Whether Claude simply trawled the vast mathematical literature and used pattern matching to find a way to solve their problem or if it applied something akin to creativity is, for Zamponi, moot because they "could not see the path forward, and Claude did," he said. And although he admitted that interacting with AI forces him to reconsider his definitions of reasoning, intuition, and creativity, Zamponi will continue to collaborate with the technology to speed up mundane tasks and provide fresh perspectives on challenging problems.

Now, Zamponi is applying this collaborative approach to a problem involving the “random sequential addition of hard hyperspheres," he said. “It is another excellent case study because, while the AI drastically accelerates writing and optimizing code, I have had to provide the vast majority of the conceptual ideas, which suggests that human guidance remains indispensable, at least in this case."

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U.S. forces carried out a sixth consecutive day of strikes against Iran on Thursday, continuing to cast doubt on the negotiations between Washington and Tehran.

The new strikes took place at 2 p.m., according to U.S. Central Command , “to further degrade Iranian military capabilities.” The ongoing strikes come as the U.S. reimposes a blockade of Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz — and as the White House continues to emphasize a peace deal remains possible.

During a press briefing earlier Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the recent strikes are in retaliation for Iran’s violation of the memorandum of understanding the two nations signed last month.

“Specifically, in the memorandum of understanding that they signed, they were not to fire on commercial vessels moving through the Strait of Hormuz. And unfortunately they have made the tragic decision — for them — to do that,” Leavitt told reporters.

The White House last month announced hostilities between the two countries would temporarily cease under the memorandum — but President Donald Trump this week formally notified lawmakers the U.S. was once again at war with Iran.

Leavitt on Thursday said Iran continues to reach out to the U.S. to negotiate a permanent ceasefire. Despite the blockade, she added, “the strait is open for ships that are not traveling to and from Iranian ports.”

“President Trump is not going to sit by and allow these active acts of terrorism to take place in the strait without ensuring Iran pays consequences for that,” Leavitt said.