Tootfinder

Plaud unveils the $179 Plaud Note Pro, an AI note-taking device with two extra mics to hear audio 16.4 feet away and a 1-inch display, shipping in October (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/766335/plaud-ai-note-pro-launch-pricing-availabili…

Plaud upgrades its card-sized AI note-taker with better range
Plaud is launching the Note Pro, a new version of its AI-powered Note device it launched in 2023. The Note Pro can pick up audio within a 16.4-foot area and comes with a small display.

Sweeping the pion chimney for axion-like particles with KOTO
Reuven Balkin, Stefania Gori, Dean J. Robinson, Christiane Scherb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08402 https://

Sweeping the pion chimney for axion-like particles with KOTO
We demonstrate that novel limits on prompt axion-like particles (ALPs) in the hard-to-probe mass range near the neutral pion - the so-called pion chimney - may be obtained from recasting $K_L \to 3π^0 \to 6γ$ KOTO data to search for $K_L \to 2π^0 a \to 6γ$. We also explore the power of KOTO $6γ$ data to probe $K_L \to 2π^0a$ for a broader range of ALP masses, incorporating displaced decays.

An approximate history of my amateur phone photography:
1. Really poor photos. Unsavory interest in (low resolution) panoramas.
2. Photos get a little better. Sometimes they're HDRs (I suspect the camera app was set to "auto").
3. A new phone. Higher resolution and a gyroscope.
4. Switching to LineageOS, and therefore to #OpenCamera. HDR enabled unconditionally.
5. HDR does not always come great (compared to the stock Motorola app that doesn't work anymore). I enable saving component photos, so I could try getting a better quality combination using the PC. I never manage that.
6. I start experimenting with exposure correction (combined with HDR). Sometimes I do multiple photos with different "Eves" to choose the best one.
7. A new phone. Finally, given even the gyroscope was failing already.
8. I learn that Pixels have "HDR " that gets activated when you do standard mode photos. For a while I do both standard and HDR photos; also I compare the middle component image with the standard mode image. [https://opencamera.sourceforge.io/help.html#faq]
9. Before I reach any final conclusions, I read "What is HDR, anyway?" I disable HDR entirely, instead I save standard mode (i.e. HDR ) raw images (which presumably aren't affected by HDR ) [https://www.lux.camera/what-is-hdr/]. Not that I ever managed to get anything good out of raws.
10. I discover that I can switch the lens. Today I've made my first photos, switching lens to get optical zoom 💪.

SciReasoner: Laying the Scientific Reasoning Ground Across Disciplines
Yizhou Wang, Chen Tang, Han Deng, Jiabei Xiao, Jiaqi Liu, Jianyu Wu, Jun Yao, Pengze Li, Encheng Su, Lintao Wang, Guohang Zhuang, Yuchen Ren, Ben Fei, Ming Hu, Xin Chen, Dongzhan Zhou, Junjun He, Xiangyu Yue, Zhenfei Yin, Jiamin Wu, Qihao Zheng, Yuhao Zhou, Huihui Xu, Chenglong Ma, Yan Lu, Wenlong Zhang, Chunfeng Song, Philip Torr, Shixiang Tang, Xinzhu Ma, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai

SciReasoner: Laying the Scientific Reasoning Ground Across Disciplines
We present a scientific reasoning foundation model that aligns natural language with heterogeneous scientific representations. The model is pretrained on a 206B-token corpus spanning scientific text, pure sequences, and sequence-text pairs, then aligned via SFT on 40M instructions, annealed cold-start bootstrapping to elicit long-form chain-of-thought, and reinforcement learning with task-specific reward shaping, which instills deliberate scientific reasoning. It supports four capability famili…

The Hidden Role of Anisotropies in Shaping Structure Formation in Cosmological N-Body Simulations
Francesco Sylos Labini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13765 https://

The Hidden Role of Anisotropies in Shaping Structure Formation in Cosmological N-Body Simulations
Initial conditions in cosmological $N$-body simulations are typically generated by displacing particles from a regular cubic lattice using a correlated field derived from the linear power spectrum, often via the Zel'dovich approximation. While this procedure reproduces the target two-point statistics (e.g., the power spectrum or correlation function), it introduces subtle anisotropies due to the underlying lattice structure. These anisotropies, invisible to angle-averaged diagnostics, become ev…