Apple’s second-gen HomePod. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
This week, Apple is hosting its first-ever dedicated smart home event. While the company hasn't shared details about what it will reveal at the "Welcome Home experience" in New York City on Tuesday, October 13th, it doesn't take an army of internet sleuths to deduce we'll get news about Apple Home - specifically, new hardware. Apple finally seems to be taking the smart home seriously.
According to Bloomberg, Apple will release a smart home display alongside a refreshed HomePod Mini and Apple TV. The display, which MacRumors reports may be called HomeView, is arguably Apple's first dedicated Apple Home hardware since it launched the HomeKit …
It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. September’s list includes a tantalizing hint of the elusive dark matter at the LUX-ZEPLIN detector; entangled Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider; possible use of psychoactive substances in the Late Pleistocene; and an intriguing technical description of a telescope attributed to Galileo.
A hint of dark matter?
Physicists believe dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of matter in our universe, with the strongest (but not only) candidate being so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). But directly detecting WIMPs, or other alternative hypothetical dark matter particles, has eluded physicists for decades. We might have our first glimpse, however, courtesy of the LUX-ZEPLIN detector buried deep in a gold mine in South Dakota. Those potentially exciting results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan, with a preprint available on the arXiv. (It has been submitted to Physical Review Letters for peer review.)
The announcement came with strong caveats: the signal is just a hint, well below the threshold needed to confirm discovery, and might just be a statistical fluke. Anyone who regularly follows dark matter news knows that past tantalizing anomalies evaporated as more data came in. But the LUX-ZEPLIN team was unable to account for this event and decided to report their result to the broader physics community. They are still collecting data, as is the XENONnT at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. And China's PandaX detector is currently being built.
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