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OpenAI introduced a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers—the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence—who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life, and even companionship.

The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens is tailored for kids ages 13 to 17 with stronger protections, including content restrictions around things like self-harm and romantic chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays.

The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said.

“We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we’re showing up with the right developmental stage when we’re not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we’re also making sure that they’re not exposed to material that they shouldn’t be exposed to,” said Ann O'Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI.

The effectiveness of the safeguards remains to be seen, said Brendan Bouffard, associate general counsel for AI and privacy at children’s advocacy group Fairplay. He said it is unclear whether OpenAI’s actions are enough to address young users' compulsive use of and emotional dependence on chatbots.

“Announcements like these can be seen as a step in the right direction,” he said. “But I also would caution against parents being lured into this false sense of safety based on the announcement.”

Parents, educators, and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children's use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork. While even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers' brains are not yet fully developed, making them particularly vulnerable.

In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to AI chatbots for companionship, and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Paris has transformed into a global cycling capital in recent years, and for international tourists this development offers a new way of seeing some of the city’s most famous sights and landmarks.

In June, Paris recorded about 3.8 million tourists, roughly 3% more than in the same month last summer, according to the city’s Tourism Office.

And as visitor numbers climb, more travelers are choosing bicycles instead of buses or walking to get around.

Among them is the Buss family, from Webster, New York. The family of five is on a 12-day trip to Europe, celebrating the graduation of their two eldest children.

After having spent six days in Tenerife, they came to Paris and decided to hop on a 3-hour guided bike tour around the French capital, cycling next to the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Panthéon.

For Jamie Buss, a 49-year-old project manager working for a nonprofit, and her husband Mike, a 55-year-old IT worker for US news outlets, the bike tour allows them to see, with their children Tyler, 22, Ella, 18, and Lucy, 16, as many landmarks as possible given the little time they have to visit the capital.

“It's a unique tour because I'm used to writing things down, either writing with pen and paper or putting things in my notes to remember them,” explained Jamie.

“I like to have my notes refer to things, and you don't get that because you have to keep your hands on the bike at all times. But it's also nice to just be in the moment, and then we can come back and take a look at things a second time later and have a little bit more time to absorb the history and the culture of it all,” Jamie added.

From here, the family will finish their travels in Amsterdam, another city known for its cycling culture, before flying back to the United States.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The first smartphone with a robotic arm has been launched in China. But are new styles of devices enough to energize the flagging phone market?

A simple hand gesture triggers a hidden arm to pop out of the top of this new smartphone. The Honor Robot Phone has an innovative new gadget: an AI-powered camera on a mechanical gimbal.

The device playfully interacts with its user, performing tricks on command. It will also take a look at your outfit and give a little confidence boost with its assessment of your style.

Jamie Cooper, Sales Director at Honor, says it’s a “completely new innovation in terms of the smartphone category.”

The phone uses Honor’s own in-house AI system YOYO Robot Mode to do things like identify faces and track them. That means you can make a hands-free video call and move around as much as you want—the camera will follow, so you’re never out of frame.

What I love about it is that it actually tracks using AI. So, it has a contextual understanding. It uses multimodal tracking for AI. It tracks the user and a center person or the center focal point of a person. And it can kind of follow you around the room as well,” says Cooper.

So let's say, for example, you're cooking. You want to phone your family. And you're pottering around the kitchen, as an example. It's one of those things that can just track. And you have and keep the conversation going and keep connected with people as well, so that's something that's very interesting in terms of a use case of the device.”

The Robot Phone is aimed at content creators and vloggers who want to capture the perfect video.

Honor has partnered with professional cinema camera manufacturer ARRI to allow filming and editing in high quality. The ambition is for the moving arm to interact with the world around it in ways phones have never been able to before.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Encouraging customers to mend worn clothes instead of buying new ones might seem like a self-defeating sales strategy. But in-store repairs and sewing workshops are becoming essential retail services for clothing brands as they try to appeal to young consumers who want to save money and the planet.

While luxury fashion houses and select specialty retailers like Patagonia have offered product repairs for decades, the concept has caught on. Jeans giant Levi Strauss Co., casual wear chain Uniqlo and budget retailer Primark are some of the apparel companies hoping to win over Generation Z shoppers with a needle and thread.

Levi's created a hand-stitching course for high school students after determining that many Gen Zers lacked the sewing skills to match their interest in thrift store shopping and sustainability. Employees spend 90 minutes instructing teenagers on four tasks: sewing on a button, hemming, patching a hole, and fixing a tear.

The Wear Longer Project, which the San Francisco-based company is expanding across the U.S., builds on the repair and customization services Levi's offers at hundreds of stores worldwide.

We think it's important to empower the people who buy our clothes with the skill sets to maintain them, to get them to that second life, Paul Dillinger, Levi's head of global design innovation, said.

Detroit resident Chloe Halprin is the kind of consumer retailers hope to attract with a fix it, don't ditch it message.

In high school, Halprin shopped at inexpensive, trendy stores. Fixing a big rip felt beyond her limited sewing ability. If she damaged a top or skirt from Forever 21, I might just throw it away.

These days, Halprin buys most of her clothes secondhand. She recently learned to hem with a sewing machine and hopes to tackle projects like turning a skirt into a shirt.

I try to be conscientious of my carbon footprint, Halprin, a nonprofit grant writer, said. I really don't like waste. I'm trying to save money as well.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

At a Massachusetts lab, pebble-sized pellets are transformed into forks and films that won't leave persistent microplastics in the environment.

These are bioplastic pellets. CJ Biomaterials ferments sugar to make plant-based polymers that microbes will consume. These alternatives to traditional plastics made of fossil fuels are seen by some as one of many solutions needed to confront global plastic pollution.

At the company's Woburn research facility, lab technicians recently poured pellets into a molding machine to make forks. The test forks were thin enough for home composting, though too bendy for stabbing a steak. Other batches have been rigid, similar to a typical plastic fork. The technicians melted pellets to roll out flexible films for food packaging, like a bag for baby carrots. The film was quite strong but not stretchy like cling wrap.

Technicians from CJ Biomaterials are figuring out how the pellets’ biopolymers can make products with attributes similar to conventional plastics, but that can go in a composting bin instead of a trash can. Forks and films are breaking down in the lab’s compost bin. Straws that were added are long gone. A recently tossed-in knife showed pitting on the surface as bacteria colonized it, starting to consume the material.

Plastics have never really fundamentally been disrupted. Now, interest in bioplastics is growing because of concern over microplastics. It's the new “wild card” in this market, said the company's marketing director Leah Ford.

“I've been doing this for a long time, and the compostability has always been a really strong driver. But with the greater understanding of microplastics, I think, that's going to change how people think about materials,” she said.

Traditional plastics last for decades or even centuries as they fragment into harmful microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics. Microplastics have been found in the ocean and the air, in our food and water, and in a wide range of body tissues.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

WK Kellogg Co said that it will remove artificial colors from all its cereals by the end of this year.

The change comes a year ahead of schedule. Kellogg said last August 2025 that it would remove synthetic dyes from its cereals by the end of 2027.

But the company said it has identified fruit- and vegetable-based juices that will give cereals like Froot Loops and Apple Jacks their distinctive colors. The Battle Creek, Michigan-based company said it has also invested in equipment that will allow it to transition to natural colors.

The company said it is also removing BHT, an artificial preservative, from the small number of cereals that still contain it.

“More and more consumers are looking for foods made with simple, recognizable ingredients, and we are proud to meet those expectations even sooner than planned,” Kellogg Chief Growth Officer Doug VanDeVelde said in a statement.

Kellogg has faced pressure for years to remove artificial ingredients from its cereals, which it has already done in other countries like Canada. In 2024, dozens of people rallied outside Kellogg's headquarters and delivered petitions with 400,000 signatures asking the company to remove artificial dyes and BHT.

That pressure has grown under President Donald Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has urged food companies to phase out petroleum-based artificial dyes. Last August 2025, Kellogg also signed an agreement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton saying it would “permanently remove toxic dyes” from its cereals by the end of 2027.

Retailers are also forcing companies to act. Earlier this year, Target said it would stop selling cereals that contain artificial colors by the end of May. Walmart has also said it will remove artificial colors from its store brands by January 2027.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Software engineer Josh Dersch loves old computers. He spends countless hours tinkering in his garage, trying to coax decades-old machines back to life. He estimates he owns more than 200 vintage computers and devices in his Seattle home.

It's always been fascinating to me to see the origins of things, Dersch said. It's a fun challenge to debug and repair. You can understand the entire system from top to bottom.

Dersch is part of a growing community of vintage computer collectors who are preserving the classic machines that helped launch the digital revolution. While Silicon Valley has since moved on to shaping the future of artificial intelligence, these hardware enthusiasts are intent on saving the Atari, Commodore, and IBM machines that are ancestors to today's laptops, wearable devices, and smartphones.

Where others see junk, people like Dersch see artifacts of computer history that are worthy of attention and respect. They delight in hearing the beeps and chimes of their childhood and firing up a low-def game of Pong or Space Invaders.

The enthusiasm for the history of computers and all the stuff around it is growing, said Erik Klein, president of the Vintage Computer Federation, which organizes an annual festival at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley.

This year, more than 3,500 people attended the two-day Vintage Computer Festival in early August that celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apple, founded in 1976 in nearby Cupertino, California. It featured a panel with co-founders Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne reminiscing about the company's early days as a scrappy startup led by the late Steve Jobs.

More than a dozen such gatherings have since sprung up in cities across North America, South America, and Europe.

Growing interest is reflected in more demand for vintage computers in online marketplaces, Klein said. Rare, iconic computers like the Apple-1—the company's first product—can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A coalition of farmers, consumer associations, and environmental groups is urging Malaysia's National Biosafety Board to reject a proposed field trial of genetically modified rice, warning the project could pose risks to food safety, the environment, and farmers.

The board is evaluating an application by Zen Cropscience for the confined field trial in northern Perak state that involves a genetically modified version of the MR219 rice variety that is tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate and resists diseases caused by bacteria and fungi.

The coalition of 61 organizations said it had submitted a formal objection as part of a public consultation process that ended several weeks ago. The groups said the project is similar to one submitted for a field trial in Perlis state in 2019 that was later abandoned, and that they are renewing their earlier objections.

The groups said their main concern is the potential for genetically modified material to contaminate conventional and wild rice through cross-pollination or other means. They said Malaysia's biosafety law has insufficient legal protection and compensation mechanisms for farmers who could suffer economic losses from accidental contamination of their crops.

Farmers also worry that the genetic modification could encourage greater use of glyphosate, potentially accelerating the development of herbicide-resistant super weeds that would require farmers to apply more herbicide to control them. They warned glyphosate residues could remain in harvested rice and enter the food supply.

The integration of a gene for fungal resistance is worrying as it could potentially compromise food safety by altering nutritional values or increasing allergenic and toxin levels, the coalition said.

Abdul Rashid Yob, who heads a farmers' association representing 200,000 members nationwide, pointed to previous negative experience with the herbicide-tolerant Clearfield rice. While production initially improved, weeds quickly developed resistance, forcing farmers to use higher doses of herbicides, which raised production costs and degraded soil fertility, he said.

GM rice will be much worse. It is not the answer, he said.

Malaysia relies heavily on imported rice, with domestic production meeting only about half its national consumption needs, according to official data.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A deluge of 90,000 rubber ducks poured out of a truck and into the Chicago River, then bobbed along a stretch of the skyscraper-lined river in the annual Chicago Ducky Derby that raises thousands of dollars for charity.

The truck dumped the ducks from one side of a half-raised bridge. After forming a yellow pool in the river, the ducks floated for around 15 minutes before a winner and runner-up were plucked from the water.

The annual event, a fundraiser for Special Olympics Illinois, draws thousands of participants. At an accompanying festival, participants snapped pictures with inflatable ducks and doodled on a chalkboard under the prompt, “I adopt a duck because …” Some sported rubber duck-printed shirts.

Becky Cavanagh, the Ducky Derby ambassador and a 13-year Special Olympics athlete, held up the winning duck to the cheers of crowds packed on both sides of the river.

Cavanagh said her favorite part about the Special Olympics was “making new friends.” Asked before the race how she felt about picking the winning duck, she cheered. “Woo!”

Special Olympics Illinois organizes competitions across the state for people with disabilities and special needs. It costs $10 to sponsor a “lone duck,” which will feed an athlete lunch at a competition, and $30 for a “quack pack” of six ducks, which supplies gold medals for a team. The competition has raised more than $480,000.

The sponsor of the fastest duck wins an SUV, and the runner-up will win $2,500 in cash, said Pete Beale-DelVecchio, president of Special Olympics Illinois.

“It really is a fantastic day for our athletes,” he said ahead of the race at an area next to the river, where derby attendees posed with inflatable rubber ducks and bopped along to a live DJ.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A new study calculates that human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood of the tinderbox weather conditions that sparked Canada's massive summer wildfires, which sent smoke everywhere and raised the ire of some politicians.

Fire and climate scientists said some politicians, who have talked about punishing Canada for poor fire management, should look more in the mirror than up north when it comes to blame, given the United States' huge historical emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil, and gas.

The fire weather conditions in Northwest Territories and northwestern Ontario, while unusual, weren't that rare, but still were made twice as likely by global warming, according to a study by World Weather Attribution, a group of international scientists who examine extreme weather conditions to see if there are climate change fingerprints. It's about the same as the team found for summer fires in France, but not nearly as clear a climate fingerprint as they calculated in Spanish fires, which the scientists said were 20 times more likely because of climate change.

The study, which was done so quickly that it has not been peer-reviewed yet, looked at the weather conditions that are connected to large wildfires and the Canadian index for those conditions, which are heat, lack of rain, humidity, and wind. The researchers found the doubling of frequency when—using scientifically accepted techniques to search for climate fingerprints—they compared current conditions to a world without the 2.5 degrees (1.4 °C) of warming that's occurred since the industrial age and the burning of fossil fuels started. The weeklong weather conditions that led to the fires in Ontario are now the type that can happen every six years or so, the report said.

“In a pre-industrial climate, this would have been much less likely to occur, maybe once in a lifespan. So, climate change has made those events more likely,” said study co-author Jonathan Boucher, a fire scientist at the Canadian Forest Service.

Outside climate and fire scientists said the flash study made sense and reflects a world where hotter and drier conditions are making fires burn more often and more intensely.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.