James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix shape of #DNA, has died at age 97.

James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died. He was 97.

The breakthrough -- made when the brash, Chicago-born Watson was just 24 -- turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But near the end of his life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people are less intelligent than white people.

Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a double helix, consisting of two strands that coil around each other to create what resembles a long, gently twisting ladder.

That realization was a breakthrough. It instantly suggested how hereditary information is stored and how cells duplicate their DNA when they divide. The duplication begins with the two strands of DNA pulling apart like a zipper.

Even among non-scientists, the double helix would become an instantly recognized symbol of science, showing up in such places as the work of Salvador Dali and a British postage stamp.

The discovery helped open the door to more recent developments such as tinkering with the genetic makeup of living things, treating disease by inserting genes into patients, identifying human remains and criminal suspects from DNA samples and tracing family trees. But it has also raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether we should be altering the body’s blueprint for cosmetic reasons or in a way that is transmitted to a person’s offspring.

“Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, that was pretty clear,” Watson once said. He later wrote: “There was no way we could have foreseen the explosive impact of the double helix on science and society.”

Watson never made another lab finding that big. But in the decades that followed, he wrote influential textbooks and a best-selling memoir and helped guide the project to map the human genome. He picked out bright young scientists and helped them. And he used his prestige and contacts to influence science policy.

Watson died in hospice care after a brief illness, his son said Friday. His former research lab confirmed he had passed away a day earlier.

“He never stopped fighting for people who were suffering from disease,” Duncan Watson said of his father.

Watson’s initial motivation for supporting the gene project was personal: His son Rufus had been hospitalized with a possible diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Watson figured that knowing the complete makeup of DNA would be crucial for understanding that disease -- maybe in time to help his son.

He gained unwelcome attention in 2007, when the Sunday Times Magazine of London quoted him as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- where all the testing says not really.” He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with Black employees find this is not true.”

He apologized, but after an international furor he was suspended from his job as chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He retired a week later. He had served in various leadership jobs there for nearly 40 years.

In a television documentary that aired in early 2019, Watson was asked if his views had changed. “No, not at all,” he said. In response, the Cold Spring Harbor lab revoked several honourary titles it had given Watson, saying his statements were “reprehensible” and “unsupported by science.”

Watson’s combination of scientific achievement and controversial remarks created a complicated legacy.

He has shown “a regrettable tendency toward inflammatory and offensive remarks, especially late in his career,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019. “His outbursts, particularly when they reflected on race, were both profoundly misguided and deeply hurtful. I only wish that Jim’s views on society and humanity could have matched his brilliant scientific insights.”

Long before that, Watson scorned political correctness.

“A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid,” he wrote in “The Double Helix,” his bestselling 1968 book about the DNA discovery.

For success in science, he wrote: “You have to avoid dumb people. ... Never do anything that bores you. ... If you can’t stand to be with your real peers (including scientific competitors) get out of science. ... To make a huge success, a scientist has to be prepared to get into deep trouble.”

It was in the fall of 1951 that the tall, skinny Watson -- already the holder of a Ph.D. at 23 -- arrived at Britain’s Cambridge University, where he met Crick. As a Watson biographer later said, “It was intellectual love at first sight.”

Crick himself wrote that the partnership thrived in part because the two men shared “a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, and an impatience with sloppy thinking.”

Together they sought to tackle the structure of DNA, aided by X-ray research by colleague Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Watson was later criticized for a disparaging portrayal of Franklin in “The Double Helix,” and today she is considered a prominent example of a female scientist whose contributions were overlooked. (She died in 1958.)

Watson and Crick built Tinker Toy-like models to work out the molecule’s structure. One Saturday morning in 1953, after fiddling with bits of cardboard he had carefully cut to represent fragments of the DNA molecule, Watson suddenly realized how these pieces could form the “rungs” of a double helix ladder.

His first reaction: “It’s so beautiful.”

Following the discovery, Watson spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, then joined the faculty at Harvard in 1955. Before leaving Harvard in 1976, he essentially created the university’s program for molecular biology, scientist Mark Ptashne recalled in a 1999 interview.

Watson became director of the Cold Spring Harbor lab in 1968, its president in 1994 and its chancellor 10 years later. He made the lab on Long Island an educational center for scientists and non-scientists, focused research on cancer, instilled a sense of excitement and raised huge amounts of money.

He transformed the lab into a “vibrant, incredibly important center,” Ptashne said. It was “one of the miracles of Jim: a more disheveled, less smooth, less typically ingratiating person you could hardly imagine.”

Training your #brain may improve focus and attention. Many people have started playing Wordle or doing crossword puzzles, but those brain ticklers don’t appear to improve overall cognition, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently told viewers on CNN.

“What crossword puzzles and word games are probably really good at is making you better at crossword puzzles and word games,” Gupta said. “People often use brain-training exercises with the hopes of reducing their risk (of dementia). Truth is, there’s not a lot of data on this to suggest it actually reduces your risk for dementia.”

But there’s a new twist to that scientific conundrum: According to a new clinical trial, the success of brain training in slowing cognitive decline may depend on the type of game and how it affects certain neurotransmitters in the brain.

Brain games that focus on boosting attention and improving processing speed — like BrainHQ’s Double Decision and Freeze Frame — appear to preserve acetylcholine, a key neurotransmitter, according to the new research.

Acetylcholine is an “excitatory” neurotransmitter and neuromodulator, which “functions like a switch to make the brain more awake, more focused and attentive,” said senior study author Etienne de Villers-Sidani, an associate professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal.

When acetylcholine is activated, it changes the activity of the entire brain, said Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco and co-founder and chief scientist of Posit Science, which makes BrainHQ, a for-profit brain-training company.

An elder statesman in the field of neuroplasticity, Merzenich and two other scientists received the prestigious Kavli Award in Neuroscience in 2016 for their groundbreaking discoveries that the adult brain could change, adapt and create new neural connections throughout life. Prior to their discoveries, it was thought that the brain was unable to change or regenerate after a certain point in early adulthood.

“This is the first human study to document an upregulation of acetylcholine, which is absolutely crucial for sustaining brain plasticity in aging,” Merzenich said.

Upregulation causes a cell to add more receptors for a neurotransmitter, thus boosting its ability to respond.

“This is an important study because the training had a brain-wide impact — it’s not limited to the very narrow set of processes that people were trained on,” Merzenich said. “We’re talking about a fundamental physical chemical change that we know really matters as a contributor to brain health.”

The discovery adds to existing knowledge about how to prevent cognitive decline, said preventive neurologist Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of research at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Boca Raton, Florida.

Eating a well-balanced diet, improving sleep and getting regular exercise are all proven ways to enhance brain power and overall vitality. Research has also showed that engaging the brain in new ways builds cognitive reserve, which is how the brain can maintain its functioning in the face of aging, damage or early stages of disease.

Brain training can be one of the many ways to build cognitive reserve, Isaacson said.

“There is no one magic pill to prevent dementia, but a combination of interventions can help people take control in the fight against Alzheimer’s,” he said. “Because of the science, I’ve suggested these exact BrainHQ tests as a component of a cognitive engagement plan, along with learning a new language, playing a new instrument or taking up a new hobby, like dancing or photography.”
The games they played

The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed gaming journal JMIR Serious Games, randomized 92 relatively healthy older adults from Quebec into two groups. Each group was asked to do 30 minutes of daily brain training for 10 weeks.

The control group played the card game Solitaire and Bricks Breaking Hex — which requires the user to break bricks in groups of the same color — at their own pace. The intervention group played BrainHQ’s Double Decision and Freeze Frame modules, which became progressively harder as players improved.

Freeze Frame displays a target image and then a series of other images, asking the user to click “no” for every wrong image. Double Decision briefly shows the user one of two cars in a desert, along with a Route 66 sign that can appear anywhere on the screen. To do the training correctly, the player must quickly click on the correct car and the location of the sign.

An earlier version of Double Decision was used in the 2001 ACTIVE trial (Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly), which found that cognitive gains from the training were still present at a five-year follow-up.

Cognitive and other testing was done before and after the training and at a three-month follow-up. Acetylcholine was measured by PET scans.

According to the scans, the intervention group had a 2.3 per cent increase in the upregulation of acetylcholine after the 10-week high speed training. The improvement was in key areas of the brain responsible for memory and decision-making, said functional imaging specialist Dr. Raj Attariwala, founder and medical director of AIM Medical Imaging in Vancouver, who was not involved in the study.

This improvement nearly countered the average 2.5 per cent decline in acetylcholine that occurs naturally in each decade of life. The control group, however, had no significant benefit.

Although the study advances science in the field, it’s too soon to draw conclusions because the “work is early stage (and) effect sizes are small,” said brain game researcher Aaron Seitz, a joint professor of psychology, game design, and physical therapy, movement and rehabilitation services at the Northeastern University Bouvé College of Health Sciences in Boston. He was not involved with the study.

“It will be important for others to replicate these findings before we can reliably conclude that acetylcholine production is upregulated by these types of computerized exercises,” Seitz said.

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN

#Tech billionaire Thiel says Greta Thunberg servant of ‘#Antichrist’, The eight hours of lectures fused religious beliefs with warnings against technology regulation, according to recordings reviewed by The Washington Post.

In four roughly two-hour talks delivered over the past month at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Thiel argued that those proposing limits on technology development threaten to bring about the destruction of the United States and an era of global totalitarian rule, the Post reported Friday.

Thiel, part of the so-called PayPal mafia that also includes Elon Musk, has a net worth that stands at around USA$27 billion and has close ties to the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance, a former associate.

He was also the only major figure from Silicon Valley that supported Donald Trump in his 2016 campaign to be president.

In Thiel’s view, the biblical Antichrist is not an evil tech genius but someone who warns of existential risk nonstop and calls for strong regulation in innovative sectors.

“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” Thiel said in his September 15 opening lecture, referring to Thunberg and AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky, according to the recordings.

In his talk, the billionaire criticized financial regulations as signs that a world government has begun to emerge that could be taken over by an Antichrist figure.

“It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money,” Thiel said, describing an “incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture” that gives wealthy people only an “illusion of power and autonomy.”

The lectures come amid rising Christian nationalism in the United States and as Silicon Valley leaders escalate their fight against AI regulation under U.S. President Trump’s second term.

Tech leader John Ruffolo hopeful #Canada will take digital sovereignty seriously

OpenAI’s Sora joins Meta in pushing AI-generated videos. Some are worried about a flood of ‘AI slop’.

If the future of the internet looks like a constant stream of amusing videos generated by artificial intelligence, then OpenAI just placed its stake in an emerging market.

The company behind ChatGPT released its new Sora social media app on Tuesday, an attempt to draw the attention of eyeballs currently staring at short-form videos on TikTok, YouTube or Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook.

The new iPhone app taps into the appeal of being able to make a video of yourself doing just about anything that can be imagined, in styles ranging from anime to highly realistic.

But a scrolling flood of such videos taking over social media has some worried about “AI slop” that crowds out more authentic human creativity and degrades the information ecosystem.

“These things are so compelling,” said Jose Marichal, a professor of political science at California Lutheran University who studies how AI is restructuring society. “I think what sucks you in is that they’re kind of implausible, but they’re realistic looking.”

The Sora app’s official launch video features an AI-generated version of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaking from a psychedelic forest, and later, the moon and a stadium crowded with cheering fans watching rubber duck races. He introduces the new tool before handing it off to colleagues placed in other outlandish scenarios. The app is available only on Apple devices for now, starting in the U.S. and Canada.

Meta launched its own feed of AI short-form videos within its Meta AI app last week. In an Instagram post announcing the new Vibes product, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a carousel of AI videos, including a cartoon version of himself, an army of fuzzy, beady-eyed beings jumping around and a kitten kneading a ball of dough. Both Sora and Vibes are designed to be highly personalized, recommending new videos based on what people have already engaged with.

Marichal’s own social media feeds on TikTok and other sites are already full of such videos, from a “housecat riding a wild animal from the perspective of a doorbell camera” to fake natural disaster reports that are engaging but easily debunked. He said you can’t blame people for being hard-wired to “want to know if something extraordinary is happening in the world.”

What’s dangerous, he said, is when they dominate what we see online.

“We need an information environment that is mostly true or that we can trust because we need to use it to make rational decisions about how to collectively govern,” he said.

If not, “we either become super, super skeptical of everything or we become super certain,” Marichal said. “We’re either the manipulated or the manipulators. And that leads us toward things that are something other than liberal democracy, other than representative democracy.”

OpenAI made some efforts to address those concerns in its announcement on Tuesday.

“Concerns about doomscrolling, addiction, isolation, and (reinforcement learning)-sloptimized feeds are top of mind,” it said in a blog post. It said it would “periodically poll users on their wellbeing” and give them options to adjust their feed, with a built-in bias to recommend posts from friends rather than strangers.

Matt O’brien, The Associated Press

AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.

First-of-its-kind medical robot is helping doctors perform spinal surgeries in Delaware.

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (KYW) - A first-of-its-kind medical robot is helping doctors at Nemours Children’s Hospital perform spinal surgeries.

Doctors at Nemours said this robot is making surgery faster and more precise, and it means a quicker and easier recovery for patients.

Rhiannon Groff, 16, is recovering from a new kind of spine surgery performed by Dr. Brett Shannon at Nemours.

The 11th grader has scoliosis, a curvature of the spine.

“I would have a lot of soreness and aching, especially in my lower back,” she said.

To relieve the pain and straighten her back, surgeons place rods like these that are held in place with a series of screws.

“It’s important to make sure that they’re placed exactly in the bone rather than outside into the lung or to the blood vessels or to the nerve roots,” said Shannon.

Doctors said the robot makes spine surgery faster and more accurate. Nemours is the first facility on the East Coast to have this new spinal robot.

“This elevates us to another generation of being able to see what is unseen beneath the surface and understand the three-dimensional geometry much better,” said Dr. Suken Shah of Nemours.

The robot is equipped with imaging to pinpoint the location of the screws. It can also assist in getting them precisely inserted, not touching nearby vital structures, just millimeters away.

Groff said there’s no more pain two months after the surgery.

“When I first heard that it was gonna be assisted by a robot, I honestly thought it was really cool,” she said. “And I’m so glad that it’s helping people like me and people with more serious conditions recover and get better.”

Groff is already stretching, ready to head back to running track pain-free.

The team at Nemours said they’re using the new robot to assist in a variety of spinal surgeries.

By Stephanie Stahl, Nate Sylves.

San Francisco billboard challenge puts AI engineers to the test. SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) -- On a quiet San Francisco street, a plain white billboard seemed to appear out of nowhere. No logo, no tagline, just five strings of numbers. Was it an ad? An art project? Or something else entirely?

“It was a moment of desperation,” he said.

Alfred Wahlforss, cofounder and CEO of a small startup called Listen Labs, had a big problem: how to compete for artificial intelligence engineers against Silicon Valley giants.

“We’re hiring over 100 people over the next few months and there are empty spots, but we can’t fill them because Mark Zuckerberg is giving US$100 million offers to the best engineers,” he said.

So they did something off the wall, spending a fifth of their marketing budget, about $5,000, on a billboard.

To most, it looked like gibberish. To the right eyes, a coding challenge. Solve it and you land on a website and face the real test, build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famed for its nearly impossible door policy.

Quirky, sure? But for Listen Labs, the bouncer challenge was a metaphor for their own work, using AI to decide who gets interviewed for market research and who doesn’t.

They expected a few engineers might notice. Then someone posted it online and the puzzle went viral.

“Were you surprised by the reaction? It was wild,” he said.

Within days, thousands took a shot. 430 have cracked it, among them Alex Nicita, a software consultant from New York.

“It was very fun to go through, solve the challenge and reach the top of the leader board,” he said.

Now he’s in the interview round, and yes, some of these code breakers have already been hired.

In the end, 60 people made the cut, including the winner who scored a night at Berghain, all expenses paid.

“It’s a reminder to take risks and do something unique and different and extra extraordinary things happen,” Wahlforss said.

US$2,000 for a phone? Apple says yes.

Back in 2017, consumers balked at the idea of a US$1,000 iPhone. Now, some shoppers may end up paying double that if they choose Apple’s latest top-of-the-line model.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max, the larger variant of Apple’s Pro phone that launches today along with the iPhone 17, 17 Pro and iPhone Air, costs $2,000 if buyers choose the version with two terabytes (2TB) of storage. Phones with extra storage typically cost more, but this is the first time Apple has released a 2TB option for the iPhone, making it one of the most expensive phones on the market.

The launch comes as Apple faces mounting pressure to boost iPhone sales amid concerns about its AI strategy. Offering a more expensive price tier for the iPhone allows Apple to generate more revenue without selling more units during what has been, until recently, a rocky smartphone market. Some analysts say consumers, tightening their purse strings because of inflation and tariffs, have been cutting back spending on smartphones.

Apple’s new iPhones should modestly raise the product’s average selling price, or the average price iPhones are sold at, said Angelo Zino, senior vice president at investment research firm CFRA. That’s a metric analysts monitor as a sign of how lucrative the iPhone is for Apple.

But Zino largely expects the price boost to be driven by demand for the iPhone Air, which is $100 more expensive than last year’s iPhone 16 Plus. The 2TB storage option is a means for Apple to differentiate its high-end phones from the competition, he says. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra and Google’s Pixel 10 Pro XL top out at 1TB of storage.

“I think it’s an interesting kind of offering, in the sense that I don’t believe there’s another phone out there that offers a two terabyte internal storage,” he said.

The $2,000 iPhone may be Apple’s most expensive phone yet, but it’s not quite as pricey as foldable phones from Samsung and Google with 1TB of storage. The 1TB version of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 costs $2,419.99, while the Pixel 10 Pro Fold with the same amount of storage is priced at $2,149.

Many buyers aren’t likely to immediately face that price tag since carriers typically offer trade-in deals and payment plans to soften the blow. Fifty-five percent of phone shoppers in the United States — including those who purchase flip phones and basic mobile phones — buy their device through an installment plan, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

And it’s shoppers looking for less expensive phones, not premium devices like the iPhone 17 Pro Max, that are more likely to hold off on upgrading.

“Economic uncertainty tends to compress demand at the lower end of the market, where price sensitivity is highest,” the International Data Corporation’s Nabila Popal wrote in a report earlier this month.

Apple’s Pro iPhones tend to sell better than the standard entry-level models, particularly in the United States, according to CFRA’s Zino and Josh Lowitz, an analyst for Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

The increased storage may also be another sign that Apple is marketing its “pro” iPhones towards content creators and video editors. Large multimedia files typically take up more space, and the Pro models also include support for tools used to sync video across multiple cameras. Apple said it filmed its September launch event on an iPhone 17 Pro.

Lowitz noted that 2TB is considered a lot of storage even for a laptop. Those who purchase 2TB laptops typically work in fields that require saving a lot of large files locally, like graphic designers who need to preserve hundreds of different design versions for projects.

“Other than people with extraordinary video usage, two terabytes is just … it’s a crazy amount of storage,” he said.

Apple announced its new iPhone lineup on September 9 on its campus in Cupertino, California, ahead of the Friday launch. The Pro models include a redesigned back panel and a camera with a longer zoom, along with extended battery life. The iPhones also have better performance due to Apple’s new chip and an updated design that allows for better heat dissipation, Apple claims.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives predicts iPhone preorders will increase five to 10 per cent compared to last year since the firm estimates 20 per cent of global iPhone owners haven’t upgraded in the past four years.

Article written by Lisa Eadicicco, CNN

‘It’s a game changer’: New implant helps stabilize blood pressure in patients with spinal cord injuries.


Research led by teams at several universities worldwide, including the University of Calgary, shows that a new implantable system on patients’ spines can restore blood pressure balance after a spinal cord injury.

The findings, published in both Nature and Nature Medicine, describe a targeted therapy to address blood pressure regulation in 14 patients across four clinical studies conducted at three medical centres in Canada, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

“Blood pressure is a profound issue after a spinal cord injury, both highs and lows,” said Aaron Phillips, an associate dean at the University of Calgary Cumming School of Medicine, who is involved in the research.

“This is because the spinal cord is disconnected from the brain, which is responsible for controlling blood pressure.”

Phillips explains that low blood pressure can lead to fainting and reduced energy, while high blood pressure can increase the risk of a stroke.

“We also know that this blood pressure instability that happens after a spinal cord injury can lead to cardiovascular disease over the long term,” he said.

One of the 14 participants in the clinical trial is Cody Krebs from Alberta.

The 32-year-old says a semi-truck blew through a stop sign and t-boned his vehicle in 2022.

“That resulted in me breaking my neck — C6 and C7 level,” said Krebs.

Krebs is now in a wheelchair and the damage to his spinal cord means he can’t regulate his blood pressure.

“I get really lightheaded and dizzy, and my ears can start ringing,” he said.

As part of the trial, Krebs had one of the implantable systems surgically placed in his spine.

“This is a device that is implanted around the spinal cord. It delivers a low electrical current to basically replace the signal the brain would normally give to control blood pressure,” said Dr. Fady Girgis, a neurosurgeon and associate professor at the University of Calgary.

“Surgery, of course, carries some risk, but these devices have been around for a long time and are generally very safe. They can prevent patients from needing to take blood pressure medications.”

The electrical currents in Krebs’ device are controlled externally with a remote. A new prototype has been developed that allows the currents to be delivered without a remote.

Krebs says his quality of life has improved immensely with the implant.

“It’s helped me get back into work because I’m not exhausted all the time,” said Krebs.

“If I have it on throughout the day, I find I can spend more time in the evenings without being tired and having to go to bed early.”

The company that developed the implantable neurostimulation system that were used in the studies has received FDA approval to initiate a pivotal trial of the therapy. The trial is expected to involve about 20 neurorehabilitation and neurosurgical research centers across Canada, #Europe and the United States.

Mark Zuckerberg unveils Meta’s newest AI-powered smart glasses, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage on Wednesday to unveil the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence-powered wearable device: a pair of smart glasses with a tiny display inside the lens.

The Meta Ray-Bans Display glasses represent the company’s next step toward a future where we all spend less time looking down at a phone screen. Rather, we could interact with Meta’s AI technology — as well as our messages, photos and the rest of our online lives — via glasses not totally unlike regular prescription lenses or sunglasses.

The Displays and other new wearables are part of the company’s bid to make its AI technology a bigger part of users’ everyday lives as it competes with other big industry players to create the most advanced and widely used models.

“Glasses are the ideal form factor for personal super intelligence because they let you stay present in the moment while getting access to all of these AI capabilities to make you smarter, help you communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg announced the new products during the keynote at Meta’s annual Connect event — where it outlines new AI, virtual and augmented reality and wearable technologies — from its Menlo Park, California, headquarters on Wednesday. Meta also showed off the latest version of its more basic Ray-Ban smart glasses, the Gen 2 and new sport glasses, the Meta Oakley Vanguard; and new experiences on its Quest 3 virtual reality headsets, including games and a new entertainment app and partnership with Disney+ for Horizon, Meta’s immersive “metaverse” experience.

Smart glasses remain a relatively niche product, but consumer adoption is growing fast. Meta’s partner, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, said in July that revenue from its Meta glasses more than tripled year-over-year. And the company is seeking to produce 10 million pairs of Meta glasses each year starting in 2026.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are key to reaching that goal, EssilorLuxottica’s Chief Wearables Officer Rocco Basilico said in an interview with CNN.

“You can wear the glasses and feel good in your favorite brands, but if you actually need, like, some super-powers, some immediate information, that could be delivered through audio or through the display,” Basilico said, calling the new display offering “the biggest launch that we have done so far.”

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that the sales trajectory for Meta’s smart glasses are “similar to some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time.”

While Meta was early to making smart glasses that consumers actually want to buy, it faces growing competition from Google, Samsung, Snap and potentially Amazon, raising the stakes for the new technology it’s rolling out starting Wednesday.

Here’s more on the new display smart glasses and everything the company announced at Meta Connect:
Meta Ray-Ban Display

Meta has long described its Ray-Bans as smart glasses that can “see what you see and hear what you hear.” Now, with the Meta Ray-Bans Display, users will also have some visual feedback that makes it possible to interact with the device in new ways.

The Displays feature a tiny display screen on the inside right corner of the right lens. The display looks as though it’s projected several feet in front of the user’s surrounding environment.

That display makes it possible to do a variety of things one might previously have done on their phone screen: view and send messages, capture and review photos and videos, watch Instagram Reels and take video calls where users will see the person on the other end.

“We have been working on glasses for more than 10 years, and this is one of those special moments where we get to show you something that we poured a lot of our lives into,” Zuckerberg said, “and that I just think is different from anything that I’ve seen.”

There’s also a navigation feature that shows where a user is on a map in real-time, so they could walk somewhere without staring at a maps app on their phone. And live captioning and translation lets users see what a conversation partner is saying in real-time. (Captioned conversations will also save as a transcript in the Meta AI app — a feature journalists at least will find very useful!)

Users can also ask the Meta AI assistant questions and it will respond with information panels on the display, in addition to giving an audio answer.

Whereas users could interact with previous versions of Meta Ray-Bans using only voice commands, the Meta Ray-Ban Displays work with a “neural” wristband that lets users navigate the display using subtle hand gestures. Tapping your thumb and index finger, for example, acts as a select function to press play on music.

Only the wearer can see the display screen. That’s by design to protect the privacy of the user’s messages, photos and other content. But it could also lead to some awkward moments if people don’t realize Meta Ray-Ban Display users are actually reading incoming texts in the middle of a conversation.

However, users can turn the display screen off when they’re not using it — and use the spectacles just like regular glasses.

“When we’re designing the hardware and software, we focus on giving you access to very powerful tools when you want them, and then just having them fade into the background” when you’re not, Zuckerberg said.

Meta isn’t the first to try to make a device like this. Google launched an early version of glasses with a display in the lens called Google Glass in 2013, but flopped with consumers. But the technology to power smart glasses — like processors, batteries and cameras — has improved (and shrunk) significantly over the past decade. The Displays look and feel just slightly heavier and chunkier than non-techy glasses.

The Displays work for six hours on a single charge, with the case providing up to 30 hours of additional power. The wristband has 18 hours of battery life and is water-resistant.

The Meta Ray-Ban Displays will be available starting on September 30 for US$799, at limited brick-and-mortar retail stores in the United States, including some Verizon, Lens Crafter, Ray-Ban and Best Buy locations.

Ran-Ban Meta Gen 2

The Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2, priced at US$379, looks similar to predecessors but has updated colours, battery life and camera. The battery life has doubled to eight hours, and the charging case provides an additional 48 hours of power.

The glasses can now also capture higher-quality 3K video. In updates set for later this fall, they’ll be able to take slow-motion and hyperlapse videos, too.

Meta says a new, opt-in “conversation focus” feature will make it easier for Meta Ray-Ban wearers to hear someone during an in-person conversation, even in a loud area. The tool uses the glasses’ “open-ear speakers to amplify” the other person amid background noise.

An imperfect live demo at Connect served as a reminder that despite the advancements, this technology is still in its fairly early stages. The company attempted to show a chef using Meta AI on the Gen 2s to get audio directions to follow a recipe. When the assistant failed to generate an intelligible response, Zuckerberg blamed it on the Wi-Fi.

Similarly, in a demo of the Meta Ray-Ban Displays, Zuckerberg struggled to answer a video call from Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth because the button to accept the call didn’t show up on the display. “We’ll debug that later,” Bosworth said.

Meta Oakley Vanguard Sports Glasses

The new Meta Oakley Vanguard are smart glasses designed for sports and outdoor activities and cost US$499.

They pair with platforms Strava and Garmin to let users track their workouts. The Meta AI app will have a new “workouts” section to show activity details, photos and videos captured with the smart glasses, and an AI summary of each workout.

The Vanguard boasts bigger, louder speakers — so users can still hear their music on a windy bike ride, for example — and has the longest battery life of any Meta glasses, around nine hours. The Vanguard’s control buttons are on the bottom edge of the arm of the glasses, whereas other Meta Ray-Bans feature a top capture button, so users can still access them if they’re wearing a helmet.

The Vanguard glasses are also water- and dust-resistant. And the camera, which is centered on the bridge of the nose rather than on the side, has a wider field of view compared to Meta’s other glasses and can capture 3K video.

“I’ve taken them out surfing,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s fine, it’s good.”

CNN received a demo of the Vanguards paired with a Garmin watch. On a treadmill walk, Meta AI on the Vanguards could answer questions, for example, about current heart rate and the length of the exercise.