Anthropic opened Claude's voice mode to Opus and Sonnet, which until now ran only on the lightweight Haiku model. Voice sessions inherit whatever model you last used in text, and you can switch mid-conversation. The real unlock is connectors: Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Notion, and Canva now work by voice, across ten languages. Free accounts get Haiku and one app; paid gets everything. (9to5Mac)

Etched closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, led by Sequoia with a16z, SK Hynix, and Jane Street joining. That doubles its $5B valuation from seven months ago, and the company says it's the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. The part that matters: Etched has already manufactured its inference chips at TSMC and booked $1 billion in orders before most people knew the name. (TechCrunch)

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Brent closed at $100.69, up 7%, after Houthi attacks on tankers off Saudi Arabia. WTI settled at $92.36, up 6.37%. The 10-year Treasury hit 4.70%, its highest since January 2025, and jobless claims came in under 200,000. Fed funds futures now price a more than 80% chance of a September hike, up from 52% a week ago. (CNBC)

After a weather scrub and an engine swap, Starship Flight 13 lifts off at 6:45 p.m. ET tonight from Starbase. This is the first flight to deploy production Starlink V3 satellites, 20 of them, out of a PEZ-style dispenser bay. Six carry cameras aimed at Starship's own heat shield to beam back live views of reentry. Super Heavy splashes down in the Gulf, the Ship in the Indian Ocean. (Space.com)

Corgi, the AI insurance startup, closed another round at a $4 billion valuation, its third raise in just over two months. It went $1.3B in early May, $2.6B in late May, $4B now. The number underneath the frenzy: revenue went from $40 million annualized seven months ago to a projected $450 million by year end. (TechCrunch)

The last time the moon's shadow crossed mainland Europe, the euro didn't exist yet. That was August 11, 1999. On August 12, 2026, it happens again, and this time the shadow lands on northern Spain in the last hour before sunset, which is the rarest version of the whole thing.

A 180-mile-wide path of totality starts in northeastern Siberia, crosses the Greenland ice cap, clips western Iceland including Reykjavik, then runs the width of northern Spain from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean. Maximum totality is 2 minutes and 18 seconds. NASA and the National Solar Observatory both publish city-level maps, and Xavier Jubier's interactive map is the one eclipse chasers actually use.

In Spain, the sun won't be fully eclipsed until shortly before it sets, meaning totality happens low on the horizon with the landscape already going gold. Photographers have been planning around this for years, because a low-altitude corona over a Spanish ridgeline is a shot you can't get from a midday eclipse. Iceland gets it earlier, in late afternoon, with a real trade-off: Reykjavik sits at the very edge of the path, so a few miles of positioning changes everything.

Northern Spain is the higher-percentage bet on weather; Iceland in August is beautiful and frequently overcast. Lodging along the Spanish centerline has been booked for months, so look at Burgos, Palencia, and inland Valencia province and be willing to drive on eclipse morning. Rent the car before the flight. Full maps and city timings are at NASA's eclipse page and timeanddate.com. And buy real ISO-certified glasses, not the ones in the checkout aisle.

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