We’ve got a new international trailer for Predator: Badlands, the latest installment in a popular franchise that’s been around since 1987. It’s directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who is very familiar with the franchise, having also directed 2022’s highly acclaimed standalone Predator movie, Prey.

In April, Twentieth Century Studios released the first teaser, which involved multiple predators fighting or threatening one another, Elle Fanning looking very strange and cool as an android, and glimpses of new monsters and the alien world the movie focuses on. And the film was featured prominently at San Diego Comic-Con this summer. But it hasn’t quite wormed its way into the cultural zeitgeist for fall releases. Perhaps this latest trailer will boost its profile.

This is a standalone film in the franchise, with a particular focus on the culture of the Predator species; in fact, the same conlanger who created the Na’Vi language for James Cameron’s Avatar franchise also created a written and verbal language for the Predators. (We hear a bit of the dialogue in the new trailer.) And this time around, the primary Predator is actually the film’s protagonist rather than an adversary. Per the official premise: “Set in the future on a deadly remote planet, Predator: Badlands follows a young Predator outcast (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) who finds an unlikely ally in Thia (Elle Fanning) as he embarks on a treacherous journey in search of the ultimate adversary.”

This is a damaged Weyland-Yutani synth, further strengthening the world-building link between the Alien and Predator franchises. (And by damaged, we mean missing her entire lower body.) Both Fanning and Schuster-Koloamatangi actually have dual roles. Fanning also portrays Tessa, another synth who is an antagonist toward our two protagonists. In addition to the outcast runt Predator, Dek, Schuster-Koloamatangi also plays his own father, Njohur—it’s not like anyone would recognize him under all those prosthetics. Mike Homik rounds out the main cast as Dek’s older brother Kwei, who helps prepare him for his first hunt.

Predator: Badlands hits theaters on November 7. There’s also a tie-in prequel comic book, set shortly before the events of the film, that will be released on November 12 by Marvel Comics. While they’re waiting, franchise fans can catch Trachtenberg’s animated anthology series, Predator: Killer of Killers, on Hulu (it premiered on June 6).

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The discovery of three Culiseta annulata mosquitoes was confirmed this week by the Natural Science Institute of Iceland, which said the mosquitoes likely arrived by freight.

(Image credit: Robert Pickett)

The "Danger Zone" singer is asking for his performance to be deleted from a fake "King Trump" video that the president posted to Truth Social on Saturday.

(Image credit: Jerod Harris)

A stunning image of a rice weevil on a single grain of rice has won the 2025 Nikon Small World photomicrography contest, yielding valuable insight into the structure and behavior of—and providing a fresh perspective on—this well-known agricultural pest. The image was taken by Zhang You of Yunnan, China. Another of You's photographs placed 15th in this year's contest.

“It pays to dive deep into entomology: understanding insects’ behaviors and mastering lighting," You said in a statement. "A standout work blends artistry with scientific rigor, capturing the very essence, energy, and spirit of these creatures.”

There was an element of luck in creating his winning image, too. "I had observed rice weevils in grains before, but never one with its wings spread," You said. "This one was naturally preserved on a windowsill, perhaps in a final attempt to escape. Its tiny size makes manually preparing spread-wing specimens extremely difficult, so encountering it was both serendipitous and inspiring.”

Nikon's annual contest was founded back in 1974 "to showcase the beauty and complexity of things seen through the light microscope." Photomicrography involves attaching a camera to a microscope (either an optical microscope or an electron microscope) so that the user can take photographs of objects at very high resolutions. British physiologist Richard Hill Norris was one of the first to use it for his studies of blood cells in 1850, and the method has increasingly been highlighted as art since the 1970s. There have been many groundbreaking technological advances in the ensuing decades, particularly with the advent of digital imaging methods.

This year's competition received over 1,900 submissions from 77 countries; a panel of judges evaluated the submissions based on originality, informational content, technical proficiency, and visual impact. Featured below are the remaining top 20 winners of this year's contest, with subjects ranging from rat liver cells, sunflower trichomes, and slime molds releasing spores, to a moth laying eggs and a parasitic fungus invading a fly, among other microscopic marvels. You can check out the full list of winners, as well as several honorable mentions, here. The 2025 winners for the video competition can be found here.

The winners’ circle

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On Wednesday, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, a small AI language model that reportedly delivers performance similar to what its frontier model Claude Sonnet 4 achieved five months ago but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed. The new model is available now to all Claude app, web, and API users.

If the benchmarks for Haiku 4.5 reported by Anthropic hold up to independent testing, the fact that the company can match some capabilities of its cutting-edge coding model from only five months ago (and GPT-5 in coding) while providing a dramatic speed increase and cost cut is notable.

As a recap, Anthropic ships the Claude family in three model sizes: Haiku (small), Sonnet (medium), and Opus (large). The larger models are based on larger neural networks and typically include deeper contextual knowledge but are slower and more expensive to run. Due to a technique called distillation, companies like Anthropic have been able to craft smaller AI models that match the capability of larger, older models at functional tasks like coding, although it typically comes at the cost of omitting stored knowledge.

That means if you wanted to converse with an AI model that might craft a deeper and more meaningful analysis of, say, foreign policy or world history, you might be better served talking to Sonnet or Opus (being aware that they can also be wrong and make things up). But if you just need quick coding assistance that's more about translation of concepts than general knowledge, Haiku might be the better pick due to its speed and lower cost.

And speaking of cost, Haiku 4.5 is included for subscribers of the Claude web and app plans. Through the API (for developers), the small model is priced at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. That compares to Sonnet 4.5 at $3 per million input and $15 per million output tokens, and Opus 4.1 at $15 per million input and $75 per million output tokens.

The model serves as a cheaper drop-in replacement for two older models, Haiku 3.5 and Sonnet 4. "Users who rely on AI for real-time, low-latency tasks like chat assistants, customer service agents, or pair programming will appreciate Haiku 4.5’s combination of high intelligence and remarkable speed," Anthropic writes.

On SWE-bench Verified, a test that measures performance on coding tasks, Haiku 4.5 scored 73.3 percent compared to Sonnet 4's similar performance level (72.7 percent). The model also reportedly surpasses Sonnet 4 at certain tasks like using computers, according to Anthropic's benchmarks. Claude Sonnet 4.5, released in late September, remains Anthropic's frontier model and what the company calls "the best coding model available."

Haiku 4.5 also surprisingly edges up close to what OpenAI's GPT-5 can achieve in this particular set of benchmarks (as seen in the chart above), although since the results are self-reported and potentially cherry-picked to match a model's strengths, one should always take them with a grain of salt.

Still, making a small, capable coding model may have unexpected advantages for agentic coding setups like Claude Code. Anthropic designed Haiku 4.5 to work alongside Sonnet 4.5 in multi-model workflows. In such a configuration, Anthropic says, Sonnet 4.5 could break down complex problems into multi-step plans, then coordinate multiple Haiku 4.5 instances to complete subtasks in parallel, like spinning off workers to get things done faster.

For more details on the new model, Anthropic released a system card and documentation for developers.

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