Entertainment
Cabo Verde’s soccer success send travelers searching
Cabo Verde’s World Cup run ended in extra time, but its tourism bump may just be getting started.
Since the African island nation (commonly called Cape Verde in English) made its World Cup debut, its national team, nicknamed the Blue Sharks after the Atlantic waters surrounding the country, became the smallest nation by population to reach the knockout stage — and picked up a global following along the way.
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The team advanced without winning a match, holding Spain scoreless and twice coming from behind against Uruguay. In the round of 32, Cabo Verde pushed defending champion Argentina into extra time before narrowly losing 3-2.
As the run unfolded, U.S. Google searches for “Cabo Verde vacation” jumped by more than 5,000 percent compared with the previous year. Expedia recorded a similar surge, with searches from American users increasing by more than 800 percent. The interest extended beyond the United States: European travel operator TUI reported that searches for the destination had doubled since June 2025, while searches from Japan rose by 110 percent.
For a country of roughly 525,000 people, the match placed Cabo Verde in front of an audience far larger than its population and prompted many viewers to ask two basic questions: Where exactly is it, and should I go there on vacation?
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Get to know Cabo Verde
Cabo Verde is an archipelago of 10 volcanic islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa. Nine of the islands are inhabited, and each offers its own distinct character — from the beach resorts of Sal and Boa Vista to the mountains of Santo Antão and the dramatic volcanic landscape of Fogo.
Initially uninhabited, Cabo Verde was first settled by the Portuguese in the 15th century (Portuguese is still commonly spoken there). In the intervening centuries, Portugal used the islands as a base for its shipping routes and the international slave trade, according to the Cape Verdean Museum. The nation gained independence from Portugal in 1975.
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The country was already a major vacation destination before soccer fans began Googling it. In 2025 alone, its hotels welcomed nearly 1.25 million guests. During the first quarter of 2026, the country was up 16.8 percent in guest arrivals from the same period in 2025. Tourism accounts for roughly a quarter of the country’s economy, which had a GDP of about $3.1 billion in 2025.
American travelers remain a much smaller part of the industry. The United States accounted for only 1.1 percent of the country’s foreign hotel guests in 2025, which makes the current search spike notable even if only a fraction of those searches turn into booked trips.
This kind of tourism boost is exactly what countries hope for when they spend lots of money to host or participate in global sporting events. Qatar invested an estimated $220 billion in stadiums, transportation, hotels, and other infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, aiming to establish itself as an international destination. The strategy worked, at least partially — the country welcomed 4 million visitors in 2023 and is targeting more than 6 million annually by 2030.
Cabo Verde, by contrast, generated the same buzz with just four standout games and a handful of breakout stars, like goalkeeper Josimar José Évora Dias, better known as Vozinha, who gained roughly 20 million followers during the tournament.
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Cabo Verde wasn’t the only country to get a visibility boost from the World Cup. Norway’s run turned Erling Haaland into one of the tournament’s fan favorites, with Google searches for his name spiking 900 percent worldwide and over 5,000 percent in Canada.
That attention brought new fans to Norway’s team, its viral “Viking Row” celebration, and the country behind one of soccer’s biggest stars.
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Host cities benefited, too: during the tournament’s first two weeks, Boston-area hotel rooms and related tourism spending jumped 20 percent from the year before, while occupancy held steady at 87 percent.
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For Cabo Verde, the question is whether that surge of attention can extend beyond online searches and into its economy. For now, though, millions more people know the nation’s name and have seen enough of its beaches, mountains, and soccer highlights to consider opening another browser tab.
Entertainment
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Entertainment
AI just disproved a major math problem. A mathematician explains.
While the rest of the world was watching the World Cup on Sunday evening, mathematician Levent Alpöge casually announced on X that he had used Anthropic’s Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian conjecture.
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The Jacobian conjecture is a long-standing open problem in algebraic geometry that’s bedeviled highly accomplished mathematicians for almost 90 years. It was included in “Smale’s problems,” a list of unresolved math problems put forward by mathematician Stephen Smale in 1998.
But that proved no obstacle for Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest frontier AI model. (You may remember Fable 5 as the public version of Claude Mythos Preview, the AI model that Anthropic says has such advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it was too dangerous for public release.)
Alpöge is part of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and his Linkedin profile notes an affiliation with Anthropic. We’ve reached out to Anthropic with questions about Alpöge’s work.
Meanwhile, for those of us who don’t understand polynomial functions from n-dimensional space, the question is: Does this represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence, or mathematics, or neither?
“This did not cause me to update my priors about what AI can and can’t do,” professor and mathematician Andrew Blumberg told Mashable. “This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect AI to be able to do. If there was a counterexample that was concise and easy to state that people haven’t found because it’s a pain to search through all this stuff, AI will find it.”
Blumberg, who has a joint appointment in mathematics and computer science at Columbia University, is involved in the First Proof project, an effort to test the capabilities of frontier large language models in solving research-level mathematics. So, it’s safe to say he understands mathematics and AI better than most of us.
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‘You want to learn something from the answer’
Providing a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture is still a significant achievement for AI in mathematics, Blumberg notes. But he also says there’s a big difference between providing a positive proof for a major math problem and providing a single counterexample that disproves it. Here’s the metaphor Blumberg used to explain.
“Suppose that Moses came down from the mountain with tablets, and on the tablet was written, ‘Cancer can be cured.’ Would you care? You don’t just want the answer to the question. You want to learn something from the answer. And the reason Smale thought this problem was important is because he thought that if we solved it, we would understand more things about the about the way nature is structured.”
In other words, Blumberg says, “this counterexample tells us essentially nothing. It’s just, you know, there are a lot of polynomials, and it’s hard for people to check them all, but it’s not hard for machines.”
The Jacobian conjecture isn’t the only math problem AI has tackled in recent months. OpenAI announced in May an “internal model” had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a central conjecture in discrete geometry.
However, in that case, the result was more productive, Blumberg says. That’s because OpenAI didn’t just provide a counterexample — but a disproof of the problem itself.
“The disproof there already has led to interesting things because experts in the area unpacked what was going on in the disproof and then used it to do other things,” Blumberg says.
And that’s not necessarily the case with the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, he adds — while conceding he’s not expert enough to see if there’s something special about the structure of the counterexample that we can learn from. “But it’s not in and of itself interesting.”
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Entertainment
macOS 27 Beta has a secret Siri AI interface. How to try it.
You’ve waited long enough for Apple’s relaunch of Siri as an AI assistant, and now you can finally try out the Siri AI beta for iOS. But, psst, don’t tell anyone, but there’s even more Siri AI for you to try out with a secret Siri AI interface on Mac.
A Reddit user on the r/MacOSBeta subreddit has discovered a “hidden lightweight UI” for Siri AI in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta. This feature basically provides users with an array of AI tools, presented in a pop-up menu whenever text is highlighted.
The Siri AI pop-up interface includes AI tools such as Rewrite, Proofread, “How does this sound?,” and “Edit with Siri.” There are also menu options for summarization and providing bullet points from the selected text.
Siri AI can also provide a selection of specific tools dependent on the context of what’s selected. For example, highlighting a phone number provides a pop-up to “Add to contacts” or when selecting an address the pop-up offers an “Open in Maps” option. There are tools for creating calendar events, composing messages and emails, and tracking flights and packages as well.
Why is the feature hidden? Well, as MacRumors points out, the Siri AI interface in macOS 27 developer beta 3 and public beta 1 is simply an unfinished product. Certain features don’t yet work how they’re supposed to. Some options don’t work at all. Clearly, Apple has yet to make it available because it’s simply not ready.
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However, Reddit users say there is a way to turn the interface on in the macOS Golden Gate Beta. According to Redditor pdfu, if users running the macOS 27 beta simply need to open up the Terminal and input a few lines of code.
Please note: We do not recommend running terminal instructions or changing important OS files unless you fully understand what you’re doing. We have not tested these terminal instructions, so proceed at your own risk.
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool true
After that, the Reddit threat instructs users to restart their computer and the Siri AI interface will be enabled.
If you’ve had enough of the unfinished interface, you can turn it back off by once again opening Terminal and the following input:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false
It’s unclear if the Siri AI interface will launch with the official version of the new macOS. However, it’s certainly interesting to see Apple further brand its Siri AI relaunch as an all-in-one AI tool across the company’s products.
