Recycled plastic could make road surfaces more durable
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Disinfection system installed at a facility owned by South East Water Adding recycled plastic to asphalt could improve road durability without increasing the release of microplastic-like particles, according to new research from Pennsylvania State University. The findings might help alleviate concerns about the environmental consequences of incorporating plastic waste into road surfaces, although researchers caution […]
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UK pledges £17m for Chernobyl shelter repairs
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Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in September 2021. The large steel arch is the New Safe Confinement, which encloses the remains of Reactor No 4, destroyed in the 1986 accident, and now in need of repair (image credit: K Budzynski / Shutterstock). The UK Government has pledged £17 million towards repairs to the protective structure enclosing […]
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Technology drives UKWIR pipeline database enhancement project
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A valuable database that provides water companies with insights into pipes for water and sewer networks is being overhauled. UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR) has released an invitation for expressions of interest (EoIs) to revise its National Failures Database, to better safeguard below ground infrastructure in a transformative technological age. The UK water sector faces […]
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Grid constraints threaten development of Scotland’s ports
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Offshore support vessels berthed at Montrose Harbour in 2016 (image credit: Arild Lilleboe / Shuttertstock). Electricity network constraints and delays in securing grid connections could undermine investment in Scotland’s ports, potentially holding back offshore wind manufacturing and efforts to reduce emissions from shipping, according to a new report commissioned by Scottish Renewables. Published on 12 […]
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Global framework aims to standardise biodiversity measurement
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New indicators covering ecosystem extent, condition, extinction risk and species populations could help businesses establish whether their environmental interventions are delivering measurable improvements. An international initiative has launched a new framework for measuring changes in the state of nature, aiming to bring greater consistency to the way businesses and financial institutions assess biodiversity impacts, risks […]
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What Are Native Audio Models? How Speech-to-Speech AI Skips Transcription
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Native audio models process or generate acoustic representations directly, preserving timing, tone, speaker cues, and other information that a text transcript discards. This guide explains the mechanism, trade-offs, evaluation, and controls that matter in practice.
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Meta Rewrites Web-Crawling Clause in Pending Commercial Terms
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Meta has revised its pending Commercial Terms, which take effect October 30, 2026, to remove a sentence stating that the company could use content crawled from websites tied to business accounts to train Meta Company Products. The revised text was in place on Meta’s legal website by October 17, 2026, after a day of public […]
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NVIDIA Celebrates RTX Spark Launch Across Six Global Cities
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NVIDIA celebrated the arrival of its RTX Spark laptops with retail launch events in six cities on October 16, 2026, including a Berlin gathering where founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a surprise appearance and gave away five personally signed laptops, the company said in a recap published October 17, 2026. Berlin Celebration at the […]
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Giving AI a “crystal clear” view of the materials world
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In principle, artificial intelligence could make finding the right material for an application as simple as ordering dinner: Scientists would tell a large language model what they want, and it would serve them a perfectly designed crystal for the job. Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t work well yet, and the problem comes down to data: Most […]
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Repairable earbuds challenge throwaway electronics
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The Fairbuds 2 wireless earbuds. Circular design and repairability have been a long time coming in much of the consumer electronics sector, but there are signs this may be changing. One example is a new generation of wireless earbuds from Dutch electronics manufacturer Fairphone, which challenges the throwaway culture of consumer electronics by combining modular […]
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COP17: Which countries have released new pledges to tackle nature loss?
Print article Share Some 58% of countries have met a UN call to submit new pledges on addressing nature loss – two years after the original deadline – according to Carbon Brief analysis. Countries were asked to submit new pledges, known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs), by the start of the COP16 […]
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RapidCanvas Raises $29M Series B to Scale Enterprise AI Delivery
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RapidCanvas has raised $29 million in Series B funding to expand a business built around a persistent enterprise AI problem: getting useful applications into production, then keeping them working as the business changes. The round was led by Vertex Ventures SEA & India, with participation from Hitachi Ventures. Existing investors Accel, Peak XV Partners, Valley […]
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Gintare Rimolaityte, CEO and Co-Founder of Trendos – Interview Series
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Gintare Rimolaityte is the CEO and co-founder of Trendos, the AI search visibility platform that helps brands understand and optimize how they appear across LLMs. She gained early experience at Oxylabs in 2020, first as Business Development Manager and then as Head of Commerce, where she led Sales, Business Development, Account Management, and Customer Success […]
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Anthropic Says Claude Beat Best Published Quantum Circuit Designs
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In a research post published October 16, 2026, Anthropic reported that its Claude Mythos 5 model, working in a closed loop with an automated evaluator and largely on its own, designed quantum circuits that improve on the best previously published circuits across eight computational primitives, in some cases by an order of magnitude or more. […]
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Anthropic Says Claude Traced NIST ECDSA Curve Seeds to a 1990S RNG
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Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team reported in a research publication on October 16, 2026, that an internal Claude research model had traced the origins of the NIST ECDSA curve seeds to the C library’s lrand48 random-number generator seeded with Unix timestamps, answering a provenance question that had been open since the NSA supplied the values without […]
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Replit CEO Masad Says Company No Longer Works With Anthropic
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Replit CEO Amjad Masad said during an onstage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 that the company is no longer working with Anthropic, framing the decision around cost, partnership, and performance. The session recording was published by TechCrunch on October 16, 2026. Onstage Confirmation and Rationale The exchange began when the interviewer asked whether the OpenAI […]
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COP17: Developed countries ‘fall far short’ of UN targets for nature finance
Print article Share The amount of finance for nature delivered to date “falls far short” of what is needed to meet the UN’s global goals, according to a report released ahead of the COP17 biodiversity summit. The global stocktaking report, prepared by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UN CBD) ahead of this month’s summit […]
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COP17: Tracking progress towards the UN’s 2030 nature targets
Print article Share Countries will meet in Armenia this month to carry out the first global review of progress towards meeting key nature targets by 2030. These targets – and the wider ambition to halt and reverse biodiversity loss around the world – were agreed in the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022. But the […]