Autolane, a Palo Alto startup, has raised $7.4 million to build what it calls “air-traffic control for autonomous vehicles,” a system designed to coordinate where and how self-driving cars pick up and drop off passengers or deliveries. The firm has already struck a deal with retail real estate giant Simon Property Group to deploy its…

Amazon has unveiled a new AI-powered capability for Fire TV that lets viewers jump directly to a particular movie moment simply by describing it to the voice assistant Alexa+. Users can say things like “Jump to the scene in Mamma Mia where Sophie sings ‘Honey Honey’” or “Take me to the card scene in Love…

Former Neuralink co-founder and now-CEO of Science Corp., Max Hodak, is pushing far beyond the brain-computer interface work that defined his early career. Science Corp. has already acquired and refined a retinal-implant technology — dubbed Prima — which, in clinical trials, enabled about 80 percent of blind patients to read again letter by letter. But…

Recent studies of material from the near-Earth asteroid OSIRIS-REx’s sample return from Bennu indicate that the building blocks of life — including amino acids and even sugars — might already be present in space. Scientists report that the rock and dust collected from Bennu contain carbon-rich organic compounds and signs of ancient saltwater environments, suggesting…

A new study from NASA, highlighted by science outlets, reveals that the explosion of satellite megaconstellations is rapidly undermining the imaging capabilities of even space-based telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Observations between 2018–2021 showed about 4.3 percent of Hubble images were marred by satellite trails. But with satellite numbers rising steeply — from…

OpenAI has internally declared a “code red” alert for its flagship AI chatbot, ChatGPT — a signal that the once-dominant service is now under serious pressure as rivals like Google assert ground. CEO Sam Altman reportedly urged staff to drop other projects (like advertising plans or new AI agents) and redirect all resources toward improving…

Micron Technology has announced it will retire the consumer-facing Crucial brand — famous among PC builders for affordable RAM and SSDs — by February 2026. The move reflects the company’s pivot to prioritize high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and other advanced memory products for AI data centers, where demand is booming. The shutdown is already causing ripples…

The European AI upstart Mistral has rolled out its new “Mistral 3” model family — a mix of compact and powerful open-weight language models designed to run not just on massive data-center hardware, but even on smartphones and edge devices. Their smallest model, “Ministral 3B,” contains just three billion parameters yet reportedly can outperform some…

Australia has rolled out a comprehensive national strategy aimed at harnessing the economic potential of artificial intelligence while safeguarding citizens from its risks. The plan includes establishing an AI Safety Institute with a $29.9 million investment, efforts to build digital and AI skills across the population, and initiatives to support workforce transitions. Despite these intentions,…

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded more than $5.3 million to 15 university-led projects at 14 institutions across the country to upgrade nuclear energy infrastructure, including research reactors and other advanced technologies. The funding—part of a broader push under the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP)—is designed to strengthen the nation’s nuclear workforce, expand research…

A new analysis from BloombergNEF forecasts that power demand from U.S. data centers will soar to 106 gigawatts by 2035 — nearly three times the current 40 gigawatts. That growth is fueled in part by the rapid expansion of AI-driven infrastructure, which relies on increasingly large and power-hungry facilities. Much of the buildout is expected…

Zillow has removed climate-risk scores from over one million home listings after real estate agents and the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) complained the information was driving down sales. What began in September 2024 as a feature meant to help buyers assess flood, wildfire, heat, wind, and air-quality risks — using data from climate-analytics…

Amazon’s cloud arm has officially launched its new AI training chip, Trainium 3, unveiling “UltraServer” hardware that delivers roughly quadruple the training and inference throughput of its predecessor, while using 40% less power. The systems can scale to massive size — thousands of UltraServers linked together for up to a million Trainium 3 chips —…

Researchers at Google have introduced a new paradigm called Nested Learning, which recasts a machine-learning model not as a single monolithic system but as a collection of interlocking optimization problems operating at different timescales. The innovation enables models to retain long-term knowledge, continuously learn, and reason over extended contexts without “catastrophic forgetting.” A prototype architecture…

In a major push for enterprise AI transparency, Salesforce has launched Agentforce Observability, a suite of tools in its Agentforce 360 platform designed to expose every step of what its AI agents are doing — from user input to reasoning paths to final output — in near-real time. The system offers deep session-level tracing via…