Tech

An open-source tool is exploiting a quirk in how Anthropic prices image tokens to cut Claude Code and Fable 5 session costs by 59 to 70 percent — turning expensive text into cheap pixels. The tool, called pxpipe, was developed by Steven Chong and is available on GitHub. It functions as a local proxy that […]

DARPA is funding the development of batteries that could last 30 years on a single charge by harvesting energy from radioactive strontium-90 recovered from nuclear waste, with a minimum viable prototype targeted for early 2027. The program, called Project SYMPHONEE (Strontium-Yttrium Multi-junction PIN-based High-Density Output Nano-system for Extreme Environments), operates under DARPA’s broader Rads to […]

A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark, and Imperial College London has shown that contrastive deep learning can determine an individual’s age from skin biopsy images alone, and that the visual features learned by the model constitute a novel biomarker for aging that predicts mortality and chronic disease […]

A South Korean startup is deploying diamond-based quantum sensors to solve one of the data center industry’s most persistent problems: knowing exactly where, when, and why electricity is being wasted. xDots has developed xEnergy, an energy management platform that combines a diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) quantum sensor called xSee with an AI analysis engine and a […]

An automated safety testing framework for LLM agents has revealed severe vulnerabilities across four production agent systems, finding that multi-channel attacks succeed an average of 93.9 percent of the time. The framework, called Vera, instantiates software engineering testing principles for non-deterministic AI agents through a three-stage, self-reinforcing pipeline. It was evaluated on four production agent […]

An agentic AI system has autonomously rediscovered three established traffic laws and identified a previously unreported pattern in urban driving behavior, demonstrating that scientific discovery by AI can extend beyond controlled laboratory environments into complex real-world systems. The system, called TrafficSci, was developed by researchers including Xingyuan Dai and Fei-Yue Wang. It formulates traffic-law discovery […]

SYDNEY. Australia’s federal health department has warned that AI scribes used by doctors to record and transcribe patient consultations operate with “little oversight,” raising urgent questions about privacy, patient consent, and whether the tools are illegally functioning as unregulated medical devices. The warning, contained in federal briefing documents obtained by Guardian Australia, comes as the […]

Alibaba will ban its employees from using Anthropic’s AI coding tool Claude Code, effective July 10, the latest escalation in a bitter feud between two of the world’s most important AI companies. The Chinese technology conglomerate has classified Claude Code as high-risk software after internal security audits flagged alleged embedded code that could identify users […]

Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology, China’s largest chip packaging and testing company, has announced a US$1.15 billion (approximately GBP 890 million) investment in a new advanced packaging facility in Shanghai’s Lingang Special Area, as Beijing accelerates its push for semiconductor self-sufficiency amid escalating US export controls. The two-phase project will be carried out through a subsidiary […]

The AI-driven memory shortage that has pushed up DRAM and NAND prices across the industry is forcing laptop manufacturers to look beyond established suppliers. The latest sign of the shift: Lenovo has started shipping Chinese-made YMTC solid-state drives in its ThinkBook 14 laptops sold through retail channels. The drive in question is a 512-gigabyte M.2 […]