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Tech News
French AI startup Mistral AI has closed a funding round of $3.48 billion, drawing from both existing backers like Samsung and ASML Holding and new investors. The round pushes the company's valuation above $24 billion, cementing its status as Europe's leading AI challenger to US and Chinese rivals.
Stefano Cataldi, a neuroscientist at Columbia University studying serotonin's role in cognition, is weighing whether to leave bench research entirely to focus on science policy work. He is a delegate for the United Auto Workers union representing postdocs and research scientists, and last year he founded SCOPE, a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory-backed program that teaches scientists about policy, communication and career resources.
A Nature retrospective highlights the scientific career of William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, noting that his contributions extended well beyond the temperature scale that bears his name. The piece surveys his broader body of work in physics and engineering during the 19th century.
An editorial in Nature argues that prediction markets allowing wagers on the outcomes of clinical trials pose risks to research integrity and public trust in science. It calls for limits on such betting activity to prevent interference with ongoing trials.
Responding to Ming Li's proposal to separate academic 'titles' from resource allocation in Chinese universities, a Nature correspondence argues the reform is unlikely to succeed. The author agrees that suppressed performance indicators tend to resurface under different labels, but contends university administrators benefit from the current metric-based system and thus have little incentive to change it.
Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm Holdings, told the BBC that AI will eventually cure cancer by modelling complex cellular and DNA processes beyond current human or computing capability, though he said this progress is being constrained by a shortage of chips needed to build data centres. He also predicted humanoid robots would become widespread within five years, while expressing doubt that chip manufacturing could realistically be built up in the UK.
A security researcher tested how generative AI models behave when fed their own outputs repeatedly, using Nano Banana 2 to make a video poster undergo successive localized edits until the image degraded into visual noise. Testing the same recursive approach on text rewrites, the researcher found that unlike images, text doesn't spiral into total chaos because encoding is lossless and per-token entropy is low—but open-ended rewrites still drift substantially from the original, eventually stabilizing into a distinct, homogenized style.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said the 21 Air Boeing 767-300 operating Prime Air Flight 7598 overshot Miami International Airport's runway by roughly 1,300 feet after arriving from San Juan on Sunday. The jet struck a cleaning-company van inside the airport, broke through a perimeter fence and hit a passenger car outside, killing at least five people and injuring five more before sliding through a second fence near parked Tesla robotaxis.
Instructors at the University of Baltimore's writing program are moving away from surveillance-style tracking of student edits in Google Docs toward assignments that deliberately incorporate generative AI. Using the university's BoodleBox platform, faculty built chatbots with personas like the 'Confrontational Parent' for students to debate in simulated scenarios, such as a mock school board meeting on book bans. New assignments now require transcripts of chatbot conversations, handwritten outlines, and video reflections alongside traditional writing.
Apple's WebKit team has opened a call for proposals for Interop 2027, the next round of the annual cross-browser project run with Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Bocoup, and Igalia. Developers can submit ideas through September 23, with entries required to focus on mature, testable web standards measured via Web Platform Tests.
A contributor writing for Entrepreneur argues that universities are structurally too slow to keep pace with AI-driven shifts in workforce skills, citing 18-month approval cycles for new degree programs and 9-to-12-month faculty hiring timelines. The piece introduces the concept of a 'university intrapreneur' — faculty, staff, administrators or students who solve problems and build solutions from within an institution before official policy or funding catches up, launching this as the first in a series on the topic.
PostgreSQL 19, now in beta ahead of a general release expected around September or October 2026, introduces support for SQL/PGQ, the property-graph portion of the SQL:2023 standard. The feature lets developers define a graph structure over existing relational tables and query it with pattern-matching syntax rather than manually writing joins. A hands-on walkthrough tested against PostgreSQL 19 beta 3 demonstrates how tables can be declared as vertices and edges and then queried using the new GRAPH_TABLE construct.