Licube, a startup licensing lithium separation technology from Hirosaki University in Japan, is presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield. The company aims to purify lithium-6, a rare isotope that fusion reactors need to breed tritium fuel on site, since it makes up only about 7.5% of naturally occurring lithium. CEO Yohei Kiguchi told TechCrunch he expects the lithium-6 market to reach $50 billion by 2040 if fusion power becomes commercially viable.
The Donaldson Futuro House, a fibreglass flying-saucer-shaped dwelling designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, has come onto the market in the San Jacinto Mountains near Idyllwild, California. The 793-square-foot structure, about 26 feet 4 inches in diameter and 13 feet 2 inches tall, has been fitted out as a fully functional home and is described by the listing agent as one of the rarest residential structures in America.
OpenAI says it discovered a sophisticated recording device concealed in one of its offices and used its own AI models to trace it to an employee who had planted it days earlier. The company referred the case to the FBI, which made an arrest; the employee was fired, and OpenAI says it has found no evidence the person accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code, or customer data.
A federal judge's temporary restraining order barred government-funded Trump ads from airing starting 6:45pm on October 11, citing likely violations of a law against government propaganda. Despite the order, the ads—including spots about immigration, Iran, and Maduro's capture—continued through the night and into October 12. A US attorney later apologized, saying agency counsel didn't see the order until the next morning due to a delayed email forward.
A developer has released Parsimony, an open-source benchmark that measures how much code AI models add when solving SWE-bench Verified tasks, rather than just whether they solve them. It parses patches to count syntax-level coding units added and removed, producing a net score, and ranks models by mean net units added on tasks they solved. The tool and underlying data are published on GitHub, with results also shown via an interactive leaderboard and charts.
Apple TV released a trailer for its new heist thriller '12 12 12,' starring Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan. The series debuts November 13 with two episodes, then continues weekly through December 25, following a disgraced FBI agent and a career criminal across three timelines tied to a Zurich bank vault heist.
A new analysis argues that although AI tools now let developers write, refactor, and document code far faster than two years ago, overall software shipping speed has barely improved. It attributes this gap to software development lifecycles still built around sprints, manual quality gates, and review handoffs designed for an era when writing code itself was the slowest step.
At a UK parliamentary hearing, representatives from OpenAI and Anthropic said voluntary safety pledges are insufficient and called for statutory, binding AI regulation, including mandatory incident reporting. Google DeepMind and Meta did not endorse new legislation, instead pointing to existing standards and regulators as sufficient.
Apple introduced the HomeView smart display, a new Apple TV 4K with an A19 chip, and an updated Siri Remote, all now available for pre-order on Amazon ahead of their November 13 release. HomeView is a 7-inch touchscreen with facial recognition, Siri AI, and a Center Stage camera, priced at $299, matching the new Apple TV 4K's price, while the redesigned Siri Remote sells separately for $59.
A security researcher has revealed a technique to execute JavaScript functions without using traditional parentheses. The method involves manipulating the Error object's prepareStackTrace function and overriding array prototype methods to generate and invoke arbitrary code. This approach leverages prototype pollution and custom toString or valueOf functions to trigger execution.
Apple released developer and public firmware betas, build number 9B5043a, for several AirPods models including AirPods 5 and AirPods Pro 3. The rollout coincided with developer beta 4 of macOS 27.2, iOS 27.2, iPadOS 27.2, and other OS updates. Apple has not disclosed what changes or fixes the new firmware contains.
Anthropic posted a job opening in its London office for an executive assistant, describing the role as requiring someone 'highly organized, detail-oriented, and self-starting.' The listed salary is reported at around €145,000, roughly $190,000.
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