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Tech News
Uber has started mapping Manchester streets using self-driving technology from partners Pony and Verne, with a safety driver present but no passengers onboard. The companies previously launched Europe's first autonomous taxi service in Zagreb, and Uber already runs limited passenger robotaxi trials in London using Wayve vehicles under TfL licensing rules.
Nvidia has launched Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter open-weight model aimed at agentic enterprise tasks. The company says benchmark testing by Artificial Analysis shows it is five times faster than the next-best open model in its class, outperforming InclusionAI's Ling 3.0 Flash and DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash. Nvidia also cited a 44% accuracy gain in a medical insurance claims task after post-training, surpassing Claude Opus 5 on that specific benchmark.
The Simons Foundation announced a partnership with Anthropic and OpenAI committing $15 million in combined funding and resources to help mathematicians adapt to AI's growing role in research. The foundation will manage the money, including an open call for proposals, funding workshops and initiatives to evaluate AI-assisted results, train researchers on new tools, and develop shared standards. Anthropic and OpenAI will also supply AI tools and computing resources to foundation-supported researchers in mathematics and basic science.
Amazon has introduced a new version of its Bee wearable, this time shaped like a credit-card-sized puck. The device is designed to continuously listen to and record a user's surroundings and conversations, building on the original Bee wearable concept.
A joint Foreign Policy/IEEE Spectrum report details how China's dominance in rare-earth elements relies heavily on monazite ore, much of it from the Bayan Obo mine near Baotou, Inner Mongolia. The report notes that decades of processing monazite for rare earths produced the Weikuang Dam tailings lake, a highly polluted, radioactive site, and that China now bans stand-alone monazite mining due to the environmental damage it caused.
A joint report from Foreign Policy and IEEE Spectrum examines efforts by mining firms and governments in North America, Australasia, and Europe to challenge China's roughly 90 percent control of rare-earth oxide and metal markets. The report highlights monazite, a radioactive ore, as a resource that some rare-earth experts believe could help build alternative supply chains outside China's dominance.
The Dreame X40 Ultra robot vacuum and mop is on sale for $499.99, a 15% discount that matches its previous all-time low price. The device offers 12,000Pa of suction power along with a hot-water mop-washing feature.
Expense management startup Ramp announced a $1.85 billion funding round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Sands Capital, and Avenir Growth, valuing the company at $60 billion. Ramp says its annualized revenue has topped $2 billion, up from $1.5 billion in June, with 85,000 customers and over $275 billion in annualized purchase volume, up 175% year over year.
Multiple owners of Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, including 2nd- and 3rd-generation models, told Android Authority and Reddit that the devices captured audio without being activated by the required 'Hey Meta' command. Meta told Android Authority the issue 'has been resolved' and pointed users to settings where voice logs can be reviewed or deleted.
Researchers scanned 217 million HTTP response headers from a 10% sample of Common Crawl's September 2026 crawl and found 7,959 sites including headers addressed to AI agents. Most, 7,271 sites, were pointers directing agents to resources like llms.txt files or MCP servers, while 30 sites contained attempted prompt injections and 139 sites flagged whether they had identified the visitor as a bot.
A developer trying to digitize family photo negatives found their Plustek 8200i scanner's new chipset lacked Linux support. Inspired by a method shared by Tom Crider for fixing a mouse driver, they used Claude AI alongside a Windows VM to capture USB data during scans, producing a working SANE driver within hours and a near-complete one, including infrared support, within days. They also built a companion scanning app called Negative Vibes, though they later found someone had independently submitted official SANE support for the same scanner.
Erewhon, the Los Angeles health-food grocery chain, is replacing its traditional cooking oils with organic Fera fruit oil from Zero Acre Farms for its hot bar items. Hot bar staples such as buffalo cauliflower and turmeric chicken tenders remain on the menu, now prepared with the new oil.