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French startup The Exploration Company, led by Helene Huby, closed a record $450 million Series C funding round to advance its Nyx cargo capsule, a future crewed spacecraft, and plans for a reusable heavy-lift rocket. Huby says the company aims to test a 400,000-pound-thrust methane engine by 2028 and fly the new launcher by 2033, with further fundraising expected once key technical milestones are hit.
Apple says the iPhone 18 Pro charges 0-50% in about 15 minutes, roughly 5 minutes quicker than the iPhone 17 Pro, but only when paired with its 40W dynamic power adapter and a USB-C cable supporting 60W output. That adapter is currently the only one meeting Apple's requirement for USB PD 3.1 with Adjustable Voltage Supply. Wireless charging via MagSafe with a 35W brick reaches 0-50% in about 30 minutes.
The Exploration Company, led by CEO Hèlene Huby, closed a $450 million Series C funding round, the largest such raise by any European space firm and reportedly the biggest ever for a female-led company in Europe. Huby was also named an envoy at France's International Space Summit, appearing alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet as a prominent voice in European space policy.
Apple unveiled its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, alongside new iPhones and Apple Watches. The device supports the USB-C Apple Pencil on both its cover screen and inner display, though Apple notes this functionality arrives 'later this year' rather than at launch. Pricing starts at $2,000 for 256GB storage, with pre-orders beginning October 16 and availability October 23.
Apple has released the iPhone 18 Pro, introducing a variable-aperture camera system as its headline hardware feature. The upgrade allows the camera to adjust its aperture opening, a capability previously reserved for dedicated cameras and rarely seen in smartphones.
Asus' Cetra Open wireless gaming earbuds are on sale for $22 off at Amazon and Best Buy, dropping the price to $206.99. It's the first discount the open-style earbuds have received since launch.
European space startup The Exploration Company has secured $450 million in a Series C round, which it calls the largest ever raised by a European space company. The Germany-based firm, led by former Airbus and ArianeGroup executive Hélène Huby, plans to use the funds to develop a reusable heavy-lift launcher aimed at rivaling SpaceX. The company says it already has 10 missions booked and over $2 billion in contracts, including commitments from the European Space Agency and NASA.
Amazon is selling Anker's compact Nano Laptop Docking Station for $111.99, a 25% cut from its $149.99 list price. The dock offers 13 ports total, including a removable 6-in-1 hub, and supports triple monitors via dual HDMI and one DisplayPort output.
Aurzen showed off the Zip Pro at IFA, a follow-up to its pocket-sized Zip Cyber projector, now offering 1080p resolution and roughly twice the brightness in the 200-lumen range. The device is larger and heavier than its predecessor but still folds via a trifold hinge design, and battery life has grown to 2.5 hours with USB-C charging.
Austin Z. Henley, a Microsoft engineer, built a minimalist Python interpreter written in C that fits within 1024 bytes of code, after an initial attempt at 512 bytes proved too small. The interpreter supports a limited subset of Python syntax—including def, colons, indentation, and parenthesis-free if statements—enough to run a FizzBuzz program, but skips CPython's full tokenizing, AST, and bytecode pipeline in favor of global variables and a fixed-length array.
A developer blog post dissects how Rust implements runtime polymorphism through dyn Trait, comparing it to C++'s virtual functions and CRTP patterns. The author walks through experiments and diagrams showing exactly how vtable pointers and fat pointers are laid out in memory when using trait objects, with all code published on GitHub.
Martin Uecker details how GCC compiles nested functions that access variables from an enclosing function, explaining that such functions are lowered early in the middle-end. Variables referenced by the nested function are gathered into a single synthetic struct, with a pointer to that struct passed to the nested function instead of using older stack-frame-pointer techniques like those in Pascal.