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French AI firm Mistral AI announced the release of Mistral Large 4 (ML4), a multimodal model with one trillion parameters, aiming to surpass both Western and Chinese rivals. Currently accessible only through a controlled endpoint, the company plans to release the model's weights in three weeks after safety evaluations are completed.
Phia, the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni and valued at $185 million, faced allegations earlier this year of 'cookie stuffing' following a Bloomberg investigation. Melinda French Gates, Phoebe's mother, did not invest in the company and was not involved in the controversy.
AeroPress has released a walnut collection, its first product line to incorporate wood, ahead of National Coffee Day and shortly after debuting a stainless steel version. The lineup includes a brewer and a manual grinder, both featuring solid walnut components alongside stainless steel, aluminum and borosilicate glass, with the brewer's chamber and accessories redesigned to fit the wood accents.
Coffee industry sourcing expert Jose Lepe of Sightglass Coffee explains that high-end coffee shops often use reverse osmosis systems to strip tap water down to pure H2O, then remineralize it to a specific balance for optimal flavor. The report notes this same process can be replicated at home without expensive equipment, and contrasts tap water mineral profiles in cities like New York, Los Angeles and London to show how local water quality affects both coffee taste and machine longevity.
Andreas Hansen, founder of air fryer maker Fritaire, detailed a technique that gets frozen or homemade fries closer to deep-fried texture without oil. The approach borrows from a chain of chefs, including Joshua Weissman and Chris Young, who credit Heston Blumenthal's triple-cooked method as its origin. The result, per the tip, is golden, evenly crisp fries in under 15 minutes with no oil cleanup.
Thieves broke into the Renoir Museum, the artist's former home on the French Riviera, and made off with two paintings valued at $10.5 million combined. The artworks remain missing, and investigators say the theft fits a pattern of recent high-profile art crimes targeting museums worldwide.
A randomized controlled trial across 243 French high schools and 9,628 students tested giving teenagers a free one-year digital subscription to a major national newspaper and running media-literacy classes taught by teachers. Researchers tracked actual online reading behavior and found subscriptions sharply increased news consumption and even led some students to pay for subscriptions on their own nearly a year later. Students in poorer schools showed the biggest knowledge gains, and combining free access with media education produced the strongest literacy improvements, especially with experienced teachers.
Several major US space firms, including SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, K2, and Starcloud, have withdrawn from a French-organized space summit in Paris after a call led by a White House science and technology official. Politico first reported that the administration pressured these companies to avoid the event, which was convened by President Macron to unify French and European space strategy. Some US presence reportedly remains on the summit's agenda despite the corporate pullout.
Researchers with the Scott River Watershed Council built artificial beaver dams on Sugar Creek and French Creek in northern California starting in 2015, using wooden posts, branches, gravel and mud to mimic structures once built by beavers before fur trappers wiped them out in the 1830s. The dams created roughly 9,000 square metres of cooler, slower-moving wetland habitat capable of supporting more than 8,500 juvenile coho salmon, and survival rates in these restored areas jumped from about 8% to 60% compared to untreated stretches, according to findings published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
LWN published a tribute marking the passing of Steve French, a longtime contributor to the Linux community. The notice appears as a brief editorial post rather than a detailed report, with copyright information from Eklektix, Inc. accompanying it.