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Tech News
Physicl, founded by Alex de Vigan, has raised $10 million in seed funding from Inovia Capital. The startup repurposes technology originally built at de Vigan's prior company, nfinite, which created 3D product renderings for e-commerce, to generate realistic physics-based simulations for training robots and world models.
Ampere's Architecture & Performance team has released Panthera, the cycle-accurate software model it uses internally to evaluate prospective CPU features and microarchitectural tradeoffs for its cloud processors. The company published a user guide covering how to build and use the model and its associated tooling, allowing outside researchers to run workloads against it.
NASA has completed a 378-day ground-based simulation designed to mimic conditions of a Mars mission, testing how a four-person volunteer crew coped with isolation, limited resources, and delayed communication. The experiment, which took place without leaving Earth, aimed to study the psychological and logistical challenges future astronauts could face on a real mission to Mars.
BBRouter is a new tool that recreates Ben Eater's well-known 8-bit computer build as an interactive 3D breadboard simulation. It also ships an MCP server that lets AI assistants such as Claude connect, open, edit and run a user's breadboard projects directly, after a one-time sign-in and authentication step.
Bolt Graphics powered on a 12nm test chip built with TSMC, confirming its design works ahead of the full Zeus GPU, which won't reach volume production until 2028. The startup also opened a Taipei office to work more closely with manufacturing partners, and Reuters reported it is seeking roughly $100 million in funding at a $700 million valuation.
NASA livestreamed the exit of its second CHAPEA crew—Ross Elder, Matthew Montgomery, Ellen Ellis and James Spicer—from its 3D-printed Mars habitat in Houston after 378 days of simulated Mars operations. During their stay, the crew performed mock spacewalks, maintained the habitat, grew plants and endured simulated communication delays and resource constraints. NASA is now accepting applications for a follow-up year-long experiment, the Moon and Mars Exploration Analog, set to begin no earlier than August 2027.
Simantic, a startup founded by former Neuralink and Tesla firmware engineers Ahnaf and Seungmin, has launched a simulation layer that lets AI agents test and validate firmware without physical hardware. The platform offers virtual devboards accessible via API, an AI code reviewer that evaluates firmware changes using simulated test evidence, and a CI/CD pipeline that checks firmware against a simulated microcontroller on every commit. The company is part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch.
Google announced Genie 4, a real-time world model that builds on Gemini Omni and can maintain a consistent simulated environment for up to two minutes, double its Genie 3 predecessor. Users can alter scenes in real time with natural language prompts, including weather, camera movement, and new objects or characters, while the model generates ambient sound and adaptive human dialogue. Genie 4 works alongside Gemini 3.8 Flash, which breaks down prompts into steps, and is currently limited to select trusted testers in a research preview.
A Myriad educational article walks through building a simulated creature called a 'spark' using minimal neural circuits—starting with one light-sensing neuron wired to one motor neuron, then expanding to two eyes and two flippers. The demonstrations show that even these simple wiring setups produce surprisingly complex, sometimes counterintuitive movement patterns, such as a spark that appears to avoid light rather than seek it.
Researchers at the Center for Astrophysics, a Harvard-Smithsonian collaboration, published the Lumina Project in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, modeling the first 2 billion years of cosmic history across a cube about 1.5 billion light-years wide. The simulation was run on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer using roughly 15,000 of its 37,000 GPUs, surpassing the 2022 Thesan simulation in both scale and timespan covered.
A developer posted a prototype on Hacker News called Impossible Machines, which generates mechanical linkages or systems based on a user's stated goals rather than manual design. Users can specify elements like a sink's position or an obstacle, and the system produces a mechanism meeting those constraints.
A developer built WorldTUI, a 360-million-parameter model based on Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B, fine-tuned on recorded terminal sessions from real programs run in Docker. The model has no actual shell or filesystem behind it; it predicts screen changes in response to each keypress, and can simulate file creation, vim, tmux, and even the game snake. A browser demo lets users test it, including typing a misspelled command to reveal it's not a genuine shell.