THURSDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2026, 23:12
Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft’s accelerated aging experiments suggest the data...
The Executive Branch has a reported membership list that includes Trumpworld elites like David Sacks. A WIRED review of corporate filings reveals an under-the-radar player: a notorious former DC police officer.
A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe’s failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes — problems California shares in abundance — but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estimates, corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 31 months of salary per...
Fallout, Neighbors, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters are just a few of the TV shows we’re swooning over for February.
On TikTok, Chinese manufacturers are advertising signal-blocking weapons with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising.
Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, where layoffs continue and employees are expected to use AI tools daily.
These compact Edifier speakers may not be the fanciest, but they’ll blow your monitor’s built-in speakers out of the water.
The Boston startup uses AI to translate and verify legacy software for defense contractors, arguing modernization can’t come at the cost of new bugs.
Bafta has brought in “human achievement” as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intelligence would change how people worked “but at the base of...
The AI search startup once predicted advertising would be a massive business. Now it’s betting on a smaller, more valuable audience.
Research adds weight to theory Arrokoth’s two lobes produced by gravitational collapse – and reveals process
It is the most distant and primitive object ever visited by a spacecraft from Earth: now researchers say they have fresh insights into how the ultra-red, 4bn-year-old body known as Arrokoth came to have its distinctive snowman-like shape.
Arrokoth sits in the Kuiper belt, a vast, thick...
AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models — Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini — appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only 30 of the returned passwords were unique, and 18 of the...
The company says it has addressed the issue and it “did not provide anyone access to information they weren’t already authorised to see”.
Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF]. The share of the workforce on the job at 11PM, for instance, fell by over 25% from its 1970s level....
A new study [PDF] from Ramp’s economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost. The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp’s Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across...
In 2026, the digital market is shifting as traders look past the old cycles to find the next big breakout. Many are closely watching the Cardano price prediction 2026, hoping the coin can finally break through its tough resistance levels. At the same time, the latest Hedera price prediction shows a network that is stable […]
“If you are interested in helping shape and deliver the next chapter of Palantir’s work across DHS, please reach out,” a Palantir executive wrote to employees about the massive purchasing agreement.
Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. From a report: The company told senior managers and associate directors that being promoted to leadership roles would require “regular adoption” of artificial...
My father, Desmond McConnell, who has died aged 95, made a great contribution to mineralogy, inspiring scientists around the world.
At Cambridge University in the 1960s and 70s, with the excellent X-ray diffraction facilities in the Mineralogy Department, he developed work first published by his crystallographer colleagues, Peter Gay and Mike Bown, on the incommensurate behaviour (ie falling...
Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country — and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or...
The company warns of a sharp earnings per share decline after recognising a R5.2 billion loss linked to Cell C’s listing.