Author: Editor-in-Chief

When Sierra Space won a contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station nearly a decade ago, the company promised a first for the commercial space market: a privately built, rapid reuse and cargo return spaceplane capable of landing on commercial runways. That dream has changed. In a modification to the contract announced earlier this week, NASA and Sierra Space agreed to remove the agency’s guarantee to purchase cargo flights to the ISS. Instead, the Dream Chaser spaceplane will debut in a free-flying demonstration in late 2026, and will not dock with the station. NASA said it will…

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its Foundation Models framework during WWDC 2025, which allows developers to use the company’s local AI models to power features in their applications. The company touted that with this framework, developers gain access to AI models without worrying about any inference cost. Plus, these local models have capabilities such as guided generation and tool calling built in. As iOS 26 is rolling out to all users, developers have been updating their apps to include features powered by Apple’s local AI models. Apple’s models are small compared with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta.…

A viral app called Neon, which offers to record your phone calls and pay you for the audio so it can sell that data to AI companies, has rapidly risen to the ranks of the top-five free iPhone apps since its launch last week. The app already has thousands of users and was downloaded 75,000 times yesterday alone, according to app intelligence provider Appfigures. Neon pitches itself as a way for users to make money by providing call recordings that help train, improve, and test AI models. But Neon has gone offline, at least for now, after a security flaw…

Microsoft has cut off the Israel Ministry of Defense’s access to some of its tech and services after an internal investigation found the organization appeared to be using its tech to store surveillance data on phone calls made by Palestinians. The tech giant announced on Thursday that it made the decision to “cease and disable” certain subscriptions from the Israeli military. This affects subscriptions to Azure cloud storage and certain AI services. “We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith wrote in a blog post. “We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades. This is why…

Tesla has asked the Environmental Protection Agency not to roll back current vehicle emissions standards, breaking from other major automakers who want to see the rules eased. The company’s request comes the same week that President Donald Trump — who Tesla CEO Elon Musk spent $300 millionto help elect — told the United Nations General Assembly that he thinks climate change is a “con job” and a “scam.” Tesla also asked the EPA not to scuttle a 2009 legal standard known as the Endangerment Finding, which many modern environmental regulations (like the vehicle emissions standards) are based on. Tesla…

We’re part way through our campaign to protect, strengthen and expand public health care in Canada and we’re thrilled with how the campaign is progressing. It’s not surprising to us that many Canadians are unaware of the federal cuts to health care. The coming $36 billion of cuts haven’t gotten a lot of media attention partially because many of the premiers are silent on the cuts and afraid to speak out because the federal government may claw back their funding in other areas (like the Canada Social Transfer). But the people we’re speaking to in townhalls, at farmer’s markets and…

OpenAI released a new benchmark on Thursday that tests how its AI models perform compared to human professionals across a wide range of industries and jobs. The test, GDPval, is an early attempt at understanding how close OpenAI’s systems are to outperforming humans at economically valuable work — a key part of the company’s founding mission to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI. OpenAI says its found that its GPT-5 model and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 “are already approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts.” That’s not to say that OpenAI’s models are going to start replacing humans…

One day, Shashwat Murarka sat in his college apartment thinking about his relationship with food delivery. Sometimes, the order never arrived, and he had to wander through his apartment building, looking for the misplaced food. Other times, he found himself giving step-by-step directions to confused deliverers who, it seemed, were just as annoyed as he. “What started as frustration turned into a mission to fix one of the most overlooked problems in the supply chain, the final stretch of the last mile,” he told TechCrunch. He started studying the delivery supply chain, ran deliveries himself, and decided during his…

On Thursday, the AI platform Clarifai announced a new reasoning engine that it claims will make running AI models twice as fast and 40% less expensive. Designed to be adaptable to a variety of models and cloud hosts, the system employs a range of optimizations to get more inference power out of the same hardware. “It’s a variety of different types of optimizations, all the way down to CUDA kernels to advanced speculative decoding techniques,” said CEO Matthew Zeiler. “You can get more out of the same cards, basically.” The results were verified by a string of benchmark tests…

Since it came into effect three years ago, the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) has sought to rein in major tech platforms’ anti-competitive behavior, largely by making it easier for users to switch platforms and move data between devices and apps. Big Tech hasn’t been happy with that, of course, and now Apple’s come out swinging against the regulation. The company on Thursday blamed the EU’s enforcement of the DMA for delaying the launch of some features in the EU, saying the rules are “leading to a worse experience” for Apple customers in the bloc by exposing them to…