Astronomers Discover a Bright Supernova Using Gravitational Lensing for the First Time
An international team of astronomers has announced the first spatially resolved, gravitationally lensed supernova, SN 2025wny, located 10 billion light‑years away. The supernova’s light was amplified by a factor of about 50 by two foreground galaxies, producing multiple images that ground‑based telescopes could capture and spectroscopically classify as a Type Ia event. The discovery demonstrates that current facilities can study supernovae from the early Universe and provides a new, clean probe for measuring cosmic expansion. It also validates General Relativity in an extreme lensing configuration.
Our AI Investment Thesis Mirrors Industry Trends
okay i lied. the first prompt was, "here are my AI investments, write me a VC think piece about the state of AI incorporating these" and then we iterated. still, it reads pretty well, captures our thinking, and a good intro...
HIPAA Compliance and Breach Communications: Helpful Tips for SMBs
North Country Communications launched a consultancy on Dec. 15 to help small and mid‑size HIPAA‑regulated entities meet privacy, security, and breach‑notification requirements. The firm offers granular, on‑site or virtual assessments that cover risk analyses, vendor contracts, website security, and state law...
Effective Brand Marketing Is Product‑centric, Not Just Quirky Campaigns
There's a very big difference between trying to get someone to start thinking of you and preventing them from forgetting you - and a lot of the brand marketing we talk about is the latter. Big brand campaigns, the ones...
Mobileye To Acquire Mentee Robotics to Accelerate Physical AI Leadership
Mobileye announced a definitive agreement to acquire Mentee Robotics for approximately $900 million, merging its autonomous‑driving AI with Mentee’s third‑generation humanoid platform. The deal aims to create a leader in Physical AI, spanning autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, with proof‑of‑concept deployments...
What Type of Data Is Needed to Find Opportunities
Investment managers are turning to alternative and unstructured data, combined with scalable AI and agentic workflows, to generate uncorrelated alpha in a volatile market. Bloomberg’s Enterprise Tech & Data Summit highlighted how firms aim to increase data vendors, accelerate idea‑to‑production...
SDA Surveying Industry On Ability to Provide Ground Entry Points for Tranche 3
The U.S. Space Force Space Development Agency (SDA) is surveying firms capable of delivering ground entry points (GEP) for Tranche 3 of its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. A five‑year solicitation, expected next month, will cover civil engineering, procurement, installation, integration, testing...
Listening to Battery Failure
MIT engineers have demonstrated that the faint sounds emitted by lithium‑ion batteries can be decoded to reveal degradation and impending failure. By synchronizing acoustic recordings with electrochemical testing, the team identified distinct signatures for gas‑bubble formation and material fracturing. The...
Israel Space Agency Selects Team to Lead R&D Space Laboratory Development
The Israel Space Agency has awarded the Access to Space consortium, led by Creation Space and backed by ImageSat International, the Technion, and Ben‑Gurion University, to build and run a national R&D space laboratory. The government will contribute roughly $16 million,...
Laylo (YC S20) – Head of Growth (Organic and Partners and Loops and AI) – Remote US
Laylo, the Y Combinator‑backed Drop CRM for musicians and live events, is hiring a Head of Growth to lead its organic, influencer, partner and product‑loop initiatives. The remote, full‑time role offers a $150K‑$200K salary plus 0.01%‑0.03% equity and reports directly to...
Global Securities Lending Tops $15.3 Billion, Rising 26% in 2025
Global securities lending surged to $15.3 billion in 2025, a 26% year‑over‑year increase, with loan balances topping $4 trillion and generating $11.7 billion in revenue. The broker‑to‑broker market expanded to $3.61 billion, up 41%, while North America, EMEA and APAC all posted double‑digit revenue...
How S&P Global Built a Multimodel AI Platform
S&P Global adopted a multimodel AI strategy, likened to a multicloud approach, to enhance operational efficiency. Partnering with Google Cloud in December 2025, they leveraged Vertex AI to integrate Google Gemini alongside third‑party and open‑source models, enabling flexible model selection...
Panoptic Segmentation Unites Class Labels and Object Instances
Semantic vs Instance vs Panoptic Segmentation — explained 🟦 Semantic Segmentation: assigns a class label (person, road, tree, sky, etc.) to every pixel. ✅ You know what the pixel is — ❌ not which exact object (person 1 vs person 2). 🧍♂️ Instance...
Stripe Integrates Crypto.com to Facilitate Crypto Payments
Stripe and Crypto.com announced a partnership that embeds Crypto.com Pay into Stripe’s payment platform, allowing merchants to accept cryptocurrency payments. The integration automatically converts crypto into the merchant’s selected fiat currency, which is deposited like any traditional transaction. Crypto.com will...
Podcast: Reimagining Payment Experiences with Agentic AI
In this episode, Zachary Aron, a principal at Deloitte Consulting, explores how agentic AI is poised to overhaul entire payment journeys rather than isolated transactions, highlighting use cases such as travel and business expense workflows. He explains that while AI...
Small Yet Mighty: Improve Accuracy In Multimodal Search and Visual Document Retrieval with Llama Nemotron RAG Models
NVIDIA introduced two compact Llama Nemotron models—an image‑text embedding encoder and a cross‑encoder reranker—tailored for multimodal retrieval over visual documents. Both run on typical NVIDIA GPUs, emit a single dense vector per page, and integrate seamlessly with existing vector databases. Benchmarks...
Venezuela-Focused Crypto Startup Loses $341K in Cybertheft
Kontigo, a Venezuela‑focused crypto fintech, reported a cyber‑theft that drained about $341,000 USDC from 1,005 user accounts. The company said it has fully refunded the affected users despite losing access to U.S. banking partners like JPMorgan Chase and Checkbook due...
Mobileye Acquires Humanoid Robot Startup Mentee Robotics for $900M
Mobileye announced a $900 million acquisition of Mentee Robotics, the humanoid‑robot startup co‑founded by its president Amnon Shashua. The deal consists of $612 million in cash and up to 26.2 million Mobileye shares, and is slated to close in Q1 2026. Mobileye frames...
NVIDIA Launches Ultra‑low‑latency Open‑
Wow. @NVIDIA just kicked off the year by pushing open source voice agents way forward. They just dropped Nemotron Speech ASR, a speech to text model designed from the ground up for low latency use cases like real time voice agents 🔥 The...
NASA Launches an Infrastructure Modernization Effort.
The episode discusses NASA’s sweeping infrastructure modernization, including the demolition of the T‑Tower test facility at Marshall and the closure of the Goddard library, both reflecting broader shifts in agency priorities. It highlights NASA’s selection of industry proposals to advance...
Manufacturing Ideation: How AI Engines Can Reshape the Marketplace of Innovation
The article argues that AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are redefining innovation by turning idea generation into a scalable, cross‑disciplinary marketplace. By prompting AI to juxtapose unrelated domains, businesses can uncover novel concepts such as just‑in‑time publishing or...
GrowthRise Mastermind Recap Jan 6, 2026
GrowthRise’s Jan 6 mastermind call delivered actionable tactics for B2B marketers facing platform restrictions, limited budgets, and scaling challenges. Participants learned to sidestep Meta’s employment‑category limits by reframing ad copy, to concentrate pre‑seed cybersecurity outreach on 10‑20k high‑quality prospects using LinkedIn...
Has Quantum Advantage Been Achieved?
The blog post examines whether quantum advantage has truly been achieved, noting that less than half of a physics‑focused audience believed it had. It defines quantum advantage as a programmable quantum device solving a specific task faster than any classical...
Define Product-Market Fit with Real‑Time Metrics
Is product market fit… a feeling? I’d argue the opposite. PMF shouldn’t be based on intuition. It should be easily defined, and it’s something you can outline early in your sales process. In The Science of Scaling, I share a...
At CES, EVs Take a Backseat to Robotaxis and AI
At CES 2026, the automotive spotlight shifted from electric vehicles to artificial intelligence and robotaxis. Hyundai used its keynote to showcase Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot, while Mercedes announced a Nvidia‑powered Level 2++ driver‑assist system for the U.S. market. Uber displayed...
CERT/CC Warns of Critical, Unfixed Vulnerability in TOTOLINK EX200
CERT/CC has disclosed a critical, unpatched vulnerability (CVE-2025-65606) in the TOTOLINK EX200 Wi‑Fi range extender. The flaw resides in the firmware‑upload handler; a specially crafted firmware file triggers an error state that launches an unauthenticated root‑level telnet service. Exploitation requires...
New Census of Sun's Neighbors Reveals Best Potential Real Estate for Life
Georgia State University graduate student Sebastián Carrazco‑Gaxiola presented a new all‑sky spectroscopic survey of more than 2,100 nearby K‑dwarf stars within 40 parsecs. Using the CHIRON spectrograph on SMARTS in Chile and the TRES instrument on the Tillinghast telescope in Arizona,...
Top Alternatives to Sticker Mule: 10 Sticker Services to Try in 2026
Sticker Mule remains a popular custom‑sticker provider, but 2026 sees a surge of niche competitors offering distinct advantages. StickerApp leads with specialty finishes like holographic and glow‑in‑the‑dark, while StickerGiant targets high‑volume bulk orders with rapid shipping. Jukebox Print delivers next‑day...
California Lawmaker Proposes a Four-Year Ban on AI Chatbots in Kids’ Toys
Senator Steve Padilla introduced SB 867, a bill that would impose a four‑year ban on the sale and manufacture of AI‑chatbot toys for anyone under 18. The legislation seeks to give regulators time to develop safety guidelines after a series of...
How Ralph Wiggum Went From 'The Simpsons' To the Biggest Name in AI Right Now
Anthropic’s Claude Code has introduced the Ralph Wiggum plugin, turning the model into an autonomous coding agent that loops until predefined success criteria are met. The tool originated from Geoffrey Huntley’s Bash script that fed model output back as input,...
Aetina Introduces AIB-AT Series, an Edge AI Platform Based on NVIDIA Jetson Thor for Physical AI and Robotics
Aetina unveiled the AIB‑AT series, edge AI platforms powered by NVIDIA Jetson Thor modules (T5000 and T4000). The devices deliver up to 2070 FP4 TFLOPS of compute, 128 GB memory, and 7.5× performance gains over prior generations, targeting physical AI and robotics. Compact 140 mm × 165 mm...
Universal Music Signs a New AI Deal with Nvidia
Universal Music Group has struck a partnership with Nvidia to integrate the Music Flamingo AI model across its vast catalog, allowing nuanced analysis of song structure, harmony and emotional arcs. The model, capable of processing tracks up to fifteen minutes,...
NASA's Curiosity Rover Sends Stunning New Panorama From High on Mars' Mount Sharp
NASA’s Curiosity rover transmitted a striking composite panorama from high on Mount Sharp, captured over sols 4,722 and 4,723 using its navigation cameras. The view showcases the boxwork formation, a network of mineral‑rich ridges that record ancient groundwater flow. While...
How the World Got Owned Episode 1: The 1980s
In Episode 1, hosts Patrick Gray and Amberleigh Jack explore the formative era of 1980s hacking, recounting life on ARPANET, the rise of the 414s, the infamous Morris Worm, and the parallel hunt for German hackers alongside Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s...
Prediction Markets: Socially Valuable but Impractical; Sports Betting: Fun, Useless
The irony of prediction markets is that the most socially beneficial use cases (elections, foreign affairs, etc.) are infrequent, not that fun to casually gamble on, difficult to split into binary outcomes, and easy for insiders to manipulate. Sporting events, by...
Financial System Intentionally Makes Decisions Needlessly Complex
From savings to loans to retirement, financial decisions are harder than they should be. The system is not broken. It is designed this way. We discuss why with co-author of Fixed, Tarun Ramadorai of the @imperialcollege. Watch the full episode:...
SaasRise Enterprise Mastermind Call Recap Jan 6, 2026
The SaasRise Enterprise Mastermind call tackled four critical SaaS growth levers. It recommended re‑positioning a struggling lead developer into an individual‑contributor or consulting role to retain institutional knowledge. It advised pricing hikes be paired with risk‑mitigating Net 90 terms and clear...
Weather Satellites Critical to National Security Operations
House SS&T will hold a hrg next wk (Jan 13, 10:00 am ET) on "From Orbit to Operations: How Weather Satellites Support the National Security Mission." Witnesses: https://t.co/xCfXyGuaBp
HEY Calendar Launches New Year View Today
Loved this idea so much we brought it to the HEY Calendar overnight. Live now in the new Year view (top left toggle in your HEY Calendar account). https://t.co/xUOZd3RqzZ
Cobalt Credit Union Teams Up with Eltropy to Deploy AI Voice
Eltropy announced that Nebraska‑based Cobalt Credit Union has rolled out its AI Voice solution, dubbed “Coby,” across its contact center. The deployment delivered an 83% session containment rate, surpassing typical voice AI benchmarks of 60‑80% and maintaining strong member satisfaction....
Seeking USDC-to-Bolivar Withdrawal Success via Pago Móvil
Are any @kontigo_app users able to successfully withdraw from USDC to Bolivars via Pago Móvil or bank transfer?
XAI Celebrates Team Success, Thanks Investors' Confidence
Congrats to the @xAI team and thank you to investors for your faith in our company
Blockchain Security Firm CertiK Examines Crypto and Privacy Tech Advancements Heading Into 2026
CertiK released a dual‑track report outlining 2025’s regulatory overhaul and the technical rise of zero‑knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) as it looks toward 2026. In the United States, the GENIUS Act now forces 1:1 stablecoin reserves and monthly audits, while the...
Webb Reveals a Sample of Galaxies with Unusual Features, Nicknamed 'Platypus'
University of Missouri astronomers, using JWST data, identified nine ultra‑compact, point‑like galaxies dating back 12‑12.6 billion years. Their spectra feature narrow emission lines, distinguishing them from quasars and known star‑forming galaxies. The team likens the odd combination of traits to a...
New Agents Accelerate Robot Scene Creation and Task Design
still very much in r&d but one of my fav projects being worked on at lucky is these agents that make creating the scene and what you actually want the robot(s) to do faster, just such a cool concept.
Webb Finds Early-Universe Analog's Unexpected Talent for Making Dust
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers observed the dwarf galaxy Sextans A and identified two rare dust species—metallic iron grains and silicon carbide—alongside tiny clumps of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The galaxy, only 3–7 % as metal‑rich as the Sun, mimics...
SaaStr Scales GTM Dramatically with Minimal Staff
"SaaStr went from 10 humans in GTM to 1.2. And it does just as well. But we'd still love to hire 2 more humans." with @lennysan https://t.co/TKyWoJ0aau
Yield Issue in Play as Senate Looks to Crypto Bill Markup
The Senate Banking Committee is poised to mark up a crypto market‑structure bill as early as next week, despite lingering partisan gaps. Lawmakers are debating provisions that would curb stable‑coin issuers from offering yield‑like rewards, a practice the American Bankers...
Amgen Acquires UK Biotech Dark Blue Therapeutics
Amgen announced a $840 million acquisition of UK‑based Dark Blue Therapeutics, adding an investigational small‑molecule that degrades MLLT1/3 proteins implicated in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The deal expands Amgen’s targeted‑protein‑degradation platform and strengthens its oncology pipeline with a novel mechanism to overcome...
High-Performance DBMSs with Io_uring: When and How to Use It
The paper investigates how Linux io_uring can be harnessed by modern database management systems to lower I/O overhead. It evaluates two scenarios: a storage‑bound buffer manager and a network‑bound analytical shuffling workload. Advanced io_uring features such as registered buffers and passthrough...
