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A Paris-based startup called Capsule wants to transform the way users seek out their daily news. Instead of offering a standard news aggregator experience, Capsule’s mission is to become the “Spotify for news” by combining AI technology and human editorial curation to provide a news-reading experience that transforms news articles, newsletter snippets and even tweets (posts on X) and other social updates, into digestible information through its user-friendly app. The experience of using Capsule, meanwhile, feels much…

While some off-road vehicles are quite striking in appearance, not many are … pretty. The all-electric Callum Skye could soon change that, with a nice-looking design that will allow it to also be driven on city streets.Currently in prototype-in-construction form, the Skye is the first house-brand vehicle to be created by UK firm Callum Designs. The company was founded by Ian Callum, who has previously designed vehicles for automakers such as Aston Martin and Jaguar.At the heart of the all-wheel-drive Skye is a space frame…

When journalist Caché McClay heard about a new job opening last fall, she set about constructing a persuasive video application. “I wouldn’t say I’m a part of the BeyHive, but I definitely speak the language,” she declared in her submission. She got the job as USA Today‘s first-ever full-time Beyoncé reporter, working out of the Nashville newsroom for the Gannett-owned Tennessean newspaper. (Another reporter was hired for a similar position as a full-time Taylor Swift reporter.) For McClay, that line in her video…

Updated Nov. 5, 2023 3:35 pm ETElon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup showed off its first product: a bot named Grok whose sense of humor the billionaire demonstrated with jokes about Sam Bankman-Fried and how to make cocaine.Musk, in a series of social-media posts over the weekend, included those sample responses from Grok as he boasted that it has both a love of sarcasm and the advantage of access to real-time information via X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought just over a year ago.Copyright ©…

For 11 years now, German company Pinion's sealed mid-mount gearbox has offered a tougher alternative to derailleurs. It's now been combined with a motor, resulting in a two-in-one ebike module called the Motor.Gearbox.Unit – or MGU for short.Serving as the main component of the new Pinion E-Drive System – and as a rival to Valeo's existing gearbox/motor unit – the MGU is located adjacent to the bottom bracket, keeping the weight low and central.It still incorporates the company's existing gearbox, which is much less…

A "bi-sensory" treatment combining precisely timed sound and touch has shown impressive results in reducing people's experience of tinnitus, a common and debilitating form of hearing damage that presents as an incessant ringing sound in the ears.That ringing sound can become incredibly penetrating and stressful, particularly in a silent room. It's not a real sound, it's believed to be generated in a brain region called the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN). The DCN is one of the first processing stops for audio signals in the…

An artist’s representation of colloidal quantum dots (colored hexagons) cast from solution (puddles of liquid) onto a grating (groups of horizontal lines) and excited either electrically (lightning-like traces) or optically (narrow white beam coming from the right) to produce multicolor output (beams fanning out from the middle to the bottom-left). Credit: Albin GuyotLab researchers drive colloidal quantum dot lasing technology closer to device-ready.Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have made significant…

One of the more delightful things—aside from the movies themselves—to come out of Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno’s “Shin” tokusatsu movies is the Shin Japan Heroes project, a merch collab that mashes up Evangelion, Ultraman, Godzilla, and Kamen Rider. Now, it’s gotten even weirder, and more delightful.Reservation Dogs | First FandomsTo celebrate the Shin universe’s latest mashup, Bandai has created a special new short film which sees Evangelion’s Unit 1, alongside the “Shin” iterations of Kamen Rider Ichigo, Godzilla,…

While there are now a huge number of bike headlights on the market, most of them take the form of a box that sits up on top of the handlebars. The Center Light is different, in that it has a more classic low-profile look while still packing high-tech features.Currently the subject of a Kickstarter campaign, the Center Light is made by British startup Town Mouse Bikes. Its designer, William Vickery, previously brought us the equally retro Beacon Headlamp.Like the Beacon, the Center incorporates a universal mount which…

Alphabet Inc.’s Google merged its two main artificial-intelligence research units, a major reshuffling as tech companies jockey for leadership in an area quickly reshaping business.  Google said the new unit, Google DeepMind, would combine the existing Google Brain and DeepMind research groups into one team. The unit will be led by Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, which Google purchased for about $500 million in 2014. Alphabet Inc.’s Google merged its two main…