TechNews DevTop Staff 
A long conversation with an assistant eventually betrays you. In the opening message you asked for a formal register and no emojis; forty messages later the tone has loosened and the first emoji has surfaced. Nothing has malfunctioned. The drift follows directly from how large language models read text: at any moment they can only … Read more
A stolen smartphone is an expensive inconvenience. A stolen smartphone that is still unlocked — or whose passcode the thief watched you tap in — is a financial emergency. That is the thinking behind two features Google and Apple have been steadily building into their platforms: Anti-Theft Protection on Android and Stolen Device Protection on … Read more
Metallurgy has spent millennia treating contamination in recycled metal as a defect to flush out with fresh ore. An international research team has now inverted that logic, using machine learning to design cast iron that exploits the copper, tin and titanium found inside scrap. The resulting alloys are up to 15.2% stronger or 73.2% more … Read more
Roborock’s 2026 flagship has arrived in Spain at €949, and its headline upgrades are mechanical rather than cognitive. The Saros 20 debuts an AdaptiLift 3.0 chassis that scales stacked thresholds of up to 8.8 cm and a RockDock station that scrubs its mop pads in water heated to 100 °C. The navigation stack, by contrast, … Read more
Waymo is heading north. The Alphabet-owned autonomous driving unit confirmed on 16 October that its vehicles will start appearing on the streets of Toronto in the coming days — but not as robotaxis. The first cars will be driven manually, sweeping the city to build high-definition maps of its road network, as the company works … Read more
ESA’s Hera spacecraft has completed the first of two major braking burns, a 93-minute firing of three thrusters to slow its approach to Didymos and Dimorphos. The European Space Agency confirmed the next day that the maneuver stayed within expected parameters. A second burn is scheduled for October 22; together, the operations should bring Hera … Read more
A Columbia University-led team has found that water touching microplastic surfaces can spontaneously produce hydroxyl radicals—highly reactive oxygen species capable of damaging proteins and cell membranes. The peer-reviewed paper challenges the assumption that plastic debris is chemically inert and harms health mainly through physical accumulation. The experiments were laboratory-only, not in living organisms. Core finding: … Read more
Google researchers have shown that AI-designed binding proteins can be aimed at large, complex targets for a fraction of the usual compute bill — provided you shrink the target first. Their trick, which they call epitope excision, keeps only the patch of the protein where binding will occur instead of folding the whole molecule. With … Read more
Meta has confirmed that an outside group reached some of its GitHub repositories using a stolen employee credential and walked away with source code and personal information tied to roughly 1,500 people, most of them US-based employees. The company says the intrusion did not stem from a flaw in any Meta product and did not … Read more
Spain has switched on a dedicated dialling range for telemarketing. From 17 October, companies covered by the country’s customer service legislation may only place commercial calls from nine-digit numbers beginning with 400 — a change that gives consumers a recognisable signal and, in theory, a single switch to silence it. The range derives from a … Read more