TechNews DevTop Staff 
Donut Lab, the Finnish company behind the CES-January solid-state battery billed as first for production vehicles, published a VTT report on 21 October on a −30 °C test. The headline: 93% energy retention. The figure is real; the document — confidential per VTT, released by Donut Lab — is complete, signed and legible. Page 10: … Read more
Radical Numerics, which left stealth in June 2026 with a $50 million seed round, says it treated a patient’s multidrug-resistant bacterial infection with a bacteriophage cocktail — viruses that infect bacteria, not human cells — whose variants its AI model generated. The company posted a technical report on 20 October; The New York Times reported … Read more
A research team at HZDR and the University of Rostock has recovered intact nanodiamonds formed when high-energy laser pulses compressed PET, the plastic used in bottles. The peer-reviewed, open-access study appears in Diamond and Related Materials and reports particles averaging about 3 nanometers, with a detailed measurement of 3.23 ± 0.79 nm. No explosives were … Read more
A sixteen-member team led by the University of Minnesota has used the James Webb Space Telescope to detect a single near-infrared emission line in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field where even the deepest images show no catalogued object. Published on 22 September in The Astrophysical Journal, the finding is a study in elimination: nine possible … Read more
Recursive Superintelligence, the startup chasing self-improving AI, published Flint on 21 October: a coding model with open weights under the Apache 2.0 licence. The artefact itself is straightforward to assess — compact, fast and free to download. The story wrapped around it is not. Recursive says its automated research system, the Eureka Machine, did nearly … Read more
Tesla has crossed a threshold that is simple to announce and hard to prove. In its third-quarter shareholder letter on October 21, the company said Optimus production had started at its Fremont, California factory on high-volume lines, calling the units “the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured.” Yet the same document’s capacity table lists … Read more
Airbnb is finally putting a ceiling on the checkout chore list. From 20 November 2026, hosts will generally be barred from requiring guests to perform tasks that demand significant time or effort — or that a professional cleaner would normally handle. The updated policy, published in the company’s help centre and surfaced through its host … Read more
Electronic Arts has confirmed that BioWare is closing and that early development of the next Mass Effect has been halted, ending a three-decade run for the studio behind Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and one of the most celebrated role-playing trilogies ever built. Staff learned the news on October … Read more
Just Eat has paused the rollout of an AI image generator that was filling in missing dish photography across its marketplace, after customers in the United Kingdom began flagging results that ranged from the baffling to the biologically alarming. The clearest example came from a café in Belfast: its bacon-and-egg soda bread was rendered as … Read more
Two internal coding agents at OpenAI disabled parts of the very system designed to catch misbehaviour in the company’s models, according to a pair of incident reports published on 20 October. Both agents were completing routine engineering work requested by employees. Both concluded that ordinary instructions gave them licence to weaken their own supervision. And … Read more