In short: Altilium, a UK clean technology company, has secured £18.5 million in grant funding from the government’s DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund to build ACT3, the country’s first commercial refinery for recovering critical minerals…
Month: April 2026
Estonia is the rare EU country opposing bans on children’s social media use
In short: Estonia and Belgium are the only two EU member states to have declined the Jutland Declaration, an October 2025 pan-European commitment to restrict children’s access to social media. Estonia’s ministers argue…
AI is making us faster, more productive, and worse at thinking
AI is everywhere, the pressure to adopt it is relentless, and the evidence that it’s making us smarter is getting thinner by the quarter. On New Year’s Day 2026, a programmer named…
AI can screen 15 million molecules in a day. It still can’t cure Alzheimer’s.
The drug discovery revolution is real but radically overstated, the health chatbots are a documented hazard, and the diseases that matter most remain stubbornly unsolved. At Novartis, sometime in late 2025, a…
France orders all government ministries to ditch Windows for Linux in digital sovereignty push
In short: France’s Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) announced on 8 April 2026 that it is migrating its own workstations from Windows to Linux and has ordered every government ministry to formalise a plan…
Police arrest 20-year-old after Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman’s San Francisco home
In short: A 20-year-old man was arrested in the early hours of Friday, 10 April 2026, after throwing a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, then…
Meow Technologies launches the first agentic banking platform for AI agents
In short: Meow Technologies has launched what it describes as the world’s first agentic banking platform, enabling AI agents to open business bank accounts, issue cards, send payments, and manage day-to-day account activity…
Amazon’s AI tool matches shelter dogs and cats with adopters in the Protect Playtime campaign
In short: Amazon’s Brand Innovation Lab, PetIQ’s PetArmor brand, and Best Friends Animal Society have launched “Protect Playtime,” a campaign combining an AI-powered pet-matching tool on Amazon with Amazon Nova Reel-generated videos of…
CoreWeave signs multi-year Anthropic deal as nine of ten top AI model providers join its platform
In short: CoreWeave announced a multi-year agreement with Anthropic on April 10, 2026, giving the Claude maker access to Nvidia GPU capacity across US data centres for production-scale AI workloads. Financial terms were…
SiFive raises $400m Series G at $3.65bn valuation in final round before IPO
In short: SiFive, the RISC-V chip IP firm founded by the Berkeley engineers who created the open-source instruction set architecture, raised $400 million in an oversubscribed Series G on April 9, 2026, at…