🆕 Microsoft announces sweeping Windows changes - but no apologies

In a post titled "Our commitment to Windows quality," published on Microsoft's website and sent via email to millions of members of the Windows Insider Program, Windows boss Pavan Davuluri laid out a laundry list of changes Microsoft plans to make in Windows 11, starting this month.

▪️More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: repositioning the taskbar - the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of the screen, making it easier to personalize a workspace.
▪️Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus: reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
▪️Reducing disruption from Windows Updates: the ability to skip updates during device setup to get to the desktop faster, restart or shut down without installing updates and pause updates for longer when needed.
▪️Faster and more dependable File Explorer: focus on a quicker launch experience, reduced flicker, smoother navigation.
▪️More control over widgets and feed experiences: introducing quieter defaults, more control over when and how widgets appear.
▪️A simpler, more transparent Windows Insider Program.
▪️Improved Feedback Hub: rolling out the largest update to Feedback Hub yet to Insiders, with a redesigned experience that makes it faster and easier to submit feedback.

This sounds like an admission that the entire Windows creation process has been broken for a long time. Microsoft shipped the products that don't meet customers' quality standards and the testing regime for the past few years has been insufficient.

Meanwhile, a simple "We're sorry" wouldn't hurt. Do you agree? 🤔

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🇺🇸 Palantir AI system wins key Pentagon status

Palantir’s Maven AI system will become an official program of record, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve ​Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders, a move that locks in long-term use of Palantir’s weapons-targeting technology across ‌the U.S. military.

In the letter to senior Pentagon leaders and U.S. military commanders, Feinberg said embedding Palantir’s Maven Smart System would provide warfighters “with the latest tools necessary to detect, deter, and dominate our adversaries in all domains”. The decision came weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk.

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🆕 US Departments of Justice and Defense crush four massive botnets totaling 3,000,000 devices

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and its network of partners are on quite a roll lately, scoring the third botnet takedown in this calendar month alone. The DoJ brought offline the combination of networks known as Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid, and Mossad. The DoJ says that Aisuru was responsible for about 200,000 DDoS attacks, while Kimwolf scored 25,000, JackSkid 90,000, and Mossad 1,000.

The Aisuru botnet primarily targets networking and adjacent gear, such as home and office routers, IP cameras, Wi-Fi access points, and gateways. Kimwolf's favorite nourishment, meanwhile, is Android-based streaming devices such as TV boxes, Smart TVs, Android tablets, and digital photo frames.

The operation took out the command-and-control servers for a total of 3 million devices and had the help of the U.S. Department of Defense, Canada, Germany, and a group of major internet connectivity players, including Akamai, Amazon, and Cloudflare. The Defense Criminal Investigative Service seized multiple domains, virtual servers.

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🤑 Elon Musk offers to pay TSA salaries amid budget battle, airport lineups

Elon Musk said he would cover the paychecks of U.S. Transportation Security Administration ​officers during their second unpaid work stoppage in 6 months ‌amid a protracted federal funding lapse.

The budget impasse over funding for the TSA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is in its fifth week. Screeners ​and other TSA personnel are days away from missing a second ​full paycheck, but are being pressured to show up ⁠as screening times at some airports stretch on for hours.

“I would like ​to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding ​impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country,” — Musk said in a post on X.

Airlines and travel groups say absences among the TSA’s roughly 50,000 airport security officers could ‌increase ⁠again this weekend. Airports are running food drives and accepting donations for security screeners amid the partial U.S. government shutdown.

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🔥 How DeFi is quietly rebuilding the fixed-income stack for institutional capital

Tokenization alone was never the endgame. The real institutional unlock isn’t digitizing assets – it’s financializing yield. Surveys increasingly suggest that institutional engagement with DeFi could rise sharply over the next couple of years, while a meaningful share of allocators are exploring tokenized assets.

In traditional finance, fixed-income instruments are rarely held in isolation. They are repo’d, pledged, rehypothecated, stripped, hedged and embedded into structured products. Yield is traded independently of principal, and collateral moves fluidly across markets. DeFi is now beginning to replicate those core functions.

One of the most important patterns emerging in institutional DeFi is a hybrid architecture combining permissioned collateral with permissionless liquidity. Institutions can deploy regulated assets into DeFi without compromising core requirements around custody, investor protection and sanctions compliance, while still benefiting from the liquidity and composability that made DeFi powerful in the first place. 🥇

DeFi is not simply attracting institutional capital; it is, in fact, being reshaped by institutional constraints. Tokenization was phase one because it proved assets could live onchain. Phase two is about making those assets behave like real financial instruments, with yield markets and risk controls that institutions recognize. When that transition matures, the conversation shifts from crypto adoption to capital markets migration.

That shift is already underway. 🔄

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🎮 Sony will bring ML-based frame generation to PlayStation consoles

The PlayStation platform will reportedly receive frame-generation technology, according to the console’s architect. Mark Cerny, who is the lead system architect for the PS4 and the PS5, said that machine-learning-powered frame generation will arrive on Sony’s gaming console. However, it’s unlikely to arrive this year, and gamers seeking higher FPS on the same hardware will likely have to wait until 2027 (or longer) to achieve that capability.

"The new PSSR uses the same core co-developed algorithm as FSR Redstone’s Upscaling," - Cerny said. "All I can say is that we have no more releases planned for this year."

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💧 Thousands urged to evacuate as Hawaii flooding anticipated to cause widespread damage

As Hawaii endures its worst flooding in more than 20 years, officials are urging people in hard-hit areas to "LEAVE NOW." The warning early Saturday came after heavy rains fell on soil already saturated by downpours from a winter storm a week ago. Still more rain was expected during the weekend, officials said.

Raging waters lifted homes and cars and prompted evacuation orders for 5,500 people north of Honolulu. Authorities cautioned that a 120-year-old dam could fail. Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said the cost of the storm could top $1 billion US, including damage to airports, schools, roads, people's homes and a Maui hospital in Kula. 🙏

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💊 For the first time, scientists may have found a way to regenerate cartilage

For many years, doctors have thought that once cartilage wears down, it’s gone forever. Cartilage is the strong and flexible connective tissue that protects joints and bones. Damage to that cartilage can happen for a variety of reasons ranging from genetic conditions like osteoarthritis—which affects 32.5 million U.S. adults—to sports injuries or other traumas.

A team at Northwestern University led by Stupp has designed an injectable material that can both replace cartilage lost and help encourage new growth when injected at damaged sites. They have created the material, which is made of short protein fragments and a modified version of hyaluronic acid, behaved and appeared very similar to native cartilage.

Not only did new cartilage grow, the repaired tissue showed higher quality compared with the control study. This success is a key indicator that the repair could work in humans.

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🇨🇳 China finds million tons of rare earth oxides in major minerals discoveries

Beijing has unveiled significant new deposits of critical minerals, reinforcing its access to resources vital for high-tech manufacturing. The latest surveys identified substantial quantities of other industrial minerals, with 27.1 million tonnes of fluorite and 37.2 million tonnes of baryte at the Maoniuping mine in Mianning county, in Sichuan province.

Fluorite, or fluorspar, plays a critical role in semiconductor manufacturing and lithium-ion battery production, while baryte is indispensable in oil and gas drilling, where it is used to stabilise wells and prevent blowouts. Newly identified reserves are expected to further consolidate China’s dominance in the global supply of rare earths – a group of 17 elements essential to technologies ranging from smartphones and electric vehicles to advanced weapons systems and spacecraft.

#BRICS

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🌱 Mars garden: Scientists grow edible plants using fertilizer made from Martian dust

Mars lacks one critical ingredient, fertile soil. Its dusty surface contains minerals, but not the organic nutrients plants need to grow. Now, researchers in Germany have found a clever solution that involves turning Martian-like dust and hardy microbes into a working fertilizer system that can produce edible plants.

At the heart of the proposed system are cyanobacteria, often called blue-green algae, which can survive in extreme environments and use carbon dioxide, plentiful in the Martian atmosphere. The researchers recreate Martian conditions using a regolith simulant called MGS-1, which mimics the composition of Martian soil. They cultivated cyanobacteria using this artificial dust along with carbon dioxide, allowing the microbes to build up biomass using only resources that could realistically exist on Mars.

The resulting fertilizer was then tested on duckweed (Lemna sp.), a fast-growing aquatic plant rich in protein and already consumed in some parts of the world. Just one gram of dried cyanobacteria generated enough nutrients to grow 27 grams of fresh, edible plant mass. It’s a small but powerful step toward making Mars missions self-sustaining.

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🆕 Tencent integrates WeChat with OpenClaw AI agent amid China tech battle

Tencent launched a tool on Sunday to integrate its WeChat messaging platform with the OpenClaw ​agent, deepening its push into AI agents ‌that have become a key battleground among China's technology companies.

The software, called ClawBot, will appear as a contact within WeChat, ​allowing users of China's most popular app ​with over 1 billion monthly active users to ⁠connect directly with OpenClaw. Users can send and receive ​commands to interact with the AI agent through the ​messaging interface.

#BRICS

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🤖 Huawei crowdfunds world’s first ‘Mesh Crystal Antenna’ Wi-Fi 7 router

Huawei has lined up a magical-looking Wi-Fi 7 router featuring the world’s first "metal mesh crystal antenna". As well as the glowing crystal mountain at the center of the design, the router boasts a “Shark Fin Heat Exhaust System”. Huawei boasts it can prevent any thermal throttling affecting which could adversely affect long hours of online gaming or large data transfers.

The 10-inch (250mm) tall WiFi Mesh X3 Pro supports technologies such as "MLO", "4K-QAM", and "Multi-RU" to stretch its Wi-Fi 7 capabilities. There are also two 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports on the main unit. All this is driven by the custom Huawei Gigahome SoC. It might be the nearest a home tech appliance has yet got to the gadget holy grail of combining sharks and laser beams.

#BRICS

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🇩🇪🇯🇵 Germany pushes new military cooperation deal with Japan

Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Berlin had floated a so-called Reciprocal Access Agreement — a framework designed to “ease the exchange of soldiers in each other’s countries and significantly reduce bureaucratic hurdles.”

Such agreements allow partner countries to deploy troops on each other’s soil more easily for training, exercises or operations by streamlining legal and administrative procedures. Japan has signed similar deals with countries like the UK and Australia. 🤝

“How close our partnership is has become clear in light of the current developments in Iran and the Middle East,” he said, pointing to Japan’s heavy reliance on energy imports through the Strait of Hormuz. “The freedom of sea routes must be guaranteed and protected.”

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✅ Reddit is weighing identity verification methods to combat its bot problem

There could be one more step required before creating an account and posting on Reddit in the future. According to Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, the social media platform is exploring different ways to verify a user is human and not a bot.

"The most lightweight way is with something like Face ID or Touch ID," Huffman said during the interview. "Part of our promise for our users is we don't know your name but we do want to know you're a person. It'll be an evolution for us for a while, and probably every platform to find the right middle ground here."

Recent years have brought a rise in bots flooding social media platforms including Reddit, where they've even been used to conduct secret experiments. It doesn't sound like Reddit has landed on how to verify its users' human identity yet, but Huffman did emphasize that the platform still wants to prioritize anonymity for its users.

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🤖 Elon Musk unveils $20 billion ‘TeraFab’ chip project to make chips, memory, and package processors all under one roof

Elon Musk, announced Saturday night that his TeraFab semiconductor project will be built on the Tesla campus in eastern Travis County, Austin, Texas, as a joint venture between the two companies. In a livestream broadcast via X, Musk stated that the facility exists because the global chip industry cannot expand quickly enough to meet his projected demand across AI, robotics, and space computing.

The Austin fab will house equipment for logic, memory, packaging, testing, and lithography mask production in a single building. Musk claimed that capability does not exist at any other facility in the world, and that having everything under one roof enables a rapid iteration loop: make a chip, test it, revise the mask, and repeat without shipping wafers between sites.

The facility is expected to produce two types of chips. One will be optimized for edge inference, primarily for Tesla's vehicles and Optimus humanoid robots. The other will be a higher-power chip hardened for the space environment, which Musk says will run hotter than “terrestrial” designs to minimize radiator mass on satellites.

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🔋 Chinese automotive giant achieves 11-minute full charge milestone with sodium-ion tech

BAIC Group says it has developed a sodium-ion battery prototype that it claims reaches leading industry benchmarks. Across China’s EV sector, sodium-ion batteries are gaining attention as a complementary option, particularly for cost-sensitive vehicle segments and cold-weather use cases.

The prismatic cell design delivers an energy density of about 170 watt-hours per kilogram, according to internal testing. The company highlighted fast-charging performance as a key differentiator, stating the system supports 4C charging and can reach a full charge in roughly 11 minutes. BAIC added that the battery operates across a wide temperature range, from about -40°F to 140°F, while retaining more than 92% of its energy capacity at around -4°F, pointing to improved performance in cold-weather conditions.

#BRICS

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🤖 PepsiCo bets on AI across China operations to boost efficiency

Beverages giant PepsiCo Inc. is deploying AI across its operations in China and beyond to improve efficiency, Anne Tse, its head for the Asia-Pacific region, said. The company is using AI in areas such as precision agriculture, manufacturing management and consumer analytics, allowing it to expand capacity without proportional increases in headcount. Still, PepsiCo is hiring in China as it opens new plants.

PepsiCo is also targeting premium, nutrient-dense products, reducing sugar and sodium while blending local ingredients to align with Chinese culinary traditions. In January, PepsiCo announced a multi‑year collaboration with Siemens AG and Nvidia Corp. to transform its plant and supply‑chain operations using advanced technologies including AI. 🤝

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