🧠 Australia Joins Brain-Computer Interface Race With Less-Invasive Brain Tech

The University of Melbourne startup Fluent develops a new device designed to transform how people with speech impairments communicate. Many people with motor neuron disease and multiple sclerosis gradually lose the ability to speak, making communication increasingly difficult.

Fluent is developing a different approach from many existing BCI systems. While invasive BCIs require brain surgery to implant electrodes inside the skull, Fluent’s device is designed to sit beneath the scalp but outside the skull, offering what the company hopes will be a safer and more accessible alternative.

The research suggests that signals captured by the device are comparable whether electrodes are placed beneath or outside the skull. If validated through further testing, this could represent a significant advance in BCI development, as invasive systems have historically captured higher-quality brain signals and outperformed non-invasive approaches.

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🤖 Hyundai Motor Showcases Humanoid at World Cup in Robotics Push

Hyundai Motor Co. showcased its Atlas humanoid robot at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, highlighting its technical progress on football’s biggest stage as the South Korean automaker gears up for mass production and factory deployment.

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🇦🇺🇫🇯 Australia-Fiji Sign Security Deal, Expand China Containment

Australia and Fiji signed a mutual defense treaty and a new agreement to develop ties. The Ocean of Peace Alliance says the nations will ‘act to meet the common danger’ in the event either country is attacked.

It is Fiji’s first military alliance and Australia’s fourth, alongside the U.S., New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, reinforcing Canberra’s push to curb China’s influence in the Pacific.

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⚡️🤑 UNDP and Stellar Development Foundation extend partnership to scale proven digital payment solutions

The United Nations Development Programme and the Stellar Development Foundation have signed a new agreement that carries their joint work on blockchain-based digital payments into its next phase, moving from a set of proven pilots toward a standing capability that UNDP country offices can draw on as a regular part of how they deliver programmes.

➡️ Coordinated by the UNDP Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab) at the Istanbul Regional Hub, the agreement shifts the focus from testing the technology in specific contexts to putting in place the institutional conditions under which it can be used at scale.

❗️The decision to scale follows sixteen months of joint work, during which the two partners researched the use of digital payments across seventeen countries, consulted UNDP country offices and stakeholders, and implemented live pilots🔣in Haiti, Syria, Kenya, Guatemala, and The Gambia, with two further solutions developed to a working prototype in Colombia and Papua New Guinea.

➡️In parallel, the Sustainable Development Goals Blockchain Accelerator, strategically led by UNDP AltFinLab, matched a cohort of payment solutions built on the Stellar network with real UNDP programme challenges, producing a portfolio of graduated solutions with documented pathways to scale within existing country office programmes.

😄These pilots produced concrete evidence rather than promising projections.

Earlier in 2026, UNDP featured part of this work in the report New Tech, New Partners: Transforming Development in the Digital Era, which set out why reliable digital payment infrastructure matters for financial inclusion, for remittances, and for reaching people in fragile and conflict-affected settings that traditional financial systems sometimes fail to reach.

🎯 The new agreement turns these results into a capability that does not depend on any single project or funding cycle.

The two partners will establish the governance, onboarding, and safeguards🔣that allow UNDP to adopt digital payments responsibly, move validated solutions from the existing pipeline into active use, extend the same infrastructure across different categories of UNDP programming – from humanitarian response to social protection and financial inclusion.

The Stellar Development Foundation will provide technical advisory support and coordination across the Stellar ecosystem, including expertise on the network and its protocols, and engagement with the solution providers operating within the UNDP pipeline, while UNDP will retain responsibility for delivery and implementation.🚀

‼️ The agreement runs through 2027 and will conclude with a consolidated evidence base, a scaling playbook, and a formal handover, so that the capability outlasts the partnership that created it.

#Stellar

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🤑 Ripple Receives Full MiCA CASP Authorisation in Europe

Ripple today announced it has received authorisation of its Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) license from Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF).

‼️ The authorisation follows the preliminary approval announced in June 2026 and confirms Ripple as fully MiCA-compliant, with its end-to-end regulated crypto payments product now available to financial institutions, corporates and businesses across all 30 countries of the European Economic Area. 🇪🇺

“This CASP authorisation means Ripple enters the post-transitional MiCA era fully compliant and ready to scale,” said Cassie Craddock, Managing Director, UK & Europe at Ripple.

“The institutions we work with across Europe are looking to build their digital assets services alongside regulated partners, and Ripple is licensed and ready to meet that demand.”

Alongside its EU EMI license, Ripple’s CASP approval makes it one of a small number of digital asset firms to have full authorisation under MiCA, adding to a global portfolio of more than 75 regulatory licenses. 🚀

#Stellar

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🤝 Broadcom, Apple Extend Tie-Up to 2031 With New Custom Chips

Broadcom Inc. will provide new custom chips to Apple Inc. in an expanded partnership that now runs through 2031. Under the new agreement, the companies will partner on ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) silicon.

These types of chips will be found in “multiple generations of Apple products,” according to a Broadcom filing on Monday.

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🇷🇺🏦 Russia's largest bank plans crypto wallet launch as Moscow clears market path

Russia's largest bank Sberbank plans to launch a crypto wallet and digital depository by December, pending passage of new digital asset legislation expected to take effect September 1, according to Bank of Russia First Deputy Chairman Vladimir Chistyukhin.

❗️The new services will be added to its Sberbank Online and SberInvestments platforms after Russia adopts its bill “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights,” according to Kirill Tsarev, first deputy chairman of the bank's management board.

➡️ The wallet would give Sberbank clients access to authorized cryptocurrencies inside the bank’s own apps. Sberbank also plans to build a digital depository for storing and accounting for the tokens.

The legislation creates licenses for firms to engage in crypto trading, custody, digital-to-fiat exchange and cross-border settlements. 🚀

‼️ Non-qualified investors will be allowed to trade under testing requirements and limits capped at roughly 300,000 rubles (around $3,800) per year, while market participants will have until July 1, 2027, to enter the official registry.

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🤑 Denelle Dixon discusses what's new on the Stellar network, and what's coming 🚀

The baby steps are behind us. We're accelerating to a new level where assets, technology, and payments come together onchain to deliver better everyday financial services to users.

📱 Watch the full video on YouTube

#Stellar

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🤖 Oak Ridge National Lab, Cleveland Clinic, and IBM Achieve First-Known Computations of Fusion Materials on a Quantum Computer

A team of scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Cleveland Clinic, and IBM have calculated nine molecular configurations of a promising material to produce fuel for fusion energy – the first-known instance of such computations on quantum computers.

📄 Such calculations, demonstrated in a new paper published on arXiv, are computationally challenging for classical computers to scale when working alone. They are a fundamental step towards optimizing the production and extraction of tritium – an extremely rare material in nature that is necessary to produce fusion energy with most of the proposed machines.

Ensuring adequate supplies of tritium has long been a barrier to realizing the promise of clean and abundant energy from fusion power plants, and solving this issue is a key objective of the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission. 🎯

“Bringing quantum, AI, and classical computing together is essential to tackling our society's most fundamental scientific challenges – unlocking capabilities which none of these paradigms can access alone," said Jerry Chow, CTO of Quantum-Centric Supercomputing at IBM. 🤝

“These results add to mounting evidence that quantum-centric supercomputing is now a practical scientific tool for problems that have long challenged chemists, engineers, and materials scientists. As quantum computers scale, the path ahead is promising."

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🔥 Elon Musk’s xAI has officially rebranded to SpaceXAI

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🇮🇩 Indonesia Mulls 0% Income Tax to Draw Money to New Financial Hub

Indonesia is planning sweeping tax incentives for a proposed international financial center, including an effective 0% income tax rate for some businesses and foreign finance experts.

The bill to create the Indonesia International Financial Center, discussed Monday at a public hearing between lawmakers and legal and economic experts, would offer a 100% corporate income tax reduction for businesses operating in the zone, along with a full income tax break for foreign financial-sector experts.

#BRICS

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🤖 Chinese smart chip maps brain structures up to 478x faster than NVIDIA A100 GPU

Chinese researchers have developed a memory chip that can model complex brain structures in real time, a breakthrough they say could improve brain disease diagnosis, brain-computer interfaces, and surgical navigation.

The 40-nanometer chip, created by researchers from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, integrates an artificial neural network into its hardware. It reconstructs the brain’s intricate folded surface in less than half a second. The researchers reported that the chip is 50 to 478 times faster than systems powered by Nvidia’s A100 graphics processing unit for this task.

Faster processing could make advanced brain modelling more practical in hospitals, where clinicians often need results quickly to support diagnosis and treatment decisions.

#BRICS

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🤖 Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Developing Own AI Chip

DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip, a ​push that could reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei chips, which it has depended on to train and run its globally popular models. The chip is designed ‌for inference — the stage of AI computing in which a trained model generates responses for users — rather than for training new models.

If successful, DeepSeek's expansion into semiconductor development would mark a major strategic shift for a company widely hailed in China as the country's AI champion, potentially adding to challenges faced by Chinese tech giant Huawei.

#BRICS

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🇧🇾 Belarus’ Hi-Tech Park working on new business types to add to cryptocurrency legislation

The Hi-Tech Park is working on introducing new types of activities into cryptocurrency legislation, according to Advisor of the Secretariat of the HTP Supervisory Board Filipp Petkevich.

➡️Filipp Petkevich noted that Belarus has created a comprehensive infrastructure so that any user can buy and sell cryptocurrencies, and derive a profit and income legally – taking into account the current restrictions that are separate for legal persons and natural persons.

“Legislation introducing a new type of activity – a crypto bank – is about to come into force. This is a new entity combining an HTP crypto-resident and a bank under the control of the National Bank,” he said.

‼️ On 16 January, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed Decree No. 19, authorising the operation of crypto banks and regulating activities involving digital tokens. From 18 July 2026, the use of digital assets for settlements between residents and non-residents is officially permitted in the Republic of Belarus.

➡️ The further development and discussion of the legislation include the introduction of new types of activities, which were previously unavailable.

❗️“As of today we are discussing the so-called copytrading when a user can copy the transactions of another user, trust management, airdrops, and many other things we are discussing,” Filipp Petkevich remarked.

😄According to the advisor, this industry is notable for the fact that the interests of the state and the law-abiding user are aligned.

“Both the state and users are interested in having more ways to legally and safely invest their funds, use technology innovations while reducing the risk of falling victim to scammers to an absolute minimum,” he stated.

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