Visa announced on Thursday a new platform designed to stimulate small businesses through a variety of tools and network opportunities. The program, Visa & Main, identifies and helps to address what Visa calls the most pressing challenges that entrepreneurs face: accessing capital, reaching customers, and adopting modern business tools. That starts with a $100 million…
The upcoming science fiction film Project Hail Mary is getting a LEGO set. This is fascinating because LEGO typically makes sets based on long-standing franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter. Project Hail Mary doesn’t even hit theaters until March 20. It’s not an entirely new IP. The movie is based on a 2021 book…
The female pelvis may become too narrow for vaginal childbirth, meaning that caesareans could become the only option for delivering babies. At least, that’s the claim made by a research team last year. Their calculations suggest that in Australia, Mexico and Poland, the average female pelvis is now 4.2 centimetres narrower than it was in…
Anthropic is out with a new model called Claude Opus 4.6, an upgrade to its top-of-the-line Opus 4.5 model that launched in November. The new release could add new capabilities to Anthropic’s Claude Code coding assistant, which is facing growing competitive pressure from OpenAI’s Codex. Anthropic says Opus 4.6 improves on its predecessor’s coding skills…
Meta is developing a standalone app for Vibes, its feed of AI-generated videos, according to reports from TechCrunch and Platformer. Vibes was introduced as a feature in the Meta AI app in September 2025. Similar to OpenAI’s Sora app, Vibes lets users prompt Meta AI to create TikTok-style vertical videos. “Following the strong early traction…
Kanzi the bonobo at the age of 43 Ape Initiative A bonobo that took part in a pretend tea party like those acted out by young children has shown that our closest primate relatives have the capacity for make believe. Kanzi the bonobo (Pan paniscus) was born in the US in 1980 and died at…
Have you seen larger-than-life depictions of your friends lately? They might have been sucked into the latest social media trend: creating AI-generated caricatures. The trend itself is simple. Users input a common prompt—“Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me”—then upload a photo of themselves, and voilà! ChatGPT…
If you haven’t yet played Alan Wake 2, here’s your chance to immerse yourself in its terrors for free. Prime members can play it this month on Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service at no additional charge. The “fantastic” Alan Wake 2 oozes “psychedelic terror,” as Engadget’s Jessica Conditt put it in our review. The 2023…
The issue of whether statins really cause a plethora of side effects may have finally been put to bed Benjamin John/Alamy The long list of side effects associated with statins is vastly overstated, according to the most rigorous assessment of the evidence to date. This is prompting calls for the drugs’ packaging to be updated,…
Planned layoffs have now reached their highest rate since 2009’s Great Recession. The data comes from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ new layoffs report, which revealed that U.S.-based employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, marking the highest rate to start a year since 2009. Also notable, in the same month, just 5,306 planned hires…
