Mannerisms

Touted as the ‘mother of all deals’ by EU President Ursula von der Leyen, the EU-India trade agreement is one of the biggest trade agreements ever negotiated. India exported $58 billion worth of goods to the EU in 2024, the EU exported  products worth $84 billion to India. This number is supposed to increase by 41 percent for India, but ...

Picking, placing and moving materials account for 51% of all industrial robot uses worldwide in 2024. The  two other most popular applications, welding (15%) and assembling (10%), were together roughly half as prominent. This distribution underscores the ongoing automation of repetitive, labour-intensive processes, especially in sectors like automotive, logistics and electronics. Among the other industrial robot applications on the rise ...

Thanks to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero for this one – the 15 countries with the highest energy cost: Source: Department for Energy Security and Net Zero 

Meta’s capex  grew 80% last year to $72 billion and is expected to grow to  $115-135 billion this year. The goal is to achieve what CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes as “personal superintelligence.” “As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal ...

THE first direct TV relay from Moscow to London took place on April 13, the occasion of Major Gagarin’s return to Moscow after his round-the-world space voyage. So, 65 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of April 19 1961. The story continued: It has been arranged between the BBC and the USSR State Committee for Radio and ...

Apple says it has an installed base of more than 2.5 billion active devices which accounts for the growth of its services business. Services provide Apple with a steady stream of recurring, very high-margin revenue. At the scale that Apple operates, even small monthly fees add up to more than $100 billion annually. Services also help with customer lock-in: once ...

A thorny Q was raised at last week’s Cabinet: What happens to the welfare budget if the big job losses expected from AI occur under a Labour government which is pledged to support working people? Of course, the techno-illiterates around the cabinet table have virtually nothing of any use to say on the subject which gives me the chance to ...

At a board meeting of Fairchild Semiconductor on October 15th 1968, company president Les Hogan stated: “Almost all of our qualifications on MIL devices have lapsed, and we are thus excluded from shipping to the high-priced and profitable military market unless we continue to lie. There are many reasons for not doing so.” “First, it is fraud and, if exposed, ...

The US and UK are among 12 countries opposing a global ban on autonomous weapons, joined by Australia, Belarus, Estonia, India, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Poland, Russia and South Korea. Data compiled by Automated Decision Research, the monitoring and research team of Stop Killer Robots, finds that another 53 nations have yet to take a clear stance, while 127 countries, ...

This was a fabled recruitment ad for a chip company founded by a master showman and in the top ten to this day: Moral: One Day Your Wave  Will Come

The U.S. Department of War has launched a new AI acceleration strategy, aimed at securing military AI dominance. The new strategy will “unleash experimentation, eliminate legacy bureaucratic blockers and integrate the bleeding edge of frontier AI capabilities across every mission area”, according to the Department. Scientists at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warn that applications of AI in weapons ...

In a new age of brutal reality we are being asked whether the ‘rules-based international order’ or ‘digital sovereignty’ are abstractions. China and Russia show they don’t give a fig for the  ‘rules-based international order’ and now the US says it regards the concept as an  abstraction.  If the great powers  don’t believe in it, are the others being naive ...

Thanks to Linked-In for this one – the ten most innovative startups in 2025: Ayar Labs Axelera AI Celestial AI Cornelis Networks EnCharge AI Lightmatter Speedata.io Tenstorrent Xsight Labs LTD zeroRISC

Only around one third of Americans have a high level of trust in AI search  results, says a Statista Consumer Insights survey. Depending on the topic, there was a slight variation in trust, with Americans trusting AI a little more on health on wellness topics (35 percent showing a high level of trust and only 19 percent showing a low ...

Grundig Radio have produced a pocket radio no bigger than two matchboxes put sided by side (3″ by 2″ by 1″). So, 64 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of April 19th 1961 The story continued: It weighs just over five ounces including batteries and contains six transistors, a ferrite aerial and a miniature loudspeaker of approximately ...

The old Intel chutzpah is gone. Aggression is a sine qua non for a semiconductor company and you have to be a bit of a wuss to say: “If we do not get 14A (1.4nm) customers externally, it is going to be hard to justify that node”. But that’s what Intel’s CFO David Zinsner said at Intel’s results call last ...

China’s grip on the rare earth minerals market is a likely and welcome casualty of President Trump’s Greenland deal whatever the nature of that deal turns out to be, Ed confides to his diary. The ‘big chunk of ice’’ as POTUS called it, may become a hotbed of activity with miners, datacentre builders, military infrastructure constructors, suppliers of Arctic monitoring ...

Only 30% of nearly 4,500 CEOs surveyed worldwide say they are currently very confident in their company’s growth prospects, according to PwC’s Global CEO Survey. Looking ahead to the next three years, that figure rises to just under 50%. Over the past four years, CEO optimism has been on the decline. At the height of the pandemic, only 27% of ...

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, published in January, reveals a significant decline in global optimism about the future around the world. Only  32% of respondents across 28 countries believe that the next generation will be better off than today, 4 percentage  pointspoints less than the previous year. The decline is most pronounced in major Asian economies like India and China, ...

Global growth is expected to remain resilient at 3.3 percent in 2026, according to the IMF’s latest edition of the World Economic Outlook. This is slightly higher than the 3.1 percent forecast published in October 2025. The IMF attributes the resilience to continued investment in artificial intelligence and other technologies, alongside fiscal and monetary support and the adaptability of the ...