The floating robot collecting rubbish in our waterways

AI toys, companions, and robots have been everywhere at CES this year, but among the horde of waddling plushies and light-up emoji eyes, two stood out to me. HeyMates and Buddyo are each betting that the collectible figurine boom is going to come back with an AI-powered vengeance, letting us chat to sports stars and…

On Saturday, designer Kate Barton will unveil her latest collection at New York Fashion Week — with a twist, of course. Barton teamed up with Fiducia AI to create a multilingual AI agent (built with IBM watsonx on IBM Cloud) to help guests identify pieces of the collection and try them on virtually. TechCrunch caught…

Earlier this year, a mysterious new company called Tensor announced itself to the world by claiming it would be the first to sell fully autonomous vehicles to customers at scale. The news didn’t make much of a splash. No one had ever heard of Tensor, so it was the kind of announcement easy to dismiss…

Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it’s also got a wildly popular developer-tool side hustle called Backstage. Backstage is an open source project that helps companies build their own internal developer portals: a catalog of their developer tools along with quick visualizations of the work the tools have done, and other metrics. But…

“I have not seen an event like this developing in our forecasts before”, said Professor Adam Scaife, head of long-range forecasts at the Met Office. He says the scale of the growing El Niño is unprecedented in modern climate records. As it approaches its peak by the end of 2026, its influence around the world…