Articles
Traffic data point to stronger finish for Amazon, Booking and Uber
December web and app engagement figures suggest momentum picked up into the final quarter for several large internet groups, beating expectations in ecommerce, travel and delivery, while Lyft lagged peers as user growth slowed.
Will Khamenei go? Who will be the next Fed chair? And will the Bills win against the Broncos? Here we look into Polym...
On Polymarket, the internet’s collective hunches are priced, traded, and refreshed by the second. The results can look like uncanny foresight, or like a carnival mirror for the news cycle, depending on what, and who, is doing the trading.
Prediction markets: A virtual time machine. Here's News Defused's guide to trading the future and avoiding the traps
Prediction markets turn elections, sports and economic data into tradable contracts whose prices resemble probabilities. This guide explains key mechanics, platforms, why they are booming today, and pitfalls to watch.
Surveillance advertising: Trackers, fingerprinting, and what users can do
In 2026, online tracking is less about cookies and more about identity stitching across websites and apps. Here’s how it works now, what UK rules demand, and the practical steps users and publishers can take—without pretending the trade-offs don’t exist.
AI and IP for businesses: Protecting your content and your brand
From staff pasting secrets into chatbots to scammers cloning executives in seconds, artificial intelligence is widening old intellectual property risks.
I model updates, why tools change overnight and how to manage version risk
AI models and the platforms around them are updated frequently, sometimes without warning. Organisations that treat generative AI like a stable software library will eventually ship errors. The fix is operational discipline: monitoring, evaluation gates, and rollback readiness.
Robotic touch and haptics explained: Why teaching machines to feel is harder than seeing
Robots are getting better eyes, yet still fumble like someone wearing oven gloves. Touch is a tangle of friction, timing and safety limits, and the best sensors must survive being squashed, scraped and lied to by physics.
Biological age tests explained: What they measure, what they miss, and how to read the results
Biological age tests promise a peek at how fast you are ageing. In reality, they estimate different kinds of “age” from blood, saliva, images or wearables, often with more noise and uncertainty than the marketing suggests.
Lab-on-a-chip explained: Tiny microfluidic devices that could shrink the laboratory
Lab-on-a-chip devices promise to do lab work inside hair-thin channels on a disposable cartridge. They can be fast and portable, but real samples are messy. The hardest part is not detection, it is making the whole workflow behave.
Digital twins in medicine and engineering: How to tell a useful tool from an expensive mirage
Digital twins promise a living model of a patient, building or machine, updated by real-world data. They can improve planning and maintenance. They can also produce false precision if the data, calibration and validation do not match the decision.
Robot batteries explained: why they are not just smaller electric vehicle packs
Robots drain batteries in bursts, crash into things, and carry their power source in awkward places. Unlike electric cars, they must balance peak power, safety near people, and packaging constraints that can decide whether the machine works at all.
CRISPR delivery explained: Why editing DNA is easier than getting the editor to the right cells
CRISPR has a reputation for being almost plug-and-play. Choose a target, design a guide RNA, and the Cas enzyme will cut where it is told. That is the elegant part. The awkward part is the body.
Biofoundries explained: Inside the robot labs, engineering biology at industrial scale
Biofoundries are automated facilities that run biology like an engineering process: design, build, test, learn, repeat. They can accelerate enzyme discovery and strain development, and they can pivot fast in a crisis. They also force hard questions about quality and biosecurity.
New antibiotics explained: Phages, bacteriocins and AI, and why none is a silver bullet
As antibiotic resistance rises, researchers are hunting alternatives, from bacteria-killing viruses to designer peptides and AI-aided drug discovery. Some tools are already used in narrow settings. The bigger challenge is proving, making and paying for them responsibly.
Brain-computer interfaces today: Real communication breakthroughs, stubborn engineering limits, and the hype traps to...
Brain-computer interfaces are no longer science fiction; they can restore typing and even speech for some people with paralysis. The same systems still struggle with reliability, training, and long-term support. Understanding the trade-offs is the difference between progress and hype.
Why robots hate doorknobs: The small piece of hardware that exposes everything robots still struggle with
Door opening looks trivial until a robot tries it. Doorknobs combine occluded perception, slippery contact, torque control and latch mechanics, all in a tight space with pinch-point safety risks. Recent progress in touch sensing and generalist manipulation helps, but reliability is still the hurdle.
The quiet revolution in protein design: Enzymes and binders made by algorithms, built in yeast
Protein design is shifting from craft to workflow. Algorithms propose new enzymes and binding proteins, lab teams build them in microbes and yeast, then test what actually works. The results are promising in medicine and industry, but validation, safety and governance will decide what lasts.
Organoids on a chip: Miniature human tissues that are changing how drugs are tested
Organoids and organ-on-chip systems promise a more human way to test medicines, using miniature tissues grown from stem cells and kept alive under tiny flows. They can outperform animals in specific questions. They also fail, often loudly, in others.
Living medicines, strange ethics: the rise of engineered microbes that treat disease from the inside
Imagine a capsule of bacteria that senses inflammation, switches on only when needed, then quietly disappears. Engineered microbes are being designed as living medicines for gut, metabolism and cancer
The cell’s postal service: How extracellular vesicles could become the next drug delivery revolution
Extracellular vesicles are microscopic parcels that cells send to one another, stuffed with proteins and genetic instructions. Scientists want to turn them into precision couriers for medicines and diagnostics.