不仅要有风险告知等机制，更要建立医疗服务流程再造、搭建透明化的可追溯机制。 9日最高人民法院工作报告发布，破解医患纠纷成为今年报告的关键词之一。其中，医疗机构的“医疗告知”责任，以及破解复杂医疗纠纷判断难题的司法创新，成为今年报告的突出亮点。 这并非医患纠纷首次写入最高院工作报告，民法典实施以来，相关表述多次出现在最高院工作报告中。近年来司法部门对“医疗告知”责任的高度重视，及针对复杂医疗纠纷进行的司法创新探索，取得了显著成效，最新数据显示2025年医院担责案件占比下降9.5个百分点。这显示司法部门对“善尽诊疗义务、符合诊疗规范的行为依法免责”的落实正在发挥实质性作用。 医疗纠纷是一个复杂的专业判断和制度难题。作为专业服务，医疗服务在供需双方层面天然存在专业鸿沟，患者更多基于结果导向，这使得医疗服务具有信息不对称性。 医疗纠纷的另一复杂点度在于，现有医疗制度带来的激励约束兼容度亟待改善，突出反映在医院、医生和医保机构的复杂关系上。以医疗服务价格形成机制为例，直接面对患者、主要提供医疗服务的医生，其收入与最终承担的或隐或显的责任存在不对等问题。在患者和医保机构支付的费用中，医生收入占比相对有限，但一旦发生医患纠纷，医生却往往成为矛盾的直接承受方。近年来暴力伤医事件屡禁不止，警示破解这一问题已刻不容缓。 当前司法部门探索的“专家论证+司法审查”的创新机制，以及完善患者告知义务等做法，为医患纠纷的定分止争提供了强有力的评判依据，不仅有助于医疗服务过程中的操作规范，也有助于落实“预防为主、关口前移”，推动医疗服务操作各环节提升风险防范意识和风险识别能力。 要将“预防为主、关口前移”落到实处，不能止于简单的事前告知，而是要建立医疗服务流程再造、搭建透明化的可追溯机制。医疗服务风险告知固然重要，但它本质是一种通用风险揭示，是医患纠纷评判的一个环节，并不意味着医疗免责。医疗服务是一个过程，风险告知针对的是不可抗力范畴内的损害，而医患纠纷争议的聚焦点住往是医疗服务过程中的操作风险，即理应避免却未能避免的医疗安全事故。要让医患双方对同一事实的认定达成一致，需要构建医疗服务过程的透明化担保机制，基于危害分析与关键点控制，对具体医疗服务进行流程再造，让每一个关键点和风险敏感点都能透明化可追溯，实现各方责权利的排他性认定。 去年6月国家卫健委办公厅出台的《医疗机构医疗质量安全专项整治行动方...

中東多國繼續受戰火波及。 其中卡塔爾發放片段，指是防空系統攔截伊朗無人機同導彈的情況。卡塔爾國防部表示，單在周一已經攔截17枚彈道導彈同6架無人機，無人傷亡。外交部就指，卡塔爾期望加強同美國的安全夥伴關係。 美軍在中東地區最大基地位於卡塔爾。上月底美國同以色列對伊朗展開軍事行動，德黑蘭報復以來，基地成為目標之一。

China will resume passenger train services to North Korea for the first time in six years – the latest sign of warming ties between the two countries as Pyongyang grapples with increasing tensions with the South and Donald Trump’s unpredictability. The first service between Beijing and Pyongyang is scheduled to leave the Chinese capital at around 5.30pm on Thursday and arrive in North Korea at around 6.15pm the following day, according to a staff member from China International Travel Services (CITS), which is responsible for ticket sales on international rail links. In future, four train services are scheduled to run from Beijing every week – on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. Details of the return services have not yet been made available. Advertisement The employee added that passengers would have to present a valid North Korean visa and a copy of their passport to buy tickets from the CITS headquarters in Beijing. Chinese visitors made up the largest group of foreign tourists to North Korea before the Covid-19 pandemic saw the border sealed. Advertisement Allowing tourism from the country to resume has been widely seen as a test of Pyongyang’s willingness to revive economic ties with Beijing, its largest trading partner.

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The $599 MacBook Neo , available in stores this Wednesday, proves that it’s possible to make a laptop that stays true to Apple Inc. ’s reputation for craftsmanship, performance and reliability — even at roughly half the price of the popular MacBook Air. By reaching that price point, the company is opening up macOS to a completely new market of first-time buyers who previously couldn’t afford to splurge, or simply preferred not to. The Neo is a product that was once unthinkable from a company that spent years panning the idea of netbooks and never bothered to make a budget laptop of its own. But that was before Apple started equipping Macs with its own in-house silicon, upping the ante for what consumers expect in terms of battery life even when pushing these machines to their fullest potential. In early discussion of the MacBook Neo, there’s been a prevailing narrative that the machine is only suited for “basic” tasks like web browsing, watching videos and writing up documents. Perhaps that’s fair, since these are the underwhelming expectations that starter Windows laptops and inexpensive Chromebooks have saddled consumers with over the course of many years. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how far Apple’s first laptop powered by an iPhone chip can go. The Neo and its A18 Pro are capable enough to edit RAW images in Adobe Inc.’s Lightroom. They can handle cutting short 4K videos in apps like iMovie or CapCut without stumbling. Need to record a podcast or quick song demo? That’s more than doable. Even for consumers who stick to more casual computing, the Neo’s aluminum build, crisp screen and well-balanced speakers are going to make this a no-brainer purchase for millions. In your hands, the device looks, feels and sounds every bit like a Mac. Will the metal frame collect more dents and dings in education scenarios than plastic would? Almost certainly, but I’ll take a more premium design every time. Still, to reach such a mass-market price, Apple did a subs...

Israel’s Jazz raised $61 million in funding to create a platform that uses artificial intelligence to tackle data loss prevention. The Seed and Series A rounds were led by Glilot Capital Partners and Team8, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Merlin Ventures, Encoded Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, the 15-month old company said in a statement Tuesday. “We built an AI agent that investigates, learns your business, data, context, business processes, and can determine if a situation is risky,” Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Ido Livneh said in an interview. “The agent does human work at scale and efficiency that wasn't possible before.” There have been an increasing number of high-impact incidents involving data loss, which can stem from employees using AI chatbots inappropriately or through theft. A data loss incident at South Korean ecommerce leader Coupang Inc. last year compromised the data of 34 million people and led to the resignation of CEO Park Dae-jun. A 2023 data breach carried out by former employees at Tesla Inc. exposed personal information of 75,000 workers. Jazz has been marketing its product for seven months, with 15 paying customers to date, according to Levneh, who is a veteran of Israel Defense Forces’ secretive tech-focused Unit 81. He declined to disclose the company’s valuation.

Lea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world. It’s an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. “There’s no AI-proof anything,” Pao said. “Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there’s a way out.” It doesn’t always work. Recently, she asked students to visit a local museum, look at a painting for 10 minutes, and write a few paragraphs describing the experience. It was a purposefully personal assignment, yet one student responded with a sophisticated but drab reflection – “too perfect, without saying anything”, Pao said. She later learned the student had tried to visit the museum on a Monday, when it was closed, and then turned to AI. As artificial intelligence has upended the way in which students read, learn and write, professors like Pao have been left to their own devices to figure out how to teach in a transformed landscape. Many faculty members in the hard sciences and social sciences have pointed to the “productivity boost” AI can offer, and the research potential unlocked by its ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data. AI’s most enthusiastic proponents have boasted the technology may help cure cancer and “accelerate” climate action. But in fields most explicitly associated with the production of critical thought – what is collectively referred to as the “humanities” – most scholars see AI as a unique threat, one that extends far beyond cheating on homework and casts doubt on the future of higher education itself in a fast-approaching, machine-dominated future. View image in fullscreen Lea Pao. Photograph: Courtesy Lea Pao American degrees often cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and result in decade...

High heat and low moisture are key to avoiding a soggy or stuck-to-the-pan mess When I fry fish, the skin never goes crisp , and instead either sticks, rips or goes limp. What am I doing wrong? Emily, by email “The secret to perfectly crisp fish skin is heat,” says Mitch Tonks , founder of Rockfish in south-west England. Well, heat plus a little bit of prep. Fish are, of course, moist things, and moisture is the enemy in the quest for that golden-brown crust, so the first thing Emily is going to need to do is dry that skin out. “If the fish has any moisture on it, it will create steam while it’s being cooked, which, in turn, will make the skin go soggy and inedible, rather than crisp and delicious,” says British fish guru Nathan Outlaw , whose latest book, On Fish: A Seafood Handbook , is published next month. And the best way to do that, Outlaw says, is to wipe and dab the skin with some kitchen paper or a clean tea towel. Rick Toogood, head chef and co-founder of Prawn on the Lawn in London and Padstow, Cornwall, and Jack Stein, chef director of Rick Stein Restaurants , are simpatico, but Outlaw then goes that one step farther: “Take a second piece of kitchen paper [or another clean tea towel], wrap up the fish in it and leave for a couple of minutes,” he says. “This allows any remaining moisture to be absorbed.” Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com Continue reading...

Families who lost babies at two hospitals in Leeds have said they are slowly regaining trust in the health secretary after the midwife Donna Ockenden was appointed to lead a review into the failing service, where 56 babies and two mothers died in five years. Ockenden, who conducted a similar review into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford hospital NHS trust in 2020, was chosen to lead the investigation into Leeds teaching hospitals NHS trust after a campaign by the families. The group, which also includes women whose children survived but who suffered serious harm through failures in maternity care at the trust, met Wes Streeting last month to urge the health secretary to appoint Ockenden, five months after the independent review was announced. The maternity units at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) and St James’s hospital, both run by the same trust, were downgraded to “inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission in June 2025. Amarjit Kaur Matharoo, whose daughter Asees was stillborn at the LGI in 2024, said trust in Streeting was beginning to be restored, after initially feeling they were being sidelined due to delays in appointing a chair. “I think we’re slowly getting it back,” she said. “He has to regain it, it’s not something that he can just give because we have been burnt ultimately. But it’s a step towards rebuilding that relationship and ensuring that actually patients and families are heard, and making sure that actually there’s a safer space for maternity in Leeds.” Fiona Wisner-Ramm’s daughter Aliona also died at the LGI in 2020, after what a coroner described as “a number of gross failures of the most basic nature” by hospital staff. She said: “We reminded Mr Streeting that victims are the people that should be paramount in any of this and that should always come before protecting organisations, protecting other individuals in power and I think he’s very much reflected on that and that has helped his decision-making.” Ockenden said: “It is an hono...

This is a movie, adapted from Andy Weir’s sci-fi bestseller, about a desperate astronaut mission of the future, named by Nasa after the “Hail Mary pass” in American football, launched into space in a last-ditch attempt to save Planet Earth, dying because a string of alien microbes are snuffing out the sun. Hunky high school science teacher Dr Ryland Grace, played with seductive, unruffled good humour by Ryan Gosling, wakes up from his induced coma on this spacecraft, with wacky long hair, straggly beard and zero memory of why he is aboard. The rest of the crew are dead, and Grace must now figure out how he got there and how to rescue humanity. Gosling is an effortlessly charming screen player, and he keeps it watchable, though the film itself has moments of dullness and a sort of puppyish silliness, perhaps not surprising given the comedy track-record of directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. And the final moment before the credits, in a film which had been asking us to take it seriously at some level, feels like a kids’ TV show. Weir wrote The Martian, the basis for Ridley Scott’s movie with Matt Damon, and this has the same cheerful, breezy humour and tonal commitment to unseriousness; this for me meant Project Hail Mary was funny ha-ha and funny peculiar at the same time. The whole thing settles on Dr Grace’s bromance, or humanalienmance, with a friendly spider-shaped alien with stony bodyparts nicknamed “Rocky” who conveniently saves the day, scuttling about the place like ET and whose communication is rendered by Dr Grace’s software into Hulkspeak: “Rocky fix”, “Rocky help” etc. The action is interspersed with steely flashbacks in which we see how Dr Grace, a brilliant molecular biologist forced to take up teaching because the scientific establishment wasn’t ready for his radical ideas, was recruited to Project Hail Mary by the coolly impassive German technocrat Eva Stratt, a typically classy performance from Sandra Hüller. But what is the status of these flashb...

Tesla (TSLA) has recently been on Zacks.com's list of the most searched stocks. Therefore, you might want to consider some of the key factors that could influence the stock's performance in the near future. Shares of this electric car maker have returned -4.5% over the past month versus the Zacks S&P 500 composite's -2.3% change. The Zacks Automotive - Domestic industry, to which Tesla belongs, has lost 4.8% over this period. Now the key question is: Where could the stock be headed in the near term? While media releases or rumors about a substantial change in a company's business prospects usually make its stock 'trending' and lead to an immediate price change, there are always some fundamental facts that eventually dominate the buy-and-hold decision-making. Revisions to Earnings Estimates Here at Zacks, we prioritize appraising the change in the projection of a company's future earnings over anything else. That's because we believe the present value of its future stream of earnings is what determines the fair value for its stock. Our analysis is essentially based on how sell-side analysts covering the stock are revising their earnings estimates to take the latest business trends into account. When earnings estimates for a company go up, the fair value for its stock goes up as well. And when a stock's fair value is higher than its current market price, investors tend to buy the stock, resulting in its price moving upward. Because of this, empirical studies indicate a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and short-term stock price movements. For the current quarter, Tesla is expected to post earnings of $0.39 per share, indicating a change of +44.4% from the year-ago quarter. The Zacks Consensus Estimate has changed -3.7% over the last 30 days. The consensus earnings estimate of $2.08 for the current fiscal year indicates a year-over-year change of +25.3%. This estimate has changed -4.9% over the last 30 days. For the next fiscal year, the...

Tesla (TSLA) has recently been on Zacks.com's list of the most searched stocks. Therefore, you might want to consider some of the key factors that could influence the stock's performance in the near future. Shares of this electric car maker have returned -4.5% over the past month versus the Zacks S&P 500 composite's -2.3% change. The Zacks Automotive - Domestic industry, to which Tesla belongs, has lost 4.8% over this period. Now the key question is: Where could the stock be headed in the near term? While media releases or rumors about a substantial change in a company's business prospects usually make its stock 'trending' and lead to an immediate price change, there are always some fundamental facts that eventually dominate the buy-and-hold decision-making. Revisions to Earnings Estimates Here at Zacks, we prioritize appraising the change in the projection of a company's future earnings over anything else. That's because we believe the present value of its future stream of earnings is what determines the fair value for its stock. Our analysis is essentially based on how sell-side analysts covering the stock are revising their earnings estimates to take the latest business trends into account. When earnings estimates for a company go up, the fair value for its stock goes up as well. And when a stock's fair value is higher than its current market price, investors tend to buy the stock, resulting in its price moving upward. Because of this, empirical studies indicate a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and short-term stock price movements. For the current quarter, Tesla is expected to post earnings of $0.39 per share, indicating a change of +44.4% from the year-ago quarter. The Zacks Consensus Estimate has changed -3.7% over the last 30 days. The consensus earnings estimate of $2.08 for the current fiscal year indicates a year-over-year change of +25.3%. This estimate has changed -4.9% over the last 30 days. For the next fiscal year, the...

Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Is a Trending Stock: Facts to Know Before Betting on It finance.yahoo.com

Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) is a trending stock: Facts to know before betting on it MSN

Nvidia Corp. is making a new investment in Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati , and will supply chips to help train and run the startup’s AI models. Thinking Machines will use Nvidia’s forthcoming Vera Rubin AI accelerators as part of a multiyear agreement, the companies said in a statement Tuesday. The chips, which will be deployed by Thinking Machines early next year, will provide computing power amounting to at least 1 gigawatt — roughly the amount of energy needed to power 750,000 homes. Nvidia, which previously invested in Thinking Machines last year, didn’t provide terms of the current deal or discuss whether it will be an infusion of cash, chips or some combination of the two. The companies described the investment as “significant.” A Thinking Machines spokesperson declined to elaborate, while a representative for Nvidia didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The agreement is part of a flurry of investment deals for Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. The chipmaker is using its resources to promote the use of artificial intelligence in a range of industries, helping jump-start what it calls a new industrial revolution. But the deals have drawn scrutiny for their circular nature, with Nvidia taking stakes in its own customers. Thinking Machines, meanwhile, held talks last year to raise a new round of funds at a $50 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported in November. That would quadruple the startup’s valuation from July, when it raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation. “This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn,” Murati said in the statement. Under Murati, a tech executive who previously served as chief technology officer at OpenAI, Thinking Machines hired dozens of employees from the ChatGPT maker and rolled out its first product, Tinker, in October. That service helps users f...

A Quick Look at Today's Ratings for Oracle(ORCL.US), With a Forecast Between $200 to $300 富途牛牛

A Quick Look at Today's Ratings for Microsoft(MSFT.US), With a Forecast Between $600 to $650 富途牛牛

Buying a cheap laptop is easy. You just go to Best Buy or Newegg or Amazon or Walmart or somewhere, you pick the cheapest one (or the most expensive one that fits whatever your budget is), and you buy it. For as little as $200 or $300, you can bring home something new (as in, "new-in-box" not as in, "was released recently") that will power up and boot Windows or ChromeOS. Buying a decent cheap laptop, or recommending one to someone else who's trying to buy one? That's hard. For several years I helped maintain Wirecutter's guide to sub-$500 laptops , and keeping that guide useful and up to date was a nightmare. It's not that decent options with good-enough specs, keyboards, and screens didn't exist. But the category is a maze of barely differentiated models, some of them retailer-exclusive. You'd regularly run into laptops that were fine except for a bad screen or a terrible keyboard or miserable battery life—some fatal flaw that couldn't be overlooked. Read full article Comments

Apple (AAPL) is one of the stocks most watched by Zacks.com visitors lately. So, it might be a good idea to review some of the factors that might affect the near-term performance of the stock. Over the past month, shares of this maker of iPhones, iPads and other products have returned -5.4%, compared to the Zacks S&P 500 composite's -2.3% change. During this period, the Zacks Computer - Micro Computers industry, which Apple falls in, has lost 4.8%. The key question now is: What could be the stock's future direction? Although media reports or rumors about a significant change in a company's business prospects usually cause its stock to trend and lead to an immediate price change, there are always certain fundamental factors that ultimately drive the buy-and-hold decision. Earnings Estimate Revisions Here at Zacks, we prioritize appraising the change in the projection of a company's future earnings over anything else. That's because we believe the present value of its future stream of earnings is what determines the fair value for its stock. We essentially look at how sell-side analysts covering the stock are revising their earnings estimates to reflect the impact of the latest business trends. And if earnings estimates go up for a company, the fair value for its stock goes up. A higher fair value than the current market price drives investors' interest in buying the stock, leading to its price moving higher. This is why empirical research shows a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and near-term stock price movements. For the current quarter, Apple is expected to post earnings of $1.88 per share, indicating a change of +13.9% from the year-ago quarter. The Zacks Consensus Estimate remained unchanged over the last 30 days. The consensus earnings estimate of $8.41 for the current fiscal year indicates a year-over-year change of +12.7%. This estimate has remained unchanged over the last 30 days. For the next fiscal year, the consensus earnin...

Apple (AAPL) is one of the stocks most watched by Zacks.com visitors lately. So, it might be a good idea to review some of the factors that might affect the near-term performance of the stock. Over the past month, shares of this maker of iPhones, iPads and other products have returned -5.4%, compared to the Zacks S&P 500 composite's -2.3% change. During this period, the Zacks Computer - Micro Computers industry, which Apple falls in, has lost 4.8%. The key question now is: What could be the stock's future direction? Although media reports or rumors about a significant change in a company's business prospects usually cause its stock to trend and lead to an immediate price change, there are always certain fundamental factors that ultimately drive the buy-and-hold decision. Earnings Estimate Revisions Here at Zacks, we prioritize appraising the change in the projection of a company's future earnings over anything else. That's because we believe the present value of its future stream of earnings is what determines the fair value for its stock. We essentially look at how sell-side analysts covering the stock are revising their earnings estimates to reflect the impact of the latest business trends. And if earnings estimates go up for a company, the fair value for its stock goes up. A higher fair value than the current market price drives investors' interest in buying the stock, leading to its price moving higher. This is why empirical research shows a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and near-term stock price movements. For the current quarter, Apple is expected to post earnings of $1.88 per share, indicating a change of +13.9% from the year-ago quarter. The Zacks Consensus Estimate remained unchanged over the last 30 days. The consensus earnings estimate of $8.41 for the current fiscal year indicates a year-over-year change of +12.7%. This estimate has remained unchanged over the last 30 days. For the next fiscal year, the consensus earnin...

Apple Inc. (AAPL) Is a Trending Stock: Facts to Know Before Betting on It finance.yahoo.com

In this article GSK-GB Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT The headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland, Nov. 4, 2009. Jason Reed | Reuters The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved a decades-old prescription vitamin called leucovorin as the first treatment for a rare genetic disorder in certain adults and children. The move comes months after the Trump administration touted leucovorin as a potential therapy for a broader group of patients with autism spectrum disorder symptoms. The claim sparked skepticism among some in the medical and research community, but fueled excitement among families, spiking prescriptions of the drug in the U.S. One FDA official told reporters on Monday that "we don't have sufficient data to say that we could establish efficacy for autism more broadly," but said the agency is open to interest from companies in studying leucovorin in the autism population. The medication, also referred to as folinic acid, is a synthetic form of vitamin B9 that has been used to treat the toxic side effects of chemotherapy. Just a handful of small trials have suggested that leucovorin could be effective as an off-label treatment for children with autism, and some families have reported that it helped their nonverbal kids develop more language and social skills. FDA officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the decision, told reporters on Monday that they started with a broad review of leucovorin as an autism treatment before narrowing its approval to a smaller population with cerebral folate deficiency, a rare genetic mutation that prevents folate – a key vitamin – from properly reaching the brain. The condition shares overlapping features with autism, typically develops in young children under age 2 and can cause severe developmental delays, seizures, a lack of muscle control and other serious neurological complications. The officials said the FDA found that using leucovorin in patients with ...

Zoom’s AI-powered avatars, which can represent users in online meetings, will be available to use later this month, the company announced on Tuesday, alongside news of other tools and services. Notably, the company is introducing its own AI Docs, Slides, and Sheets apps, an AI agent builder for non-technical people, and a voice translator for meetings. The company said its AI-powered productivity apps will be available as a preview in the spring. The AI avatars, announced last year, are the long-anticipated photorealistic avatars that can mimic your appearance, expressions, lip and eye movements. Designed to mine your actions when you’re not “camera-ready,” Zoom says the avatars will work in online meetings as well as in its asynchronous video messaging product. Alongside the AI avatars, the company is adding a deepfake detection technology for meetings to alert participants of possible audio or video impersonation. Other new tools include a suite of AI-powered office apps, including AI Docs, Slides, and Sheets. The company said that, based on meeting transcripts and data from other services, users can create document drafts, spreadsheets with data, or presentations. Image Credits: Zoom In addition, Zoom’s AI Companion 3.0 is now coming to its desktop app, after first arriving on the web in September. The company said that the AI Companion’s monthly active users more than tripled in Q4 FY 2026 year-over-year. Workvivo, its app for employee communication, will receive the AI assistant, as well. This assistant can connect to services such as Slack, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Gmail, Outlook, Asana, and Jira to let users ask questions across different knowledge bases. Zoom is not alone in creating AI-first office software. There are established companies like Canva and new startups like Context that are trying to do the same. Salesforce-owned Slack has also been adding more AI features to its team communication apps. Image Credits: Zoom To address the growing interest in a...

Google announced on Tuesday that it’s bringing a slew of new Gemini-powered AI capabilities to Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive. The new features let users do things like quickly generate fully formatted first drafts, slides, and sheets based on information from their Gmail, Chat, and Drive. The tools are designed to make the apps more personal and capable of helping users get things done faster, right within the platforms themselves, instead of needing to switch to a separate tool or chatbot. A new “Help me create” tool in Docs lets users describe what they want to create, and Gemini will follow their instructions and gather information from Drive, Gmail, and Chat to generate a first draft. For example, you can ask Gemini to “draft a newsletter for our neighborhood association using the meeting minutes from my January HOA meeting and the list of upcoming events.” Once you have a first draft, Gemini can help refine specific sections without regenerating the entire document. You can also use the “Help me write” tool to do things like improve clarity or add details where needed. Additionally, if you have multiple people working on a draft with differing voices and tones, you can now use a new “Match writing style” feature to help unify the documents. Gemini will suggest edits to make the tone and voice consistent throughout the draft. Docs is also getting a new “Match the format” tool that lets you mirror the structure and style of another document. For example, if you find a travel itinerary template you like, Gemini can fill it in with your own trip details by pulling information from your emails, such as flight confirmations, hotel bookings, and rental car reservations. Image Credits:Google As for Sheets, Gemini is evolving from a tool you work in to a collaborative partner, Google says. With a single prompt, it will pull relevant data from across your Gmail, Chat, and Drive to quickly create a fully formatted spreadsheet. Techcrunch event Disrupt 2026: The tech eco...

The reusable rocket has transformed the space industry in the last decade, and a new startup led by a SpaceX veteran wants to do the same for satellites. Brian Taylor, who helped build satellites for networks like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Leo, founded Lux Aeterna in December 2024 to develop satellite structures with a built-in heat shield that will allow them to return to Earth with their payloads intact. The company, which came out of stealth last year, announced a new $10 million seed round Tuesday morning led by Konvoy, with participation from Decisive Point, Cubit Capital, Wave Function, Space Capital, Dynamo Ventures, and Channel 39. The company declined to disclose its valuation. The capital will support the design and construction of Lux Aeterna’s Delphi spacecraft, which has a confirmed spot on a SpaceX rocket expected to launch in the first quarter of 2027. That mission will prove out Lux’s technology by offering customers a chance to test hosted payloads and materials that will then be returned to Earth at Australia’s Koonibba Test Range through a partnership with the aerospace company Southern Launch. Bringing anything back from space requires diving back into Earth’s atmosphere at incredibly high speeds, which generates extreme heat. Spacecraft that want to survive the journey must be covered in materials that protect them from that heat, adding extra weight. Because that weight makes getting to space on a rocket more expensive, most spacecraft aren’t designed for a return journey. That calculus typically limits reentry to vehicles that carry humans, like the Space Shuttle (which saw one vehicle lost due to the extreme environment of reentry) or SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX’s repeated attempts to land its massive Starship rocket have made that challenge vivid for anyone who’s watched them on YouTube. Startups like Varda Space and Inversion are tackling the same problem on a smaller scale: They are building reentry capsules that allow customer...

The iron-core transformer is the 140-year old technology that props up both the electrical grid and AI companies. The devices are clunky but reliable, which explains why they’re still in use: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Yet as the data center power demand skyrockets and batteries and renewables carve out larger portions of the grid, the ancient technology might finally be hitting its limit. Fortunately, their electronic replacement — the solid state transformer — could be having its moment, and not a moment too soon. In the last few months, startups specializing in solid state transformers have raised $280 million. The technology promises to slash the number of components needed by data centers, improve the stability of the grid, and shrink the footprint of power conversion equipment. Now, Hyperscale Power says it can slim things down further. “We haven’t seen something that is as small as our system will be,” Daniel Rothmund, co-founder and CEO at Hyperscale Power, told TechCrunch. To build a prototype of the transformer, Hyperscale recently raised a €5 million seed round led by World Fund and Vsquared Ventures, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. In the past couple of years, the solid state transformer market went from nearly nonexistent to almost crowded. Among the competitors are Amperesand, which was incubated by Temasek’s early stage fund; DG Matrix, which counts industrial giant ABB as an investor; and Heron Power, which was founded by former Tesla executive Drew Bagnlino and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Together, they’ve raised over $330 million, according to PitchBook. Hyperscale would appear to be late to the party, but both Rothmund and his co-founder Sami Pettersson have been working on the technology for a while. Rothmund, especially: he completed his PhD at ETH Zürich in part by designing and building a 99.1% efficient solid-state transformer. Techcrunch event Disrupt 2026: The tech ecosystem, all in one room Your next round. Your next h...

Google is embedding its Gemini AI assistant even more deeply within its Workspace apps. The changes, which are rolling out to Google Workspace and AI plan subscribers, include a new Gemini chat window inside Google Docs, a way to generate entire spreadsheets with AI, and a new Gemini-powered search feature in Drive. While Google Docs already shows you a few AI writing options alongside your blinking cursor, now you’ll see a Gemini chat window at the bottom of your screen. There, you’ll get the option to describe to Gemini the kind of document you’d like to create, and the AI assistant will use information from the web, Drive, Gmail, and Chat to generate and fully format a draft. You can also ask Gemini to match an existing document’s format, which should save you some time editing the new doc’s style and structure. Google is making some tweaks to the Gemini-powered editing features in Docs as well. If you’re working on a document with other people, you can now highlight their text and select “Match writing style.” Gemini will then analyze the tone of your document and rewrite the text accordingly. It can also make changes throughout your document based on a prompt, while showing its suggestions in-line — similar to if someone else is editing your document. Google notes that these suggestions will be private until you approve them. With this rollout, Yulie Kwon Kim, Google’s VP of product for Workspace, says Google aims to put Gemini “in the places where people work,” so users don’t have to navigate to a separate app or website. “When you are, for example, wanting to write a report, or write a customer brief, people are turning to Docs,” Kwon Kim says. “You can get the assistance from Gemini right where you are in your familiar place, where you’re doing your everyday work.” Gemini can make changes throughout your document, even if you don’t select a specific section to refine. GIF: Google Gemini is getting a bigger role in Sheets, too, as you can now ask Gemini to ge...

Have you ever wondered what Arrival would be like if it was also a goofy buddy comedy? Me neither. And yet the strange combination somehow fits together in Project Hail Mary. The movie follows a scientist who travels to the far reaches of the universe to save humanity and is forced to work alongside an alien in the same position. It’s silly and heartfelt, tense and hopeful. It may be a seemingly odd mixture — but the strangest part of all is how well it all works. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of Spider-Verse fame, and based on the novel of the same name from The Martian author Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as a science teacher named Ryland Grace. In a previous life, Grace was a biologist whose career stalled because of some out-there ideas about what forms life could take on other planets. But when a mysterious phenomenon starts causing the sun to dim, along with seemingly every other star in the galaxy, scientists around the world are stumped. And it’s Grace’s previously controversial views that lead to him being brought on board in an attempt to solve the potentially world-ending crisis. The story jumps back and forth between two time periods. There’s Grace as he works with scientists all over the globe to find a solution, which mostly serves as a way to set up just what’s going on: there’s a microorganism called “astrophage” that feeds on solar energy, and it’s eating up stars. All except one, Tau Ceti, which also happens to be farther away than any space mission in human history. Eventually, Grace ends up on the team going there in hopes of finding some answers — despite frequent protestations that he’s not an astronaut. Years later he wakes up from cryosleep to discover he’s the team’s only survivor and has to pull off the mission solo. Initially, Project Hail Mary doesn’t feel too far off from the hard sci-fi established by The Martian. There are lots of discussions of scientific principles and shots of Ryan Gosling, who someh...

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Adobe announced more agentic AI features for its Creative Cloud apps this week, allowing users to edit images and documents by describing the changes to a chatbot. A native AI-assistant is now available in public beta for Photoshop on web and mobile, and some Adobe apps, including Acrobat and Express, will soon be available to access directly within Microsoft’s Copilot service. The AI Assistant in Photoshop for web and mobile was introduced in a private beta in October, but now more people can use it to remove distractions, change backgrounds, refine lighting, adjust color, and more. This follows Adobe launching similar AI assistants for Express and Acrobat. The chatbot-like interface isn’t available for the full Photoshop desktop app yet, but that’s likely still coming, given that Adobe teased in April last year that AI agents are being developed for Photoshop and Premiere Pro. “With AI Assistant in Photoshop you can choose to have AI Assistant apply edits automatically or guide you step by step so you can learn along the way,” Adobe said in its press release. “In the Photoshop app, you can use your voice to request edits you want to see, making editing on the go simple.” If you don’t want to edit your work with Creative Cloud apps via Adobe’s chatbots, the company is hoping you’ll access its tools through other AI assistants instead. Adobe says that Express and Acrobat will soon be available to Copilot 365 enterprise customers, allowing them to make conversational adjustments without leaving Microsoft’s AI platform. Similar support for Photoshop, Acrobat, and Express was introduced to ChatGPT in December.