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Driverless cars are on the rise and now we may know why they crash

For the first time, new algorithms may be able to automatically explain why some self-driving cars crash—a question crucial to answer as more autonomous vehicles take to the roads. This new approach, developed by researchers at King’s College London, reviews past events to explain why specific instances of failure happened, in the hope that this can be used to make improvements in the future.

The research was presented at the 2026 IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation.

Self-driving vehicles are increasingly being rolled out across the globe, in cities like London and San Francisco, but collisions and serious breaches of road safety have put pressure on manufacturers to explain why they make the mistakes they do. This is often hard to do, and current methods only provide limited explanations for these.

No spacecraft has ever landed in the outer solar system — except one: the Huygens probe

Two decades on, it is still the most distant landing ever made, and it remains the only one in the outer solar system.

Seven years to get there

Huygens was the lander half of the Cassini-Huygens mission, a joint venture between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian space agency. The European-built probe rode piggyback on NASA’s Cassini orbiter, which launched in 1997 and spent nearly seven years crossing the solar system before slipping into orbit around Saturn in 2004.

Roman Yampolskiy: AI Can’t Be Controlled. We Need to Pause Now!

Roman Yampolskiy spent two decades trying to prove superintelligence can be controlled. He couldn’t — and now says the proof runs the other way: not difficult, mathematically impossible.

If he’s right, we’re building the one machine we can never switch off, and the people building it are racing to do it faster.

Roman is a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville and one of the earliest researchers in AI safety.
We cover: why you’re the squirrel in the human-AI intelligence gap, what the halting problem really says about predicting a smarter mind, why he calls all current AI safety \.

Specific cognitive abilities are highly heritable independent of general intelligence

A massive new meta-analysis reveals that individual cognitive abilities, like reading and math, rely on inherited DNA just as much as overall intelligence, suggesting people possess heavily customized genetic cognitive profiles independent of general smarts.

China hits new milestone in space solar power project

XI’AN — Chinese scientists have taken a major step toward building a space solar power station, a giant power plant in space that could one day send energy back to Earth or to spacecraft.

A research team from Xidian University in Northwest China’s Shaanxi province has made significant progress on the Sun Chasing project, or “Zhuri” in Chinese. The team has developed a ground-based test system for wireless power transmission that can charge multiple moving targets at the same time.

In recent tests, the system achieved a wireless power transmission efficiency of 20.8 percent from direct current to direct current over a distance of 100 meters. It delivered 1,180 watts of power. The team has also built a wireless charging system for drones. In a test, a drone flying at 30 kilometers per hour was able to receive 143 watts of stable power from 30 meters away.

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