Tech

Nuclear startup X-energy raised $700 million in a Series D round, the company told TechCrunch. The new fundraise comes less than a year after it expanded its Series C from $500 million to $700 million, bringing the total raised in the last year or so to $1.4 billion, a sizable amount even in the heady world of nuclear power startups. …

The Trump administration has disbanded the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a controversial team of federal cost-cutters previously led by Elon Musk, despite months left of the unit’s mandate. Reuters first reported this weekend that DOGE had broken up, ending the months-long effort by Musk and his associates — many recruited from his various private-sector companies — to reduce …

Pocket Casts, the podcast app owned by Tumblr’s parent company Automattic, launched a new feature that lets you create podcast playlists, allowing you to organize your favorite episodes in just the order you like. You can either create a playlist manually, or Pocket Casts can automatically create one for you.  Playlists are designed to better personalize the listening experience for …

AI chatbots have been linked to serious mental health harms in heavy users, but there have been few standards for measuring whether they safeguard human wellbeing or just maximize for engagement. A new benchmark dubbed HumaneBench seeks to fill that gap by evaluating whether chatbots prioritize user wellbeing and how easily those protections fail under pressure. “I think we’re in an …

Facebook Groups are getting more Reddit-like with newly added support for nicknames. The feature, which allows users to post under a custom username instead of their real name, provides an alternative to posting anonymously. With anonymous posting, users can share without the post being connected to their Facebook profile and real-life identity, but this approach also doesn’t allow other group …

Short videos are in high demand. Across large platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, users are watching billions of videos every day, with companies benefitting massively from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there is pressure to create more content than ever before to be relevant and make a living out of it, especially as more AI-generated …

Several U.S. banking giants and mortgage lenders are reportedly scrambling to assess how much of their customers’ data was stolen during a cyberattack on a New York financial technology company earlier this month. SitusAMC, which provides technology for over a thousand commercial and real estate financiers, confirmed in a statement over the weekend that it had identified a data breach …

As Australia’s ban on social media use for users under 16 looms, it appears Malaysia now plans to implement a similar system starting next year. The country’s communications minister, Fahmi Fadzil, reportedly said the administration is considering systems for implementing age restrictions on social media platforms, barring users under 16 years old from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X, Reuters …

Product demos get all the attention, but software development more often involves things like debugging, quality assurance, and testing. It’s the dull but critical work that keeps software running the way it should, and as developers look to automate more of their workloads, it’s increasingly being done by AI. On Monday, the AI testing startup Momentic said it had raised …

There’s only one fusion device on earth that has been able to meet a key scientific threshold, but Maritime Fusion CEO Justin Cohen is already preparing to put a fusion reactor on a boat. Stay with me — it’s not entirely far-fetched. Thanks to advances in AI, computing, and superconducting magnets, fusion power is closer than ever to commercial reality. It’s …