The Liux Big microcar is Spain’s most audacious bet that a small European car built around genuine sustainability can hold its own against a flood of cheap Chinese EVs. That is a tall order for a 65-person startup based in Azuqueca de Henares, but Liux has spent four years quietly building the case. The company secured Europe-wide homologation for the Big in 2026 and expects to start selling it in the first half of next year. Pricing will come in below €18,000 (around $21,000) before any EV subsidies, sitting at the higher end of the microcar bracket. The waiting list…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
London, UK – 14 Sept, 2026: a British sitcom pilot has gone live on YouTube without a camera, a crew or a location shoot behind it. No Big Deal, written by Andrew Dickinson and produced by the UK studio ModeLabs.ai, is believed to be the world’s first sitcom written by a human and produced entirely using AI. The episode is free to watch here. Traditional production ruled out early Dickinson, who worked as an angel investor and investment manager before turning to comedy, did not set out to make an AI production. The intention was a conventional television build, and…
Caterpillar AI deployment has a different origin story than most: instead of starting with a chatbot or a recommendation engine, it started with a haul truck in a mine. The industrial giant spent decades automating some of the most hazardous and remote worksites on earth before it ever tried to put a voice assistant in a field technician’s hands, and that sequencing matters. From Mining to Construction: The Logic of Caterpillar AI Deployment The company’s push into autonomy grew out of mining, where labour shortages and dangerous conditions made the case for automation almost self-evident. Today, Caterpillar sells automated haul…
The Sony Music Warner Anthropic lawsuit filed late on 28 August 2026 is the most expansive copyright action Anthropic has faced yet, accusing the AI company and its co-founders of a ‘brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works’ to train its Claude model. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music are the lead plaintiffs, joined by numerous other publishers, in a case filed as 5:2026cv09217 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named personally as defendants. A jury trial has been demanded. ‘We disagree with…
The European AI sovereignty debate ran like a live wire through TechBBQ this year, surfacing in panel rooms, on rooftops, and at cocktail bars across Copenhagen, long after the formal sessions had wrapped. The annual Nordic tech conference, which closed on 27 August, drew investors, founders, and operators from across the continent, and the question they kept circling was the same: who actually controls the AI infrastructure Europe is increasingly dependent on? It was the kind of question that matched the conference’s own theme, ‘Emerging from Agency’, rather too neatly. A real-world trigger had sharpened the mood: Anthropic’s models Mythos…
The Theragun Sense guided routines are the headline feature of Therabody’s second-generation wellness massage gun, and after a few weeks of testing, they largely justify the $299 asking price. For anyone who has ever pointed a massage gun at a sore shoulder and had absolutely no idea what they were doing, this device has a refreshingly practical answer. The Sense is positioned as an everyday relaxation and recovery tool rather than a deep-tissue powerhouse. Therabody is clear about that distinction: if you want heated therapy or serious deep-tissue capability, the Theragun PRO or Prime are the hardware for you. The…
Reuters confirmed this week that Chinese automakers’ humanoid robot ambitions have moved well past the mood board stage, with Xpeng’s robotics subsidiary closing a $900 million Series A at a post-money valuation of more than $6.3 billion. The round was led by IDG Capital, with Gaorong Ventures, Tencent, and Alibaba also participating. Xpeng described it as the largest single-round private financing ever recorded in China’s ’embodied AI’ industry. That is quite a claim. It is also, given the current mood in the sector, entirely plausible. Xpeng’s Robotics Unit Puts a Number on the Dream The robotics subsidiary’s stated plan is…
Nvidia has confirmed an open-weight AI acquisition that reframes what the chip giant actually is: a definitive agreement to buy Hugging Face for a purchase price of approximately $11.9 billion, plus up to $1.0 billion in equity-based retention payments for Hugging Face employees who join Nvidia. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. The headline figure of roughly $13 billion makes this Nvidia’s second-largest deal on record, according to CNBC, trailing only its $20 billion purchase of chip assets from Groq last December. Hugging Face itself is no small trophy: more…
Tamme Tokyo Spring 2027 takes the season’s central conceit and turns the dial down: less hard authority, more ghostly trace of it. Tatsuya Tamada has been mining the image of his police officer father since last season, fusing the visual language of official dress into pieces that sit somewhere between the buttoned-up and the deliberately undone. This time, he eased off. What Docking Actually Means The collection is built around a Japanese fashion term most English speakers have never encountered: docking. It describes the practice of combining the fundamental elements of two distinct garments into a single hybrid item, a…
The Spate beauty trend tracker, produced in collaboration with Vogue Business, surfaces the brands, ingredients, and formats registering the strongest year-on-year growth with consistent upward momentum, and the sheer breadth of this latest edition is worth pausing on. Dozens of categories. Dozens of months of rolling data. The picture that emerges is less a snapshot than a slow-moving current. How the Spate Beauty Trend Tracker Works Before diving into the trends themselves, it helps to understand the machinery behind them. Spate’s forecasting methodology is built on over 1 trillion search signals, 515 million TikTok posts, and 105 million Instagram posts,…