As simple of a concept flow batteries are, the used chemicals can still be somewhat problematic in the context of a school experiment. To this end [Markus Bindhammer] decided to implement a flow battery version that uses compounds from green tea for its electrolyte, based on a German research paper from 2016.

These organic flow batteries can use gallic acid, pyrogallol as well as the polyphenols in green tea, making them rather safe even in the hands of more careless students. The demonstrated flow battery uses a carbon electrode with activated carbon around it to increase surface area, a platinum wire electrode, and a graphite foil as as third electrode.

In the paper a silver electrode is also used, along with the additional electrodes, and a terracotta flower pot as the barrier between the carbon and graphite electrodes, with [Markus] further explaining that there are fortunately cheaper options than what he is using, especially with the flower pot instead of a special ceramic vessel.

The electrolyte solution has epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) dissolved in it, which here comes in the form of finely ground green tea powder (commonly known as matcha), which so happens to be pretty rich in this substance. In the below graphic by [Markus] you can see the complete set of solutions and other relevant details.

Of course, the performance of this type of flow cell isn’t amazing, with a cell voltage of less than a volt and a few mA of current, but it’s enough to spin a small fan, and to light up a few LEDs. This would be more than enough to demonstrate the reaction and flow cells in general, as long as you don’t mind donating some tasty matcha to science.

The news comes amid the official opening of a new premises, which is also part of NTT Data’s €16.5m investment.

NTT Data, a Tokyo-headquartered AI, digital business and technology company has today (17 June) announced the creation of 50 jobs to be based out of a new Dublin office. The new premises replaces a previous Dublin-located base of operations and is part of a €16.5m investment into the local economy.

According to the organisation, the investment will focus primarily on jobs creation, as well as AI and digital services R&D in association with business and academic institutions. NTT Data has expanded its Ireland–based workforce by 50pc since 2025 and the newly announced roles are expected to be filled over the course of the next six months. 

NTT Data has stated it regards Ireland as a critical market and its Irish client base includes a range of insurance companies, banks, and telecoms firms such as Three Ireland and Eir. The company also said the new Dublin office will illustrate a commitment to supporting Ireland’s businesses with the latest research and technologies.

Commenting on the announcement, Michael Lohan, the CEO of IDA Ireland, said: “NTT Data’s new Dublin office and investment of €16.5m is a strong vote of confidence in Ireland and a clear sign of the company’s long-term commitment to growing its presence here. 

A key part of IDA Ireland’s strategy is to support Ireland as a global location for next-generation technologies, including AI and to help companies scale high-value capabilities from Ireland for international markets. 

“NTT Data’s focus on research and development strengthens the wider technology ecosystem, deepening collaboration with Irish talent and academia and driving innovation that will benefit businesses and communities across the country.”

Niccolo Spataro, the executive managing director for the UK and Ireland at NTT Data, added, “Ireland has a growing economy and a well-established and dynamic tech sector. Today’s announcement reflects our commitment to Ireland. The organisations that move decisively on AI will define their industries for years to come, and we intend to be the partner that helps Ireland’s leading enterprises do exactly that.”

In late May, in Galway, global healthcare technology company Medtronic also announced the creation of new roles amid the establishment of a European software development hub for its patient care systems function.  

New roles at the Galway site will be in areas such as leadership, software engineering and systems reliability and the hub will serve as a global ‘centre of excellence’ for cardiac digital health. 

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The Tour de Suisse 2026, the 89th edition of the race, will be five days long rather than the usual eight and in an innovative move to give the fans more chance to see the action each day, the stages will start and finish in the same town.

Heading the list of contenders is the GOAT himself Tadej Pogačar who will be racing for the first time since winning the Tour de Romandie at the end of April. Challenging for the overall will be Tom Pidcock, Primož Roglič and Richard Carapaz then of those looking for stage wins keep a close eye on Matthew Brennan and Mathieu van der Poel.

Cyber Essentials has always been the UK’s baseline cybersecurity standard.

It’s a practical floor designed to block common attacks and ensure business resilience when organizations implement them, rather than treating the scheme as lip service.

Microsoft confirmed that it’s working on a security patch for a Defender zero-day vulnerability named “RoguePlanet,” disclosed one week ago.

The security researcher who published a RoguePlanet exploit during the June 2026 Patch Tuesday (known as Nightmare Eclipse) said it affects fully patched Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices and allows attackers to spawn command prompts with SYSTEM privileges via a Microsoft Defender race condition.

He shared a proof-of-concept exploit in a self-hosted Git repository, claiming that Microsoft had previously targeted and removed their repos hosting exploits on GitHub and GitLab.

“The exploit is a race condition, so it’s a hit or miss. I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it struggled to work on others,” Nightmare Eclipse said.

“Microsoft is aware of the reported vulnerability and is actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims. Microsoft is committed to investigating security issues and updating impacted products to protect customers as soon as possible,” a Microsoft spokesperson told BleepingComputer when asked for a statement at the time.

On Tuesday, one week after the RoguePlanet flaw was disclosed, Microsoft assigned the CVE-2026-50656 ID to this security flaw and confirmed it’s currently working on a patch, but didn’t acknowledge that Nightmare Eclipse was the one who found the vulnerability.

“Microsoft is aware of an elevation of privilege in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine in Microsoft Defender publicly referred to as ‘RoguePlanet,’ it said in an advisory published yesterday. “We are working to provide a high quality security update that addresses this vulnerability. We will provide information in this CVE when the update is available.”

The RoguePlanet release is part of an ongoing dispute between Nightmare Eclipse and Microsoft over the latter’s bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure practices.

Over the past several months, the researcher has publicly leaked multiple Windows zero-day exploits, including for the BlueHammer, RedSun, GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, YellowKey, and UnDefend flaws. Some of these zero-days affect Microsoft Defender, while others target BitLocker and Windows components.

The company reacted to Nightmare Eclipse’s disclosures by issuing warnings of legal action when people engage in “malicious activity causing real harm to our customers,” leading cybersecurity experts and researchers to believe that Microsoft was threatening the researcher.

Microsoft fixed the GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, and YellowKey flaws last week as part of the June 2026 Patch Tuesdayupdates.

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Threads is rolling out a batch of upgrades to its Communities feature and introducing a new feed personalization tool, as Meta marks the platform reaching 500 million monthly active users.

Communities get their own identity

The Communities feature, which launched last year and lets users form groups around shared topics, is now out of beta and picking up several additions. Communities can now have custom icons to make them easier to identify across the app, and a new Communities Hub puts them in the main menu alongside the feed, so switching between them takes fewer taps.

Meta says it is also adding a progress indicator that shows users how far a topic is from becoming a full community, expanded champion status to recognize more active members, and native-language tags for communities in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Live Chats, which are already available in some Communities, will expand to more groups in the coming weeks and gain co-hosting and the ability to quote moments directly to the feed.

Your Algo puts feed controls in your hands

Meta is also rolling out a new feed-tuning tool called Your Algo. It builds on Dear Algo, a feature introduced in February that lets users signal to the algorithm what they want to see more or less of.

Your Algo works alongside it, letting users privately set topic preferences and choose how long those preferences stay active, with options for one, three, or seven days. The requests are visible only to the user, and both tools are managed from a single hub. Your Algo is live for users in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

The rollout comes just days after Instagram introduced a similar feature called Your Algorithm, which lets users add and remove topics to shape what they see across the app.

Today, Chinese AI startup Z.ai (formerly Zhipu AI) announced the immediate release of GLM-5.2, a 753-billion parameter open-weights large language model (LLM) engineered specifically to dominate “long-horizon” autonomous coding and engineering tasks.

Available immediately on Hugging Face, the Z.ai API, and more than 20 third-party coding environments, the model boasts a highly stable 1-million-token context window alongside enterprise subscription tiers starting at just $12.60 per month.

In excellent news for cost and security-conscious businesses, z.ai has released GLM-5.2’s core weights under an unrestricted MIT open-source license, allowing enterprises to download the model freely from Hugging Face, customize or fine-tune it to their liking, and run it potentially locally or via virtual machines for only the cost of their compute and electricity.

This is an increasingly appealing option for enterprises, as state-of-the-art American proprietary models face an uncertain and potentially interrupted regulatory future, following the Trump Administration’s export control directive last week prohibiting foreign nationals from using Anthropic’s new Claude Fable 5 model (which that company responded to by taking the models in question entirely offline for all users).

For enterprise technical decision-makers, z.ai’s GLM-5.2 provides a highly capable path to host frontier-level AI locally, entirely bypassing the geographic fencing and commercial limitations.

IndexShare re-uses one indexer for every four sparse attention layers, reducing compute needs

Under the hood, GLM-5.2 operates with 753 billion parameters and introduces a major architectural optimization called “IndexShare”.

In standard massive language models, recalculating attention mechanisms across long documents is computationally exorbitant. IndexShare solves this by reusing the identical indexer across every four sparse attention layers.

At the maximum 1-million-token context length, this single innovation reduces per-token compute FLOPs by a massive 2.9 times.

The model also features an upgraded Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) layer for speculative decoding, which boosts accepted token length by up to 20% during inference.

Additionally, Z.ai has implemented flexible, selectable “Thinking Modes”. Users can toggle the model’s reasoning effort between “Max,” designed to push the limits of logical problem-solving, or “High,” which strikes a careful balance between high-end performance and latency-sensitive token efficiency.

State-of-the-art benchmarks for an open model, and matching, even beating proprietary leaders on some categories

On industry-standard third-party benchmark tests, GLM-5.2 performs above most open source flagship models, even DeepSeek v4 and scores near or above its closed-weights rivals, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8.

The model particularly shines in agentic tool use and long-horizon software engineering tasks:

• SWE-bench Pro: GLM-5.2 scored 62.1, decisively beating GPT-5.5 (58.6) and its own predecessor, GLM-5.1 (58.4).

• FrontierSWE (Dominance): Designed to test long-horizon task completion, GLM-5.2 hit 74.4%, surpassing GPT-5.5 (72.6%) and finishing in a near-tie with Claude Opus 4.8 (75.1%).

• MCP-Atlas: On this tool-usage evaluation, GLM-5.2 achieved a 77.0, outscoring GPT-5.5 (75.3) and performing just shy of Claude Opus 4.8 (77.8).

• Humanity’s Last Exam (w/ Tools): When equipped with external tools, GLM-5.2 reached a score of 54.7, coming out ahead of GPT-5.5 (52.2) and tracking closely behind Claude Opus 4.8 (57.9).

• PostTrainBench & SWE-Marathon: In extended, multi-hour engineering workloads, GLM-5.2 consistently topped GPT-5.5, scoring 34.3% against GPT-5.5’s 25.0% on PostTrainBench, and 13.0% against GPT-5.5’s 12.0% on SWE-Marathon.

While GLM-5.2 trails Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 slightly on raw Terminal-Bench 2.1 scores (81.0 versus 85.0 and 84.0, respectively), it significantly outscores Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro (74.0).

Beyond traditional coding metrics, GLM-5.2 took an impressive first place on the crowdsourced design task benchmark Design Arena, beating out even the aforementioned state-of-the-art Claude Fable 5 with an ELO score of 1360.

Furthermore, the impact of Z.ai’s new selectable “thinking modes” is clearly visible in the data: under the “Max” effort level, GLM-5.2 pushes to peak intelligence, but utilizes nearly 85k output tokens per task. Switching to the “High” effort setting sacrifices only a few points in performance while effectively halving the required token output, providing a crucial optimization lever for latency-sensitive applications.

Available via Coding Plans and API

To operationalize the model, Z.ai launched the GLM Coding Plan, aiming squarely at developer workflows rather than simple chat interfaces.

The plan offers out-of-the-box support for third-party U.S. and global agentic coding harnesses and tools including Claude Code, OpenClaw, Cline, Kilo Code, Crush, and Factory, among others. The Coding Plan pricing tiers (when billed annually) are highly competitive:

• Lite: $12.60 per month ($151.20 per year starting in the 2nd year), geared toward lightweight iteration on small repositories.

• Pro: $50.40 per month for day-to-day development on mid-sized repositories, offering 5x the usage allowance of the Lite plan.

• Max: $112.00 per month for heavy workloads, offering 20x the Lite usage and dedicated resources during peak hours.

For enterprise developers integrating the raw model into their own applications, Z.ai’s API pricing undercuts its Western rivals significantly while matching the exact rates of the previous GLM-5.1 generation.

GLM-5.2 API access is priced at $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens, making it a mid-priced model globally, but about

Sorted by total cost (input + output) from least to most expensive. Pricing shown is standard pay-as-you-go pricing per 1 million tokens.

To further optimize costs for long-context workloads, Z.ai offers a cached input rate of just $0.26 per million tokens, alongside a limited-time offer for free cached input storage.

The stark contrast between open-weights innovators and proprietary Western labs has not gone unnoticed by the developer community.

On X, prolific AI observer Lisan al Gaib (@scaling01) argued that “frontier labs are absolutely scamming you on API pricing”.

The post noted that while massive open models like the 744-billion-parameter GLM-5.2 charge $4.40 per million output tokens and DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6 trillion parameters) charges just $0.87, proprietary models demand heavy premiums: Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.8 charge $15.00 and $25.00 respectively, while OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 costs $30.00 for output.

Highlighting that open-model developers are operating profitably without relying on the newest “fancy Blackwell chips,” the commentator suggested that leading proprietary labs are “probably at 90%+ margins at this point”.

The beauty of the unmodified MIT License for enterprise use

The most disruptive aspect of the GLM-5.2 release is its licensing. Z.ai released the model’s weights under an MIT open-source license, establishing it as a “Pure Open” system.

The company’s technical documentation explicitly notes that this license guarantees “no regional limits” and allows “technical access without borders”.

For enterprise technology leaders, an MIT license means the software can be used, modified, and commercialized without paying royalties or adhering to restrictive “acceptable use” governance policies common to dual-use licenses.

It allows engineering teams to host frontier-level AI on their own sovereign infrastructure, entirely eliminating vendor lock-in.

Warm reception among AI developers and toolmakers

The developer reaction to the release has been immediate and overwhelmingly positive.

The team behind Kilo Code confirmed day-one integration, posting on X: “GLM-5.2 runs in Kilo Code on day one. The 1M context window and Max effort mode are both live. Point your config at it and go!”.

Open-source coding environment Cline IDE echoed this sentiment on X, noting the economic advantage: “GLM-5.2 is the first open-weights model to cross 80% on Terminal-Bench, and beats every other open model available. It also beats Gemini, making it a frontier-level model for a fraction of the cost. Open weights is back. This model is a game changer. Available in Cline now!”.

Similarly, rival open source coding desktop agent Eigent AI also tested the model’s new capabilities on complex agentic workflows, noting on X: “threw a real long-horizon task: research 30 companies across 6 sectors of the AI infrastructure stack, structure it into JSON, then build an interactive HTML report… where 5.2 pulls ahead: -> plans…”.

Apple’s plan to change a privacy feature that lets paying customers hide their real email addresses when creating online accounts could make it easier for apps and websites to block anonymous sign-ups.

Apple’s Hide My Email is an iCloud+ feature that generates anonymous email addresses under the @icloud.com domain, which then forward messages to a person’s real email address. The reason these privately generated email addresses work is because they cannot be distinguished from regular Apple users, whose email addresses also use the @icloud.com domain.

Apple said in a note to developers on Monday that in the coming weeks the company will move its anonymously generated email addresses to @private.icloud.com, effectively making it easier for apps and websites to know that an email address is private and block users from signing up.

Existing addresses will continue to function and forward mail without interruption, Apple said in the note to developers. The company added that app and email providers would have to update their filtering to ensure that emails to customers who rely on the feature continue to go through.

Several Apple users on Reddit criticized the change to the email domain, saying it would make it more difficult to use the service. 

Apple did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch about the change, or explain why it made the change.

Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Apple turned over the real account information of a user who generated an anonymized email address using Hide My Email to send an allegedly threatening email to the girlfriend of the FBI director Kash Patel.

The Trump administration has made efforts over the past year to unmask anonymous accounts, including those of Trump’s critics, by using subpoenas to demand that tech companies turn over information about their users.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It was a bit tricky today, I thought, especially 6-Across and 2-Down. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Witty one-liners
Answer: QUIPS

6A clue: Common poster in a geography class
Answer: USMAP

7A clue: Country that’s won the World Cup four times (but failed to qualify in 2018, 2022 and 2026)
Answer: ITALY

8A clue: The one for Starbucks has a wavy-haired mermaid
Answer: LOGO

9A clue: ___ socks (1970s fad)
Answer: TOE

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Patchwork blanket
Answer: QUILT

2D clue: “We feel the same!”
Answer: USTOO

3D clue: Word after spitting or mirror
Answer: IMAGE

4D clue: ___ Alto, Calif.
Answer: PALO

5D clue: Secret agent
Answer: SPY