Boston Dynamics spent this morning showing Atlas a new pair of hands, and the first thing that stands out is a missing digit. There is no pinky. Four fingers sit on a palm a little larger than an average human hand, and the assembly is a little stronger than the gripper it replaces. Engineers reached that count with a blunt test: they taped a pinky to a ring finger and spent a day trying to work. The missing finger never blocked the jobs they cared about. Chief technology officer Zack Jackowski put the lesson in plain shop language. The best part is no part.

Older Atlas grippers, called GR2, had only seven degrees of freedom and were primarily meant to close around an object. The transition to newer models, such as the GR3, takes a significant leap to 13. Add in a thumb with four joints that can meet any other finger, as well as three joints on each of the other fingers that allow them to spread out and aim with precision. Every joint is powered by the same type of motor, which is snugly tucked inside the finger, eliminating the possibility of frayed external wires as the hand moved. This allows the hand to read the force of touch directly through the motors. The thick touch sensors on the fingertips and palm can detect even the smallest of touches that the motors may not be sensitive to.

Clips from the latest video demonstrate how beneficial all of those extra joints are. A thumb can slide along another finger’s length or width when gripping a small object. Gripping with the thumb and any of the digits is also an option, and a 3-point grasp can be used to hold a tool steady while yet allowing you to move it about. Atlas has already demonstrated excellent performance by pressing triggers on drills, torque drivers, grinders, nail guns, and welding torches. If a grasp begins to slip, the fingers can recover without dropping the object being held. Atlas has a payload rating of over 100 pounds, and we’ve seen Boston Dynamics use the robot to walk with a loaded small fridge on its back, so these hands better be up to the task.

Alberto Rodriguez, who leads Boston’s robot behavior team, insists that hand design is all about giving up one thing to acquire another. Of course, this implies that strength, durability, affordability, repairability, and sensing are all competing for the same limited amount of space. Many other businesses are attempting to produce something that closely resembles a human hand, including tendons flowing through soft fingers. Those hands can look quite convincing in a movie, but they’re also fragile, prone to straining or cracking, and expensive to construct in large quantities. Atlas is willing to give up the cosmetic appearance in order to achieve something that functions.

Rodriguez claims that the hand design is not horrible, but it does mean that the fingers can travel farther than a human hand would ever allow. Even so, he believes that by practicing in simulation, we can discover new ways to use those extra motions, and that because the hand is near enough in size to a human hand, we can still learn a lot from watching a human perform a task, even if it’s just the general outline of what has to happen.

The other part of the issue is getting the simulation correct. The motors are simple enough that we can replicate them fairly realistically, and training sessions can alter a variety of factors like as torque, friction, item form, and how something would drop on your palm. That way, when we come to the actual thing, we can be confident that the hand will continue to perform as planned. On the other hand, the motors’ quick readings provide the majority of the feedback we require, with the pads detecting even the tiniest touches. Swapping out a failing motor is as straightforward as swapping out an entire unit, so we can keep the hand going even if one of its components fails.

After adapting Stephen King stories like Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck, horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan has taken on the author’s breakout novel in Prime Video’s Carrie series. Many people are already familiar with the story: a shy teenager with telekinetic powers faces vicious bullying from her peers until she unleashes psychic vengeance on Prom Night.

While Carrie has been adapted into multiple feature films, most notably by Brian De Palma in the ’70s, Flanagan expands the original novel into an eight-episode Prime Video miniseries set in the present day. At this point, one may wonder why another Carrie adaptation is needed. But with its layered story, realistic characters, and timely depiction of school bullying, Flanagan’s Carrie delivers one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever.

Carrie expands King’s story and characters

Fans already know Carrie White as a girl brought up by her abusive, fanatical mother. However, Flanagan’s series builds upon that as we follow Carrie from childhood to adolescence with a new story. In the show, Carrie, played by Summer H. Howell, had never left her house and was homeschooled by her paranoid, conspiracy-based parents. On her first day of public school, she enters a whole new world, having never used a smartphone or even a computer. Because Carrie has grown up scared of the outside world, her journey to high school becomes even more terrifying for her and the audience.

The series doesn’t just change Carrie. This eight-episode story spends much of its time exploring the lives and struggles of Carrie’s mother, her classmates, and the adults who knew her in the town of Chamberlain. Even villains like Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan) and Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) evoke more sympathy because of their nuanced characters and troubled backgrounds. We then see how the two of them became abusive, mean-spirited people, showing how bullying can begin not at school, but at home.

Overall, the town of Chamberlain feels more like a character that changes throughout the series. The scope and depth of the story only heighten Chamberlain’s tragedy when Carrie destroys the town and kills many of its residents.

Flanagan delivers a fresh, faithful interpretation of Carrie

From Oculus to The Haunting of Hill House to The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan has often told his horror stories in a nonlinear perspective, playing with audiences’ perception of time and reality. While this makes for unconventional retellings of classic stories, it fits perfectly with Carrie. King’s novel actually presents its narrative through in-universe books, news stories, and investigative reports about Carrie and her rampage on Prom Night, featuring testimonies from students, teachers, and locals who knew her.

As a result, Flanagan’s series tells the story much like a true-crime docuseries, with Kate Siegel’s character interviewing Prom Night survivors and exploring psychic phenomena throughout human history. It actually feels like we’re learning things about the story that weren’t covered before in previous adaptations. Since general audiences have seen multiple Carrie films told the same way, Flanagan’s series stands out with a more distinctive approach.

The series explores adolescence, bullying, and violence in the digital age

By setting King’s narrative in the present day, Flanagan’s Carrie expands on the source material by tackling issues affecting modern American youth. The show addresses problems like cyberbullying on social media, with Carrie becoming the center of a vicious meme account attacking everyone at her school. Sparking debates about misinformation and freedom of speech, this new storyline unleashes a firestorm of controversy that nearly destroys Chamberlain even before Prom Night.

Carrie also acts as a parable for mass shootings in schools, which have become more common in the decades since King published his novel. This can make Carrie’s psychic rampage at her school hit much closer to home with audiences. However, that makes King’s story as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

Carrie ultimately shows how schools have become much more dangerous in modern America. At the same time, the show conveys how adults have failed the younger generation by mishandling parenting and education, making Chamberlain’s destruction seem even more inevitable.

Overall, Flanagan’s adaptation of Carrie makes some drastic changes to King’s original narrative. This can throw off fans of the latter, but the series justifies its existence by delivering a unique reimagining that tackles issues affecting modern schools. Though the story leaves the door open for another season, it preserves the horror and tragedy that made King’s story a groundbreaking classic.

Mike Flanagan’s Carrie premieres on Prime Video on October 7.

It’s disheartening how much power gets generated and then promptly lost as it travels through grid networks. This leaking of electricity happens when it vanishes as heat as well as when it is pilfered by thieves and nonpaying customers.

More than half of the countries that track these metrics lost at least 10 percent of their electricity in 2023, according to the World Bank. Losses topped 20 percent for 24 of those nations. Two countries lost more than half of what they generated.

With numbers this high, cutting down on losses makes sense. Electricity demand is rising beyond what many grid operators can supply; reducing waste would help meet some of that demand without having to build new power plants. Plus, when the power comes from fossil fuels, any loss means emitting even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And electric losses hit the bottom lines of power providers, which ultimately pass those costs on to everyone else.

The trouble is, reducing electricity losses is a hard and expensive process that takes a long time. Typically, the less maintained the grid infrastructure, the more electricity that’s lost. And the more fragile the region’s law enforcement and government, the more prevalent the power theft. Natural disasters and war make things worse.

Fixing a power grid requires a systemic approach across many sectors. There’s no one technology that will solve the problem. At the outset, the obstacles to success may feel insurmountable. Equipment across entire grid networks must be updated. Multiple arms of government must agree to reforms and coordinate to ensure power providers are set up to succeed. Regulations must be written or revised, investments made, cultures changed.

The city of Delhi did all those things. Over the past 25 years, it cut its electricity losses from about 50 to 5 percent. How the city pulled off that impressive feat is the focus of “The Epic Comeback of Delhi’s Power Grid” by Mini Shaji Thomas, an electrical engineer at the university Jamia Millia Islamia who has lived in Delhi since the 1990s. She gives us a view from the inside—as a resident and a power systems expert.

Delhi is a shining example, but some other regions have significantly lowered electricity losses over the last quarter century too. The country of Georgia went from losses of over 16 percent in 2002 to about 8 percent in 2023. In Singapore, losses dropped from 6.6 percent to a nearly nonexistent 0.2 percent over the same time period.

Global Electricity Theft Crisis

But there are many parts of the world where electricity losses remain a problem or have gotten worse. In Jamaica, where power theft is rampant, losses have hovered between 21 and 28 percent for years. Argentina’s losses nearly doubled between 2015 and 2023, going from an all-time low of about 12 percent to an all-time high of nearly 24 percent. The main problem: Transmission and distribution companies lacked the capital to maintain and upgrade their networks, which left equipment operating under stress. A delay in the installation of smart meters has allowed thieves to more easily siphon power and tamper with meters.

Thomas says she hopes her account of Delhi’s grid comeback will serve as a blueprint for others. It’s possible to replicate the sweeping changes Delhi made, she says. But it “requires a concerted effort from all stakeholders, customers, the utility, the government, and their employees.”

The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for the latter — yes, a real funeral in a church, with speeches and everything. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and WhatsApp, now has $4.5 million in seed funding to develop its products. The raise comes after the company signed up over 40,000 developers grew its revenue 10x in just four months, it says.

Photon co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian said the “app funeral,” held in San Francisco on September 17, was also a developer day for the startup, featuring panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. It also included an actual coffin for app icons.

The move to host an app funeral was obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but Tian believes the app era is coming to an end. “Honestly, it’s going to take a while, but I think, directionally, it’s inevitable,” he said of the shift from apps to agents.

The thesis behind the startup, as you may have guessed, is that users no longer want to install new apps. Instead, they want access to agents that work through the messaging apps they already use, like iMessage and WhatsApp.

Meta’s Muse, whose app has soared to No. 1 on the app stores, is putting that theory to the test. But even if Muse comes to dominate the consumer AI space, Tian sees a market for serving developers who want their applications to work over messaging services. That’s why Photon is offering a package of tools, including a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface (CLI), and an observability suite. Combined, they allow developers to build and operate an agent experience that works over iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, voice, and more.

The idea for Photon emerged from the time co-founders Tian and Ryan Zhu, the CTO, spent building consumer apps as students, often at hackathons. Every time they finished a new app, they hit the same bottleneck: getting people to discover it. By building an agent that worked within iMessage, they realized they could reach people through an app those people already use every day: Apple’s Messages.

Tian, for instance, had built a bot that would text his friends back as him over iMessage. When he and Zhu made the technology open source on GitHub, thousands of developers adopted it. So they went all in. Tian dropped out of UPenn’s M&T program, and Zhu left high school, later becoming a visiting student at MIT’s Media Lab.

Today, the open-source version of Photon still accounts for 98% of its use.

This April, the founders decided to create a managed platform and sell access to it via subscription tiers. This hosted version of the product offers 99.95% uptime, which is much higher than what you’d get if you were just running the open-source version on your local Mac for a hobby project. It’s also SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA-compliant, which opens the door to healthcare agent use cases.

To date, the startup’s platform has attracted over 40,000 developer sign-ups and now includes paying clients. (Any usage beyond 10 users requires moving out of the free tier to one of the three paid tiers, we’re told.) The company isn’t sharing revenue figures but said that, in addition to the 10x revenue growth, it’s seeing less than 3% churn, and its messaging volume has grown by 5x in the last month alone.

Customers using Photon include Corgi Insurance; social introductions app Boardy; Gen Z dating platform Ditto; business banking platform Rho; finance AI assistant Fliptexts; AI email client Slashy; and others building agents for fintech, consumer AI, and other vertical use cases.

Photon’s technology integration partners also include companies such as like Vercel (Eve and ChatSDK) and Nous Research, whose Hermes agent uses Photon as its default iMessage layer. Photon is also the layer under Tencent’s QClaw and NanoClaw. Plus, Photon has seen framework and infra integrations across LangChain, Mastra, Convex, Render, Railway, and Telnyx, among others.

Vercel is also one of Photon’s new backers. The startup’s seed round was co-led by Gradient and A* with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and other angel investors.

Across both the hosted and open-source versions, the technology reaches millions of end users, Tian estimated.

While today, Photon focuses on agents connecting with humans, Tian believes there’s potential to grow into an expanding market that involves connecting agents to other agents.

“I think, in the future, agents will be able to find you the agent that can do the right things — so it’s going to be the A-to-A communication layer,” Tian said. For instance, if a person was chatting with their AI assistant making travel plans, the agent could pull in other agents when needed, like a flight-booking agent or hotel-booking agent. “It’s been pretty powerful to observe the whole A-to-A-to-P [agent-to-agent-to-person] space,” he added.

Indeed’s report found that Ireland is emerging as Europe’s leading market for data centre related hiring.

A new report published by hiring platform Indeed has found that Ireland is among the countries in Europe with the most job postings referencing data centres. 

Almost 5pc of job postings in Ireland are related to data centres in some way, representing a figure that is roughly double the figures from 2019 to 2025 and is the highest among the 10 European countries analysed as part of the research. 

What the report shows is that job expectations and requirements are changing, as AI reshapes “ where and for whom tech-adjacent jobs are being created”. 

“Data centre hiring is one of the few areas where we are seeing growth in tech-adjacent hiring at a time when wider tech postings remain under pressure,” said  Pawel Adrjan, the senior director of economic research for EMEA and APAC at Indeed.

He added, “Ireland stands out particularly strongly, with nearly 5pc of job postings now mentioning a data centre, roughly twice the share we have seen in recent years. Ireland’s data centre labour market is already more developed than in most of the other European markets we analysed.” 

Data centre-related searches accounted for 0.05pc of all searches on Indeed in Ireland in August 2026, which is equivalent to one in every 2,000 searches and according to Indeed, the relatively modest recent growth in Irish searches compared with some other European markets is reflective of  Ireland’s already high level of interest 

“Jobseeker interest is particularly strong with data centre related searches accounting for a higher share of searches in Ireland than elsewhere in Europe, although it remains a specialist area with fewer searches than for other, larger occupations like retail or driving. The key question now is whether this momentum can be sustained as Europe’s data centre build-out gathers pace.”

Global research indicated that between 50pc and 60pc of data centre postings in each country analysed came from just five occupations, IT infrastructure, operations and support, software development, management, installation and maintenance and lastly, project management.

The AI race

According to Indeed, Europe is attempting to keep pace with international competition in the race to build the data centres needed to power generative AI and roughly €176bn is likely to be invested into related infrastructure. 

The report said, “The growth in Ireland follows the easing of constraints on new data centre grid connections around Dublin and the introduction of a new Government plan to direct new data centre development towards regions with spare renewable and grid capacity.”

While Indeed found that data centre hiring has ‘surged’, it also made the argument that wider hiring in the technology sector is stagnating. 

It said, “Data centre job postings are above their pre-pandemic level in all 10 European markets analysed while postings for other tech roles remain below their pre-pandemic levels. The recent increase has been most notable in Spain, Italy and Ireland.”

A valuable skill

Perhaps indicating the specialist nature of roles in this field, Indeed’s research indicated that data centre jobs often offer higher compensation, with the report noting that European employers advertise higher pay for data centre roles than for the same occupations elsewhere.

“Of the 29 country-occupation pairs analysed, 28 showed a pay premium for data centre work. The largest premiums are generally seen among workers directly tied to data centre sites, including installation and maintenance roles.”

Posted wages for data centre roles in management and project management fields were also found to be high, with the largest figures observed in Italy and the UK. Software development roles tied to data centres offered the smallest pay ranging from around 1pc more than non-data related roles in Germany to roughly 23pc in Italy.  

The report said, “Given that salary transparency in job ads remains low in many European countries and posted wage data are sparse in some places, these figures are best read for direction rather than magnitude. And the direction is clear, demand for data centre workers is driving up wages.”

Indeed found that Europe’s data centre endeavours, while smaller and at an earlier stage than US counterparts, is visible in the wider labour market, particularly in the metrics used to track it, such as job postings, pay and jobseeker engagement. 

Moreover, “It is also one of the very few sources of growing tech-adjacent hiring on a continent where tech postings remain deeply depressed and where the broader labour market continues to soften.”

Ultimately, Indeed’s research states that it remains to be seen whether strong investment over the course of the next few years can create a jobs boom that is both durable and can meaningfully lift the economy, rather than offering “a temporary and limited reprieve for a continent struggling to find new dynamism”. 

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