New video and simulations of the sun’s surface can now bring you a closer look than we’ve ever had before.

The images were captured by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the largest of its kind in the world, located atop the volcano Haleakalā on Maui, which translates to “house of the sun” in English.

These new images of swirling plasma provide evidence that seems to confirm a long-predicted theory about what may be occurring on the sun’s surface.

As liquids of different densities flow past one another, they swirl together at the point where they meet, creating motion that resembles hurricanes or the mixing of ocean waves.

Understanding these complex interactions on the sun may help predict space weather, particularly severe disturbances called coronal mass ejections, which can overwhelm Earth’s protective magnetic field and damage Earth’s infrastructure, including power grids and communications networks.

To see the sun’s newest and most extreme close-up yet, check out the video embedded in this article.

Jesse Orrall

Senior Video Producer

Jesse Orrall (he/him/his) is a Senior Video Producer for CNET. He covers future tech, sustainability and the social impact of technology. He is co-host of CNET’s “What The Future” series and Executive Producer of “Experts React.” Aside from making videos, he’s a certified SCUBA diver with a passion for music, films, history and ecology.

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US AI leadership will be achieved through an open ecosystem of models, not frontier dominance, Jensen Huang said.

Nvidia is planning to use its $6bn deal with AI start-up Poolside to build open-weight AI models that can rival those made by China’s DeepSeek and Moonshot, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported over the weekend.

The reports come after the chipmaking giant promised a combined $7bn investment into the AI start-up, including $1bn in equity at a pre-money valuation of $12bn. This marks a fourfold jump from the company’s 2025 valuation of $3bn.

Founded in 2023, Poolside is behind the Laguna series of open-weight models, which are small enough to run on a single Nvidia DGX GPU.

Nvidia’s reported plans to make its own open-weight models would also put it in direct competition with other US AI companies it backs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, as global businesses compete for dominance in the space.

Open-weight models are generally far cheaper to run and allow developers to make customisations to suit their needs.

And China is by far the leader in this space, according to data collected by Hugging Face, which found that Alibaba’s Qwen and related models were downloaded more than 3bn times over the past six months, placing it ahead of models from Google, OpenAI, Meta and other rivals by a large margin.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, in a recently published letter, highlighted the importance of open weights for AI leadership. “Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector,” he wrote.

“Open weights expand access to the AI economy. Start-ups, established businesses, universities and public institutions can build on advanced models without training one from scratch or paying frontier model prices for every task.

“Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe; they can be breached, misused or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk.”

Alongside its multibillion-dollar commitment to Poolside, Nvidia is also nabbing the start-up’s 109 employees. The non-exclusive nature of the deal means leadership will not be joining Nvidia and will continue working on their own projects.

Deals like these give Nvidia access to a company’s technical prowess, including research and staff, while minimising impact on the chipmaker’s overall efforts to develop its own technology.

In 2025, the company signed US AI company Groq in a licensing deal that saw much of its talent hired away by the chipmaking giant. The same year, it spent more than $900m to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the AI start-up and license the company’s technology.

Nvidia is also reportedly in talks with South Korean chipmaker Rebellions for a similar partnership that could result in an investment or an acquisition.

Poolside employees joining Nvidia will reportedly work on the company’s Nemotron project – which aims to develop open-weight models – according to WSJ sources.

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Ray Hoe is betting on the small Japanese town of Toyama for his first hotel project

For some Singaporeans who make money in the stock market, a second property is the next move. Ray Hoe did too—just not one here.

The 41-year-old channelled his gains into a 77-year-old ryokan in Toyama, a small city on the Sea of Japan coast that most tourists pass through on the Shinkansen without stopping.

He had no hospitality experience, didn’t and still doesn’t speak Japanese, and had never visited Toyama before the property caught his eye. 

Four years and a seven-figure investment later, Hooray Toyama, a boutique modern ryokan (traditional Japanese inn featuring tatami-matted rooms), is preparing to open its doors in Sept 2026.

An early interest in hospitality

Ray has lived in Singapore all his life. He grew up watching his parents draw other people’s buildings—both were draftsmen, the people who translate an architect’s vision into technical drawings. 

His father later became a small property developer in Malaysia. At the same time, his mother worked in the drafting studio of an architect who later founded Banyan Tree Hotels.

His parents’ work gave Ray an early interest in hospitality and property. Ray went on to study at the University of British Columbia before returning to Singapore to start his career at commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, where he spent years selling international properties in London, Tokyo, and New York to Singaporean buyers. 

Along the way, he kept meeting a certain type of developer, the ones who were doing hospitality projects rather than residential ones.

“They were the coolest people. Most generous, most fun, most artsy,” he said. “I thought: one day I want to be a hotelier like them.”

That opportunity came 15 years later. Ray made money in the stock market when COVID-19 hit and had to decide what to do with the gains.

With time on his hands during the pandemic, he began researching hotels in Japan online, looking for a way to finally pursue his long-held ambition of becoming a hotel operator.

Why Toyama?

Ray knew from the start he didn’t want a hotel in Kyoto, Osaka or Tokyo. 

What he wanted was a Japan that most visitors don’t see—not metropolitanism, but nature and culture and food and the particular quietness of a place that hasn’t been overrun by tourism.

That led him to the Hokuriku region, which stretches along Japan’s northwestern coast and includes Toyama, Ishikawa, and Fukui.

Toyama, in particular, stood out for several reasons. One was the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, which Ray describes as the Japanese Alps in a compact, stunning setting and what he considers the best hiking experience in Japan.

The second appeal is the food. Having visited Japan many times—and even lived there for a year for a previous job—Ray had developed a particular appreciation for the seafood in the region.

“Every time I come back from Toyama, I find that the sushi in Osaka and Tokyo doesn’t match up to the freshness in the Hokuriku region,” he said. 

The cold, clean waters of the Sea of Japan feed some of the finest seafood in the country, a fact well known to Japanese food lovers and almost unknown to international tourists.

The third reason was a calculated bet, and Ray was ready to ride the wave.

In 2025, Japan’s government has set a target of 60 million inbound visitors by 2030 — roughly double the 36 million who came in 2024. 

A significant part of that plan depends on spreading visitors beyond the crowded major cities into regional destinations, and it can be said that Toyama is exactly the kind of place that policy is designed to promote.

“More people will be willing to go deeper into Japan rather than seeing the same things,” Ray said. “And I thought: why not? Let’s try Toyama.”

The ryokan has been around for 77 years

The property Ray acquired has a relatively long history of its own. 

Built 77 years ago, Hooray Toyama has passed through three generations of the same family. A grandmother founded it, and the third-generation owner invested millions in renovation before reopening in 2019, right before the pandemic closed the country.

Unable to survive two years of virtually zero tourism, the property went to auction in 2024.

Ray wasn’t the only one looking at it. He had actually spotted it earlier, but lost it to another bidder. 

Assuming the opportunity was gone, he turned his attention elsewhere. He bought a small piece of land along the Shimanami Kaidō cycling route in Hiroshima, overlooking the Seto Inland Sea.

A year later, the winning bidder decided to sell the Toyama property. Ray moved quickly, redirecting the funds he had set aside for the Hiroshima project towards the ryokan instead. The Hiroshima land remains undeveloped for now, although Ray has plans for it in the future.

“I preferred not to buy a property where I have to build everything from scratch,” he said. 

A seven figure investment

The ryokan in Toyoma fits Ray’s checklist of a modern boutique ryokan stay.

It features a 10,000 sqft space spread across four floors, a commercial kitchen, a roof garden open in summer as a beer garden, a cafe space that seats 40 to 50, a yoga hall, a library, two onsens, and 11 rooms already fitted out in traditional ryokan style. 

“I felt that by taking on Hooray Toyama, I was giving it a chance to succeed. And if it succeeds, it proves to the previous owner that spending so many millions to renovate it was the right decision.”

Ray shared that the purchase price of the Toyama ryokan was seven figures, which he financed with an equity loan against his Singapore property, together with some of his savings. 

Monthly operating costs average around S$30,000, though they have spiked as high as S$60,000 in months when the boiler and the elevator both needed some attention since the property sat unused for four years.

Ray has drawn no salary for close to a year and a half. His advice to anyone considering something similar is blunt: don’t sell your primary residence in Singapore.

“Maintaining it provides a necessary contingency plan should business ventures abroad fail. If you sell it and something goes bad, it’s very hard to climb back onto the property ladder,” Ray advised.

Making Toyama easier to discover

In a small town like Toyama, Ray found that there was no established international community or expat bubble to draw from.

But he did find people who spoke both English and Japanese fluently—including those with mixed parentage and people who had spent years living between countries.

His general manager, for instance, is half-Singaporean and half-Japanese. His front-desk staff is half-Brazilian and half-Japanese, while his chef is half-Filipino and half-Japanese. His barista is Thai, and two Taiwanese women on the team have lived in Toyama for more than 20 years. His Japanese business partner and co-CEO, meanwhile, grew up in California.

Together, they make up a team of three full-time and six part-time staff. Ray is the only one who still can’t speak Japanese.

He sees that as an advantage when it comes to serving foreign travellers.

“Because I can’t speak Japanese, I’m attracting local people who can speak English and Japanese to come work for me,” he said. “In a small town like Toyama, that immediately stands out.”

The team acts as a bridge for foreign travellers, helping them make restaurant reservations, recommending izakayas and advising on which attractions are worth the trip.

That can be particularly useful in Toyama, where restaurant reservations are often required, English menus are uncommon, and much of the information is only available in Japanese.

“The best thing about Toyama is to eat at the local restaurants,” he said. “The food is of high quality, it’s of value, [and] it’s not ridiculously expensive like Tokyo.”

More than just a place to stay

Ray also wants the hotel itself to give guests a taste of what he values about the region.

Breakfast is served in the café space, with house-made sourdough bread and coffee. When the baker he had originally lined up fell through, he called his mother, who came to Toyama for three months and trained the team using a starter she had brought from Singapore.

At night, the shared restaurant space is closed for regular service but open for private chef pop-ups, an initiative Ray is developing to bring the local Toyama community and hotel guests together. 

Rooms at Hooray Toyama start from around JPY¥14,400 per night (roughly S$120), with pricing varying by season and weekend demand, and bookings are open on Trip.com, with the ryokan set to open in Sept.

From the Shinkansen station, Ray encourages guests to walk the 15 minutes to the hotel not just for practicality, but because the route takes you past Toyama’s old trams, some 80 to 100 years old. 

“As you walk, you get transported back in time. It’s quiet. It’s like imagining what your parents would experience if they came to Japan during the Showa era,” he reminisced.

Unlike traditional ryokans, Hooray Toyama doesn’t include a kaiseki dinner, which keeps pricing more accessible while still offering the full ryokan experience. “It’s a mini resort in a small hotel in the city,” Ray said. “I wouldn’t expect you to stay in your room all the time.”

Getting the hotel going

Early signs have been encouraging. The hotel has been running a soft launch over the past two months, with friends and family of the team staying at discounted rates.

The response has been largely positive—one group of eight guests from Taiwan arrived for a two-night stay and eventually extended it to a full week.

Ray has been documenting his journey on TikTok, with one video even racking up close to 700,000 views.

Getting there wasn’t a smooth journey, though.

Ray only managed to secure his hotel license in Jun after four years—only for his visa renewal to be rejected shortly after under stricter immigration policies from Japan’s administration under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

He’s found a co-partner to run operations on the ground while he handles the backend from Singapore, and he’s not giving up: he intends to head back to Toyama soon.

Ray’s eventual goal isn’t just to stop at one hotel.

Currently, he is consulting with an architect on plans to build a three-storey hotel with sea views on his land in Hiroshima. It will be a different scale from Toyama but based on the same philosophy of being a boutique property in a place with something to offer that visitors haven’t yet fully discovered.

Ray projects a 10% return on investment over 10 years. But he isn’t in a rush to see returns, knowing that time plays a crucial part in this huge investment of his.

For now, the hotelier’s measure of success is humble: get the Sept opening right, accumulate the first real guest reviews, and prove that a Singaporean who doesn’t speak Japanese can run a ryokan in a small Japanese town that most people have never heard of.

• Find out more about Hooray Toyama here.
• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Hooray Toyama

More than half of Gen Z employees were found to be more open about pay transparency in the workplace.

Since coming into effect in early June, the EU Pay Transparency Directive dictates that employers have to acknowledge a new set of rules and guidelines governing how pay is discussed and related information is shared. 

Designed to reduce pay inequality in the workplace, the Directive means organisational leaders must provide job applicants with details on initial pay or pay ranges and ensure that job vacancy notices, titles and recruitment procedures are gender-neutral and non-discriminatory. 

Employers are also limited in their line of questioning, mainly, they are prohibited from asking candidates about previous salaries. Information regarding an employee’s pay level and how this is determined must also be made more accessible. 

Recruitment agency Robert Walters, in the months of June and July, conducted research to explore how modern Irish professionals regard the often taboo topic of pay transparency in the workplace. The company collected data from 1,000 Ireland-based employees aged 18 and older. 

What was discovered is that Gen Z aged professionals in particular are more likely to openly discuss their salary at work. 54pc of contributing Irish Gen Z employees were found by Robert Walters to be “disputing existing workplace taboos and discussing their salaries openly with colleagues”.

According to the report, this suggests that, in the wake of the EU Pay Transparency Directive, “the drive for salary transparency is not solely a top-down agenda,” particularly as younger generations of the workforce advocate for openness and transparency in pay discussions.

Commenting on the results of the report, Suzanne Feeney, the country manager for Ireland at Robert Walters, said, “While policy changes are mandating organisations to disclose salary and reward data publicly, we’re also seeing this practice at play at a grass-roots level. 

“In fact, it’s Gen Z who are increasingly challenging the traditional attitudes of discretion and confidentiality and opting to open up the conversation around salary with colleagues.”

 The age divide

This push for greater transparency is not a motivator amongst all age-based cohorts, found the research. Older employees who took part in the survey were found to be less concerned with discussing financials than their younger counterparts. 

Only 29pc of professionals aged 45 to more than 61 explored the topic openly, compared to 41pc who argued it is too personal a matter. From a Gen Z perspective, the report indicated that 38pc of participants in this group don’t perceive any barriers preventing them from openly discussing their salary. 

The scenarios in which they most often choose to discuss the issue tends to be if it is with a close colleague (32pc) or if there is a situation in which the sharing of such information is reciprocal (22pc).

Feeney said, “Leaders are now managing workplaces with up to five different generations, each with their own views on issues like salary transparency, workplace culture and employer expectations. For some, pay remains a private matter.”

She added, “As the EU Pay Transparency Directive comes into full force in Irish workplaces, professionals will gain more autonomy in requesting information around their own pay and average pay levels within their organisation. Management teams and leadership will still play a critical role in setting the tone for what is appropriate when salary is discussed in the workplace. 

“Professionals have different expectations of salary transparency, but fairness and inclusivity should always be prioritised. When conversations stay constructive, workers don’t risk sharing any information they don’t feel comfortable with, and any discrepancies or inequalities can be identified and quickly addressed.”

In early July, job search platform Mokaru analysed nearly 1.8m global job listings posted between the start of April and end of June on the career sites of 48,758 employers, across more than 46 applicant tracking systems. What was noted is that many organisations and countries have yet to fully adapt to the new rules. 

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The Sonos Roam 2 is an excellent portable speaker, and it can now be yours for less.

The Sonos Roam 2 is now available for £139 instead of its regular £179. This is the first drop we’ve seen on this speaker since Prime Day.