A growing number of Nigerian companies are turning to kit-based assembly to bring electric vehicles to market in Africa. Lagos-based Saglev Micromobility Nigeria recently partnered with Dongfeng Motor Corporation, in Wuhan, China, to assemble 18-seat electric passenger vans from imported kits.

Kit-based assembly allows Nigerian firms to reduce costs, create jobs, and develop local technical expertise—key steps toward expanding EV access. Fully assembled and imported EVs face high tariffs that put them out of reach for many African consumers, whereas kit-based approaches make electric mobility more affordable today. Saglev’s initiative reflects a broader trend: CIG Motors, NEV Electric, and regional players in Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, and Kenya are also leveraging imported kits to build local EV ecosystems, signaling that parts of West Africa are intent on catching up with global electrification efforts.

Expanding the Local EV Ecosystem

CIG Motors operates a kit-assembly plant in Lagos producing vehicles from Chinese automakers GAC Motor and Wuling Motors. These vehicles include the Wuling Bingo, a compact five-door electric hatchback, and the Hongguang Mini EV Macaron, a microcar with roughly 200 kilometers of range aimed at ride-share operators looking for ultralow-cost urban transport. NEV Electric focuses on electric buses and three-wheelers for urban transit and last-mile delivery.

Saglev’s CEO, Olu Faleye, emphasizes that Nigeria’s EV transition addresses both practical economic needs in addition to environmental goals. Beyond passenger transport, electric vehicles could help reduce one of Nigeria’s persistent agricultural challenges: post-harvest spoilage. Nigeria loses an estimated 30–40 million tonnes of food annually because of weak logistics and limited refrigeration infrastructure, according to the Organization for Technology Advancement of Cold Chain in West Africa.

Electric vans, mini-trucks, and three-wheel cargo vehicles could help close this gap because their batteries can power refrigeration systems during transport without relying on costly diesel fuel. As EV adoption grows and charging infrastructure expands, temperature-controlled transport could become more affordable, reducing spoilage, improving farmer incomes, and helping stabilize food supplies, the organization says.

“I don’t believe that the promised land is making a fully built EV on the ground here.”
–Olu Faleye, Saglev CEO

Beyond Nigeria, Mombasa, Kenya–based Associated Vehicle Assemblers has begun assembling electric taxis and minibuses from imported kits, and Ghana’s government is spurring kit-car assembly there under its national Automotive Development Plan. In Ghana, assemblers benefit from import-duty exemptions on kits and equipment, corporate tax breaks, and access to industrial infrastructure. Saglev is already availing itself of those benefits, at its kit-assembly plant in Accra. The company says it also plans to expand its assembly operations to Cote D’Ivoire.

Infrastructure Challenges and Workarounds

Despite these signs that West Africa’s EV ecosystem is gaining traction, limited grid reliability and sparse public charging infrastructure remain major barriers to widespread EV adoption. Urban households in Nigeria experience roughly six or seven blackouts per week, each lasting about 12 hours, according to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics. That’s more downtime each day than the average U.S. household experiences in a year. More than 40 percent of households rely on generators, which supply about 44 percent of residential electricity, according to research by Stears and Sterling Bank.

Many early EV adopters therefore charge vehicles using gasoline or diesel generators. Faleye notes that Nigerians have long relied on such workarounds and expects fossil fuels to remain part of the EV charging equation for the foreseeable future—at least until falling costs for solar panels and battery storage make cleaner charging viable.

He acknowledges that charging EVs using hydrocarbons is fraught from an environmental perspective, but he points out that the practice at least brings other benefits of EVs, including lower maintenance costs and the EVs’ synergies with refrigeration and transportation logistics. And he points to a 2020 peer-reviewed study in the journal Environmental and Climate Technologies that compared the overall efficiency of internal combustion vehicles and electric vehicles across the full well-to-wheel energy chain. The study’s conclusion: Even after accounting for conversion losses, generating electricity with a diesel or gasoline generator to power an electric vehicle can remain just as efficient overall as burning the same fuel directly in a vehicle’s internal combustion engine.

Scalable EV Adoption in Nigeria

The approach taken by Saglev and other Nigerian kit-car builders shows how local assembly can advance EV adoption even where infrastructure remains unreliable. By starting with kits, companies can deploy practical electric mobility solutions now while building the supply chains and technical expertise needed for more resource-intensive localized production.

Still, when asked whether Saglev plans to eventually move beyond kit assembly to independent design and manufacturing of EVs, Faleye calls such a move impractical.

“I don’t believe that the promised land is making a fully built EV on the ground here,” he says. “For me to do efficient vehicle manufacturing, I’d need a lot of robotics and 3D printing. That expense is unnecessary—it would just increase costs and make EVs more expensive.”

In a country where electricity can disappear for days, Nigeria’s kit-based EV strategy highlights a practical truth: incremental progress and ingenuity may matter more than perfect infrastructure. For Saglev, every kit-based vehicle rolling off the line is not just a van or bus—it’s a step toward an EV ecosystem that works for Nigeria’s realities today.

inKONBINI: One store. Many Stories transports you to a small-town convenience store during a peaceful Japanese summer in the early 1990s. Makoto Hayakawa, a college student on a break from school, walks into her aunt’s shop and realizes that the routine of working there is far more intriguing than simply stacking shelves. Every time you set the shelves exactly right, the bell above the door rings, and a customer walks in, you get a little further into a world where regular hours reveal all sorts of surprising connections.

As the days pass, the pace slows, with you replenishing shelves with all of the traditional snacks and drinks of the time, tidying up the display so it catches the light just right, and taking orders for the regulars who keep coming in searching for the same thing. Nothing is hard or time-consuming, but there’s a calm satisfaction in getting it all done, and you find yourself falling into a routine that seems very fulfilling on its own.

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People begin to arrive throughout the day, including a regular who orders the same drink every afternoon, and you can always expect a brief conversation with them, although another customer may stay a little longer, and you must determine how to respond. Your choices are important; one polite word or question might reveal a completely other side of their tale, revealing how their life continues after they leave the business. As you see them over and over, you get a sense of how your own summer is intertwined with theirs.

Exploring the shop is also an important feature of the game; players can roam through every inch of the single-level shop, looking for all the nooks and crannies behind the counters and in the back of the shelves for all the little notes and lost goods that get left behind. Each of these minor findings reveals a bit more about the shop’s history. You have a landline phone on the wall that you can use to contact your aunt for advice, to solve an issue, or to simply speak with a customer you’ve become friendly with. Each call feels like you’re reaching out to an entire world beyond the shop that continues to exist, just out of sight.

The day is broken up by little surprises that keep things interesting, such as the old gachapon machine in the corner, which is simply waiting for coins. You flip the handle and get a capsule with a small toy inside; it’s a small item, but it’s enough to pique your interest and keep you going after a long morning at work. On April 30, 2026, inKONBINI will be available on the Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox consoles, and PC via Steam.

The soft ping or buzz on your phone that lets you know a new message has arrived is hard to ignore. But it can mean trouble when it’s time to concentrate on a task, according to a new study that will be published in the June issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior. 

The study found that whenever we receive a message notification, it interrupts our concentration for 7 seconds. It turns out that the type of information that we see in the notification also matters. The more personally relevant the notification, the larger the distraction.

“This interruption likely arises from several mechanisms, such as [a notification’s] perceptual prominence, the conditioning acquired through repeated exposure, and the possible social significance,” Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the study’s first author, told CNET.

While 7 seconds may not seem like much, we get a lot of notifications throughout the day, and those seconds can add up. 

“We observed that both the volume of notifications and how often individuals check their smartphones were linked to greater disruption,” Fournier said. “This pattern suggests that the fragmented nature of smartphone use, rather than simply total usage duration, may be a key factor in understanding how digital technologies influence attentional processes.”

Attention hijack

The study used a Stroop task, a test that measures how quickly you can process information and how well you can focus. Colored words flash across a screen for the test. The font of each word is one color, but the text of the word is a different color. So the word “blue” might be written in green font.

You have to identify the font color and ignore the color that the word spells out. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. You can take the test yourself using this YouTube video. 

The researchers recruited 180 university students for the study. The students were randomly split up into three groups. All students received a Stroop task, and notifications popped up on the screen as they completed the test. But the researchers slightly changed the experiment for each group.

The researchers told the first group that the screen was mirroring their personal phones, so the students thought they were seeing their real notifications.

The second group saw pop-ups on the screen that looked like real social media notifications, but the group knew they were false. This helped the researchers test how learned habits impact attention, without personal relevance. 

The third group saw only blurry notifications, with illegible text. The researchers used this test to determine how the visual distraction of an unexpected pop-up affected the group’s attention. 

The notifications slowed students’ ability to process information by about 7 seconds across all three groups. But for students who thought they were getting real notifications, the delay was more pronounced. 

“Although it is well documented that notifications can automatically attract attention, far less is understood about the cognitive processes that drive this attentional capture and the reasons why some people may be more susceptible than others,” Fournier said. “Our objective was to gain a better understanding of both the underlying mechanisms and the individual differences that could account for this variability in sensitivity.”

Brain delay

In the US, 90% of all people own a smartphone, according to Pew Research, and a Harmony Healthcare IT study found that we spend over 5 hours a day using them. But how long we spend on our phones may not matter as much as how often we check our notifications.

“In a lab study designed to mimic real-life notification exposure, we found that the frequency of notifications and checking habits mattered more than total screen time,” Fabian Ringeval, another of the paper’s authors, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “The more often we interact with our phones, the more vulnerable our attention becomes to interruption.” 

Anna Lembke, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, told CNET that the study mirrors what she sees clinically and in research literature, “namely that the level of engagement — for example how many notifications a person gets and how quickly they respond to notifications — is as big a predictor, or an even bigger predictor, of harmful, problematic use than time spent.”

Researchers found that study participants received about 100 notifications per day. So the notifications we get on our phones could be slowing down our cognitive abilities through near-constant distraction. 

“In everyday situations that require continuous attention — like driving or learning — even short slowdowns can add up,” Ringeval wrote. “Our findings suggest that improving digital well-being may be less about ‘using our phones less’ and more about reducing unnecessary interruptions.”

Lembke said it’s fair to worry about how smartphone notifications impact our attention, “which is why platforms for minors should silence notifications by default and make it difficult to re-activate notifications without parental consent, and why adults should electively turn off notifications to improve concentration and well-being, with rare exceptions for safety reasons.”

It’s been a long winter, but spring is close. On Friday, the vernal equinox arrives, signaling the astronomical start of spring (and the end of winter!) in the Northern Hemisphere. Though equinoxes might not get the same attention as solstices, they’re a lovely way to observe the shifting of the seasons. Let’s get to know the vernal equinox, what it is and why it happens.

When does the vernal equinox happen?

The spring equinox has a specific time, occurring at 10:46 a.m. ET/7:46 a.m. PT, on Friday, March 20.

What is the spring equinox?

You’ve no doubt noticed the lengthening of daylight as winter winds down, especially with the time change this past weekend. The vernal equinox marks the tipping point into longer days.

The word “equinox” comes from the Latin words for equal and night. Daylight and night are roughly equal during the equinox. We experience two each year — the vernal equinox in the spring and the autumnal equinox in the fall. The word “vernal” traces to Latin and references spring. 

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“The spring equinox is when the Northern Hemisphere transitions from being pointed away from the sun (during winter) to being pointed toward the sun (during summer),” says Emily Rice, associate professor of astrophysics at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. “The tilt is lined up with Earth’s orbit for just a moment.” That’s when we get nearly equal amounts of daylight and night.

How are equinoxes different from solstices?

Solstices are the extremes of days and nights. The summer solstice is the longest day, and the winter solstice is the shortest. In 2026, the summer solstice for the Northern Hemisphere occurs on June 21, and the winter solstice happens on Dec. 21.

Solstices get more love than equinoxes. 

“The extremes are easier to mark and to visualize than the inflection points, which are more subtle changes, so the solstices get all the attention,” says Rice. All of them are related to Earth’s tilt and the sun, so think of solstices and equinoxes as siblings that each have their own seasonal connection.

What the equinox looks like from space

It can be challenging to visualize the Earth’s tilt and what happens during an equinox from down on the ground, so NASA put together a video showing the Earth as seen by a satellite.

It tracks our planet through its seasons. Watch how night and daylight shift over time.

How to celebrate the spring equinox

Perhaps you’ve heard that the only day you can balance a raw egg on its end is on the equinox. This legend might be accompanied by some vague discussion points about Earth’s gravity and alignment and the sun. 

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Spigen has created the Classic LS, a protective cover for the AirPods Pro 3, as a throwback to the classic 1980s Macintosh mouse. This accessory clips onto the charging case in two separate pieces, one fitting over the base and the other over the hinged lid. It comes in a stone color that’s nearly identical to the old-school beige tone. It retains the same shape as the original but adds a new layer of protection without affecting how the case opens or shuts in the least.

Fitting the case takes just a few seconds, and the lid opens just as smoothly as the original with no resistance or awkwardness. The USB-C port and status light are cleanly cut out and fully accessible, and wireless charging works without any issues.

There’s a fairly large grey button in the center of the mouse-like surface; press it, and the lid snaps shut, preventing accidental openings when the case rattles around in a bag or pocket. Let release of the button, and it swings open again. It’s a minor detail, but it completely alters how you use your AirPods on a daily basis, especially when you’re simply tossing the case into a pocket or backpack on your way to work.

The shell is built from a combination of polycarbonate and TPU, with extra impact protection reinforcing the corners and cushioning worked into the rest of the surface to handle everyday bumps and minor drops. The material holds up well against scratches too, so pulling it in and out of a pocket or bag repeatedly won’t leave it looking worn. Despite the added protection it stays slim enough to fit anywhere the original case would.

A lanyard attaches directly to the shell for easy carrying. It may be clipped around your wrist, to a backpack strap, or simply tucked into a pocket; it’s ideal when you’re tired of losing your earbuds at the bottom of a bag. The strap feels robust, and it integrates nicely with the classic aesthetic rather than standing out.

There has been quite a bit of news recently about the  Battle Born LiFePO₄ (LFP) batteries and how they are dying in droves if not outright melting their plastic enclosures. Although the subsequent autopsies show molten plastic spacers on the bus bars and discolored metal in addition to very loose wiring, it can be educational to see exactly what is happening during repeated charge-discharge cycles at a fraction of the battery’s rated current. Thus [Will Prowse] recently sacrificed another Battle Born 75 Ah LFP battery to the Engineering QA Gods.

This time around the battery was hooked up to test equipment to fully graph out the charging and discharging voltage and current as it was put through its paces. To keep the battery as happy as possible it was charged and discharged at a mere 49A, well below its rated 100A.

Despite this, even after a mere 14 cycles the battery’s BMS would repeatedly disconnect the battery, as recorded by the instruments. Clearly something wasn’t happy inside the battery at this point, but the decision was made to push it a little bit harder while still staying well below the rated current.

This led to the observed failure mode where the BMS disconnects the battery so frequently that practically no current is flowing any more. Incidentally this is why you need to properly load test a battery to see whether it’s still good. In this failure mode there is still voltage on the terminals, but trying to pass any level of current leads to the rapid disconnecting by the BMS, even while as in this case the plastic spacer on the bus bar melts a little bit more.

Despite these very rapid disconnects and observed thermal issues, the BMS never puts the battery into any kind of safe mode as other LFP batteries do, leading to the melting plastic and other issues that have now been repeatedly observed. The discoloration of the battery terminals that originally started the investigation thus appears to be a result of higher charge currents and correspondingly higher temperatures.

Worryingly, Battle Born recently put out a statement – addressed in the video – in which they completely disavow these findings and insist that there is no issue at all with these LFP batteries. Naturally, if you still have any Battle Born LFP installed, you really want to test them properly, or ideally replace them with a less sketchy alternative until some kind of recall is issued.

The hit open source autonomous AI agent OpenClaw may have just gotten mogged by Anthropic.

Today, Anthropic announced Claude Code Channels, a way to hook up its own powerful Claude Code AI agentic harness to a human user’s Discord or Telegram messaging applications, letting them message Claude Code directly whenever they want while on the go and instruct it to write code for them. Official documentation is here.

This isn’t just a new UI; it is a fundamental shift in how developers interact with AI agents, moving from a synchronous “ask-and-wait” model to an asynchronous, autonomous partnership. Previously, Claude Code users were stuck interacting with the agentic harness on the Claude desktop application, terminal or supported developer environment, and Claude mobile app through a somewhat flaky (in my experience) interconnection setting called Remote Control.

Now, Anthropic is offering some of the same core functionality as OpenClaw that drove its rapid adoption among software developers and vibe coders following its release in November 2025 by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger (who, ironically, originally called his project “Clawd” in honor of Anthropic’s own AI model Claude which powered it initially, until Anthropic sent him a cease-and-desist for potential trademark violations. Steinberger was since hired by Anthropic’s rival OpenAI.)

Central to OpenClaw’s appeal was its capability of allowing users to have a persistent, personal AI worker that they can message 24/7, whenever they feel like, over common messaging apps such as iMessage, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp and Discord, and have their AI message them back — not just to chat with, but to perform real work for them on its own, from writing, sending and organizing email and files to creating whole applications, applying for jobs on the user’s behalf, to managing complete ongoing social marketing campaigns. When the AI finishes a task, it can immediately alert the human user over their preferred messaging platform.

But OpenClaw also came with a high degree of security risk (since it could be given access to a user’s hard drive and file system, or other personal information, and run amok) and difficulty for non-technical users, inspiring a wave of offshoots promising greater ease and security, including NanoClaw, KiloClaw and Nvidia’s recently announced NemoClaw.

By giving Claude Code this same basic functionality — the ability for users to message it from popular third-party apps Discord and Telegram, and have it message them back when it finishes a task — Anthropic has effectively countered OpenClaw’s appeal and offered something it does not: the Anthropic brand name with its commitment to AI security and safety, and ease of use right out of the box for less technically inclined users.

Technology: The Bridge of the Model Context Protocol

At the heart of this update is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) open source standard that Anthropic introduced back in 2024. Think of MCP as a universal USB-C port for AI: it provides a standardized way for an AI model to connect to external data and tools. In the new “Channels” architecture, an MCP server acts as a two-way bridge.

When a developer starts a Claude Code session with the --channels flag, they aren’t just opening a chat; they are spinning up a polling service.

Using the Bun runtime—known for its extreme speed in executing JavaScript—Claude Code monitors specific plugins (currently Telegram and Discord).

When a message arrives, it is injected directly into the active session as a event. Claude can then use its internal tools to execute code, run tests, or fix bugs, and reply back to the external platform using a specialized reply tool.

The technical achievement here is persistence. Unlike a standard web-chat that times out, a Claude Code session can now run in a background terminal or a persistent server (like a VPS), waiting for a “ping” to spring into action.

How to set up Claude Code Connectors on Telegram and Discord

Setting up these native connectors requires Claude Code v2.1.80 or later and the Bun runtime installed on your desktop PC or Mac. Follow the instructions here or below.

1. Setting up Telegram

1. Create your Bot: Open BotFather in Telegram and use the /newbot command to generate a unique bot and access token.

2. Install the Plugin: Inside your Claude Code terminal, run: /plugin install telegram@claude-plugins-official

3. Configure the Token: Run /telegram:configure to save your credentials.

4. Restart with Channels: Exit Claude and restart using the channel flag: claude --channels plugin:telegram@claude-plugins-official

5. Pair your Account: DM your new bot on Telegram to receive a pairing code, then enter it in your terminal: /telegram:access pair