By OpenAI COO’s own admission last February, “we have not yet really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes.” But for enterprise software giant SAP, whose stock has dropped significantly in 2026 in part from the “SaaSpocalypse,” the issue is still front and center.
On Monday, the European heavyweight announced its intention to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs for an undisclosed amount. Pending regulatory approval, SAP plans to invest €1 billion (approximately $1.16 billion) into the business over the next four years to grow it into an AI lab focused on structured data — the tables and databases where enterprise information typically sits.
SAP declined to disclose how much it spent on the acquisition itself, but sources told Pathfounders that this was a healthy exit: an “almost all cash” deal, with well over half a billion dollars in cash up front for the startup’s founders — Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir.
The trio co-founded Prior Labs just 18 months ago with a focus on tabular foundation models (TFMs) — AI models that can make predictions from data that sits in tables and databases. This is potentially a better fit for enterprises than language models. It is certainly a better fit for SAP, whose widely used software products for accounting, HR, procurement and expense management rely on its database.
However, Germany’s most valuable company also seems be playing defense as the tech industry marches toward agentic AI. While it works to create its own AI lab, the company has blocked OpenClaw and any other agent tech that it has not explicitly authorized, The Information was first to spot.
In response to a request for comment, SAP’s press department referred TechCrunch to the company’s latest API policy, which does say that SAP “prohibits” AI agents from accessing its products through its API except for those that are “SAP-endorsed architectures.”
Authorized architectures of course include SAP’s own offering, Joule Agents, still in beta, which lets customers create their own agents. Nvidia also announced in March that SAP’s Joule supports Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, which is software for managing agents. This toolkit is the foundation for Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused OpenClaw competitor, NemoClaw. Hence SAP customers will be authorized to use NemoClaw agents.
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For a giant incumbent player like SAP, AI is both a threat and an opportunity. “It’s all about how quickly [we can] as SAP actually also embark [on] these technologies in our R&D portfolio to keep the relative economies of scale advantage,” CFO Dominik Asam told CNBC in January.
SAP hasn’t been sitting on its hands. The German company invested in generative AI companies that develop language models large and small: In 2023, it backed OpenAI rival Anthropic — as well as Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which now intend to merge to form “a global AI powerhouse.”
It had also developed SAP-RPT-1, a relational pretrained transformer model. “Early on, SAP recognized that the greatest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI wasn’t large language models; it was AI built for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” SAP CTO Philipp Herzig declared in a statement.
But Prior Labs’ acquisition is a significant shortcut in that direction. Its TabPFN model series has experienced a lot of traction among developers. In a blog post on the deal, the startup’s founders said that its open source models have been downloaded over three million times.
In a press release, SAP promised that Prior Labs will maintain the open source versions: “The lab will operate as an independent unit to ensure research velocity while SAP provides long-term investment and a direct path to productization across the SAP portfolio with SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud as well as the agentic layer with Joule.”
SAP and the startup headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, hope that this investment will lead to TFMs that can grab data in the tables where it lives, combine that with language, reasoning, and domain knowledge.
More than that, they hope that Prior Labs, with this “massive boost” from SAP, can become a new “globally-leading frontier AI lab for structured data — in Europe, in the open,” founder and CEO Frank Hutter celebrated in a post on X.
In February 2025, the startup had previously raised some $9.3 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Balderton Capital — more than competitor Neuralk-AI, but a lot less than Fundamental, which emerged out of stealth with a $255 million Series A in February.
In a post on X, Balderton partner James Wise called Prior Labs’ acquisition “one of Germany’s biggest ever venture outcomes.” As for SAP, its stock is currently trading slightly upwards.
Meanwhile, SAP is being very strict as to the agents it will allow into its ecosystem. This is a wildly different approach than Salesforce, another incumbent caught in the SaaSpocalypse. It is allowing enterprise to choose their own agents, including OpenClaw if they so wish, with its new Headless 360 architecture.
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Hackers trojanized installers for the DAEMON Tools software and since April 8, delivered a backdoor to thousands of systems that downloaded the product from the official website.
The supply-chain attack led to thousands of infections in more than 100 countries. However, second-stage payloads were deployed only to a dozen machines, indicating a targeted attack aimed at high-value targets.
Among the victims receiving next-stage payloads are retail, scientific, government, and manufacturing organizations in Russia, Belarus, and Thailand.
A report today from cybersecurity company Kaspersky notes that the attack is ongoing and that trojanized software includes DAEMON Tools versions from 12.5.0.2421 through 12.5.0.2434, specifically the DTHelper.exe, DiscSoftBusServiceLite.exe, and DTShellHlp.exe binaries.
DAEMON Tools is a Windows utility that allows mounting disk image files as virtual drives. The software was extremely popular in the 2000s, especially among gamers and power users, but today its deployment is limited to environments where virtual drive management is required.
As of today, Kaspersky says that the attack is ongoing.
Once unsuspecting users download and execute the digitally signed trojanized installers, they trigger the malicious code embedded in the compromised binaries. The payload establishes persistence and activates a backdoor on system startup.
The server can respond with commands that instruct the system to download and execute additional payloads.
The first-stage malware is a basic information stealer that collects system data, such as hostname, MAC address, running processes, installed software, and system locale, and sends them to the attackers for victim profiling.
Based on the results, some systems receive a second stage, which is a lightweight backdoor that can execute commands, download files, and run code directly in memory.
In at least one case targeting a Russian educational institute, Kaspersky observed the deployment of a more advanced malware strain dubbed QUIC RAT, which supports multiple communication protocols and can inject malicious code into legitimate processes.
BleepingComputer has contacted DAEMON Tools with a request for a comment on the supply chain attack, but we have not heard back by publication.
Kaspersky describes the DAEMON Tools supply-chain attack as a sufficiently sophisticated compromise that evaded detection for almost one month.
“Given the high complexity of the attack, it is paramount for organizations to carefully examine machines that had DAEMON Tools installed, for abnormal cybersecurity-related activities that occurred on or after April 8,” the researchers say.
Although Kaspersky does not attribute the attack to a particular threat actor, based on strings found in the first-stage payload, the researchers believe that the attacker is Chinese speaking.
Since the beginning of the year, software supply-chain attacks have been detected almost every month: eScan in January, Notepad++ in February, CPU-Z in April, and DAEMON Tools this month.
Similar attacks targeting code repositories, packages, and extensions have been even more prevalent this year, with Trivy, Checkmarx, and the Glassworm campaigns being among the most prominent.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
5G is deployed. Fiber is rolling out. AI tools are embedded in everyday professional life.
And yet millions of users still experience buffering, failed transactions, and AI assistants that stall before completing a simple query.
Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Mozark.
The infrastructure promise and the user reality remain stubbornly misaligned.
Article continues below
The reason is not bandwidth; it is measurement. We are still evaluating 21st-century networks with 20th-century monitoring logic.
Quality of Service (QoS) reflects what the network does: download speed, latency, and packet loss. Quality of Experience (QoE) reflects what the user actually feels: did the app load? Did the payment go through? Did the video stream uninterruptedly?
The Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) defines QoE as “the degree of delight or annoyance” experienced by the user, intentionally shifting measurement to the human perspective.
A network that meets every technical benchmark can still fail to deliver a usable experience if the application layer, the Content Delivery Networks (CDN) routing path, or the cloud infrastructure between operator and end user introduces degradation.
This gap between technical performance and user perception is where operators lose loyalty and where traditional monitoring provides limited visibility.
The mobile industry has committed to an extraordinary level of investment in the pursuit of better connectivity. GSMA Intelligence estimates that operators will invest $1.5 trillion in capital-expenditure between 2023 and 2030, of which more than 90% is directed toward 5G. As of early 2024, 261 operators had launched commercial 5G across 101 countries.
The industry is also increasingly aware that infrastructure alone does not guarantee a good customer experience. Operators are integrating AI tools into network management, deploying 5G Standalone architectures that enable network slicing and quality-on-demand, and building API frameworks.
The direction is clear: the industry is moving toward experience-aware network management. The challenge is that this movement requires measurement frameworks capable of capturing experience, not just infrastructure performance.
The mass adoption of AI assistants, copilots, and generative tools introduces new experience metrics. Time to First Token (TTFT), query completion rates, and response streaming consistency. These determine whether an AI assistant is genuinely useful in a professional context. They are currently invisible to a traditional Network Operations Center.
A connection that meets every conventional QoS threshold can still make a large language model practically unusable. As enterprises embed AI into core workflows and as operators position AI connectivity as a monetization opportunity, the inability to measure AI-level QoE becomes both a commercial and a technical blind spot.
One of the most underappreciated sources of experience degradation sits between the operator and the application. CDN and cloud computing infrastructure can cause buffering, slow loading, or stalled AI responses.
According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, video represents roughly 74% of global mobile network traffic as of 2024 and most of it is delivered through CDNs that no single operator controls end-to-end.
True QoE measurement must span the full stack, from the radio access network through CDN, cloud availability, and application responsiveness. Without this visibility, troubleshooting becomes guesswork.
Regulators worldwide are moving toward experience-based oversight.
In the US, the FCC’s Measuring Broadband America program uses crowdsourced measurements via the FCC Speed Test app to capture real-world performance across both rural and urban areas.
In India, TRAI’s MySpeed app performs a similar function, enabling citizens to submit real-device measurements that feed directly into regulatory analysis.
These initiatives share a common logic: the most credible measurement of network quality is what citizens actually experience, collected at scale, continuously, and independently.
The digital divide has always been a policy concern. Today, it is also a measurement challenge. According to the ITU, globally, 83% of urban residents use the internet compared to 48% of rural populations.
Critically, the urban-rural ratio has remained at 1.7 for four consecutive years, unchanged despite years of infrastructure investment.
Two users on the same operator, in the same city, can have radically different experiences depending on device, building, or time of connection. Without continuous and granular QoE monitoring, inclusion programs risk targeting the wrong areas.
None of this is achievable with synthetic lab-based testing. Emulators do not replicate device behavior under load, and controlled tests do not capture peak-hour congestion, CDN routing decisions made in production, or the compounding effect of multiple degradation factors across the delivery chain.
Measuring QoE credibly requires testing on real devices, live operator networks, and running actual applications continuously.
This methodological shift, from a “full-stack, always-on” approach, creates actionable intelligence for operators, regulators, and policymakers. It ties investment to measurable improvements in real user experience rather than theoretical performance metrics.
We list the best network monitoring tools.
This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.
The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit
Sometimes, eating makes me feel like Sisyphus. Every day, I must toil up the mountain and the rock to figure out what the heck I want to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I tested Factor meals earlier this year, and they’re a solid option if you’re the type of person that doesn’t want to fuss over your food. With expansive menus and an emphasis on tracking macros and nutrition, you can simply pick out your meals, get them delivered, and then reheat them in the microwave or oven when it’s time to eat.
Texture eaters might not love Factor’s meals, which tend to be a little mushy. They’re still tasty and very filling. I suggest accompanying them with some crisp veggies, parmesan snaps, or fresh fruit to jazz up the texture a bit. If you’re the kind of person that can meal prep a week’s worth of chicken and rice and happily eat it every day, Factor is going to be right up your alley. Right now, you can save with this Factor coupon and get up to $130 off 6 boxes. Just follow one of our links above, and enjoy your discounted meal kits.
Not only is Factor a convenient way to make protein-packed meals in minutes, they also have tons of choices tailored to your dietary needs and preferences. Different Factor meal categories you can choose from include GLP-1 Support, Low Carb, Fiber Filled, and Calorie Smart, ensuring that whatever health goal you may have, Factor has the meals to get you to reach that goal through convenient, pre-prepared meals.
If you want to get serious about your health goals, Factor makes it easy, with prepared keto meal delivery from Factor. Whatever your health goal may be, Factor’s prepared meal delivery makes it easy to stick to a keto diet plan and lose weight, using chef-prepared keto meals that are ready to eat in just a few minutes. Whether you want to use Factor for a keto diet food delivery service, or just want a healthy meal delivery plan, Factor makes it easy (and our promo codes make it cheaper).
Factor is one of the easiest ways to conveniently get high-protein, chef prepared meals that are reheatable and ready in two minutes. These meals are not only packed with protein, but are also dietitian-approved and prepared by chefs. Each has 30 to 50 grams of protein per serving, making it super easy to hit those nutrition goals without any extra work in the kitchen from you. Once you decide, you’ll pick from a new rotating menu of over 100 dietitian- and chef-designed meals, including add-on options each week that are especially tailored to a high-protein diet.
Factor wants to reward adventurous (and healthy) eaters, by offering 50% off your first subscription box, plus free shipping. The offer is only valid for new Factor customers with a qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase (and you’ll still get an $11 shipping fee on subsequent boxes).
Factor offers year-round promotions and savings, so you should always keep an eye out for an opportunity to save some cash. First responders, teachers, medical providers, nurses, doctors, military members, and veterans can take advantage of the Factor Hero Discount to save 55% on their first order and up to 15% on every box for the first year. Save the most with Factor first-order discounts, and what all the fuss is about.
I first met Robert Woo in 2011, during his third time walking in a powered exoskeleton. The architect had been paralyzed in a construction accident four years earlier, but he was determined to get back on his feet. Watching him clunk across a rehab room in an exoskeleton prototype, the technology felt astonishing. I had the same reaction when reporting on early brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which enabled paralyzed people to move robotic arms or communicate by thought alone. Both types of bionic technology seemed to verge on magic.
But that initial sense of awe, I’ve learned over many years of reporting on these technologies, is only a starting point. What matters is not what these systems can do in a carefully staged demo but how they perform in the real world. Do they work reliably? Can people with disabilities use them for their intended purposes? And what does it actually cost—in time, effort, and trade-offs—to do so? The question isn’t whether the technology looks impressive the first time but whether it holds up on the hundredth.
The special report in this issue, “Cyborg Tech From the Inside” takes that perspective seriously. In my feature article on Woo, an exoskeleton super-user who has spent 15 years testing these systems, the story of the technology is inseparable from the story of its use. Woo’s relentless feedback has driven steady, incremental improvements. In Edd Gent’s reporting on the pioneers testing the earliest BCIs, the experience of these extraordinary technologies likewise resolves into something more complex. As one trial participant notes, these early adopters are like the first astronauts, who barely reached space before coming back down to Earth. Together, these stories reframe these individuals not as passive medical patients but as the ultimate beta testers and co-engineers of the bionic age.
I saw the gap between demonstration and daily use firsthand when I interviewed Woo in a Manhattan showroom recently, where he was testing a new self-balancing exoskeleton from Wandercraft. The device is a striking advance that kept him upright without crutches, but it also revealed the friction of the real world. As Woo tried to walk out the door, barely an inch of slope on the Park Avenue sidewalk was enough to trigger the machine’s safety sensors and halt his progress. It was a stark reminder of how far these systems must evolve before they fit seamlessly into everyday life.
For the people who use them, that seamless integration is the ultimate goal. Getting there will depend not just on technical breakthroughs but on how well these systems hold up outside controlled environments, over time, and under real conditions. Looking from the inside doesn’t make these technologies any less remarkable, but it does change how we judge them—not by what they can do once for a photo but by what they can sustain over a lifetime. That’s the standard their users have been applying all along.
Our commitment to evaluating technology from the user’s perspective extends beyond this special report. To provide a necessary corrective to the “techno-solutionism” that often dominates coverage of assistive devices, IEEE Spectrum created the Taenzer Fellowship for Disability-Engaged Journalism, under which six writers with disabilities are contributing articles about the devices they rely on daily. As Special Projects Director Stephen Cass notes, these journalists “aren’t afraid to ask clear-eyed questions about the tech and are deeply aware of how it impacts humans.” You can read the fellows’ work at spectrum.ieee.org/tag/taenzer-fellowship.
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One of the follow-on payloads pushed to about a dozen organizations was what Kaspersky described as a “minimalistic backdoor.” It has the ability to execute commands, download files, and run shellcode payloads in memory—making the infection harder to detect.
Kaspersky said that it observed a more complex backdoor dubbed QUIC RAT, installed on a single machine belonging to an educational institution located in Russia. Initial analysis found that it can inject payloads into the notepad.exe and conhost.exe processes and supports a variety of C2 communication protocols, including HTTP, UDP, TCP, WSS, QUIC, DNS, and HTTP/3.
The 100 infected organizations were primarily located in Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and China. Kaspersky’s visibility into the attack is limited because it’s based solely on telemetry provided by its own products.
Kaspersky researchers wrote:
The analysis shows that 10% of the affected systems belong to businesses and organizations. Attackers attempted to infect most of the affected machines only with the information collector payload. However, the other backdoor payload, which is more complex, has been observed only on a dozen machines of government, scientific, manufacturing and retail organizations located in Russia, Belarus and Thailand. This manner of deploying the backdoor to a small subset of infected machines clearly indicates that the attacker had intentions to conduct the infection in a targeted manner. However, their intent – whether it is cyberespionage or ‘big game hunting’ – is currently unclear.
More recent supply-chain attacks have hit Trivy, Checkmarx, and Bitwarden and more than 150 packages available through open source repositories. Last year, there were at least six notable such attacks.
Anyone who uses Daemon Tools should take time to scan the entirety of their machines using reputable antivirus software. Windows users should additionally check for indicators of compromise listed in the Kaspersky post. For more technically advanced users, Kaspersky recommends monitoring “suspicious code injections into legitimate system processes, especially when the source is executables launched from publicly accessible directories such as Temp, AppData, or Public.”
LegalZoom is one of those online legal services that in most cases can handle basic legal tasks for you. I recently tried it out to make an LLC for my cosmic country band, Steel Fringe (shameless plug), and it appears to have worked just fine (we’re still waiting on a full evaluation from legal experts for a future guide to these services). If you use a LegalZoom promo code right now, you will get a discount on the service.
I found it super easy to set up my LLC, and after about $500 and 30 minutes of my time, I was off to the races with an LLC for my band. I did make the mistake of spelling my co-bandleader’s middle name as his last name (I blame his wrongly named Instagram handle for this), so I had to toss them another $129 to fix that. My bad.
Save on top services at LegalZoom, like LLC registration, incorporation, estate plans, and more with coupons and deals from WIRED below.
If you’re in need of basic legal services like establishing an LLC, estate planning, or other contract-based services, LegalZoom offers a very simple interface that is shockingly easy to use. I am a luddite when it comes to understanding legal jargon and steps in a process like establishing my band’s LLC, but LegalZoom’s simple interface made it shockingly easy to make sure everything was in order.
If you use our exclusive code for 10% off LLC Formations (found in the table above), you’ll get a nice chunk of change off the cost of setting up your small business. As you’ll read below, it’s not especially cheap to do this, even digitally, in many states. There are mandatory filing fees and other fees that can range from a few hundred to many hundreds of dollars. Take the discount!
LegalZoom services expand well beyond just helping establish personal LLCs, there are also other business formations that LegalZoom can help with. Some of these include Limited Liability Company LLCs, which start at free, plus state filing fees. This is the simplest, flexible way to ensure your business protects any personal assets. There’s also Corporation (S corp or C corp), which starts at $149 plus state filing fees. This is a more complex structured formation, with the ability to issue shares, go public, or go global. There’s also help for Nonprofit (501c3) LLCs, which starts at $99 plus state filing fees. This one is designed to support a public or social benefit that’s eligible for tax breaks. And finally, Doing Business As (DBA) starts at $99 plus state filing fees. This is an efficient way to use a business name that removes the sometimes annoying upkeep of LLCs or corporations.
The cost to properly set up an LLC in your state can range from $35 to $500, depending on various factors like local legislation and business registration laws. Most states charge between $50 and $200 for filing fees, so you can expect to pay somewhere in that range unless you’re from Montana ($35) or Massachusetts ($500). LegalZoom also shoves a bunch of options you probably don’t need in your face, so be sure to Google what you actually need in your state before paying extra money to … print all your documents and put them in a folder for you, or other such nonsense.
Although it’s a little morbid, folks need to think about what will happen to their assets after they pass, and get a plan in place to protect their loved ones. LegalZoom offers estate plan services to create your will or trust easily online. There are several options available, so make sure you choose the right plan for you. Right now, if you choose the Premium Trust, you’ll get 10% off LegalZoom products, plus 25% off important attorney services. There are two will options and two trust options: the last will outlines how your assets should be distributed after death, and a living trust, a legal arrangement where a trustee manages assets. Make sure to read through the link above to know which plan is right for your needs.
Registering a trademark is an important step in many business ventures, a necessary step that can be very confusing. Legalzoom wants to make it easier for you, by using one of their experienced trademark attorneys who can handle the oftentimes complicated process. They can perform a trademark search, provide legal advice, and prepare and file your application, so you can relax knowing you’re protected. Prices start at $899 plus federal fees for registering a trademark.
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No one wants to imagine it, but it’s important and necessary to take steps to ensure you are protected and have a plan in place if and when a medical emergency happens. LegalZoom has options for affordable advance healthcare directives, starting at $39. With LegalZoom, you can complete an advanced healthcare directive easily and in advance, so that you can take control of your care when you can’t speak for yourself. LegalZoom’s healthcare directives include medical power of attorney and a living will, making it easy to ensure you’re protected in the future. Plus, you’ll be able to get guidance from experienced attorneys to ensure everything needed is in place.
NASA has awarded a $6.9 million contract to Seattle-based Interlune for the development of a system that can extract gases such as helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar soil and rocks.
The system will be developed and tested on Earth under the terms of an 18-month Small Business Innovation Research Phase III grant, and then launched to the moon on a commercial robotic lander in 2028. Interlune says the project meshes with its plan to extract and market lunar helium-3 for applications on Earth ranging from quantum computing and medical imaging to neutron detection and commercial nuclear fusion.
“We’re gathering data and advancing technologies that serve multiple purposes across industry and government,” Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of Interlune, said today in a news release. “NASA’s continued investment in space technology enables technology development projects like this one to ensure America’s leadership in building the lunar economy.”
Interlune’s payload will include a robotic arm and scoop to gather up moon dirt (technically known as regolith), a particle-sorting device, hardware for heating up lunar material and harvesting the gases that are given off, a multispectral camera capable of determining helium-3 concentrations, and a mass spectrometer that can analyze the gases.
“For the first time ever, we will measure volatile gases by heating lunar regolith while on the moon, dramatically advancing the scientific community’s understanding of its properties,” Interlune chief scientist Elizabeth Frank said. “The data we collect will also tell us how much power is needed to extract resources like helium-3.”
The project builds on Interlune’s previous efforts to build payload prototypes and test them on parabolic airplane flights that simulate lunar gravity. The company plans to send a camera to the moon on California-based Astrolab’s FLIP rover as soon as this summer for a demonstration mission known as Crescent Moon. In March, Astrolab announced that it would work with Interlune to integrate resource extraction hardware onto future lunar rovers.
The NASA-supported mission, called Prospect Moon, would generate data detailing the concentrations of volatile materials that have been deposited on the moon’s surface by the solar wind. Follow-up missions could focus on extracting hydrogen for rocket fuel and other lunar power applications, alongside helium-3 that could be sent back to Earth.
Interlune says it already has nearly $500 million in binding purchase orders for helium-3, from quantum computing companies and from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of the Air Force. For initial deliveries, Interlune plans to harvest helium-3 from natural gas supplies on Earth while full-scale lunar infrastructure is developed.
Helium-3 is the first resource targeted by Interlune, but the company plans to widen its focus over time to extract other potentially valuable materials from lunar regolith, including industrial metals, rare earth materials and water.
Interlune was founded in 2020 and reported raising $18 million in seed capital in 2024. This January, Interlune announced an additional $5 million investment offering aimed at advancing key technical milestones.
As fuel prices surge in 2026, electric vehicle owners may be feeling a bit smug. The remainder of us are currently paying an average of $4.30 per gallon for gas, or $5.49 for diesel. Some lucky states are paying a bit less, while Californians are paying more than $6 per gallon. It’s a hit on our budgets and wallets, and there’s no relief in sight.
Making the switch to an electric vehicle is a substantial adjustment, and many drivers may not feel ready. They may be concerned that the infrastructure doesn’t fully support the technology and worry about the availability of chargers. While there are few alternatives, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are at work on a novel concept: an engine that uses both gasoline and diesel.
Called the Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition (RCCI) engine, this concept is just that — a theory that exists only in the lab, at least for now. Combining the fuels means this engine achieves a fuel-to-power conversion rate of up to 60%. Typical gasoline engines convert 30-40% of their fuel into power, while the average diesel engine converts about 45-50%, meaning the RCCI engine is a much more fuel-efficient idea. Here’s how it works.
We all know not to put diesel into a gasoline car, but you may not understand why. While they are both refined from crude oil, gasoline is more refined and thinner, so it burns faster and is a good choice for higher horsepower engines. Diesel is thicker and burns more slowly; it’s used for larger machines that need more torque.
The conceptual RCCI engine works like a standard gasoline engine at first, mixing air and fuel in the combustion chamber. Then, at a particular point in the process, diesel fuel is added to the chamber for a mix of gas, diesel, and air. As the piston moves, a bit more diesel is injected just before ignition, and the mixture of gas and diesel then ignites and causes the remaining gas to ignite. The result is not only more efficient fuel, but it’s also cleaner, putting out lower emissions. It’s an interesting concept but of course it would mean you’d have to visit two different fuel pumps to fill up!
Continuing to burn fossil fuels at the current rate is widely considered unsustainable, and scientists, engineers and more continue to attack the problem from all angles. Potential alternatives to electricity and fossil fuels include hydrogen fuel cell technology; biodiesels, or renewable fuels manufactured from alternatives such as vegetable oils; synthetic fuels; natural gas; and renewable diesel.
Microplastics absolutely saturate the Earth’s environment, and that’s probably not a good thing unless you’re looking for a sediment marker for the Anthropocene period. On the other hand, environmental contamination only becomes a really big problem if it bioaccumulates– that is, builds up in the tissues of plants and animals. At least when it comes to worms, that’s not the case with microplastics, according to new research from the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan.
Credit: David Stobbe / Stobbe Photography, via University of Saskatchewan
The Canadian Light Source isn’t just some hoseheads in an igloo with a flashlight– it’s a 2.9 GeV Synchrotron tuned to produce high-energy photons. Back when Synchrotrons were used for particle physics, Synchrotron radiation was a very annoying energy sink, but nobody cares about 2.9 GeV electrons anymore. So rather than slam them into each other or a static target, the electrons just whip about endlessly, giving off both soft- and hard X-rays for material science studies– or, in this case, to observe the passage of polyethelyne microplastic particles through the guts of some very confused earth worms. To make them detectable by x-ray, the polyethylene was bonded to barium sulfate, an x-ray absorber. Equally opaque barium titanite glass microspheres were used with different worms, as a control.
Despite being fed plastic enriched with far more plastic than you’ll find outside of a 3D print farm, it seems the worm’s digestive system was able to reject the particles, even those as fine as 5 microns. That’s a good thing, because if the worms were absorbing plastic from the soil, it’s likely their predators would absorb it from the flesh of the worms, so and so forth up the food chain in the sort of cascade that made DDT a problem and makes mercury compounds so serious. If the worms are rejecting these compounds, there’s a chance other creatures can too– and at the very least, it means they aren’t building up on this bottom rung of the foot chain. If you’re looking for a more technical read, the full paper is available here.
It’s too early to say what this means for how microplastics get into humans and other animals, but it’s hopeful. Equally hopeful was the recent finding that studies that don’t rely on football-field sized X-ray machines might be picking up on microplastics from lab gloves, skewing results.
Header image: the digestive systems of earth worms as imaged by the Canadian Light Source. Credit Letwin, et al,
Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, vgag072, https://doi.org/10.1093/etojnl/vgag072
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Trump’s 25% EU auto tariff breaches Turnberry Agreement that also covers semiconductors and digital trade
Insider Claims Reason Behind Key & Peele Split
Paul Scholes issues Marcus Rashford reality check as agreement emerges over Man United star
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Texas Instruments made a new flagship graphing calculator: the TI-84 Evo
Meta (META) starts stablecoin payout to creators in Circle’s USDC on Polygon, Solana via Stripe
Strait of Hormuz Remains Heavily Restricted on April 29 Amid Iran Conflict
Strait of Hormuz Blockade Persists Amid US-Iran Standoff, Sending Oil Prices Soaring
David Benavidez responds to team Canelo saying the fight will never happen
New on Prime Video in May 2026 — Full List of Movies and Shows
Cavaliers vs. Raptors Game 6 live score, updates, highlights from 2026 NBA playoffs first-round series
Saudi Arabia set to withdraw LIV Golf funding after 2026 season, per reports
Kylie Jenner Hit With Second Lawsuit From Ex-Housekeeper
Plane crash in Wimberley, Texas kills 5 pickleball players at tournament
Arsenal, Atletico Madrid share draw after penalty drama in Champions League semi-final
Mark Zuckerberg Says Meta Is Working On AI Agents For Personal And Business Use
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