Disappointingly, Brompton hasn’t given the T Line Electric any more speed for US-based riders, so I’m afraid you’re limited to the UK speed limit of 15.5 mph instead of the Class 1 pedal assist maximum of 20 mph.

I first came across the e-Motiq system in 2024, when I tested the larger 20-inch Brompton G Line. This powerful rear-mounted motor, which can hit 20 mph, offered a more stable ride compared to the front-mounted design, and being pushed definitely feels more natural than being pulled along. The redesign also keeps the weight at the rear, so the folding mechanism remains balanced.

There are three power-assist levels available here, plus Push Assist (more on that below), and the e-Motiq system also adjusts based on your own riding style. It monitors pedal force and cadence. How often you stop and start and over your first 62 miles on the bike tweaks how the power is used. This isn’t to eke out out extra mileage, but to make your ride smoother and more natural.

During testing, I barely noticed any changes as I racked up the miles, but I was seriously impressed by how normal the bike felt. Well, normal for a marginally wobbly upright design with tiny 16-inch wheels. Yes, there was a surge of power as I started to pedal, but the initial acceleration was controlled. It felt more like I’d supercharged my legs, rather than strapped a motor to my bike.

My test bike was single-speed, but there is also a four-speed option available. Riding around London, I did not need more than one gear as the motor just takes the effort out of any hills. Endless traffic also means it’s harder to exceed top speed for long, but when the road did open, I was impressed by how easily it was able to transition between assisting and backing off the power to stick to 15.5 mph. I can only speculate, but on America’s bigger roads, I think I’d want four gears. I’d also want a boost in the speed assist limit. It’s a shame Brompton only thought to include one of those things.

I also rode a few miles without the battery pack, and was pleasantly surprised. It weighs less than my old steel Brompton, and feels much nicer to carry, too. I hauled the Electric T Line e-Motiq up countless stairs, onto the London Underground, slung it in the trunk of a taxi at 2 AM, and only left it in a restaurant cloakroom once. It is light and small enough to just carry with you, and it’s also expensive enough that you’ll never lock it up and leave it on the street.

I’ve also been able to ride the nonelectric titanium Brompton T-Line, which at 17.64 pounds, was almost laughably light. If you don’t need electric power, it is the perfect commuter bike.

Control, Extras, and Competition

Photograph: Chris Haslam

It’s tiny, but the handlebar-mounted controller does some cool things. There’s a start-assist button, that if you press just before you set off at traffic lights, or hit a hill for instance, will give you a powerful push to get you started. It’s not a throttle—you need to be stationary though for it to kick in.

Many artificial intelligence startup ideas are still little more than superficial “wrappers” built on top of existing models. But as the AI model makers add more features, investors are wary of startups that could become so easily unnecessary.

Case in point: when reviewing more 4,000 applications for the joint AI accelerator for India startups run by Google and venture firm Accel, “wrapper” ideas dominated. But none of them were among the five startups for the latest cohort, Accel partner Prayank Swaroop told TechCrunch (pictured above).

Announced in November, the AI-focused Atoms program by Google and Accel aims to back early-stage startups building AI products linked to India. Startups selected for the latest cohort will receive up to $2 million in funding from Accel and Google’s AI Futures Fund, along with up to $350,000 in cloud and AI compute credits from Google, the firms said.

Roughly 70% of the rejected applications were “wrappers” — startups that layered AI features such as chatbots on top of existing software but “were not reimagining new workflows using AI,” Swaroop said.

Many of the remaining applications that were denied, Swaroop said, fell into crowded categories such as marketing automation and AI recruitment tools, areas where investors saw little novelty. Startups in those sectors often struggle to differentiate themselves, he said.

This isn’t, perhaps, surprising. This year’s program received nearly four times the applications than previous Accel’s Atoms cohorts — with many first-time founders.

India’s growing AI ecosystem remains largely focused on enterprise applications and Swaroop said the applications reflected that. About 62% of the submissions focused on productivity tools and another 13% on software development and coding, meaning around three-quarters of the applications were enterprise software ideas rather than consumer products. (Swaroop had hoped to see more ideas for healthcare and education.)

Jonathan Silber, co-founder and director of Google’s AI Futures Fund, said the five startups selected aligned closely with areas where Google expects AI to see deeper real-world adoption.

The program does not require startups to use Google’s models exclusively, Silber said, noting that many companies combine multiple models depending on the workflow. The goal, he said, is to gather feedback from startups on how Google’s models perform in real-world applications.

Insights from those startups can then be fed back to Google DeepMind teams to help improve future models, creating what Silber described as a “flywheel” between startup experimentation and AI development. “If a company is using an alternative model, that means Google has work to do to build the best model in the market,” he told TechCrunch.

This year’s startups selected are:

• K-Dense, which is building an AI “co-scientist” to accelerate research in fields such as life sciences and chemistry;
• Dodge.ai, which develops autonomous agents for enterprise ERP systems;
• Persistence Labs, which focuses on voice AI for call centre operations;
• Zingroll, which is building a platform for AI-generated films and shows;
• Level Plane, which applies AI to industrial automation in automotive and aerospace manufacturing.

OpenAI told BleepingComputer that ChatGPT ads are not yet rolling out outside the US, even though some users noticed references to ads in the updated privacy policy.

On Reddit, some users pointed out that the updated privacy policy mentions ads, which led to speculation that ChatGPT ads were expanding globally, even for users outside the US.

However, the mention in the privacy policy does not mean ads are rolling out more widely.

OpenAI confirmed that ads are currently limited to the United States and said it has nothing new to share about a global rollout.

OpenAI rolled out ads in ChatGPT in the US on February 9, 2026, and has been gradually expanding access there.

Unlike Google ads, ChatGPT ads are more personalized and could influence buying decisions, which raises additional concerns.

In fact, OpenAI admits that it’s taking a deliberate, phased approach to learn from real-world use before expanding globally.

OpenAI promsies ChatGPT ads respect your privacy, and appear below answers only

ChatGPT ads appear below the answers, and they are shown only to logged-in users on Free and Go plans in the US.

You will also not see ads if you are under 18 (based on your behavior), or even if you request ChatGPT to show ads.

OpenAI argues that ads do not influence the answers, but it is not denying the fact that ads are indeed personalized around your queries.

“Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses,” OpenAI noted in a document.

“Ads are separate and clearly labeled. Ads are paid placements, and seeing an ad doesn’t mean OpenAI endorses or recommends the advertiser or its products or services.”

OpenAI does not share your conversations with ChatGPT with advertisers, which means advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details.

OpenAI had nothing to offer when we asked when ads would roll out more widely.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

Download The Report

Platinum-group metals (PGMs) are great catalysts, but they’re also great investments — in the sense that they are very, very expensive. Just ask the guy nicking car exhausts in the Walmart parking lot. If one could replace PGMs with a more common element, like, say the aluminum that makes up over 8% the mass of this planet, it would be a boon to the chemical industry, and a bane to meth addicts. Researchers at King’s College, London have found a way to do just that, with a novel form of aluminum called cyclotrialumane.

The aluminum trimer is exactly what the ‘tri’ in the name makes it sound like: three aluminum atoms, bonded in a triangular structure that is just pointy and stick-outy enough to poke into other molecules and make chemistry happen. OK, not really — you can see from the diagram above it’s not nearly that simple — but the point is that the shape makes it a good catalyst. The trimer structure is useful in large part because it is very stable, allowing reactions to be catalyzed in a large variety of solutions.

The researchers specifically call out their trialuminum compound as effective at splitting H2 in to H+ ions, as well as ethene polymerization. Both of those are important industrial reactions, but that’s only a start for this trialuminum wonder catalyst, because the researchers claim it can catalyze totally new reactions and create previously-unknown chemicals.

If you never took chemistry, or it’s been too many years since you last slept through that class, we have a primer on catalysts here. By accelerating chemical reactions, catalysts have enabled some neat hacks, like anything involving platinum-cure silicone.

Thanks to [Lightislight] for the tip! Hacks do appear here on their own, but you can always use our tips line to catalyze the synthesis of a particular article.

Header image adapted from: Squire, I., de Vere-Tucker, M., Tritto, M. et al. A neutral cyclic aluminium (I) trimer. Nat Commun 17, 1732 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68432-1

Some days, it feels like we’re getting all the bad parts of cyberpunk and none of the cool stuff. Megacorps and cyber warfare? Check. Flying cars and holograms? Not quite yet. This week, things took a further turn for the dystopian with the news that a woman was hospitalized after an altercation with a humanoid robot in Macau. Police arrived on scene, took the bot into custody, and later told the media they believed this was the first time Chinese authorities had been called to intervene between a robot and a human.

The woman, reportedly in her seventies, was apparently shocked when she realized the robot was standing behind her. After the dust settled, the police determined it was being operated remotely as part of a promotion for a local business. We’ve heard there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but we’re not sure the maxim holds true when you manage to put an old lady into the hospital with your ad campaign.

Speaking of robots, the U.S. Library of Congress recently discovered and subsequently restored Georges Méliès’s Gugusse et l’Automate (Gugusse and the Automaton), a short film from 1897 that’s considered the first piece of science fiction cinema. As far as anyone knows, it’s also the first time a robot appeared on screen, although this isn’t exactly The Terminator we’re talking about here.

The runtime is less than a minute, but to make the short story even shorter: a guy cranks up a robot that gets bigger and bigger until it turns on its maker and starts to hit him with a stick. The human responds in kind by smashing the robot with a cartoonishly large mallet until it poofs out of existence. The modern film school interpretation is that it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology, ye old Black Mirror, if you will. Since nobody can ask old Georgie what he was going for, we’ll just have to take their word for it.

Returning to the desert of the present, Tom’s Hardware reports that at least one manufacturer is starting to pack their new RAM with an additional non-functioning filler module. With prices skyrocketing, this allows folks who can’t afford to fill all the memory slots on their motherboard to stick something in there that at least looks the part. This may seem pointless, but consider that many gamers and other power users have PC’s with clear side panels to show off their elaborate internal layouts. We get it from an aesthetic standpoint, but it also sounds like a new way to potentially get scammed when buying parts on the second-hand market. Though, to be fair, it could be that we’re just overly cynical after watching that Georges Méliès film. At the very least, the current price of memory certainly makes it feel like we’re being hit with a stick.

Finally, what good is living in a cyberpunk world without the occasional bout of rebellion? That’s where the Ageless Linux project comes in. This is a Linux distribution that’s intentionally configured to violate the California Digital Age Assurance Act, which essentially states that the operating system must ask the user how old they are and make this information available to any piece of software that wants to know.

To be fair, being in violation of this law right now is easy — indeed, the OS you’re using now is almost certainly not compliant. But the idea is that it may bend the knee at some point, while Ageless Linux won’t. One could argue that they started the project a bit too early, but frankly, the whole thing is performative in the first place, so if it gets people talking, that’s enough. We’re particularly interested in their idea of making a non-compliant hardware device that’s cheap enough to distribute while still meeting the definition of a computing device, as it’s written in the California Digital Age Assurance Act.

Think they would mind if we borrowed the idea for this year’s Supercon badge?

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.