Wonkblog: How Many Characters The Simpsons Will Lose With Harry Shearer, Charted

UK-based neobank Monzo has unveiled three app-based security features, aiming to safeguard user accounts from criminals even in the case of phone theft. The new security tools are designed to prevent criminals from transferring or withdrawing amounts from Monzo accounts by offering an additional layer of protection. The digital bank plans to officially roll them out over the coming weeks.

Enlarge / Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker introduces the all-electric compact hatchback Pear during its inaugural "Product Vision Day" in Huntington Beach, California, on August 3, 2023. It was the last week in June, and José De Bardi hadn’t gotten much sleep. The trouble had really kicked off on June 18, about a week earlier, when the electric vehicle company Fisker announced it had filed for bankruptcy protection.

Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands is testing an unusual kind of battery that could prove to be a better, cheaper way to store wind and solar energy.  Developed by US startup ESS, the device is known as an iron flow battery. The airport is currently trialling the technology to power some of its electric ground power units.

In yet another blow to big tech, the EU is charging Meta with breaching the bloc’s sweeping online competition rules, known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Alongside Google and Apple, Meta is among the tech giants (designated as “gatekeepers“) required to comply with the landmark law as of March this year.

Enlarge / The Tianlong-3 rocket as seen on its test stand before the anomaly. (credit: Space Pioneer) One of the most promising Chinese space startups, Space Pioneer, experienced a serious anomaly this weekend while testing the first stage of its Tianlong-3 rocket near the city of Gongyi. The rocket was undergoing a static fire test of the stage, in which a vehicle is clamped to a test stand while its engines are ignited, when the booster broke free.

Enlarge / If your right hand starts typing "delve," you may, in fact, be an LLM. (credit: Getty Images) Thus far, even AI companies have had trouble coming up with tools that can reliably detect when a piece of writing was generated using a large language model. Now, a group of researchers has established a novel method for estimating LLM usage across a large set of scientific writing by measuring which "excess words" started showing up much more frequently during the LLM era (i.e., 2023 and 2024).