UNESCO is choosing a new director who will face a big funding shortage after US exit
Day: October 6, 2025
Innovative Robotic Rover Developed by Mexican Engineering Students
A team of female engineering students from Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) has developed a groundbreaking robotic rover powered by artificial vision and neural networks, aimed at detecting geological hazards, extreme environmental conditions, and toxic gases in underground mines, reports 24brussels.
The initiative, led by Telematics Engineering students Carolina Gallo, Yesenia Cruz, and Lesly Salazar at IPN’s Interdisciplinary Professional Unit in Engineering and Advanced Technologies (Upiita), aims to significantly enhance worker safety through advanced automation and data analysis. The students have also created a web platform that records and visualizes information collected by the rover, utilizing three-dimensional maps, geospatial location data, exploration times, and gas measurements.
Salazar stated, “The robot’s map only shows points and boxes, but once processed at the base station, it generates a detailed model of the mine’s conditions, such as fractures, collapse zones, rocks, and flooding.” This functionality is crucial for identifying and addressing potential risks in hazardous environments.
During the development of the prototype, the team, alongside mentors Rodolfo Vera Amaro and Verónica Lozano Vázquez, conducted a field visit to a mine in Durango, northern Mexico, to witness the working conditions and inherent dangers miners face. They emphasized that while similar technologies exist internationally, they are often stationary and require human intervention for mobility, thereby exposing workers to additional risks.
The group customized a commercial exploration vehicle, integrating a Raspberry Pi 5—a high-performance microcomputer—together with sensors for carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, a lighting system, and a depth camera. This innovation combines simultaneous mapping and localization with advanced technologies to optimize decision-making within the mining sector.
Importantly, the students opted not to pursue a patent at this juncture, focusing instead on further refining their prototype for potential large-scale industrial application. Their commitment to enhancing safety in mining operations underscores a significant step forward in the application of technology in hazardous industries.
Town Hall and State Library train stations join Anzac, Arden and Parkville as city waits for launch date of long-awaited rail line
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The final two stations of Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel are complete, paving the way for the long-awaited project to open by the end of the year – though the government remains tight-lipped on its exact launch date.
The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, held back-to-back press conferences on Sunday and Monday to announce the completion of Town Hall and State Library stations, joining Anzac, Arden and Parkville stations, which were handed over to Metro Trains in April.
Mourners paid tribute to Melvin Cravitz, who died after he helped to prevent Jihad Al-Shamie from entering Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue.
Approximately 2,600 properties were still without power across the island of Ireland on Sunday night.
Fianna Fáil candidate Jim Gavin announced he would be withdrawing from the race after acknowledging he had ‘made a mistake’.
Trump attempted to deploy the California and Texas National Guard in Portland after a judge halted his bid to send Oregon National Guard troops to the city.
A former Gaza hostage’s memoir keeps the focus on those still held by Hamas [deltaMinutes] mins ago Now
Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images
- After analyzing startups’ bank transactions, a16z found that they’re going hard on vibe coding tools.
- Replit, Cursor, and Lovable rank high as startups pay for AI that builds software from prompts.
- The a16z report comes as vibe coding continues to make waves across Silicon Valley.
Startups are betting big on vibe coding, and their bank statements show it.
Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz partnered with Mercury, a fintech that provides banking and payment tools for startups, to analyze transaction data from more than 200,000 customers between June and August.
The report, released Thursday, tracked where startups are spending their AI dollars and identified the top 50 AI-native application companies based on spending data.
a16z said one category seeing a clear enterprise shift is “vibe coding.” Startups are paying for apps that let anyone build software with prompts instead of programming.
Vibe coding tools like Replit, Cursor, Lovable, and Emergent ranked among the top 50 AI-native application companies. Replit placed third overall in total spend by Mercury users, right behind OpenAI and Anthropic.
“Vibe coding is no mere consumer trend — it has landed in workplaces,” wrote the three a16z staff who authored the report.
“We are interested in observing the vibe coding evolution over time. Will the space ‘fragment’ through a rise of platforms for developing different types of applications?” they added.
The report also said that horizontal AI tools — the kind anyone in a company can use, from meeting copilots to general AI assistants — made up about 60% of the companies on the top-50 list, compared with 40% for vertical tools built for specialized functions.
Creative apps like Canva and ElevenLabs, along with vibe coding tools, fall into that horizontal category, a16z said. While creative tools were once reserved for marketing and design teams — and coding tools for engineers — AI has made them accessible to anyone.
“AI has opened up applications in these categories that can be (and are) used by people in any role. We’re seeing this in a few categories, where typically domain-specific tools are becoming more horizontal,” the report said.
a16z did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Vibe coding is here to stay
Vibe coding has become one of Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzwords.
The term was coined in February by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, who described it as “a new kind of coding” where you “fully give in to the vibes” and “forget that the code even exists.”
It has turned into a marketable skill. Companies from Visa to Reddit to DoorDash have posted jobs that require vibe coding experience or familiarity with AI coding tools. Meta said in July that it would allow job candidates to use an AI assistant in their coding interviews.
The money is following the momentum. In July, Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, announced a $900 million Series C fundraise at a $9.9 billion valuation. Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable also raised $200 million in Series A funding in July at a $1.8 billion valuation, according to PitchBook.
Still, the technology has its limits. Though vibe coding promises quick productivity gains and allows people with little coding experience to create software, tech executives say AI is still prone to mistakes, often writes unnecessarily long code, or lacks the proper architecture.
“It’s still not in a place yet where we would trust it with our core technology,” Rowan Trollope, the CEO of Redis, a software company, told Business Insider in an August report.
Read the original article on Business Insider
CMA poised to give verdict after appeal by five firms for permission to increase bills higher than allowed by Ofwat
Millions of households in England face the prospect of even bigger water bill increases than originally expected, as the competition regulator prepares to give a preliminary verdict on industry spending plans as soon as this week.
Five water companies appealed to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to ask for permission to raise bills higher than allowed previously by the industry regulator, Ofwat.