• Owlet (OWLT) is pivoting to a subscription-first model, prioritizing Owlet360 and telehealth to drive recurring revenue and operational efficiency.

• Q1 saw Owlet360 reach115K+ subscribers, $1M MRR, 67.4% subscription gross margin, and improved churn, with strong US market share gains despite category contraction.

• Management lowered FY26 revenue guidance to $118–122M but raised adjusted EBITDA to $7–9M, emphasizing profitability over top-line growth.

• Operational focus remains on US and Europe, with international expansion and headcount additions paused to optimize cost structure and scalability.

• Our Primer.

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The company’s pediatric data software platform, Owlet360, is rapidly gaining subscribers (110K by early March 2026), and the company is engaging with AI to leverage its vast proprietary pediatric data trove.

The shares, which had rallied strongly late last year, collapsed after the Q4/25 results disappointed and haven’t recovered:

Growth indeed slowed down markedly, from the mid-30s in FY25 to just 6.4% in Q1/26:

We’ll get into that, and the prospects for the company in an upcoming article; first, here is the Primer to help you familiarize yourself with the moving parts of the company:

Company Overview

• Owlet is a leading pediatric health platform and the only company globally providing both FDA-cleared and internationally medically-certified wearable pediatric monitors for home use.

• The company’s ecosystem consists of wearable monitoring systems, an integrated video platform, and a mobile app designed to bridge the gap between hospital care and home wellness.

• Owlet has served over 2.5M parents since 2012, leveraging one of the largest proprietary datasets of infant health and sleep information to drive its AI-powered platform; see its first Baby Sleep Report from data of 1.2M monitored baby’s using an Owlet device.

• The core vision is to transition from reactive monitoring to proactive, data-informed pediatric wellness.

• On April 6, 2026 Kurt Workman, Executive Chair of the Board, co-founder, and former CEO, became CEO again when Jonathan Harris resigned as President and Chief Executive Officer.

• As of December 31, 2025, the company had 108 full-time employees.

Integrated Product Portfolio

• Dream Sock: An FDA-authorized wearable monitor utilizing pulse oximetry to track heart rate and oxygen levels. It provides Live Health Readings and notifications to caregivers if values move outside preset ranges.

• BabySat: A prescription-only version of the wearable monitor for high-risk infants (e.g., those with RSV or pneumonia). It is FDA-cleared in the US and allows for customizable alarm limits under physician supervision.

• Dream Sight: A smart audio/video monitor featuring 2k HD video, motion/cry detection, and the SGS Cybersecurity Mark for high digital safety standards.

• Dream Duo: A combined offering of the Dream Sock and Dream Sight that provides a holistic view of a child’s health and safety. Dream Duo 3 was named the Best for Monitoring Baby’s Health’ in PARENTS 2026 Best for Baby Awards

• Accessories: Includes fabric accessory socks and travel cases.

The Owlet360 Subscription Service

• Launched in January 2025, the service gained over 98K subscribers by the end of the year and recently surpassed 110K paying subscribers.

• Priced at $9.99 per month, it provides personalized health and sleep insights derived from Owlet’s vast pediatric dataset.

• The service is a key pillar in Owlet’s transition to a software-led platform, driving predictable recurring revenue and increasing customer lifetime value (LTV).

• Currently available in English-speaking markets (US, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand), with plans for additional languages and markets in FY26.

Growth Pillars

• Leveraging its status as the only FDA-authorized over-the-counter monitor in its category to increase U.S. market share.

• New products:

• International expansion: Dream Sock holds seven international regulatory clearances (EU, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Israel) and is sold in over 30 countries. The company launched Dream Sight and Dream Duo 3 in Australia and New Zealand May 2026.

• Healthcare channels: Expanding BabySat adoption through insurance reimbursement, which is now available in 37 states on Medicaid and through over 250 commercial carriers.

• Hospital partnerships: are another growth vector with the consignment agreement with Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters (CHKD) to prescribe devices directly to patients upon discharge.

• Strategic partnerships, like the one with PromptCare to expand distribution of BabySat, its prescription pediatric pulse oximeter or with WebAI to “to accelerate the development of secure, personalized, and data-driven intelligence across the Owlet product ecosystem.”

Regulatory and Research Leadership

• In 2023, Owlet transitioned from a consumer tech firm to a medical device company with 510(k) clearance for BabySat and De Novo authorization for Dream Sock.

• Current investments are centered on AI and computer vision for camera products and AI-driven personalization for wearables.

• The company is exploring sensors for temperature trends and hydration indicators.

Manufacturing and Operations

• Owlet relies on third-party manufacturers, primarily Benchmark Electronics (Thailand) for Dream Sock and BabySat, and Aoni (China/Vietnam) for Dream Sight.

• Plans are underway to expand manufacturing with Benchmark to a new site in Mexico in 2026.

• The digital ecosystem is hosted on a hybrid cloud platform using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

FY25 Finances

• Revenue was up 35.4% to $105.7M.

• Gross margin increased 20bp to 50.6%, despite global trade headwinds.

• Adjusted EBITDA was $2.0M, marking the company’s first full year of positive Adjusted EBITDA.

• The company reported a net loss of $39.7M for FY25.

• Financial stability was bolstered by a successful warrant exchange and a follow-on equity offering completed in late 2025. In June 2026, it opened a $25M credit facility with Wells Fargo, replacing existing facilities (a term loan and an asset-based credit facility), significantly reducing interest costs (SOFR plus 2.00% to 2.25%, compared to SOFR plus 7.50% to 8.50%).

Stay tuned for our take on financials and the prospects.

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An unprecedented transfer of wealth in the coming decades is likely to disproportionately benefit America’s most affluent families, boosting their fortunes by trillions of dollars, a new report from Visa says. Almost three quarters of those expected to inherit from Baby Boomers are already in the top 10% by household net worth.

Boomer Wealth Transfer Set to Favor America’s Richest Families

• Sweden ranks first in the 2026 Best Countries quality of life rankings, ahead of Denmark and Canada.

• Europe accounts for 20 of the world’s top 30 countries, led by a strong Nordic showing.

• The U.S. ranks 27th overall, placing last among G7 economies.

What makes a country a great place to live? Based on perceptions from 15,131 adults across 33 countries, The Wharton School’s 2026 Best Countries Index ranks the nations seen as offering the world’s highest quality of life. The rankings highlight countries viewed as offering a strong combination of safety, healthcare, education, economic opportunity, and public services, while also revealing how sharply perceptions differ across regions.

Ranked: The Best Countries for Quality of Life in 2026

Russia’s grip on its gateway to the Black Sea is slipping after a series of Ukrainian attacks forced Moscow to suspend traffic through the key waterway this week, limiting the Kremlin’s ability to trade with the rest of the world. The development marks a major reversal of fortunes for Russia as the Azov Sea was for years out of Kyiv’s reach, providing Russia with a convenient staging ground for attacks against Ukraine and linking vast swaths of southern Russia with the world’s oceans.
But recent advances in Ukraine’s drone program have changed this. Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s ‌drone forces, said on Wednesday that Kyiv had hit 116 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov in just the past nine days – a sharp increase…

Russia is the world’s largest grain exporter, accounting for about one fifth of global wheat exports, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service. About a quarter of Russia’s wheat exports is shipped through the Sea of Azov, according to Andrey Sizov, a leading Black Sea agricultural markets analyst. “The Black Sea for (the) wheat market is similar to what the Persian Gulf means for the crude market. (The) Black Sea is by far the biggest supplier of wheat to the global market,” he said, adding that if the situation continues, Russia’s economic losses could climb into billions of dollars.

Prices of wheat futures, a key indicator of traders’ expectations, have jumped in recent days, partly because of the Azov Sea crisis. Russia claims it can bypass the Sea of Azov and reroute all of its grain exports via other terminals in the Black Sea, but Sizov said this would not be possible during the peak season when Russia’s total grain exports far exceed the capacity of those ports.

Strait of Hormuz-style crisis looms for Russia as Ukraine forces shutdown of a key waterway

Speaking at a defence and innovation summit in Pennsylvania, the CIA director said: “What I would say is, our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine. So the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit, right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.”

Ukraine-Russia war latest: Kyiv destroys bomber plane on raid 500 miles past border

Two fish named Fede and Magui have been recognized by an Argentine court as sentient beings with rights and moved out of a restaurant’s glass display case

Argentina court recognizes two goldfish as sentient beings with rights

Goodness knows how frenzied the atmosphere will be during Sunday’s final. After Argentina won the World Cup four years ago, about four million people took to the streets of the capital. The city was so congested that a planned open-top bus parade had to be abandoned, so the players flew overhead in helicopters. I asked a local how long the public celebrations had lasted. “They’re still going on,” came the dry reply.

View from the other side: inside Argentina’s celebrations after semi-final win against England

An Alzheimer’s drug could prevent dementia before symptoms show, with research suggesting it could clear toxic brain plaques in just three months.
Trontinemab, a medicine given as a monthly infusion, will be offered to about 1,600 people with no memory problems who are at high risk of the disease to see whether it can stave off symptoms. Scientists said the landmark trial could be a “game changer”, raising the prospect of “statins for the brain” being routinely offered to people in mid-life.

New Alzheimer’s drug could stop disease

In a study published in Physical Review Research, Professor Giovanni Barontini demonstrates that it is possible to measure the passage of time without relying on a clock. Instead, the experiment shows that a version of time can emerge naturally from the behavior of a quantum system itself.

Why Some Physicists Think Time May Not Be Fundamental

Several theories of modern physics suggest that time may not exist as a built in feature of the universe. One example is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which describes the universe as a single quantum state with no external clock. In this picture, particles display both wave like and particle like behavior, and the familiar flow of time must arise from relationships between different parts of the system rather than from an independent ticking clock.

Physicists created a tiny universe where time emerged without a clock

If there was one statistic that brutally condemned his approach, it was that England only had 12% possession between taking the lead and Martinez’s winning goal nearly 40 minutes later.

Why England’s loss to Argentina felt like most painful in 60 years of hurt

China has validated a solid-state battery system after a year of underground operation within a Beijing Energy Group heating network, where it completed a winter cycle at temperatures up to 85°C and humidity levels of 95%. The milestone demonstrates progress in real-world solid-state battery deployment, but it raises a bigger question for the EV industry: why are solid-state batteries still not powering mass-market cars?

Solid-state batteries are already running in China for a year, so why aren’t they in EVs yet?

This is an insanely polarized country, which means it isn’t very often that you see a political supermajority on any issue, let alone one that emerges almost out of nowhere to announce itself as a major new front in our politics. But that’s exactly what has happened just over the last year with A.I. data centers. Around seven in 10 Americans now oppose the construction of local data centers to power artificial intelligence. Last fall, people were almost exactly evenly split when asked if they’d support a new data center nearby. Now there’s a 50-point gap. That is an absolutely crazy swing, much bigger than the reversals you tend to see when a new president comes into office or even when someone declares war.

Is This the Fastest Opinion Shift in American Politics?

Having choked off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is now signaling it could play its most dangerous card yet: using Yemen’s Houthi allies to shut the Bab el-Mandeb gateway ​to the Red Sea, opening a new front against Washington and putting two of the world’s most vital energy arteries at risk… A senior Yemeni official warned on Monday that the country’s armed forces were prepared to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait - a move he said could send oil prices soaring to $200 ​a barrel - if Saudi Arabia continued to attack Yemen, according to a report on Iran’s Press TV website.

After Hormuz, Iran turns to Red Sea gateway as new pressure point

Shipping a production LLM system means iterating fast on improvements to something that is, by construction, non-deterministic. Models drift, judges disagree with themselves, references regenerate as different strings, and bugs may persist until the next release, because retraining takes weeks. Most of this friction comes from infrastructure challenges, not model quality, and the fixes come from classical software engineering techniques. At Airbnb, we built reliable LLM infrastructure by addressing four layers.

From weeks to a day: how we made LLM evaluation fast enough to iterate on

Mr. Trump acknowledged that he hadn’t yet raised the license matter with the two main manufacturers of the missiles, Lockheed Martin and RTX. And even if they were to agree, it would take years for Ukraine to start full production. In the meantime, Ukraine has to compete with U.S. armed forces and 16 other foreign clients waiting for Patriot deliveries, and these fancy weapons take time to put together.

Each $3.9 million missile takes about two years to make, and Lockheed currently produces only about 600 a year. In the 39 days of bombardment before the cease-fire with Iran began, the United States used up about half of its inventory of 2,330 Patriots, so just replacing them would take three and a half years, according to an estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That is not what Mr. Zelensky wants to hear. “It is simply absurd that, in the modern world, production has still not been scaled up to the level actually required to protect people from ballistic terror,” he said in one of his nightly video addresses. But even if Ukraine were to receive all the interceptors Lockheed turns out, it would not be enough to block all the ballistic missiles Russia throws at Ukraine.

The Ukraine-Russia War Reaches a New Phase

If orbital AI compute scales the way he thinks it can, SpaceX doesn’t just benefit from launching satellites. It becomes the backbone of a computing layer that has no physical limits tied to land, power grids, or cooling water

Elon Musk’s startling claim to SpaceX investors

There’s only one snag. It now appears that just five days of overconsuming foods high in sugar and fat can actively rewire your brain, triggering neurological shifts that make it harder to stop eating.

How just five days of overeating can rewire your brain

Windows 11 updates could soon include fixes for more security issues at once. Microsoft said in a blog post on Thursday that it’s now using AI to “identify potential issues earlier,” which means “customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release.”

Hackers, even amateurs, have increasingly been using AI to quickly exploit security weaknesses over the past several months. Security researchers are also using AI to find issues faster, leading to more frequent high-severity vulnerabilities, like the “Copy Fail” exploit that impacted nearly every Linux distribution in May. Similarly, when Anthropic announced its Claude Mythos model earlier this year, it claimed that Mythos had already found high-severity vulnerabilities in “every major operating system.”

Microsoft’s patch Tuesdays are about to get bigger

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We wrote a Primer on Toast (TOST), which provides an overview of the business model and the products, followed by a Quick Take on the latest developments and outlook. Below, we condense this into some simple reasons why the stock is an attractive buy at the moment (at $30).

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Leadership in the Agentic AI Economy

Netskope is uniquely positioned to govern the agentic economy, where autonomous AI agents interact via APIs and the Model Context Protocol.

AI-Native Architectural Moat

Netskope was built from inception to deal with the modern language of the internet and AI, API, and JSON traffic, enabling the platform to interpret the semantic intent of prompts and responses in real-time, rather than just seeing a generic connection (Q1/27CC):

Organizations are facing a fast widening gap between the speed of AI adoption and the security architecture needed to adopt it securely. This is precisely what Netskope was built for. From inception, we architected Netskope as an AI-native platform designed to understand the modern language and context of the Internet, including API and JSON traffic, which is also the language of AI. As a result, while legacy vendors rely heavily on out-of-band inspection and post-event analysis, we understand the semantic context and intent behind them, enabling customers to apply granular dynamic policy controls without compromising user or agentic experience or performance.

And from the Q4/26CC:

Most solutions simply see a connection. Netskope understands the deep interaction. Because our proxy is natively AI fluent, we possess the active context to determine dynamically in real time the specific AI app instances, activities, data and more. We also determine the semantic intent of prompts and responses in real time and enforce in-line policy. Our Netskope One Agentic Broker, one of a number of new AI products we announced earlier today, also seamlessly applies this to all MCP transactions, either sanctioned or unsanctioned.

Netskope AI Labs has deployed over 190 domain-specific models. These models are built using a decade of granular traffic data that management believes is nearly impossible for competitors to replicate.

Governing Agentic Transactions (MCP)

Netskope launched the Agentic Broker to provide visibility and control over all Model Context Protocol (MCP) transactions, which has quickly become the dominant standard for AI agent integrations.

Unlike legacy vendors that rely on post-event analysis, Netskope’s proxy is natively AI-fluent. It can make granular go/no-go decisions in mid-flight to stop sensitive data from entering a prompt or block a poisoned AI response before it reaches the customer’s environment.

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This was actually the original idea behind this website, which carries the subtitle “We summarize the best research on the web.” For now, here are some stocks which, based on our own research, are still buyable.

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An AI just carried out a cyber attack without any human oversight for the first time- Security researchers have uncovered what they believe to be the first ever instance of an artificial intelligence agent executing a cyber attack from start to finish without human assistance. The AI-powered attack marks a major milestone for both artificial intelligence and cyber security, raising concerns that AI is lowering the barrier for cyber criminals. The fully automated campaign involved an AI carrying out a ransomware attack, where victims are forced to pay a ransom in order to regain access to their data.

An AI just carried out a cyber attack without any human oversight for the first time

The recent initial public offering for SpaceX was the biggest stock sale the world has ever seen, with shares priced as if life on Mars were a sure thing. The company’s debt, on the other hand, is priced as if it were junk. Is this what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when, nearly a century ago, he wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”?

SpaceX, Elon Musk and the ‘Dumb Money’ Problem

The language of the deal has left the two sides fighting over that point rather than making progress on a final agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program. “This gap in interpretation is wide, baked into the deal, and not exactly surprising,” said Michael Horowitz, an Israeli geopolitical analyst. “Washington has tried to convince Tehran that compliance would be more profitable, but this framing misses the point. Iran’s behavior isn’t driven by financial motives but by security concerns and bargaining leverage. It’s a power dynamic.”

The Fight Over Hormuz Boils Down to One Poorly Worded Clause in Trump’s Deal

Coaching seminars held by the Norwegian Football Federation have been known to play a short video showing a 16-year-old boy taking part in a shooting drill. Footage has been captured from behind the goal and most of the 20 attempts, to be kind, are wayward. The aspiring coaches in attendance are asked if the youngster has what it takes to play for Norway. “Everyone says no because in the video it looks like a poor striker,” says Hakon Grottland, the long-standing head of player development within Norway’s national association. Perhaps the distinctive blond hair, kept short at the time, provides a clue but the boy spraying shots in all directions has become Norway’s talisman and the world’s best centre-forward: Erling Haaland.

Why America has fallen for Erling Haaland, football’s most likeable superstar

The federal government is demanding that autonomous-vehicle companies address their driverless cars’ pattern of impeding or ignoring first responders and emergency vehicles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has documented incidents of autonomous vehicles driving into active emergency scenes and blocking the paths of ambulances and firefighters. Autonomous vehicles have also failed to recognize traffic cones, flashing lights, and other safety threats such as smoke and fire, according to a Wednesday letter from NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison.

Federal Regulator Warns Robotaxis Are a ‘Danger’ to the Public

There is a beautiful stupidity in the next great innovation of the food industry: food designed to make us want less food. Capitalism has finally eaten itself, and now it’s complaining that it feels a bit full. This is the strange promise of inulin-propionate ester, or IPE, a “supercharged” fibre developed by scientists at Imperial College London and the University of Glasgow. It has been approved by the European Food Safety Authority for use in food, which means products containing it – smoothies, cereal bars, bread and breakfast foods, the sort of things already wearing too many health claims for their own good – could start appearing in Europe within the next year.

Why a type of ‘GLP-1’ weight loss fibre could soon be added to food to make you eat less

Subramanian Iyer, an electrical engineer and educator, has long specialized in a sleepy niche of the semiconductor industry that has now become a major choke point in the global contest for artificial intelligence leadership. That niche is a technology called advanced chip packaging, which bundles as many as dozens of the components in palm-size modules. As computing gains from the traditional practice of shrinking transistors to pack more of them onto each chip have diminished, Nvidia and other chip giants have turned to packaging as an essential way to deliver semiconductors capable of more complex tasks for A.I.

How a Niche Technology Became a Choke Point for A.I.

The largest U.S. power grid operator, PJM Interconnection, said Friday ​it is ​under a federal emergency alert to reduce electricity consumption across its territory, as ⁠it ‌battles generator outages, massive overloading ⁠on transmission lines, and a surge in air conditioning use from the current heatwave. PJM, which serves 67M people ⁠in the Mid-Atlantic, South, and Washington, D.C., areas, said the order applied to industrial and residential electricity users with ​contracts that pay them in return for mandatory consumption cuts during emergencies. PJM also told neighboring regional grids, including in New York and ​the Midwest, that its electricity exports from may be curtailed, a procedural step that allows those regions to plan accordingly.

Largest U.S. power grid orders emergency curbs to avoid blackouts

That commitment was tested 50 years ago. When the dictatorship seized power in 1976, the Argentine press fell silent. What readers found in most newspapers were official statements and stories about economic reforms or inflation. What they didn’t find, what was deliberately missing, was any meaningful coverage of the systematic disappearance of thousands of people. The Buenos Aires Herald was the exception. The commitment to revealing what was going on had begun even before the coup. In the early 1970s, Andrew Graham-Yooll was already publishing the names of those killed by armed organizations and by the illegal repression of the Triple A.

150 years. One mission

More than half of adult smokers in the UK wrongly believe that vaping is as harmful or more harmful than cigarettes, making them less likely to switch to vapes and quit the deadly habit, research has found. Evidence from scientific studies shows that, while vaping is not risk-free, it is far less harmful than smoking tobacco, which produces thousands of chemicals, including toxic metals, poisonous gases and substances that cause cancer.

Majority of UK smokers wrongly believe vaping is as harmful as cigarettes, experts find

Whether you’re learning guitar or trying to get fit, short bursts of effort can work wonders

Feeling stuck? Try ‘productivity snacking’

Do you know how to get an American company to grant you excellent wages and amazing benefits, even for an entry-level job? Move to Norway and take the job there. Construction workers, hotel maids, gas station attendants and store cashiers will typically earn more than $20 an hour plus evening or weekend bonuses, about five weeks’ paid vacation each year, a pension, maternity and paternity leave that add up to a year and paid leave when a child is sick. You may even get paid time off if you move homes. Those are broadly the terms for Norwegian and foreign companies alike, including the likes of 7-Eleven shops, Burger King restaurants and ExxonMobil-affiliated gas stations. Which raises the question: If American and other international firms can offer such munificent terms for retail jobs in Norway, could they do so in our country?

To understand how the Nordic socioeconomic system evolved, I dropped by the office of Kalle Moene, an economist at the University of Oslo. The system began in the 1930s, he said, when workers in thriving sectors of the economy agreed to hold down their wage demands to support sectors that were struggling. That principle — sacrificing to help those not doing so well — still underpins the region’s business model. Norwegians who are better off are willing to give up some income to ensure that people in blue-collar jobs get by. Moene argues that this wage compression promotes innovation and dynamism by boosting the profitability of growth industries and by lowering profits in lagging industries. “The lowest wages become higher, destroying bad jobs,” Moene said. “The highest wages become lower, creating more good jobs.”

What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness

Experts say China trails the United States in A.I. development by just six months. Anthropic and other U.S. companies argue that without help from distillation, China would be much further behind, which could affect major A.I. uses like business planning, drug research, mass surveillance and military weapons. Their complaints have new urgency now that the Chinese start-up Z.ai has released an A.I. model, GLM-5.2, that is nearly as powerful as the top American systems. It rivals them when used for cybersecurity, an area that American A.I. companies and the Trump administration have singled out as vitally important to geopolitics. But what exactly is distillation, and are Chinese companies the only ones doing it? Here is an explanation.

American A.I. Companies Say Chinese Copycats Are Quickly Catching Up

Men’s average testosterone levels have halved over the past 50 years, according to scientists, who say society is facing a male fertility crisis. Total testosterone levels in men declined by 54% between 1972 and 2019, according to data presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in London on Tuesday. Rising levels of obesity and diabetes are expected to play a part, but the team behind the work suggest that environmental factors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals – which can be found in various household items – and global heating could also be factors in the apparent striking decline.

Men’s average testosterone levels have halved in last 50 years, say scientists

In How To Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest, Dr Merijn van de Laar says stressing about sleep is the opposite of what we should be doing. Throw the “sleep hygiene” rules out of the window, he says – we need to change how we think about the eight-hour rule. “The evolutionary theories around sleep are amazing, because not many people know about them,” Van de Laar explains. “It’s very important to go back to the body – how the body is made and what we’re actually intended to do. The last couple of hundred years have seen such a rush into new technologies and into new science, but we still have those old bodies. “And to really understand something as ancient as sleep, you have to go back to the roots of it all.”

The caveman sleep rules that will help you watch Mexico v England and not feel tired

For a century, swimming in the dirty Seine was unthinkable. Now, a $1.6-billion engineering marvel has turned the French capital’s river into its ultimate summer escape.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/04/travel/paris-seine-river-toxic-swimming-spots

SentinelOne (S) is a cybersecurity company that is making the jump from endpoint security to a wider offering. As a result of the AI revolution, the company is gaining rapid traction in newer offerings like AI SIEM and Purple AI, which are especially designed for the new security landscape with AI-driven threats, and at the same time, the company is producing operating leverage leading to financial improvements while the share has been range-bound. We think not for long:

See our Primer for an introduction.

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Below is our free primer to familiarize investors with the moving parts, followed later by an assessment of the financials, latest developments, and verdict.

Overview

• Dave Inc. is a leading mobile-first neobank designed to provide everyday Americans with more effective money management tools.

• The company targets the financially coping or vulnerable, a segment estimated at 185M Americans (69% of the US population) who are often underserved by traditional banks.

• Since its inception in 2017, over 19M members have signed up for the app, with more than 14 million having used at least one product.

• The mission is to level the financial playing field by offering transparent, low-cost alternatives to legacy banking systems that charge high fees for basic services.

• As of December 31, 2025, Dave employed approximately 280 full-time employees. The company operates a remote-first strategy with employees across more than 30 states, which has helped reduce voluntary turnover to below peer median rates.

• Dave uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework to align priorities and foster accountability across the organization.

Core Product Offerings

• ExtraCash provides members with up to $500 in short-term credit via a discretionary overdraft through bank partners to bridge liquidity gaps between paychecks.

• In February 2025, Dave transitioned to a mandatory 5% overdraft service fee (with a $5 minimum), replacing its previous optional fee model to enhance unit economics.

• Dave Checking is a fee-free demand deposit account offering FDIC pass-through insurance, a branded debit Mastercard, and access to 40,000 fee-free MoneyPass ATMs.

• Personal Financial Management (PFM) is a platform that includes tools such as Budget (overdraft prediction), Goals (automated savings), and Side Hustle (a job application portal for gig economy work).

• In mid-2025, Dave increased its monthly membership fee from $1 to $3 for new members, which has improved average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value.

Proprietary Technology and AI

• CashAI is Dave’s proprietary underwriting engine that analyzes real-time cash flow data—including income patterns and spending behavior—rather than relying on FICO scores or credit bureau data.

• Model v5.5 was implemented in September 2025, nearly doubled the feature set of prior models, and is optimized for the new fee structure, resulting in higher approval amounts and lower delinquency rates.

• CashAI has been trained on over 180M originations and billions of transactions, providing a structural data advantage in credit decisioning.

• The company utilizes DaveGPT (an AI chatbot) for automated member support and proprietary AI systems for real-time fraud detection and prevention.

• Dave operates a cloud-native platform, which reduces the cost to serve members and allows for rapid deployment of new software and AI models.

Strategic Growth Pillars

• Dave maintains a stable customer acquisition cost (CAC) of approximately $19, with payback periods now under four months—the fastest in the company’s history.

• The Engagement and Retention strategy focuses on converting members into Dave Debit Card actives, who generate 1.7x higher ARPU and have 11 times the monthly transaction volume compared to non-card users.

• The company leverages its foundation in underwriting and payments to prepare for the launch of new products in FY26.

Operational Partnerships

• Dave currently operates concurrent programs with Evolve Bank & Trust and Coastal Community Bank.

• As of Q4/25, all new members are being onboarded to Coastal Community Bank, with the transition of existing members expected to be finalized by the end of 2026.

• Dave has a multi-year agreement with Galileo Financial Technologies for payment processing, which was amended in 2023 to significantly reduce processing fees.

Regulatory and Competitive Landscape

• Dave is subject to regulation by the CFPB, FTC, and various state authorities regarding consumer protection, AML (Anti-Money Laundering), and privacy laws.

• The company is monitoring evolving rules, including the CFPB’s finalized 2024 revisions to overdraft rules under the Truth in Lending Act and new Open Banking standards under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act.

• Dave competes with traditional large banks (JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo), digital neobanks (Chime, Varo), and other fintech innovators (MoneyLion, Earnin, Affirm).

• Management argues its 4.8-star App Store rating and structural cost advantage (no physical branches) allow it to offer a superior value proposition to the paycheck-to-paycheck market.

FY25 Financials

That stock price acceleration is no surprise:

• FY25 was very strong: revenue rose 60% to $554.2M, net income increased 238% to $195.9M, and adjusted EBITDA grew 162% to $226.7M. The company also ended the year with $123.2M of cash and investments and lifted its share repurchase authorization to $300M.

• And FY26 promises to be good as well:

• Note of caution: the short position has been rapidly rising in H1/26 to almost 25% of the float.

Stay tuned for our take on the financials and prospects.

We did choose a top 5 for FY26, which in fact was a top 6 with two no.3s

• 5) Aehr Test Systems (AEHR)

• 4) Crexendo (CXDO)

• 3) PaySign (PAYS)

• 3) SurgePays (SURG)

• 2) Senestech (SNES)

• 1) Gatekeeper (GKPRF)
  

Aehr Test Systems (AEHR)

• Up 246.5% YTD, obviously a big winner despite crashing 45% from its recent high ($126.26!)

• This was the largest position in our Investment Group Portfolio at Seeking Alpha (where it was one of the first buys in July 2020 at $2), but we sold all four positions between $59 and $92, as the valuation didn’t make sense (even at $70, it’s a $2.2B company with $45M in revenue).

• The accelerated decline last week is the result of the company becoming too big to be included in certain indexes (Russell Microcap, Russell 3000).

• The company’s future is very bright; it’s selling mostly package-level testing equipment to AI and photonics chip producers and other segments (a solution it recently acquired), but its own sophisticated FOX systems for wafer-level testing are likely to catch on as well, producing a stream of high-margin consumables.

• Big new orders (AI and SiPh) go some way to allay our valuation concerns, but the stock is still too expensive for us to re-enter.

Crexendo (CXDO)

• Our Primer

• Up 17.7% YTD, but the stock was up much more in May until the CEO started selling some of his holdings, which is only normal.

• In the meantime, the company is reaccelerating growth:

• As we argued several times before, it’s well positioned to take market share from the two leading competitors, as well as taking advantage of AI significantly increasing ARPU (most notably through Kairo, its AI-based receptionist).

• So we think that it’s still eminently buyable at $7-$7.5.

PaySign (PAYS)

• Up 60.4% YTD.

• Latest update.

• We did rate it as a strong buy in February here in an update on February 2.

• We did buy the stock at $3.17 in February and again at $5.65 in May for our SA Investment Group, as we couldn’t believe how the stock kept going down while company performance was stellar (with triple-digit growth for its Pharma vertical).

• While it’s no longer cheap, we think the stock has further to run and would add on dips.

SurgePays (PAYS)

• Down 65.7% YTD even after last week’s revival of sorts. As we argued, this was always a bit of a wildcard and by far the riskiest stock of the five.

• We assumed that with fast-growing (now 200K+) combined subscribers from Lifeline and LinkUp and several other revenue streams (most notably a fast-growing prepaid top-ups network in 9K+ convenience stores and bodegas), it would be close to cash breakeven and need little additional financing.

• We were wrong, simply because the contract they had with AT&T was too onerous, sucking up cash and slowing S&M activity, crucial for underpinning subscriber growth.

• But guess what, that contract has now been revised:

  • AT&T removed all remaining minimum spend commitments under the prior agreement.

  • AT&T forgave about $10.3M in previously billed charges, reducing accounts payable and creating an estimated $8.5M Q2/26 gain.

  • Management argues the revised pricing should lower acquisition and monthly subscriber costs, which is favorable to operating margins.

• The company is actually growing nicely:

• While considerably reducing OpEx:

• The revised deal with AT&T should give them a new lease of life and reduce their financing needs.

• When we included the stock in the list half a year ago, they were really growing their subscriber base quickly, which has slowed down a bit, but with better unit financials, the cash break-even point will have come down quite a bit, and they might even be able to spend a little more on S&M.

• Management argued this during the Q4/25CC:

we estimate our current monthly cash burn at the end of Q1 2026 to be approximately $250,000 to $300,000.

• Operating cash burn was still $4.6M in Q1/26, so we’re not entirely convinced, but if true, cash burn would be less than $1M in Q2/26 and with the revised AT&T deal, they could actually approach cash breakeven in Q3 or Q4.

• They have been very creative, forging new partnerships and revenue streams, as we discussed in various updates.

• With a better deal from AT&T, recovery could be around the corner but this is still speculative.

SenesTech (SNES)

• YTD down 30.8%

• This is going much slower than we expected given the amount of sales channels, verticals and international distribution deals the company already put in place last year.

• The main channel is still Amazon and they had some headwinds in Q1 when they took hold of managing this account, depressing sales in Q1 but this will be better going forward and initial Q2 signs are promising, as we argued in an update.

• There also has been considerable insider buying:

• Given the magnitude of the problem the company is addressing and the tiny market cap ($8M, $6.8M in cash at the end of Q1, enough to last until Q3/27, according to management), we think there is every chance of this stock turning into a winner, although it’s still speculative as long as they’re not cash flow positive.

Gatekeeper (GKPRF)

• Down 25.6% YTD but this is one we’re not worrying about, given mandates in the US and Canada forces customers hands and Gatekeeper will take a good slice of the ensuing demand.

• OEM deals with the likes of Althom and rapidly rising SaaS revenue (management projects 10M MDCs by year-end to produce recurring subscription revenues, up from just a few thousand at the start of the year.

• The situation hasn’t changed much since we last wrote about the company (see here, here and here).

• We think this this stock is poised to recover later this year.

So a bit of a mixed bag, AEHR, PAYS and CXDO put in strong performances even with big retreats in AEHR and CXDO. SURG was indeed the riskiest but the revised deal with AT&T gives it a new lease of life. Developments at SNES and GKPRF are a bit slower than we expected, but we still have faith that will improve going forward.

We think you can still buy GKPRF, SNES, while more speculative, the stock is cheap and they still have plenty of cash, CXDO and PAYS on dips and AEHR if it falls further, which might very well not happen and one could buy a small position at $70 or sell some puts here.

The company earns a stable 8% fee for providing exchange services, regardless of whether the premium is handled by its owned insurance entities or third-party partners.

Members join the exchange to gain access to stable, long-term capital, allowing them to focus on underwriting rather than sourcing capacity. Accelerant further supports them with proprietary risk models and economies of scale on shared services.

Capital providers join because the exchange provides access to a highly diversified, low-volatility portfolio of specialty insurance, a large volume of small policies with low limits, offering attractive and consistent returns.

Business model

Its business model is best described as a risk exchange—a technology-driven marketplace that sits between specialty insurance underwriters and global capital.

Rather than operating like a traditional brick-and-mortar insurance carrier that keeps all risk on its books, Accelerant acts as the digital infrastructure that connects the various players in the insurance chain.

The model thrives on a three-sided network effect:

• The Members (MGAs) are Managing General Agents—highly specialized underwriters who focus on niche markets (like insurance for bowling alleys, small restaurants, or regional contractors). They get stable, multi-year capacity (the legal ability to write policies) and a plug-and-play tech stack. The company has 232 Members on its platform as of March 31, 2025.

• The Risk Capital Partners are reinsurers and institutional investors (like AXA, Munich Re, or pension funds). They get direct, transparent access to diversified, low-volatility insurance portfolios without having to build their own underwriting teams. The company had 96 risk capital partners on its platform as of March 31.

• Accelerant (The Exchange): The middleman that vets the members, provides the technology, and monitors the data.

Accelerant’s income is increasingly moving toward a Capital-Light or fee-based model, which investors generally value more highly than traditional insurance risk.

Three revenue streams

The company generates three different revenue streams:

1. Exchange Services

This is the core of the business and the highest-margin segment. Accelerant acts as a digital marketplace, and they charge a fee for every dollar of insurance premium that passes through it.

• Accelerant collects a fixed-percentage, volume-based fee from Risk Capital Partners (the reinsurers and investors) for using their proprietary technology, data ingestion (InSightFull), and real-time portfolio monitoring.

• As Accelerant onboards more third-party capital (moving toward its 42% target for 2026), this fee revenue grows without Accelerant needing to use its own money to back the insurance. In Q1/26, 41% of Exchange Written Premium went to third-party insurers, up from 30% for FY25

2. MGA Operations

This segment includes Mission Underwriters (30, majority-owned by Accelerant) and other Owned Members (15, 9 majority-owned, 6 minority stakes). In this stream, Accelerant acts more like a business partner and consultant to the underwriters.

Accelerant earns commissions for originating and underwriting policies, charging the MGAs they incubate (see below) for operational support (HR, legal, IT).

Because they often take a stake in these MGAs, they share in the underlying profit of the agency itself, so this segment generates higher margins than Exchange Services.

This segment saw massive growth in 2025 as Accelerant launched 90+ new products and dozens of new independent MGAs. The 45 (out of a total of 265) owned MGA’s generated $372M in premiums.

3. Underwriting

This is the most old-school part of the business, where Accelerant acts as a traditional insurance carrier through its own subsidiaries (like Accelerant Insurance Europe).

Net earned premiums are the money left over after they pay for reinsurance and cover claims. Also, when Accelerant sells part of its risk to a reinsurer, that reinsurer pays Accelerant a commission for finding and managing the business.

Management is intentionally shrinking the Net Retention part of this stream. In 2026, they’ll retain only about 10% of the risk themselves, using this segment primarily as a bridge to prove the business is good before handing it off to third-party capital.

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Introduction

• Capstone Energy+, Inc. (formerly Capstone Green Energy Holdings, Inc.) is a provider of behind-the-meter clean energy solutions for industrial, commercial, and AI/data center applications.

• Effective April 30, 2026, the company changed its name to Capstone Energy+ to reflect a broader strategic identity encompassing clean power, thermal recovery, and circular economy applications.

• The company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 7, 2023, and officially closed the cases in June 2025.

• Operations are conducted through Capstone Green Energy LLC (the Operating Subsidiary). On March 31, 2026, the company acquired the assets and liabilities of the “Reorganized PrivateCo” (Legacy Capstone).

• As of March 31, 2026, the company employed 115 full-time employees.

Core Technology Pillars

• The company’s microturbines achieve some of the lowest emissions in distributed generation. Key models are CARB-certified to meet 2007 standards, simplifying the permitting process for end-users.

• The microturbines use a high-pressure field of air instead of petroleum lubricants or ball bearings. This eliminates oil changes and coolant systems, significantly reducing maintenance costs and increasing uptime.

• The tech manages all functions (speed, fuel flow, load) digitally. The inverter-based architecture allows seamless transitions between grid-connected and stand-alone modes, serving as a backbone for microgrids.

• Proprietary software allows for global management and proactive maintenance of microturbine systems.

Product Portfolio and Development

• The company offers scalable platforms with the core offerings including the C65, C200, C400, C600, C800, and C1000S Series.

• Multiple units can be combined through digital controllers to provide multi-megawatt capacity with built-in active redundancy.

• The company is developing a new C250 engine, designed as a modular building block specifically for the power topologies favored by AI data center operators.

• During FY26, the C200 and C1000 families achieved UL1741 SB and IEEE 1547 certification, streamlining interconnection in North American markets like California and Hawaii.

Manufacturing and R&D Focus

• The Van Nuys facility can produce over 1 GW of power annually.

• Focus on moving the supply chain to the Southwest US to mitigate global freight delays and tariff impacts.

• The company is collaborating with Argonne National Laboratory and UC Irvine, focusing on optimizing engines for 100% hydrogen operation and minimizing NOx emissions.

• Significant engineering resources are dedicated to Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) to reduce material costs through part count reduction and streamlined fabrication.

AI and Data Center Strategy

• The company’s ESP (Energy Surplus Program) is a purpose-built architecture for AI workloads that integrates microturbines, absorption chillers (for low-energy cooling), dry coolers (for waterless operation), and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS).

• In October 2025, Capstone announced an 800-volt direct-current microturbine designed to interface directly with next-generation AI chips like NVIDIA’s Kyber and Rubin Ultra.

• The 800 VDC system eliminates AC/DC conversion stages, reducing copper mass by 45% and improving power efficiency by approximately 5%.

• These AI Power Blocks are designed to scale from small edge deployments to massive AI giga-campuses exceeding 1 GW.

Market Verticals and Applications

• The company’s solutions can be applied in a wide variety of environments and verticals, using different fuels.

• Energy Efficiency (CHP/CCHP): Captures waste heat to achieve total system efficiency of 85% to 90%, significantly lowering utility costs and emissions compared to separate boiler/chiller systems.

• Natural Resources: Providing power for oil, gas, and mining operations, often using flare gas or associated gas as fuel to reduce emissions and displace diesel.

• Renewable Energy: Operating on biogas from landfills and wastewater plants. The technology is resilient to variable-quality fuels, including those with high sulfur content.

• Bridge Power: Serving as a temporary solution for customers facing long utility interconnection queues, allowing them to operate while awaiting permanent grid infrastructure.

• Ports and Transportation: Supporting port electrification and EV charging with mobile, containerized 1 MW systems that require a small physical footprint and offer hydrogen fuel flexibility.

Go-to-Market and Service Model

• Global Distribution: A network of independent partners provides local engineering, installation, and long-term maintenance.

• Direct Sales Expansion: The company established Capstone West Territory (CWT) in August 2025 after acquiring the Cal Microturbine distributor territory.

• Energy as a Service (EaaS): Offering rentals, PPAs, and ESAs for customers who prefer non-ownership models or want to preserve capital.

• In-Sourcing Support: In March 2026, Capstone acquired the Distributor Support Services Corporation (CDSSC) to bring brand standards and global marketing fully in-house.

Geographic Markets

• North America: The largest market, currently driven by the convergence of AI power demand and grid constraints.

• Europe: Supported by an Integrated Remanufacturing Facility in the UK. Energy security needs to influence demand following the disruption of Russian gas.

• Latin America & Asia: Growth is seen in energy efficiency and natural resources, with increasing interest in rental models.

• Middle East & Africa: Primarily focused on flare gas-to-power applications to meet “Zero Routine Flaring” initiatives.

FY26 Financials

• Revenue grew 24% to $106.0M in fiscal 2026, a record year.

• Gross margin improved to 32%, reflecting better mix and operating leverage.

• Net income turned positive at $2.8M, versus a $7.2M loss in the prior year.

• Adjusted EBITDA doubled to $7.4M for FY26, showing continued operating improvement.

• Q4/26 adjusted EBITDA was $3.6, up from $2.8M in Q4/25, suggesting momentum carried into year-end.

• R&D spending was $3.6M in FY26, focused on hydrogen-capable combustion, higher-output turbines, and the 800-volt DC platform.

Stay tuned for our Quick Take discussing the financials and prospects

PaySign (PAYS)

• It was our third buy candidate for FY26

• Our latest update in May (with a strong buy under $6 issued), we just made that article free, so it’s accessible to all.

• We bought it at the end of February 2026 for $3.17 for our SA Investment Group and added in May at $5.65.

• The shares are no longer cheap, but not overvalued either. We would wait for a pullback, but the rally still has legs.

AEVEX (AVEX)

• Our Primer

• Our latest post (June 25)

• The company entered the Russell 2000 and won a $15M contract extension

• We think the shares can still be bought at $17, they did a financing at $27 earlier this month.

Usio (USIO)

• Our Primer (June 2026)

• Our latest article (June 24, 2026)

  

• We bought at $1.42 on June 2025 for our SA Investment Group, obviously a little early, but things are finally clicking into gear as we argued in our latest article linked above.

• While the shares are still not overvalued, some consolidation will kick in at some point, quite possibly soon, given the sudden share explosion.

ServiceNow (NOW)

• Our Primer

• We recently argued that this stock was due for a comeback after a brutal sell-off driven by AI angst, which seems overblown to us.

• At $100, it’s a buy for us. Compare the stock chart with the charts on company metrics; these can’t run in opposite directions for much longer.

For decades, Google has hidden a flight simulator game in the desktop app for Google Earth, and now everyone in the world can access it through a web browser.

Google Earth’s Secret Flight Simulator Is Now Free for Everyone on the Web - CNET

According to Subquadratic, it has developed a new kind of LLM, called SubQ, that is faster and cheaper and uses a lot less energy than any other model on the market. The company also claims that SubQ is able to process up to 12 times as much text at once than most other models, allowing it to carry out a range of data-heavy tasks, such as analyzing hundreds of documents or entire code bases. What’s more, Subquadratic says, SubQ does this while more or less matching the performance of the best models put out by Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic on key tasks like coding.

A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs | MIT Technology Review

Alexis Charlambakis, a fisherman in Crete, told the AFP news agency: “If one of these bites you, it will take your finger clean off. They are the destruction of the sea. “They leave nothing behind. If this wasn’t my boat, I’d quit this profession for good. The situation is dire ... we cannot survive.” Giannis Giankakis, another fisherman, said: “It’s an omnivorous fish that eats everything it encounters. Nothing seems to bother it, because it has no natural predators.” The economic impact is reportedly severe. It is estimated that in some parts of Greece, every fishing boat is sustaining an average of €8,500 (£7,300) in losses and damages each year.

Voracious pufferfish wreak havoc on the Mediterranean

Most skills worth having take a long time to acquire. Speaking a language fluently takes years. Playing an instrument to any meaningful level takes thousands of hours. Writing well, thinking clearly, managing people effectively — these are capabilities that compound across a lifetime without ever feeling finished. The investment required is real, the timeline is long, and the improvement is incremental. This list is about the other category: skills whose learning curve is front-loaded enough that a single focused session of 30 to 60 minutes produces a genuinely useful level of competence. Not mastery — mastery in almost any domain requires far more than an hour. But competence: the point at which the skill becomes practically available, at which you can do the thing well enough for the situation at hand rather than defaulting to helplessness or to paying someone else.

20 useful skills you can learn in under an hour

The tropical butterfly Heliconius hewitsoni lives for 348 days, nearly 25 times longer than close relatives. Scientists discovered these butterflies evolved anti-aging mechanisms beyond their pollen-based diet. Researchers said they hope studying these insects can reveal longevity insights applicable to human aging.

Some tropical butterfly species have unlocked an evolutionary way to live longer

Dunne, who was announced as an unpaid government adviser on youth justice this week, said many young men were “falling through the cracks of society”, attracted to extremism from both the left and right, predominantly due to a lack of community and belonging they feel in their lives. “They’re finding digital forms of belonging and there are people online who are exploiting that lack of community and providing community online. Which is why you have ‘incels’, which is why you have far-right nationalist groups and any other actors like that who create a space for belonging and identity that soothes the void young men feel in their lives,” he said.

Young men caught up in extremism ‘in search for belonging’, says UK youth violence campaigner

A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE provides evidence that reading comic books on physical paper helps the brain absorb and connect story details more easily than reading on a digital tablet. The findings suggest that physical books provide stable spatial and tactile cues that lower the brain’s workload when a reader tries to recall complex plot points later. This research offers fresh insights into how digital reading formats might subtly alter human reading comprehension and memory.

Neuroscientists discover previously unknown cognitive benefits of reading physical books

Some have noted that a stack of $100 bills amounting to $1 trillion would extend 679 miles high. The economist Steven Durlauf has observed that John D. Rockefeller’s wealth at one point equaled about 1.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product and that Mr. Musk’s wealth now amounts to at least twice as much, at more than 3 percent. It may not escape New York Knicks fans that even Jalen Brunson, who makes about $39 million per year, would need to play more than 25,000 seasons to accumulate that kind of money. But of all the numbers I’ve seen, the one that struck me most forcefully was a calculation in The Times that Mr. Musk’s net worth is five million times as large as that of the average American family. As a historian of political thought, I immediately thought of Plato, the first Western philosopher to really grapple with economic inequality. In his “Laws,” through the character of the Athenian Stranger, Plato contended that in a thriving republic, if anyone acquired more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens, he should donate the surplus to the city. Not five million times the wealth of the typical family — four times the wealth of the poorest.

Elon Musk Is Too Rich. We’ve Known That Since Plato.

Some public health threats make global headlines: Covid-19. Ebola. Famine. When these disasters hit, photographs and videos of people suffering and dying spur countries to respond, international bodies to cooperate and individuals to donate supplies and money. Yet one of the world’s deadliest threats gets almost no attention at all, because it is largely invisible to the public and mostly absent from media coverage: air pollution. Every day, billions of people are inhaling air that is shortening their lives and making them sicker with every breath. Every year, air pollution kills more than 8 million people worldwide. That’s more deaths than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. It hides in plain sight and strikes without mercy, leading to heart and lung disease, cancers and other deadly conditions.

Air pollution is a fixable problem – just look at how London and New York have cleaned up their acts

Local LLMs have become more capable than ever, and unsurprisingly, they’ve become part of more workflows than ever before. From coding and brainstorming to research and agentic automation, running models locally has enabled entire communities of professionals to get more out of their time, for zero cost.

I used Meta Llama 4, Qwen 3-Coder and Gemma 4 to develop a Python app, and only one model is worth keeping for developers

“I think we treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but have really underweighted the burden that they impose on society,” says Nan Ransohoff, the Stripe executive leading the initiative along with Charlie Petty, a venture capitalist who joined Stripe this year. On average, people spend 5% of their lifetime fighting a cold or the flu, according to Ransohoff. Despite that, drug companies put relatively little effort into preventing colds. Part of the problem is that the sniffles are caused by more than 200 different viruses, according to the American Lung Association, with rhinoviruses being the most common culprits. There are so many that it typically doesn’t pay to try to stop any one of them with a vaccine. “When pharma companies look at it, it’s not as attractive as other things they could work on,” says Ransohoff. “So it hasn’t attracted the resources.”

Stripe, Anthropic and OpenAI are backing an effort to stop respiratory infections | MIT Technology Review

For decades, Nike has sold shoes on the promise that they could help buyers to run faster and farther, jump higher, or even just look a little cooler. This year, the sportswear giant has made its most ambitious pledge yet: to alter minds. Its Mind shoe range has captured imaginations around the globe since hitting the market in January, rapidly selling out across repeated worldwide releases with buyers eager to get their hands on Nike’s first foray into “neuroscience-based footwear.”

Nike’s ‘mind-altering’ shoes are flying off shelves. Is this the era of ‘passive neuro-wearables’?

Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn’t collect the blood samples directly, they couldn’t make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions,” he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.

A Common Assumption About Aging May Be Wrong, Study Suggests

The key finding: Immigrant and native workers are not simply substitutes for each other. They are complements. When you remove one, you often undermine the other. In much of the economy, immigrants aren’t competing for jobs held by American-born workers; they make other jobs possible. Immigrants tend to take on more physically demanding tasks, which allows American-born workers to shift into communication-intensive, supervisory and coordination roles. Immigrants also help drive American innovation and patents, and they are about 80 percent more likely than American-born workers to start a business, which could then hire Americans.

ICE Is Killing Jobs for Americans, Not Creating Them

Mothers and babies in Madagascar become unintended casualties of a global fuel and food shortage caused by conflict in the Middle East

Thousands of miles from the Strait of Hormuz, the Iran war death toll is rising

Yea, that’s quite a selloff, from $40 to $15 in just over two weeks. What happened, and is now a good time to buy?

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Overview

• AEVEX Corp. is a defense technology prime contractor dedicated to supporting the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) strategy of the United States and its international partners.

• The company is positioned as a full defense-tech drone stack solution, offering a comprehensive platform that integrates hardware, software, services, and advanced manufacturing.

• Its core mission is to provide advanced autonomous systems for modern battlefield environments while shaping the future of global defense technology.

IPO and Market Valuation (April 2026)

• AEVEX made its public debut on April 19, 2026, pricing its IPO at $20 per share and raising $320M in gross proceeds.

• The stock surged 35% on its first day, closing at around $27 per share and bringing its market capitalization to approximately $3.7B.

• The company maintains a net cash position of approximately $60M, though its balance sheet includes $335M in mezzanine equity (non-controlling interest).

• AEVEX currently trades at a compelling relative valuation of roughly 4x forward run-rate sales, a significant discount to peers like AeroVironment (AVAV), which trades at approximately 6x sales.

Market Opportunity

• This doesn’t need much illustration; one only has to look at the wars in Ukraine and Iran to realize that drones are a dominant part of the future of warfare. Indeed, that future has already arrived.

• The US will have to catch up as well, as Iran has shown that cheap drones can be a match for expensive missiles, which can’t easily be replaced.

Product Portfolio

• Tactical Systems (75% of sales) includes a wide range of UAS across four groups, from small tactical drones to large strategic endurance drones for deep-strike and persistent ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance).

• Diverse Hardware: Beyond standard drones, the portfolio includes loitering munitions (kamikaze drones), unmanned surface vehicles (sea drones), launch systems, and counter-drone simulations.

• Software and Autonomy: The proprietary CompassX platform serves as the “brain” of the systems, enabling sensor fusion, targeting, and navigation in GPS-denied environments.

• Mobile Manufacturing (ForgeX): One of the company’s most distinct innovations is a containerized mobile drone factory that allows for in-theater manufacturing of systems directly in combat zones.

Financial Performance and Growth Trajectory

• FY25 revenue was up 10% to $433M, although gross profits dipped 15% due to start-up costs for a new platform.

• Revenue cadence grew significantly throughout 2025, scaling from $53M in Q1 to $157M in Q4.

• Preliminary Q1 2026 results show revenue between $200 million and $208 million, placing the company on an annualized run rate of $800 million.

• Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 2026 is projected at approximately $35 million, representing margins in the high-teens.

• The company’s funded backlog more than tripled in 2025 to over half a billion dollars, with $8.1B in total identified opportunities supporting its long-term growth.

• Analysts project a 46% sales CAGR and an 83% EBITDA CAGR, with free cash flow expected to turn positive in 2026.

Operations and Infrastructure

• Production Capacity: AEVEX operates a 100,000-square-foot facility capable of producing 1,000 units per month.

• Delivery History: The company has already delivered 6,200 systems, with total commitments exceeding 10,000 units through the end of 2026.

• Services Revenue: Additional revenue streams are generated through training, analysis, operational support, and the provision of spare parts.

Risks

• A major risk factor is the company’s heavy reliance on the US government, which accounts for 80% of its sales.

• Growth is highly sensitive to military spending and the rapid pace of innovation emerging from active conflict zones like Ukraine.

• Potential risks include the ability to scale margins favorably, higher-than-anticipated capital expenditures, and the potential conversion of mezzanine equity into common shares.

Stay tuned for our article with the latest information, financials and prospects

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Ukraine has used AI-powered “terminator” drones to kill Russian soldiers without human oversight for the first time, a senior military general has claimed. Alexander Kokhanovskyy, a senior figure in Ukraine’s defence industry, said that AI-controlled drones were used on the frontline in a one-off test. It has not yet been implemented more widely after the test took place two years ago, he told the New Scientist. The quadcopter drones are programmed to fly towards the front line and then engage an AI model - named “terminator mode” - which searches for and intercepts targets. “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” Mr Kokhanovskyy told the magazine.

Ukraine-Russia war latest: Kyiv used AI-controlled ‘terminator drones’ to kill Russian soldiers for first time | The Independent

Researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) collaborated with Google to recycle “old” Pixel smartphones and give them a second life as a low-cost data center.

Researchers recycle old phones and cluster them into ‘computing platforms’ that operate as a low-cost data center — says processors on modern smartphones deliver higher single-core performance than comparable multicore servers | Tom’s Hardware

The numbers are hard to ignore. More than 2.4 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat globally, and according to the WHO and WMO, worker productivity drops by 2 to 3 percent for every degree above 20°C. In 2023 alone, high temperatures contributed to an estimated 28,000 workplace injuries in the United States. Yet very little of this conversation gets directed at the people who feel it most: those working outdoors, in the sun, in gear that was never designed to help them stay cool. That’s what makes Teron°, a cooling workwear concept by German design graduate Jorin Frenzel, feel so refreshingly grounded. Frenzel, who completed his Bachelor of Arts in Product Design at Hochschule Hannover in early 2025, didn’t reach for a tech-heavy solution. No battery packs, no wearable air conditioning units, no app to pair it with. He went back to basics: evaporation.

No Battery, No Tech: A Grad Just Solved Outdoor Worker Heat Stress

We might believe we are in control of what we choose to eat, but our senses are constantly manipulating what we buy and how much we consume. Here’s how to turn them to your advantage.

Seven ways to trick yourself into eating better

It’s 2031 and the US and China are about to tear Europe into pieces. The US ploughed vast sums into datacentres and the EU did not. China built robots and Europe did not. American companies “restructured” their workflows around AI and fired people, while EU workers went on long lunch breaks and handed over administrative tasks to the AI model Claude. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Europe’s economy is a shambles because it does not have its own AI. Populism is surging, the euro is wobbling, cyber-attacks are shredding EU businesses.

A viral doomsday scenario aims to shake Europe out of its AI complacency

BREAKING: Iran says it will close Strait of Hormuz after alleged ceasefire breaches Tehran has claimed it will close the Strait of Hormuz to vessel traffic, citing alleged violations of a truce agreement by the US and Israel. Iran’s top joint military command, ​Khatam al-Anbiya Central ‌Headquarters, said the closure was the “first step” in response to what it described as breaches of commitments and warned that further measures would be taken if “aggression” continued.

Iran-US war latest: Tehran says it is closing Strait of Hormuz days after Trump deal due to ‘ceasefire violations’

A Russian MP has demanded that Vladimir Putin deliver a plan to end the war in Ukraine as he berated the Kremlin’s “ineffective leadership”. In a lengthy tirade, Vyacheslav Markhayev listed corruption scandals, oligarchy, losses of the “most active and reproductively capable segment of the population” and Ukrainian drone strikes among the ills plaguing wartime Russia. In March, Ilya Remeslo, formerly a staunch Kremlin loyalist, turned against Putin, branding the Russian president “a war criminal and a thief”, and calling for him to be put on trial.

Russian MP warns Putin: We’re on the brink of social collapse

At the same time, most Americans live in single-family homes, and one of the biggest reasons only about 9 percent of them have solar panels is the price tag. The United States has eye-watering rooftop solar costs compared with those in the rest of the world. A standard 7-kilowatt rooftop solar system that costs $28,000 to install in the United States would cost only $4,000 in Australia or $10,000 in Germany, according to the research and advocacy group Permit Power.

The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America

To say the least, it’s perilous to build a product, invest in a company, or even just try to leverage AI for productivity gains in an environment in which the government might at any time take a wrecking ball to your plans. America and its tech companies have many factors in their favor when it comes to leading the way in AI development. As of now, the White House is not one of them.

This Is How America Loses the AI Race

Tehran had already pledged 10 years ago in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action not to seek nuclear weapons. No one should trust the Iranians, but before Trump unilaterally canceled the agreement in his first term, the JCPOA seemed to be working. More to the point, at the time Trump chose to go to war, Iran was nowhere near getting a bomb, and certainly not within weeks of a weapon, as Trump asserted.

Trump Parties While America Surrenders

When Mythos first entered limited release, there was widespread debate whether its power came from the model or the harness. With Mythos demonstrating that it was possible, the open-source community scrambled to build harnesses that could steer other AI models towards similar capabilities. They largely succeeded. For example, a Prague company was able to replicate Anthropic’s few verifiable cybersecurity capabilities with a much smaller and cheaper model – and a more sophisticated harness. Last week, a group showed that multiple cheaper models harnessed in concert matches Fable’s performance.

The Anthropic ‘Fable’ saga proves: we have opened the AI Pandora’s box. What now? | Bruce Schneier | The Guardian

Yesterday, the regime’s state media reported that a toll was to be charged on the Strait of Hormuz, later rebranding it an “environmental tax” (a nod to Greta Thunberg, maybe). The demand came at the eleventh-hour – classic Iranian tactics – and was reportedly waved through by a desperate US. In truth, Washington has been desperate for some time. Yesterday, we learnt that during the war, the US sordidly approved a secret deal between the jihadi states of Qatar and Iran which saw billions of dollars paid to Tehran in exchange for free passage for Qatari ships through Hormuz.

JD Vance has just confirmed our worst fears about Trump’s Iran deal

US intelligence agencies have recently assessed that Iran can effectively shut down access to the Strait of Hormuz at will from now on, meaning the country’s regime has acquired a powerful new ability to hurt the global economy as a result of the war, according to three sources familiar with the findings.

“We have now handed Iran de facto control over the strait – a weapon more powerful than any nuke,” one of the sources familiar with the US intelligence assessments told CNN, emphasizing how the war has fundamentally altered Tehran’s thinking about leveraging similar tactics in the future.

US intel assesses Iran can shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will from now on

And the suggestion that this is about catering to the political needs of the Iranians certainly doesn’t sound like the US is negotiating from a position of strength and imposing its will. Then there was Trump on Wednesday at the G7, where he said, remarkably, that the agreement he made was necessary to avert a “worldwide depression.” “The alternative would be a worldwide depression,” he said. “You know, the stupid people want to have a worldwide depression. And they’re stupid people.” Trump added: “You can only go so far. You drive somebody into the ground, a lot of bad things happen. Number one, the strait would never open, because they don’t like floating billion-dollar ships up and down the strait when there are rockets flying over them and mines all over the place. The strait … wouldn’t be open for a long time.”

On Iran, Trump is committing the cardinal sin from the ‘Art of the Deal’

There’s a joke in the beaver science community “that if you’ve got a problem, there’s a beaver for that,” Fairfax said. It’s an oversimplification, she acknowledged, but beavers “really do provide a staggering number of ecosystem services.” So far, the London initiative has been a success. By the beavers’ second winter at the site, there was no flooding in the target area for the first time in a decade, McCormack said. The beavers’ work has also created a mosaic of different habitats, encouraging other animals to flock to the site, including birds, butterflies, bats and even freshwater shrimp and fish.

Beaver rewilding: This city had a flooding problem, so it turned to the world’s second largest rodent for help | CNN

If you pay for ChatGPT or Claude and you genuinely lean on it by spending your day coding, running agents or even churning through long research sessions, then you're getting one of the best deals in tech right now. And yet, you're also the reason the deal won't last. At least that's the uncomfortable takeaway from a new analysis by research firm SemiAnalysis, which bought every paid tier from OpenAI and Anthropic and deliberately ran them into the ground. The team pushed each plan with long, agent-style coding tasks until it hit the weekly usage cap, then worked out what all those tokens would have cost at standard pay-as-you-go API rates. The gap between what you pay and what you get turned out to be enormous.

‘The math doesn’t work’: Why your $200 AI subscription is secretly worth thousands | Tom’s Guide

ASML has pushed back on Lutnick's suggestion, explaining that none of these tools — which are the size of a school bus, are manufactured in limited quantities, and require constant upkeep from ASML employees — are in China, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

US Tells ASML It’s Concerned China May Have Top Chip Tool

The good news: The Strait of Hormuz is open again, after Iran and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding this week. The bad news: It may be too late. Oil hasn’t been coming out of the Middle East for nearly four months. All told, the world lost 1.15 billion barrels of oil supply during the war, according to analytics firm Kpler. That has left the oil market in a precarious state, and it’s rapidly approaching a breaking point. The International Energy Administration’s strategic petroleum reserves are at their lowest levels since 1990. The American emergency reserve is at a 43-year low. And commercial inventories have hit operational stress levels. “You want to see bedlam?” President Donald Trump said at the G7 in Versailles Wednesday. “We run out of reserves in about four weeks.” Trump is right. But reopening the strait this week may not get oil out of the Persian Gulf fast enough to prevent crude inventories from effectively running to empty. Oil prices may have to go higher again.

More than 1 billion barrels of oil have gone missing

Iran sought to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz by saying that ships need its permission and mandatory insurance in order to cross, even as the US said that 20 ships had quietly sailed through overnight via a route along Oman's coast.

Iran Floats ‘Insurance Fees’ and Asserts Control Over Hormuz

The survey on which you report (Only one in 10 Europeans now see US as an ally, survey suggests, 10 June) is wonderfully in line with the view of US citizens themselves, given the recent poll finding that only 2% of them trust the US government “just about always”, and only 15% trust it “most of the time” – a shrivelled fraction of the 73% who in 1958 said they trusted it always or most of the time, according to the Pew Research Center. We can rest easy knowing that Europeans and Americans (never mind their governments) remain natural allies with plenty to agree about. Never make the mistake of conflating the people of a country or civilisation with those who govern it. This goes for Washington, Brussels, London, Moscow, Beijing, Kinshasa, you name it.

At last, something Europeans and Americans can agree upon | Trump administration | The Guardian

The deal not only puts off the question of the disposal of Iran’s near bomb-grade uranium to future negotiations — negotiations in which the Trump administration has already given up its military leverage — but also, most amazingly, it clearly leaves open the possibility that Iran will be able to charge a toll in the future to any ships that want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Just read the cease-fire agreement: Upon the signing of this memorandum of understanding, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only …” Editors’ Picks Pushing Forward, Onstage and Off At Art Basel, a Nervy, Make-or-Break Mood The Glitchy, Gloppy Look of Now After billions of dollars of bombs dropped on Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner won from Tehran 60 days of toll-free passage through Hormuz.

Opinion | Trump Put His Own Interests Above All in the Iran Deal - The New York Times

The secret sauce is Longsys's recently unveiled custom SPU and iSA configuration that offers the ability to compress data in real time, a feat that the company says allows it to fit as much as twice the amount of data in storage drives of up to 128GB, leveraging a caching layer that reduces DRAM requirements considerably. The approach involves offloading experts not in active use to a large, fast storage buffer that the AI chip can then reintroduce them from if needed.

This tiny AMD PC just ran a massive 397B AI Model that required a server room full of GPUs a year ago | TechRadar

A Taiwanese company called Skymizer has unveiled a PCIe AI accelerator that challenges both AMD and Nvidia using surprisingly old technology. The HTX301 card can run language models with up to 700 billion parameters on a single device while consuming only 240 watts of power. The card achieves this feat using older 28-nanometer chips and standard LPDDR4 and LPDDR5 memory instead of expensive HBM or GDDR solutions.

Taiwanese startup shocks AI industry with low-power accelerator using outdated chips and massive 700 billion parameter support | TechRadar

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