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Dan Ives On Why 2026 Is The Start Of Tesla’s $3 Trillion AI Chapter

Tesla is poised to reach a $3 trillion valuation by 2026, driven by its advancements in AI, autonomous vehicles, and robotics, which are expected to outweigh its challenges in EV sales and regulatory pressures ## Questions to inspire discussion.

Autonomous Driving Deployment Timeline.

🚕 Q: What are Tesla’s specific robotaxi deployment targets for 2026?

A: Tesla aims to launch robotaxis without safety drivers in 30 cities by 2026 while significantly expanding geo-fenced areas in cities like Austin, leveraging its 10 million cars on the road to scale autonomy faster than competitors through superior data collection advantage.

🎯 Q: What evidence do investors need to see in 2026 to validate Tesla’s autonomous strategy?

A: Investors must see city-by-city proof of autonomous accuracy, achievement of true level 5 autonomy, measurable regulatory progress, and rapid scaling capability across multiple markets to confirm the long-term bullish thesis.

Continue reading “Dan Ives On Why 2026 Is The Start Of Tesla’s Trillion AI Chapter” | >

Redesigned carbon molecules boost battery safety, durability and power

Research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society demonstrates a new way to make carbon-based battery materials much safer, longer lasting, and more powerful by fundamentally redesigning how fullerene molecules are connected.

Today’s lithium-ion batteries rely mainly on graphite, which limits fast-charging speed and poses safety risks due to lithium plating. These research findings mean progress toward safer electric vehicles, longer-lasting consumer electronics, and more reliable renewable-energy storage.

When solar radiation grounds planes

In late November, airlines around the world were told to urgently ground planes within their Airbus A320 fleets. Investigators had found that intense bursts of solar radiation could corrupt data inside a flight-control computer, potentially causing an aircraft to pitch unexpectedly. Pitch is the movement of the aircraft nose upward or downward.

Approximately 6,000 aircraft from the A320 family, about half of all A320s flying globally, needed immediate software changes before they could carry passengers again.

In Australia, Jetstar canceled around 90 flights and disrupted travel for more than 15,000 passengers, while engineers worked through the night to install the fix.

Nissan says thousands of customers exposed in Red Hat breach

Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. (Nissan) has confirmed that information of thousands of its customers has been compromised after the data breach at Red Hat in September.

The Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Yokohama, Japan, produces more than 3.2 million cars a year. The company employs 120,000 people and has a strong presence in Japan, North America, Europe, and Asia.

In an announcement yesterday, Nissan informed that it was indirectly impacted by a security breach incident at the U.S.-based enterprise software company Red Hat.

Precessing magnetic jet engine model reveals power source of rare ‘heartbeat’ gamma-ray burst

Prof. An Tao from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed a novel “precessing magnetic jet engine” model to explain the peculiar gamma-ray burst (GRB) 250702B, a rare cosmic explosion discovered on July 2, 2025.

This GRB exhibited periodic flares approximately every 47 minutes over more than three hours. The new model elucidates the physical origin of this “heartbeat” and resolves the mysteries surrounding its extremely hard spectrum and apparent excess energy. Results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on December 2.

GRB 250702B was detected by high-energy observatories, including the Fermi satellite and Konus-Wind. Its uniqueness lies in its temporal structure. The entire burst lasted approximately 3.2 hours and included three distinct, intense gamma-ray pulses with intervals that were integer multiples of a base period of about 2,825 seconds. Interestingly, approximately one day prior to this event, China’s “Einstein Probe” satellite detected a softer X-ray burst at the same location, acting as a precursor to the main event. This combination of “early warm-up plus hour-scale heartbeat” is extremely rare in GRB observations.

Russia-Linked Hackers Use Microsoft 365 Device Code Phishing for Account Takeovers

A suspected Russia-aligned group has been attributed to a phishing campaign that employs device code authentication workflows to steal victims’ Microsoft 365 credentials and conduct account takeover attacks.

The activity, ongoing since September 2025, is being tracked by Proofpoint under the moniker UNK_AcademicFlare.

The attacks involve using compromised email addresses belonging to government and military organizations to strike entities within government, think tanks, higher education, and transportation sectors in the U.S. and Europe.

Batteries lose charge when they ‘breathe’: Understanding deterioration is a step toward longer-lasting batteries

Researchers have identified a key reason why the batteries used to power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles deteriorate over time, a critical step toward building faster, more reliable and longer-lasting batteries.

The research team from The University of Texas at Austin, Northeastern University, Stanford University and Argonne National Laboratory found that every cycle of charge and discharge causes batteries to expand and contract, similar to human breathing. This action causes battery components to warp just a tiny amount, putting strain on the battery and weakening it over time. This phenomenon, known as chemomechanical degradation, leads to reduced performance and lifespan.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

Putting the squeeze on dendrites: New strategy addresses persistent problem in next-generation solid-state batteries

New research by Brown University engineers identifies a simple strategy for combating a major stumbling block in the development of next-generation solid-state lithium batteries.

Solid-state batteries are considered the next frontier in energy storage, particularly for electric vehicles. Compared to current liquid electrolyte batteries, solid-state batteries have the potential for faster charging, longer range and safer operation due to decreased flammability. But there’s been a consistent problem holding back their commercialization: lithium dendrites.

Dendrites are filaments of lithium metal that can grow inside a battery’s electrolyte (the part of the battery that separates the anode from the cathode) during charging at high current. When they grow across the electrolyte, dendrites cause circuits between the battery’s anode and cathode, which destroy the battery. So while solid electrolytes can—in theory—enable faster charging than liquid electrolytes, the dendrite problem is one of the primary limitations that has to date prevented them from reaching that potential.

‘AI advisor’ helps self-driving labs share control in creation of next-generation materials

“Self-driving” or “autonomous” labs are an emerging technology in which artificial intelligence guides the discovery process, helping design experiments or perfecting decision strategies.

While these labs have generated heated debate about whether humans or machines should lead scientific research, a new paper from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) has proposed a novel answer: Both.

In the paper published in Nature Chemical Engineering, the team led by UChicago PME Asst. Prof. Jie Xu, who has a joint appointment at Argonne, outlined an “AI advisor” model that helps humans and machines share the driver’s seat in self-driving labs.

The Universal Law Behind Market Price Swings

Analysis of a large dataset from the Tokyo Stock Exchange validates a universal power law relating the price of a traded stock to the traded volume.

One often hears that economics is fundamentally different from physics because human behavior is unpredictable and the economic world is constantly changing, making genuine “laws” impossible to establish. In this view, markets are never in a stable state where immutable laws could take hold. I beg to differ. The motion of particles is also unpredictable, and many physical systems operate far from equilibrium. Yet, as Phil Anderson argued in a seminal paper [1], universal laws can still emerge at the macroscale from the aggregation of widely diverse microscopic behaviors. Examples include not only crowds in stadiums or cars on highways but also economic agents in markets.

Now Yuki Sato and Kiyoshi Kanazawa of Kyoto University in Japan have provided compelling evidence that one such universal law governs financial markets. Using an unprecedentedly detailed dataset from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, they found that a single mathematical law describes how the price of every traded stock responds to trading volume [2] (Fig. 1). The result is a striking validation of physics-inspired approaches to social sciences, and it might have far-reaching implications for how we understand market dynamics.

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