HTS magnets are costly but important components in any magnetic confinement reactor, one of the two main ways startups are attempting to harness fusion power for commercial purposes. In magnetic confinement reactors, powerful magnetic fields contain and compress plasma, helping to heat the particles until the fuel can fuse and release large amounts of energy. Thea's reactor is based on a design known as a stellarator. Stellarators look like inner tubes that have been twisted and squeezed in ways that help it confine the plasma more effectively. Most stellarators use magnets that are built to mimic those twists and turns, which makes them expensive to manufacture. To minimize manufacturing costs, Thea uses fewer variants. The 12 large magnets that do the heavy lifting are made from four different templates, and the more than 300 smaller magnets used to fine tune the plasma are all identical. They're arrayed around the periphery of the reactor, similar to how pixels are distributed across a computer display....

Some people view the world, at least major parts of it, as a zero sum game where one person gains only to the extent that another loses. Starting with this point of view, it is natural enough to see all disagreements as questions of which side you are on. Do you favor workers or employers, landlords or tenants' The alternative is to see disagreements as not only about how to divide up the pie but about how to change its size. It then becomes not only a question of us vs them but also of our arguments vs their arguments, with some hope that one set of arguments will eventually persuade almost everyone. These different viewpoints are reflected, in political rhetoric and political thinking, in the difference between relative and absolute measures. If we define the poor as the bottom ten percent of the income distribution we can be confident that they will always be with us. If we define the poor by the real income of the tenth percentile as of the US in1900 the problem of poverty has been solved for developed countries, since the number of people in them with incomes that low is now close to zero....

Money has evolved into far more than the cash in your wallet or your bank account. And at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, we're devoting an entire stage to that progression. The brand-new Smart Money Stage will be where fintech, payments, and AI collide. From October 13'15 in San Francisco's Moscone Center, you can join leaders from Circle, Robinhood, American Express, Plaid, Airwallex, and many more as they dig into the details of how money is changing. We're talking about how stablecoins and instant payments are reshaping money movement, the ways in which AI agents are being entrusted (or not) with financial decisions, and what it takes to create regulated financial infrastructure built for a global market. We're closing in on the end of our current pricing window ' your chance to save on the best Disrupt prices is ending soon ' so check out our ticket options right here. And if you still need some convincing, let's dive into the Smart Money Stage's programming: Stablecoins and instant payments are changing how money moves around the world. This session looks at how these new payment systems compare to traditional banking infrastructure, where FedNow and private networks fit in, and how regulatory and market changes could shape the future of payments. Hear where these new systems are gaining traction, and which challenges remain....

Microsoft on Monday launched its first cybersecurity-specialized model alongside a new AI cybersecurity platform at a small event in San Francisco, taking a big swipe at major players in the space ' namely Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. The company describes MAI-Cyber-1-Flash as a model that's built 'to find challenging vulnerabilities in complex codebases.' The model is built to animate MDASH, Microsoft's harness dedicated to software vulnerability identification and remediation. The new security platform is dubbed Perception, and it's designed to deploy teams of agents to assist with and automate various security workflows, including identifying and remediating bugs. The platform can also integrate with MDASH. 'We're very very excited to announce our results,' said Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind and current CEO of Microsoft AI. 'We have MAI-1 Cyber Flash binded [sic] with GPT 5.4 inside of the MDASH harness ' which beats out Gemini, GPT 5.5 Cyber, GPT 5.6 Sol, and Mythos 5 on Cyber Gym, which is the primary benchmark that we all use. The golden benchmark.'...