BYD breakthrough to cut EV charging time to 5 minutes, Telegram founder returns to Dubai
Electric vehicle (EV) owners could soon charge their cars in the same time it takes to fill up a petrol tank after an apparent breakthrough by BYD, a Chinese rival to Tesla. China’s largest EV maker has unveiled a new fast-charging system that it claims can provide a full charge for a car battery within five to eight minutes. Wang Chuanfu, the BYD chairman and founder, said the new technology would address “users’ anxiety over charging” and was an important step in “our pursuit is to make the charging time for EVs as short as the refuelling time for fuel vehicles”. Telegraph
Some may use yoga mats and virtual reality headsets to mentally escape the daily grind but now statisticians are using them to chart the rising cost of living. Both items have made their way into the basket of goods and services used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to calculate inflation. The basket contains 752 items. The ONS collects the costs of these products and services across many different retailers to come up with the monthly inflation figures. BBC
Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder and chief executive of Telegram, has returned to Dubai after authorities allowed him to leave France, where he is under investigation over criminal activity on the messaging app. The billionaire, 40, was arrested at Le Bourget airport outside Paris last August. He was subsequently placed under formal investigation and banned from leaving the country, where he holds citizenship. The Guardian
Two astronauts stuck in space for more than nine months have left the International Space Station on their 17-hour journey back to Earth. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams blasted off to the ISS on 5 June, and were meant to be up there for just eight days. They were testing out Boeing’s long-awaited Starliner, a ship designed to rival SpaceX’s Crew Dragon that is currently used to ferry astronauts into space. Sky News
I’ve spent plenty of time playing with ChatGPT’s Deep Research tool and getting long and complex reports on every passing notion that sparks my curiosity. Naturally, Google piqued my interest by making Gemini’s identically named and broadly similar Deep Research feature. As the name states, Deep Research is Google Gemini’s AI-powered research assistant. Rather than the usual search and response of the standard Gemini model, it puts together a full report, including citations from sources that it analyzes and creates a tidy package from. Tech Radar
Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge is coming next month, and it will allegedly be offered in three colorways, according to a new rumor. These will be called Titanium Icyblue, Titanium Silver, and Titanium Jetblack. The names strongly imply that the phone’s frame will be made from titanium, just like the S25 Ultra‘s. The S25 Edge will apparently be offered in Europe in two versions, both with 12GB of RAM. The 256GB iteration is said to cost between €1,200 and €1,300, while the 512GB model will go for between €1,300 and €1,400. GSM Arena
Readers may recall that mobile operator O2 (Virgin Media) integrated Hiya’s new AI-powered scam detection service (‘Call Defence’) to help combat fraud and nuisance calls last November 2024 (here). Since then, more than 150 million “suspected” scam and spam calls have been flagged by the new technology, recently rising to more than 50m per month. The service, which O2 launched for its customers “at no extra cost“, is clearly helping to protect consumers by using Adaptive AI to analyse call number behaviour in real-time. ISPreview
