Europe’s housing crisis is deepening. High building costs, tight regulations, and labour shortages have choked the supply of affordable homes. As cities swell with new arrivals and construction workers retire en masse, the gap between supply and demand is only widening. Endless solutions have been proposed. Mass housing projects, revamping the planning system, modular buildings, pre-fabricated materials, rent controls, and restrictions on corporate acquisitions of homes have all been explored with mixed success. But the shortage of affordable housing has only grown. Dutch startup Monumental has pitched another fix: automation. The company is developing a suite of autonomous, electric robots…

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IBM and the European Space Agency (ESA) today launched TerraMind, a new open-source AI model with an “intuitive” understanding of Earth. According to the research team, the system is the best-performing AI model for Earth observation. In an ESA-led evaluation, TerraMind beat 12 leading AI models on the PANGAEA benchmark — a community standard for Earth observation. The model excelled at various real-world tasks, including land cover classification, change detection, and multi-sensor analysis. On average, it outperformed other models by 8% or more. “To me, what sets TerraMind apart is its ability to go beyond simply processing earth observations with…

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As the Trump administration ramps up what academics call a  “war on science,” US researchers are increasingly looking to Europe for new opportunities — which could be good news for the continent’s tech sectors. France, in particular, is positioning itself as a safe haven for scientists. In a not-so-subtle appeal to disaffected US talent on Friday, the country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, called on researchers to “choose France, choose Europe” for their next job. In a post on X, he promoted a new platform that aims to make it easier for international scientists to conduct research in the country.  “Here in…

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Five flourishing French scaleups have made it into TECH5 — the “Champions League of Technology.” The quintet will now compete for the title of top scaleup in Europe. The contest concludes on June 19-20, when the TECH5 champion will be announced on the main stage of TNW Conference. But first, the contenders have to win a regional crown. For the French challengers, that’s no easy task.  The country’s tech sector has been going through a historic boom. Over the past decade, the startup scene has seen the most dramatic growth of any European country, with investments surging nearly 1000% to…

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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope say they have detected the “strongest evidence yet” that life exists outside our solar system.   Scientists at the University of Cambridge found signs of the gases dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. On Earth, these gases are only produced by living organisms like phytoplankton, suggesting that K2-18b may also support life.  Located 124 light years away, K2-18b is almost three times the size of Earth and inhabits a region in space where temperatures might allow liquid water. This has long made the exoplanet a top candidate…

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