A new artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by the Chinese company behind TikTok rocked Hollywood this week - not just because of what it can do, but what it could mean for creative industries. Created by tech giant ByteDance, Seedance 2.0 can generate cinema-quality video, complete with sound effects and dialogue, from just a few written prompts. Many of the clips said to have been made using Seedance, and featuring popular characters like Spider-Man and Deadpool, went viral. What is Seedance - and why the stir? Seedance was launched to little fanfare in June 2025 but it is the second version that came eight months later that has caused a major stir.

On TikTok, Chinese manufacturers are advertising signal-blocking weapons with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising. "Pew, pew, pew!" a woman wearing sneakers and high-waisted pink trousers says cheerfully in a video uploaded to TikTok. She is standing on what appears to be an industrial rooftop while demonstrating how to use a black device resembling an oversized laser tag gun. "Jamming gun, good," she adds, flashing a thumbs up. These days, nearly any product imaginable is available for purchase on TikTok straight from Chinese factories, ranging from industrial chemicals to mystical crystals and custom pilates reformers.

An explosion at a fireworks shop in central China's Hubei province has killed at least 12 people, state media reported, marking the second deadly blast linked to fireworks as the country celebrates the Lunar New Year . The explosion tore through the shop in Xiangyang on Wednesday afternoon. Officials said five children and seven adults died in the explosion. The victims included the shop owner and customers who had been buying fireworks for holiday celebrations. Some had travelled from other areas to visit relatives during the festive period .

Should we be impressed or worried by China's humanoid robot display? - video China's dancing robots: how worried should we be? Dancing humanoid robots took centre stage on Monday during the annual China Media Group's Spring Festival Gala, China's most-watched official television broadcast. They lunged and backflipped (landing on their knees), they spun around and jumped. The display was impressive, but prompted some to wonder: if robots can now dance and perform martial arts, what else can they do? Experts have mixed opinions, with some saying the robots had limitations and that the display should be viewed through a lens of state propaganda.

China's annual gala on Lunar New Year's Eve has showcased Beijing's giant leap in technology as humanoid robots took centre stage to perform a joint martial arts routine featuring several firsts. China's Spring Festival Gala, which aired on Monday on state broadcaster CGTN, has gone viral, drawing nearly half a million views on YouTube. The performance marked a stark contrast with last year's show, when robots twirled handkerchiefs and performed simple movements. The first robots to appear were Noetix's Bumi models, who performed a comedy sketch. Unitree's robots later exhibited martial arts alongside child artists, including backflips and trampoline jumps, followed by Magiclab's humanoids in a musical segment.

Across the world, unsuspecting people are unwittingly becoming caught up in a new and growing type of organized criminal enterprise: vehicle transport fraud and theft. Crooks use email phishing, fraudulent paperwork, and other tactics to impersonate legitimate transport companies and get hired to deliver a luxury vehicle. They divert the shipment away from its intended destination before using a mix of technology, computer skills, and old-school techniques to erase traces of the vehicle's original ownership and registration. In some cases, the car has been resold or is out of the country by the time the rightful owner even realizes it's missing. The nationwide epidemic of vehicle transport fraud and theft has remained under the radar, even as it's rocked the industry over the past two years. Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem.

Recently, commonsense reasoning in text generation has attracted much attention. Generative commonsense reasoning is the task that requires machines, given a group of keywords, to compose a single coherent sentence with commonsense plausibility. While existing datasets targeting generative commonsense reasoning focus on everyday scenarios, it is unclear how well machines reason under specific geographical and temporal contexts.

Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. In April 2024, a mysterious someone using the online handles "Waifu" and "Judische" began posting death threats on Telegram and Discord channels aimed at a cybersecurity researcher named Allison Nixon. These anonymous personas targeted Nixon because she had become a formidable threat: As chief research officer at the cyber investigations firm Unit 221B, named after Sherlock Holmes's apartment, she had built a career tracking cybercriminals and helping get them arrested. Though she'd done this work for more than a decade, Nixon couldn't understand why the person behind the accounts was suddenly threatening her. And although she had taken an interest in the Waifu persona in years past for crimes he boasted about committing, he hadn't been on her radar for a while when the threats began, because she was tracking other targets. Now Nixon resolved to unmask Waifu/Judische and others responsible for the death threats--and take them down for crimes they admitted to committing.

India plans AI'data city' on staggering scale Information technology minister for India's Andhra Pradesh state, Nara Lokesh, speaks during an interview in New Delhi in January. New Delhi - As India races to narrow the artificial intelligence gap with the United States and China, it is planning a vast new data city to power digital growth on a staggering scale, the man spearheading the project says. The AI revolution is here, no second thoughts about it, said Nara Lokesh, information technology minister for Andhra Pradesh state, which is positioning the city of Visakhapatnam as a cornerstone of India's AI push. And as a nation ... we have taken a stand that we've got to embrace it, he said ahead of an international AI summit this week in New Delhi. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

China builds regulatory framework for low-altitude economy as AutoFlight unveils Matrix flying car with passenger flights planned by 2026. Officials expect baseline rules by 2027.