As the data center backlash grows, support is growing for server factories and the hundreds of jobs they're expected to bring. Last month, Pamela Griffin and two other residents of Taylor, Texas, took to the lectern at a city council meeting to object to a data center project. But later, they sat back as council members discussed a proposed tech factory. Griffin didn't speak up against that development. A similar contrast is repeating in communities across the US.

A labour rights organisation claims it has found evidence of worker exploitation in a Chinese factory that makes the viral Labubu dolls. China Labor Watch (CLW), a US-based non-governmental organisation, alleges that its investigation found that one of Pop Mart's suppliers made employees work excessive overtime shifts, sign blank or incomplete contracts and did not give them paid leave. The furry Labubu dolls have surged in popularity around the world in recent years and are best known for selling toys in blind boxes, which hide its content from buyers until it is opened. Pop Mart told the BBC that it is investigating the claims. The Beijing-based toy retailer said it appreciated the details from the review and that it will firmly require companies making its toys to correct their practices if the allegations are found to be true.

Where Are All the New Cars? New cars were scant at CES this year, largely because the center of gravity for the auto world has moved--technologically and geographically--to China. This robotaxi built by Uber, Lucid, and Nuro was one of the few cars announced at CES, and it's not even one you can buy. Some years ago now, a very senior Mercedes executive in the US confided in me that CES was "the second-most important car show in the world, after Detroit." Before the auto world's full-on EV boom, this was quite the thing to admit--shocking, in fact--but it marked the subsequent carmaker takeover of the world's largest tech show. This year in Las Vegas, however, the cars were almost nowhere to be seen.

I walked literal miles to find what's here. Recyclables in the trash is my metaphor here. Every third booth at CES showed off some new AI product or other. If you wanted to find a robotic lawn mower, throw a rock. Humanoid robots, smart locks and super thin TVs were everywhere.

This year, the right-to-repair movement got a boost from--surprisingly--big tech, tariffs, and economic downturn. It has been a big year for the right to repair, the movement of advocates pushing for people to be able to fix their own electronics and equipment without manufacturer approval. The issue has gathered broad support from technologists, farmers, military leaders, and politicians on both sides of the aisle. It is popular with just about everyone--except the companies who stand to gain if the parts, instructions, and tools necessary to fix their products remain under lock and key. Three US states passed right-to-repair laws this year, including in heavily Republican states like Texas where the measure received a unanimous vote in both the House and Senate.

Initial participants in the new Apple Manufacturing Academy tell WIRED that the tech giant's surprising frankness and hands-on support are already benefiting their bottom lines. An instructor at the Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit demonstrates how an iPhone and optical inspection software can be used to photograph and automatically identify an issue with a part. About 10 Apple employees spent some of their valuable hours over recent months on a project that might seem unusual for the tech giant: customizing an open source AI tool for ImageTek, a small manufacturer in Springfield, Vermont whose lines of business include printing millions of labels for food packaging. The Apple engineers developed a computer vision system to automatically identify color errors, and on one run it picked up bacon labels with a far-too-pinkish beige before they got shipped, according to Marji Smith, ImageTek's president. She says the timely catch helped ImageTek from losing a crucial customer.

The US firm behind the Roomba smart vacuum cleaner, iRobot, has filed for bankruptcy protection after facing competition from Chinese rivals and being hit by tariffs. Under the so-called pre-packaged Chapter 11 process, the main manufacturer of its devices, Shenzhen-based Picea Robotics, will take ownership of the firm. The tough commercial landscape had forced iRobot to cut its prices and make major investments in new technology, according to documents filed on Sunday. US import duties of 46% on goods from Vietnam, where most of iRobot's devices for the American market are made, increased its costs by $23m (£17.2m) this year, the firm said. The loss-making company was valued at $3.56bn in 2021 after the pandemic helped to drive strong demand for its products.

Fulu sets repair bounties on consumer products that employ sneaky features that limit user control. Just this week, it awarded more than $10,000 to the person who hacked the Molekule air purifier. Companies tend to be rather picky about who gets to poke around inside their products. Manufacturers sometimes even take steps that prevent consumers from repairing their device when it breaks, or modifying it with third-party products. But those unsanctioned device modifications have become the raison d'être of a bounty program set up by a nonprofit called Fulu, or Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users.

Deep learning holds immense promise for transforming medical image analysis, yet its clinical generalization remains profoundly limited. A major barrier is data heterogeneity. This is particularly true in Magnetic Resonance Imaging, where scanner hardware differences, diverse acquisition protocols, and varying sequence parameters introduce substantial domain shifts that obscure underlying biological signals. Data harmonization methods aim to reduce these instrumental and acquisition variability, but existing approaches remain insufficient. When applied to imaging data, image-based harmonization approaches are often restricted by the need for target images, while existing text-guided methods rely on simplistic labels that fail to capture complex acquisition details or are typically restricted to datasets with limited variability, failing to capture the heterogeneity of real-world clinical environments. To address these limitations, we propose DIST-CLIP (Disentangled Style Transfer with CLIP Guidance), a unified framework for MRI harmonization that flexibly uses either target images or DICOM metadata for guidance. Our framework explicitly disentangles anatomical content from image contrast, with the contrast representations being extracted using pre-trained CLIP encoders. These contrast embeddings are then integrated into the anatomical content via a novel Adaptive Style Transfer module. We trained and evaluated DIST-CLIP on diverse real-world clinical datasets, and showed significant improvements in performance when compared against state-of-the-art methods in both style translation fidelity and anatomical preservation, offering a flexible solution for style transfer and standardizing MRI data. Our code and weights will be made publicly available upon publication.

Why Don't Norwegians Hate Tesla Like the Rest of Europe Does? November's Tesla registrations were down in France, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Norway, however, is bucking the trend--thanks to a tax incentive system that will soon be rolled back. The slump does not stop. Tesla sales in Europe slumped again in November 2025, confirming a negative trend that has been going on for more than a year.