BUSINES

Musk’s Starlink in new Canada spat over access to subsidies

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Elon Musk’s Starlink is in a fight with Canada’s top telecoms group over accessing millions of dollars in subsidies, as the country’s growing anti-US sentiment puts the billionaire’s satellite business under further scrutiny. Bell and … Read more

We face a looming rice crisis

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Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Agriculture myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. The writer is a science commentator There is more to rice than meets the fork. The grain, harvested from a semi-aquatic grass, is a staple food for over half of the world’s population. Many countries in … Read more

China gains dexterous upper hand in humanoid robot tussle with US

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At the headquarters of China’s pioneering robot maker Unitree, visitors are invited to push and kick the G1 — a 1.3-metre-tall, silver humanoid — to test its balance.  The Hangzhou-based group is demonstrating the strength of its effort to transform the nascent industry to build humanlike machines. The robots are powered by open-source software that … Read more

Scientific discovery is AI’s killer application

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Christopher Bishop has been at the forefront of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence applications for some time since he runs the company’s AI for Science research unit, which applies the powerful technology to the natural sciences. Bishop sees the mission of the lab, which was founded in 2022, as accelerating scientific discovery using the technology. His team … Read more

Shipping groups clash over regulatory cost of using LNG to power vessels

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Mitsui OSK Lines, the world’s second-largest shipowner, has struck back against calls by its rival AP Møller-Maersk to place a higher regulatory cost on the use of liquefied natural gas to power ships than zero-carbon … Read more

Samsung boosts profits as customers stockpile chips ahead of US tariffs

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Customers stockpiling chips and bringing forward smartphone purchases ahead of US tariffs and export controls have boosted quarterly profits at Samsung Electronics. Shares in the world’s largest memory chipmaker jumped 2.1 per cent on Tuesday … Read more

How do we really feel about robots?

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For more than 100 years, writers, artists and filmmakers have sketched out their visions of the household robot, a supposedly inevitable culmination of human technological advancement. One day, these multitasking machines will, we’re told, perform tedious tasks efficiently and without complaint, respond courteously to requests and remain unobtrusively compliant and meek. In The Automatic Maid-Of-All-Work (1893), … Read more