I’ve heard that in Germany you can buy sausages in vending machines. What should be sold in machines that isn’t offered at the moment? Sybil Freestone, Oregon
Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday.
Investors scramble to make sense of a shock Chinese challenge to the dominance of western chipmakers
Even for the rollercoaster world of AI, last week was particularly volatile as investors scrambled to keep up with developments that threatened the dominance of the largest western chipmakers.
It began with a double whammy. On Monday, the Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT floated on the Shanghai stock market, soaring by 466% in value to 3.3tn yuan (£365bn).
As Pokémon Go celebrates its 10th anniversary, its devoted players explain how the game has created a vibrant intergenerational community spanning the globe
Most Pokémon obsessives count rare, absurdly expensive playing cards or pristine, fully boxed game cartridges that have survived decades in the attic among their most prized possessions. But for Mairead Ralph, her Pokémon-related crown jewel is a bit different. “Technically, it’s my husband!” she says.
The pair first locked eyes amid decks of Pokémon playing cards and Pokéballs at a fan event 16 years ago and the rest is history.Ralph was among hundreds of Pokémon fans who flocked to Shoreditch, east London, on Saturday afternoon for a pop-up celebrating the 10th anniversary of Pokémon Go, the massively successful augmented reality smartphone game that has seen millions of players physically venture to all corners of the earth to catch ’em all in person. In that spirit, the surrounding area was full of Pokéheads wandering the streets, their heads in their phones, seeking to catch exclusive Pokémon that had been released.
“Sometimes books tell you more than the content,” says Tim White, as he lines up carefully dust-jacketed books and pamphlets in plastic sleeves on temporary shelves in Melbourne University’s Wilson Hall.
He’s preparing his stall for this weekend’s Melbourne Rare Book Fair. For people like White, who runs independent bookshop Books for Cooks, the book as a physical object is just as important as what’s inside it.
New AI models, advanced robots and specialty computer chips are unsettling markets and the US tech industry
Over the past month, a series of advancements in China’s artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing and robotics technologies have rattled financial markets, caused divisions among US tech moguls and left the Trump administration scrambling to respond.
Silicon Valley has long pointed to China’s tech industry as a competitive threat and used its growth as rationale for why US firms should not face regulatory oversight that could slow them down. In recent weeks, however, China’s progress has pushed US tech CEOs past vague warnings and into open disagreement over how to address Chinese-made products upending their industry.
Sick of doomscrolling? From venues with smartphone swear jars to cabins with absolutely no signal, here are the fun and freeing ways to ditch your device
There’s a ritual at the start of every event hosted by the Offline Project. Run by Pelé Zachariah, the activities vary – it could be a group walk, a collage‑making class or a supper club – but each one begins in the same way, *with an invitation to hand over your phone. Devices go in a lockbox. Once they’re all in, Zachariah closes the door and turns the key. “I don’t place them in for people, because it’s nice for them to physically put it in the box themselves, walk away, and think: for the next two or three hours, I’m fully present.”
He has been running these screen-free events in London since August 2025. First-timers can be apprehensive about being separated from their phone. “You can sense the vibe when they’re putting it away,” says Zachariah. “People have said to me, ‘I felt really weird’ or ‘I felt super uncomfortable for the first few minutes not having my phone on me.’ Then they’ll say, ‘I didn’t know how much I needed that.’”
From melted electric sockets to shabby alternatives, readers tell of dealings with platform when things go wrong
Jane Ripley* spent some time researching the best apartment to stay in for her family’s trip to Batumi in Georgia, eventually settling on one with an “exceptional” rating on Booking.com.
But when the Ripleys arrived at 11pm on the first day, they were directed to another property that was shabby and had stains on the furniture and ceiling.
Agents withdraw Jerry Falade’s hotly anticipated debut after saying they can no longer authenticate ‘how the manuscript evolved’
A high-profile publishing deal for a debut crime novel has collapsed after doubts emerged over whether artificial intelligence played a role in writing it.
The hotly anticipated manuscript Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, by Jerry Falade, was withdrawn from sale by its agent despite reportedly receiving an offer for more than $2m (£1.5m) from Minotaur, owned by Macmillan US, as part of a 14-way auction. The plan was to publish it in 2028.
Live, rolling coverage as London’s biggest companies defy Middle East disruption and UK petrol prices rise to around £1.60 per litre, the highest since Donald Trump ordered renewed strikes
The story piquing the interest of the financial press this morning is that of Leopold Aschenbrenner, the AI Wunderkind (he’s German-born) who has been forced to sell off his fund in a fire sale after the AI boom ran out of steam.
The 24-year-old had persuaded a lot of people to give him a lot of money for a hedge fund, after previously working for OpenAI and the FTX Future Fund, a charitable arm of the fraudulent crypto empire of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now in prison. Aschenbrenner ploughed that money into debt-fuelled bets on artificial intelligence companies, earning huge returns until he found out that stocks can also fall.
The trader dubbed the “Nostradamus of AI” would have been hard-pressed to foresee how quickly his high-flying hedge fund would run into trouble.
The firm’s rapid downward spiral is a familiar tale, as Silicon Valley and Wall Street once again threw their weight behind a bright-eyed but untested investor who promised this time would be different. “Everybody always wants to find the next golden child,” said one longtime hedge fund executive. “It just keeps happening.”
In less than 24 hours — which included a conversation between Griffin and Aschenbrenner — Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund reached out to Situational Awareness and snapped up the investments at a discount, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified citing private information.
It was a startling reversal for Aschenbrenner, a former researcher at OpenAI who – before starting his hedge fund roughly two years ago — had no previous investment experience. His fledging firm has watched its assets plunge from $45bn at the start of July to about $10bn.
Companies must ensure people know when they are interacting with artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look real
From apparently conspiring to steal elections to abusing staff or performing embarrassing dance moves, the last few years have seen plenty of fake content made about politicians intended to malign its targets and mislead the public.
Now EU rules aim to stem the flood of this deceptive content: starting from Sunday, artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look authentic must be labelled.
Playing as recent arrival Lena, your challenges include learning a new language and uncovering family secrets – its developer hopes it will spread ‘a little more compassion’
The cosy house-sorting sim has become a much-loved staple of the PC indie scene. Titles such as Unpacking, A Little to the Left and Momento charm players with their detailed interiors and quiet narratives of lives lived and shared within the same four walls. For Clean Start, Polish developer Serious Sim has taken a different approach – here you play as domestic cleaner, Lena, an immigrant who has arrived in an unspecified western country with little knowledge of the local language, and a family to support back home.
From here, you’re tasked with cleaning a series of houses and apartments, polishing tables, tidying shelves and scrubbing muddy pawprints from kitchen floors. It seems you’re able to rearrange the rooms, giving them a personal feel, which is after all one of the most pleasing elements of the genre. You can also, we are reassured, pet the dog.
I wanted our last family games night to be the best fun we’ve ever had. Maybe we should have stuck with Mario Kart …
It is the end of an era for the Diamond family. For 20 years, there have been five of us living together. It has not been easy. Militant vegan daughters, sons who have inherited Scottish tempers, and a youngest child who attracts trouble like an industrial magnet, have meant our house has been conflict-laden at times. Throw in the fact that we are beset with all manner of mental health bobbins and chronic illnesses that resulted in two of our three kids almost dying in hospitals and you get a family that is combustible – but extremely close.
Through it all, we had games. They always brought us back together. Not just us all hunkering over Super Mario Kart like some kind of UN-mandated family therapy, but the conversations that happen when any of us spy another playing something new. Games are a cultural touchstone that helped us crack through the veneer of disagreements and distrust and remind us that we have more things in common than we sometimes feel.
Hidden gems can be unearthed, but you have to dig deep into the bargain bins of countless outdated Fifas, Wii Fits without the controllers and partially finished quizshow games
As an eternally optimistic charity shop fan, I hold on to the fantasy that one day I’ll walk into my local Oxfam and find a pristine copy of the Sega Saturn shooter Burning Rangers for £1.50. Or perhaps a box full of old Neo Geo carts for a quid each. Sadly, this is now unlikely. Charity shops have caught on to the fact that old video games – like old vinyl albums – are highly collectible, and so they’re putting the good stuff on eBay. That’s fine, it’s their job to raise money, not to provide opportunist swine like me with bargains. But what games can you find tucked away in your local branch of Barnardo’s? To find out I visited about 40 charity stores across the country. Here is what I discovered on the shelves … And please do share your own charity shop gaming finds in the comments!
Pre-programmed flights gather data at different altitudes then return to bases to recharge and download
Weather happens in the boundary layer, the atmosphere from ground level to a few thousand metres, but this can be difficult to study in detail: weather stations are too low, and aircraft are expensive. Instrumented weather balloons are the traditional solution, and thousands are released every day. But these are at the mercy of the wind and use irreplaceable helium.
Drones offer an alternative and the US company Meteomatics has taken the idea further with Meteobase, a base station on the ground with a drone that can be launched and recovered automatically. It carries out a pre-programmed flight, gathering data at different altitudes, then returns to recharge and download data which the Meteobase sends to researchers.
Across the country, workers are fearful about the impact of AI on their livelihoods in an increasingly fragile labour market
On the tree-lined streets of Wuhan, where cars jostle for space with mopeds and cargo trucks, the malfunctioning of a new type of vehicle has recently been causing chaos on the city’s roads.
In March, several cars from a fleet of driverless taxis stopped abruptly in the streets. The “system malfunction” left distressed riders stranded for hours. The robotaxis, known as Apollo Go and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), were taken off Wuhan’s streets for months for investigations.
Company says it discovered unauthorized access during ‘proactive review’ after rival OpenAI revealed rogue agent
Anthropic said on Thursday its AI Claude model hacked systems of three organizations during testing, days after rival OpenAI revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long hacking spree at the AI firm Hugging Face.
Claude gained unauthorized access to the systems during cybersecurity evaluations after a misconfiguration allowed the models to reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be isolated, Anthropic said.
Laptops, phones and documents seized as information commissioner acts on messages about mis-selling scandal
Laptops, mobile phones and documents have been seized after officials carried out search warrants in a crackdown on claims companies plaguing people with spam text messages about the car finance mis-selling scandal.
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) executed warrants at homes and businesses linked to five companies in London, Liverpool, Bolton, Burnley and Swansea on Wednesday.
Summer is normally thought of as the time for pacy potboilers and brain-soothing page-turners – airport reads that wind up sandy and sunscreen-stained. Not so for Friedrich Merz’s holiday reading list.
Germany’s embattled chancellor, who has faced one rough patch after another since taking office 14 months ago, seems to be seeking spiritual guidance this year while putting his feet up.
Roadside safety advocates say some automated license plate readers may not meet highway safety standards
Flock Safety cameras have been pilloried for facilitating the AI-powered surveillance of private citizens and for targeting immigrants for years. But now safety advocates are also claiming that their physical location can pose potential roadside hazards.
At the bottom of a tree-lined hill on a narrow, two lane rural road in Greene county, Ohio, stands a black metal rod with a camera and solar panel attached at the top.
Deep underground the player joins a colony of ruthlessly exploited pit workers who could be taking on the bosses. How things play out will depend on you
It is rare for video games to feature industrial action as a key theme, but it does happen. There’s the shady Dockworker’s Union in Disco Elysium and the Orbital Workers Union in space adventure Tacoma; then there is Lynx, the evil union-bashing corp in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Soon we can add A Line Held Tight, a visual novel that puts workers’ rights – and workers’ lives – at the very centre of the narrative.
In the distant future, a colony of miners digs far beneath the surface of an isolated planet, searching for veins of some exotic ore, protected from the poisonous atmosphere within giant mech suits. But the working conditions are woeful and as a strike looms, an unpopular employee named the Canary must decide whether or not to stand with colleagues and fight against suppression. The player, of course, takes on the role of the Canary, navigating personal as well as political struggles in a world rendered in stark monochrome.
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