https://techxplore.com/rss-feed/business-tech-news/ en-us The latest news on the technology businesses, technology business, technology companies and tech business news. As electric vehicle (EV) adoption grows in the United States and globally, the demand for EV batteries and their critical materials—such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite—is expected to surge dramatically. This makes the resilience of the supply chain underpinning battery production increasingly important. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-ev-battery-imports-domestic.html Business Thu, 21 May 2026 11:40:02 EDT news698582221 At any given time, technology does two things to employment: It replaces traditional jobs, and it creates new lines of work. Machines replace farmers, but enable, say, aeronautical engineers to exist. So, if tech creates new jobs, who gets them? How well do they pay? How long do new jobs remain new, before they become just another common task any worker can do? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-technology-jobs-young-skilled-workers.html Business Thu, 21 May 2026 10:01:36 EDT news698576317 The case for investing in direct air capture weakens substantially once it is directly compared against solar and wind, according to an analysis published in Communications Sustainability. The paper is titled "Direct air capture has substantial health and climate opportunity costs." https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-renewable-energy-effective-air-capture.html Business Mon, 04 May 2026 05:00:03 EDT news696852301 Production of drones and autonomous robots is expected to explode by the late 2030s—by up to 10× for commercial drones and 100× for humanoid and quadruped robots. Publishing in Chem Circularity, researchers estimate how this boost in production could impact US and global supply chains of 18 raw materials used in robots and drones. They predict that incremental demand for rare earth metals and carbon fiber could pose supply problems and recommend that technology developers piggyback off existing capacity from other industries such as electric vehicles to prevent shortages. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-chain-issues-drone-robot-production.html Business Fri, 01 May 2026 11:00:04 EDT news696767222 Electric vehicle sales in China and Europe have reached a threshold or "tipping point" that has triggered an irreversible shift away from their petrol and diesel-powered equivalents. For their article published in Nature Communications, researchers analyzed global sales from 2016–23 and observed that EV sales were increasing exponentially across 32 countries, with the global fleet of electric and hybrid vehicles doubling every 1.5 years. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-electric-vehicles-europe-china.html Business Fri, 01 May 2026 09:20:08 EDT news696845701 As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded in critical decisions about health, safety, finance, and governance, a key challenge is no longer whether people and AI will collaborate, but rather how to structure this collaboration to achieve true complementarity. In the new paper, "Toward a Science of Human–AI Teaming for Decision Making: A Complementarity Framework," researchers present a framework for understanding and designing human–AI teams for decision making. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-intelligence-framework-human-ai-teams.html Business Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:00:03 EDT news696783482 The development of batteries for electric vehicles has progressed much faster than experts and policymakers had anticipated. New research shows that the market is well equipped to cope with both raw material shortages and price increases. This raises questions about which materials are actually critical to the energy transition, according to the researchers. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-ev-battery-fragile-swap-key.html Business Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:20:04 EDT news696080162 Before big tech engineers can improve the fairness of recommendation systems, such as social media feeds and online shopping results, they need to define what "fairness" even means. Should an app show people only the content it predicts they will like most, or should it boost newer creators, small businesses or historically underrepresented groups? Should an online store rank products purely by past clicks and sales, or make sure independent sellers can compete with dominant brands? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-big-tech-algorithms-fair-harder.html Business Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:40:01 EDT news696072661 Fusion power plants are sites at which electricity could be generated via a process known as nuclear fusion, which entails the merging of two atomic nuclei into a single heavier nucleus. This process is known to generate very high amounts of energy, such as the energy required to light up the sun and other stars, yet its potential for the production of electricity has yet to be demonstrated. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-fusion-power-competitive-renewables.html Business Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:20:01 EDT news695467315 In an era when most TikTok videos are prerecorded, can a band with a new single create a tighter bond with fans by debuting via livestream instead? Can a business do the same when promoting a new product? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-online-viewers-livestreams.html Business Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:40:04 EDT news694959170 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI could surpass "almost all humans at almost everything" shortly after 2027. While AI's capabilities are certainly improving, such rapid progress might seem at odds with findings that show AI is still failing at 95%+ of remote freelance projects, and continues to struggle with hallucination, long term planning, and forms of abstract reasoning that humans find easy. But recent work from METR has found evidence that LLMs can gain capabilities in rapid surges—jumping from succeeding almost never to almost always in just a few years. If this is true across the economy, it could mean that workers could be blindsided by AI advances. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-tides-overturning-prior-views-ai.html Business Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:20:01 EDT news694364439 Soft, dark-gray graphite is not just useful in pencils: The highly conductive and heat-resistant mineral is uniquely suited for advanced manufacturing. Yet the United States imports nearly half of the graphite it needs to forge steel, batteries, and manufacturing equipment from China, which currently supplies the majority of global graphite. But what if the United States could produce that graphite domestically—from waste we would normally toss into a landfill or burn? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-biomass-graphite-critical-mineral.html Business Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:00:08 EDT news693675061 In the iconic Star Wars series, captain Han Solo and humanoid droid C-3PO boast drastically contrasting personalities. Driven by emotions and swashbuckling confidence, Han Solo often ignores C-3PO's logic-driven caution. That human-droid relationship is exemplified in Solo's famous statement, "Never tell me the odds!" as he dismisses C-3PO's advice against navigating an asteroid field with a 3,720-to-1 chance of survival, odds that had been painstakingly calculated by the shiny sidekick. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-humans-ai-cognitive-alignment.html Business Thu, 19 Mar 2026 05:58:30 EDT news691407956 In shipping, efficiency is everything. Take the shortest (safe) route between two points. Offload cargo as quickly as possible to the person who will pay you the most. Pick up your next load as fast as you can and start it all over. But the effective management of these shipping vessels' routes, and the kinds of voyages that really are most efficient, has gone understudied by an industry that can be set in its ways, according to István Z. Kiss, a professor of network science at Northeastern University London. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-cargo-ships-greater-efficiency-tanker.html Business Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:20:01 EDT news692882161 TikTok is built for people to create and share their own content, so dance music and indie artists fill the platform's Top 100. On Spotify, love songs and music from major record labels dominate its top charts. On both platforms, people's preferences only partly explain what songs become hits. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-tiktok-spotify.html Internet Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:40:04 EDT news692281682 Renewable energy is lowering electricity costs in some parts of the country, but those benefits aren't being seen by consumers everywhere because they're typically placed far away from demand centers. Better integrating electricity transmission networks across regions could significantly reduce generation costs, new research from the University of Michigan shows—at the expense of generation companies' profits. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-power-financial-incentives-block.html Business Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:20:08 EST news691772469 Green hydrogen—the cornerstone of net zero strategies around the world—could fail in becoming a truly sustainable fuel unless countries rapidly decarbonize their energy grids, according to research led by the University of Sheffield. In a study published in the journal Communications Sustainability, researchers have highlighted the decisive role that national energy mixes will play in determining the level of emissions involved in producing the fuel and its impact on the environment. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-green-hydrogen-backfire-chain-overhaul.html Business Tue, 03 Mar 2026 12:20:01 EST news691762742 You know it's time to put your phone down, but your thumb finds "Play Again" once more. In an age where digital entertainment never sleeps, willpower alone isn't enough. As more players, especially the younger generations, face physical and mental health challenges from excessive gaming, ethical design that prioritizes human well-being during development has become more urgent. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-gray-screens-delays-gaming.html Consumer & Gadgets Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:20:04 EST news691758361 Inside America's junk drawers sits an untapped fortune, and a national and economic security solution. As the global race for critical minerals intensifies, University of Houston researchers have unveiled a breakthrough supply chain model designed to transform e-waste from a mounting environmental hazard into a stable, domestic engine for the U.S. economy. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-urban-path-mineral-sovereignty.html Business Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:00:03 EST news691174022 Researchers at the University of Maryland and Tilburg University in the Netherlands have produced an AI-driven innovation to reshape how marketers place digital ads. AdGazer, a predictive tool, evaluates both an advertisement and the media environment around it to forecast how much attention viewers will give. The result, they say, is smarter, more effective ad placement. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-ad-ai-attention-content-context.html Business Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:50:01 EST news690808684 A cyber-attack does not always need to steal data or shut systems down to cause damage. Sometimes it only needs to shift the clock. Researchers at the University of East London (UEL), in collaboration with industry, have identified a critical weakness in the timing systems that keep modern automated industries running—and warn attackers could exploit it to quietly destabilize factories, robotics and other safety‑critical infrastructure. The work is published as a comprehensive analysis of threats to Time‑Triggered Ethernet (TTEthernet) clock synchronization in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-cyber-disrupt-smart-factories.html Business Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:25:22 EST news690729901 The approximately 5 billion people who use the internet daily leave traces of their activity behind. Companies use these data to learn user interests, purchase history, and other browsing habits, and benefit through sales, advertising, or researching user behaviors. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-online-clicks-scrolls-thin-labor.html Business Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:10:01 EST news690202404 As solar energy rapidly expands to meet urgent climate targets and increasing demand for electricity, the key challenge is to ensure that this transition is not just scalable but sustainable. Pioneering research led by Northumbria University shows how the renewable energy sector can scale up the production of solar energy technology while further reducing environmental impacts. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-scaling-global-solar-panel-sustainably.html Business Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:08:49 EST news689962081 A firm that wants to use a large language model (LLM) to summarize sales reports or triage customer inquiries can choose between hundreds of unique LLMs with dozens of model variations, each with slightly different performance. To narrow down the choice, companies often rely on LLM ranking platforms, which gather user feedback on model interactions to rank the latest LLMs based on how they perform on certain tasks. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-platforms-latest-llms-unreliable.html Business Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:10:18 EST news689861401 When energy researchers talk about the future of the grid, they often focus on individual pieces: solar panels, batteries, nuclear plants, or new transmission lines. But in a recent study, urban systems researcher Anton Rozhkov takes a different approach—treating the energy system itself as a complex, evolving organism shaped as much by policy and human behavior as by technology. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-policy-people-power-interact-future.html Business Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:28:17 EST news687623281 Many people are optimistic about ammonia's potential as an energy source and carrier of hydrogen, and though large-scale adoption would require major changes to the way it is currently manufactured, ammonia does have a number of advantages. For one thing, ammonia is energy-dense and carbon-free. It is also already produced at scale and shipped around the world, primarily for use in fertilizer. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-ammonia-energy-tradeoffs-world.html Business Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:06:41 EST news687524761 Rare earth elements are an easy-to-find, hard-to-refine resource critical for everything from magnets and electronics to batteries and catalysts for chemical reactions. Since the 1980s, a race has been on between the United States and China for dominance of the rare earth element market—and the United States is losing. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-coal-tailings-states-rare-earth.html Business Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:10:01 EST news687096354 Online adverts are sometimes so personal that they feel eerie. Even as a researcher in this area, I'm slightly startled when I get a message asking if my son still needs school shirts a few hours after browsing for clothes for my children. https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-chatgpt-advertising.html Business Thu, 25 Dec 2025 11:10:01 EST news685717588 Scientists at HSE University have found that current AI models, including ChatGPT and Claude, tend to overestimate the rationality of their human opponents—whether first-year undergraduate students or experienced scientists—in strategic thinking games, such as the Keynesian beauty contest. While these models attempt to predict human behavior, they often end up playing "too smart" and losing because they assume a higher level of logic in people than is actually present. https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-ai-overestimates-smart-people-economists.html Business Wed, 24 Dec 2025 13:26:23 EST news685804966 Robots from around the world converged on Silicon Valley to provide a glimpse of a potential future. https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-silicon-valley-summit-robots-laundry.html Business Thu, 18 Dec 2025 10:00:04 EST news685274253