August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Four gigawatts contracted, fifteen in development, one equity stake
Nvidia is paying at most 3 billion dollars for a fifth of a power developer. What that money buys today is four gigawatts under contract and a place in the interconnection queue for up to 15 more. The capacity is contracted; it has not been energised.
From 20 guesses a day to thousands, with the filter still unpublished
Discovered Materials says its agents produce thousands of candidates a day where a doctoral student managed about 20. The number that decides whether any of them matter is missing from the announcement: how well the company's own physics simulations separate a useful candidate from a merely plausible one.
Nepal's border claim rests on a treaty its own archive cannot produce
Whenever Kathmandu protests over Lipulekh it names the 1816 Sugauli Treaty. On Monday the foreign minister told parliament that the government cannot even confirm it holds that document. The admission subtracts little from the claim; it shows where the weakness has been sitting for years.
Officials Say Bessent's Sanctions Are Squeezing Iran; the Trade Data Isn't In Yet
Washington's officials describe a regime running low on cash and unable to pay its own troops. The number that would actually prove it — Iran's oil exports, reserves and the routes still carrying its trade — has not been published by either side.
One anneal after growth, and the AlScN line inherits the whole gain
Al0.9Sc0.1N reaches 15.0 picocoulombs per newton and 34.9 per cent coupling after a rapid thermal anneal, and the chain the authors draw from bond ionicity up to a microphone's noise floor is the part worth checking.
The 20-hour shift is disclosed; the headcount that shares it is not
Agility Robotics and Boston Dynamics each put a number on the same day on how long their humanoids can keep working. Neither number says how many people stay on the same floor, or who picks up what the robot cannot handle.
The biggest eruption we know of moved the thermometer about half a degree
A lake on the flank of Kilimanjaro keeps annual layers like tree rings, and reading the 450 years of mud around the Toba ash gives the super-eruption a number instead of a wide range: roughly half a degree of cooling in eastern Africa, gone inside two years. The reason it came out small is the reason volcanic forcing has a ceiling at all; beyond a certain sulfur load the droplets grow, settle faster and scatter less.
The LPG gap moved from 500 rupees to 188 — on the refiner's books
India's state refiners lost 188 rupees on each household LPG cylinder in August, down from 500 rupees in July. The figure measures the distance between what these sales cost the refiners and what they bring in. The households that stopped buying a cylinder appear in neither month's number.
The two new trains ADNOC Gas bought both sit behind the strait
Second-quarter net income of 665 million dollars came in above guidance while the Strait of Hormuz was still restricting product liftings. The 8.2 billion dollars of contracts awarded alongside it buys processing and fractionation capacity at Habshan and Ruwais, both on the landward side of the water the cargo has to cross.
Westpac's steady margin leans on the line it controls least
The bank's third-quarter net interest margin recovered 5 basis points. Of that, 4 basis points came from the treasury and markets line, which swung between 15, 7 and 11 basis points across three quarters.