Daily Info Dose

China's driverless taxi race just took a big step forward. On 8 October 2026, XPENG officially named its robotaxi service "XPENG YOYO" and opened public registration in China through invitation codes — moving the project from internal testing into real-world commercial operations. According to XPENG, YOYO is China's first fully in-house developed robotaxi to reach pre-loaded mass production. Instead of converting an existing taxi, the vehicle is built from the start as a robotaxi, based on the company's flagship GX SUV. The technology underneath is striking. The car runs on four of XPENG's own Turing AI chips, which the company says deliver 3,000 TOPS of effective computing power. Its second-generation VLA 2.0 system relies on cameras alone — no LiDAR and no high-definition maps — and is designed for Level 4 autonomous driving, where the system handles the driving task itself within defined conditions. This is not just a concept. XPENG says its employees h...

The past 48 hours packed an extraordinary run of science, space and technology news into a single window, and our latest Daily Info Dose roundup brings the ten biggest stories of 6–7 October 2026 together in one video. The Nobel season opened with a ghostly winner: work linked to Francis Halzen and the IceCube observatory, which detects elusive neutrinos beneath Antarctic ice, took centre stage in physics. Chemistry also celebrated asymmetry, with the prize recognising Kagan and Soai for research on mirror molecules — compounds that exist in left- and right-handed forms with very different effects. Artificial intelligence delivered shocks of its own. Anthropic's Claude Mythos was reported to have uncovered around 129,000 hidden flaws, underlining how AI systems are changing software security, while France pushed back in the global AI race with Mistral Large 4, a new flagship model aimed at keeping Europe competitive. Beyond Earth, NASA's Curiosity rover marked a record clim...