🔍 Google’s AI Mode | 📱 Galaxy S25 Edge goes ultra-thin | ⚛️ Fusion-in-a-bottle snags $36 M

🔥 Warm-Up

Hey there, bandwidth bandit—welcome to Tuesday’s charge-up.
• Google toys with dumping “I’m Feeling Lucky” for a flashy AI button.
• Samsung’s new S25 Edge shows you really can skip leg day.
• A Wisconsin startup wants fusion power in something the size of a shipping container.
• Dutch engineers build a robot that sprints on air—with zero silicon brains.
• Marks & Spencer scrambles after hackers swipe customer data.

🖋 Editor’s Note

Take a breath: mid-May’s juggling act of spring showers, earnings calls, and AI hype is in full swing. While markets tap-dance around inflation prints, techies are busy swapping “beta” stickers for bold release buttons. It’s one of those in-between days—not quite sleepy, not full-tilt—where small breakthroughs quietly set tomorrow’s headlines. So grab your beverage of choice, skim the pixels below, and remind yourself that even on a Tuesday, the future keeps sneaking up fast.

––Sascha Thiele

💰 The Market

🚀 Today in Tech

Google’s “Lucky” break-up

• Source: https://www.theverge.com/news/665560/google-search-ai-mode-feeling-lucky-tests
  
  TL;DR: Google Labs users have spotted an “AI Mode” badge parked where the famous “I’m Feeling Lucky” button lives, or even inside the search bar itself. The rainbow-ringed icon shunts you into a chatbot-style results page, hinting at how search may morph post-I/O. Only a “small percentage” of U.S. users can poke it for now, but Google says it’s one of “many experiments” in flight. Translation: the classic button might soon join Google Reader in the great graveyard of neat-but-neglected features.

Samsung slices the phone—again

• Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/samsung-launches-slimmest-smartphone-races-against-rival-apple-2025-05-13/
  
  TL;DR: The Galaxy S25 Edge is just 5.8 mm thick yet packs a 6.7-inch screen and on-device multimodal AI. Launching May 23 in Korea (May 30 stateside) at $1,099+, it’s aimed squarely at the TikTok crowd that wants pocket-friendly hardware without throttling. Samsung insists its thinned-out vapor chamber keeps temps tame, while analysts say the early debut is a pre-emptive strike before Apple’s rumored wafer-thin iPhone this fall.

Fusion-in-a-bottle gets $36 M

• Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/realta-fusion-taps-36m-in-fresh-funds-for-its-fusion-in-a-bottle-reactor/
  
  TL;DR: Madison-based Realta Fusion hauled in a $36 million Series A led by Future Ventures to finalize the “Anvil” prototype—an extendable magnetic-mirror reactor it says could hit $100/MWh power costs. The three-year-old spin-out already set a plasma-confinement field record and hopes to be shovel-ready for construction by 2027. Investors are betting the mirror design scales like Lego bricks (only, you know, at 100 million °C). If this works, it’s the first startup where “running hot” is on the roadmap.

Air-logic robot outruns its brain

• Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/dutch-scientists-built-a-brainless-soft-robot-that-runs-on-air/
  
  TL;DR: TU Eindhoven researchers demoed a silicone crawler powered by “air logic” circuits—pneumatic channels that act like AND/OR gates without electronics. Compressed air sequences let the bot gallop at 0.7 body-lengths per second and even hurdle obstacles. The low-cost tech hints at future surgical or search-and-rescue bots that remain functional even when soaked, shocked, or MRI-scanned. Brainless never looked so clever.

M&S hit by data-grab heist

• Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/may/13/m-and-s-personal-data-cyber-attack-marks-spencer-card-passwords
  
  TL;DR: British retailer Marks & Spencer confirmed hackers nabbed names, addresses, and order histories—though card numbers and passwords appear safe. Online orders have been frozen since April 25, and shelves are patchy while systems recover. The Information Commissioner’s Office is probing; customers must reset passwords on next login. The incident follows a rash of UK retail breaches blamed on the DragonForce ransomware gang.

🎲 Link Grab-Bag

✅ <Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/best-amazon-pet-day-deals-2025/> — 17 sneaky Amazon Pet Day deals your cat will ignore anyway.

✅ <IEEE Spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/zinc-microcapacitor> — Tiny zinc micro-capacitors promise IoT battery life that won’t ghost you.

✅ <TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/07/ai-data-startup-wisdomai-nabs-23m-with-a-smart-way-to-avoid-hallucinations/> — WisdomAI bags $23 M to make data pipelines hallucination-proof.

✅ <The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/10/ai-firms-urged-to-calculate-existential-threat-amid-fears-it-could-escape-human-control> — MIT’s Max Tegmark wants an “AI Trinity test” before we press run.

✅ <Hackers News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43920123> — Show HN: A one-click tool that turns any GitHub repo into interactive docs.

🏁 Sign-off

Catch you tomorrow—same inbox, fewer electrons. ✌️