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General Motors is ending production of its Chevy BrightDrop electric delivery vans after sluggish demand and the expiration of key EV tax credits. "This is not a decision we made lightly because of the impact on our employees," GM CEO Mary Barra said during the company's third quarter earnings call Tuesday. "However the commercial electric van market has been developing much slower than expected, and changes to the regulatory framework and fleet incentives has made the business even more challenging." The Verge reports: Brightdrop first launched in 2021 as GM's effort to capture a large portion of the commercial EV market, starting with a pair of electric vans, as well as fleet management software and electric-powered carts for goods delivery. The automaker made deals with Walmart, FedEx, and other major retailers to add the van to their delivery fleets. But after trying to make a go of it as a standalone brand, GM reabsorbed BrightDrop in 2023, and then later assigned it to Chevy in order to tap into the brand's sales and service dealer network. Now the van will stand as yet another casualty of the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which ended on September 30th. In addition to the consumer credit, there was also a $7,500 discount for commercial EVs under 18,000 lbs -- which Brightdrop was eligible for. The van was a range leader, but also was more expensive than its most prominent competitor. Brightdrop's vans started at $74,000, while Ford's E-Transit van with extended battery range sold for $51,600.

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Wheeled wonder leaves European rail in the dust

China's CR450 train hit 453 km/h during pre-service trials, surpassing its CR400 predecessor's 420 km/h and outpacing Deutsche Bahn's 405 km/h test record.…

Laser-guided weapon reaches full service after successful sea trials

Royal Navy helicopters will soon carry drone-busting lightweight Martlet missiles, now declared fully operational following the anti-ship Sea Venom gaining initial operating capability (IOC) earlier this month.…

Researchers say 'Proto-X' fine-tunes databases automatically, delivering multifold performance boosts

Automated database systems based on vector embedding algorithms could improve the performance of default settings on common PostgreSQL database services by a factor of two to ten, according to a database researcher.…

ICO says probe unnecessary after reviewing ministry's handling of leak

The UK's data protection regulator declined to launch an investigation into a leak at the Ministry of Defence that risked the lives of thousands of Afghans connected with the British Armed Forces.…

NASA has reopened SpaceX's $4.4 billion moon lander contract to new bidders like Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin after delays in Starship's development threatened the 2027 Artemis 3 mission. Reuters reports: The move paves the way for rivals such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to snatch a high-profile mission to land the first astronauts on the moon in half a century. "I'm in the process of opening that contract up. I think we'll see companies like Blue get involved, and maybe others," the U.S. space agency's acting chief Sean Duffy, who also serves as U.S. Transportation Secretary, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. Duffy's comments follow months of mounting pressure within NASA to speed up its Artemis lunar program and push SpaceX to make greater progress on its Starship lunar lander, while China progresses toward its own goal of sending humans to the moon by 2030. It represents a major shift in NASA's lunar strategy, starting a new competitive juncture in the program for a crewed moon lander just two years before the scheduled landing date. Blue Origin is widely expected to compete for the mission, while Lockheed Martin has indicated it would convene an industry team to heed NASA's call. Starship, picked by NASA in 2021 under a contract now worth $4.4 billion, faces a 2027 moon landing deadline that agency advisers estimate could slip years behind schedule, citing competing priorities. Musk sees Starship as crucial to launching larger batches of Starlink satellites to space and eventually ferrying humans to Mars, among other missions. "They do remarkable things, but they're behind schedule," Duffy said of SpaceX's lunar lander work, adding President Donald Trump wants to see the mission take place before his White House term ends in January 2029.

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YouTube and Gmail already running on both x86 and homebrew Axion silicon, 70,000 more apps in the conversion queue

Google has revealed it’s ported around 30,000 of its production packages to the Arm architecture and plans to convert them all so it can run workloads on both its own Axion silicon and x86 processors.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the company's Tumblr acquisition his biggest failure -- but one he hasn't given up on yet. The comments were made at the recent WordCamp Canada 2025 conference, where Mullenweg went live for a Town Hall session to connect with the open source-focused WordPress community. The exec noted that Tumblr was still on a different technical stack than WordPress -- something he had intended to correct by migrating the back end to WordPress infrastructure. However, that massive undertaking was put on hold earlier this year, as the cost to move Tumblr's half-billion blogs would be difficult given that the blogging platform wasn't profitable and continues to be sustained by the profits of other Automattic products. The company has tried to trim costs with layoffs and the reallocation of Tumblr resources to more profitable parts of the business, but those efforts have yet to pay off. Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns at his Town Hall session, saying, "I need to switch [Tumblr] over to WordPress, but it's a big lift. It's over 500 million blogs, actually, and, as a business, it's costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue." As a result, Automattic had to prioritize other projects to make Tumblr sustainable, he said. "It's probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we're still working on it," he added.

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