Tech Express | November 15, 2026: Astronomers Watch a Giant Planet Vanish From View for the First Time

1. Astronomers Watch a Giant Planet Vanish From View for the First Time

Source: Mashable

For seven years, NASA's TESS telescope watched a Jupiter-sized exoplanet cross in front of its star again and again — until this year, when the transits simply stopped. The planet, TOI-2535 b, was arriving as much as six hours early or late, and its crossings were growing shorter and fainter.

"The planet's orbit is tilting so quickly that its transit disappeared while we were watching," said Samuel Yee, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow and the study's corresponding author. The paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The "hot Jupiter" sits about 1,000 light-years from Earth and completes an orbit in roughly eight days, compared with 88 days for Mercury around the Sun.

Combining the timing shifts with measurements of how the star wobbles, the team concluded that a second planet — likely at least as massive as Saturn — circles nearby on a tilted orbit and never blocks starlight TESS can detect. The two worlds tug on each other, so their orbits wobble slowly like spinning tops. The researchers expect TOI-2535 b to swing back into view in 30 to 50 years.

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2. Microsoft Outage Tops 24 Hours as UK Health Service Falls Back on Paper Records

Source: DW

Microsoft said on Saturday (November 14) that a global disruption affecting the Microsoft 365 apps used by businesses and governments had ended after more than 24 hours. Teams, Outlook and Copilot were among the affected services, leaving government agencies and companies in dozens of countries unable to send email or hold online meetings.

In a post on X, Microsoft said it had finished work to resolve the root cause and had restored service for the remaining affected customers and regions. The company said it found "no indication" of external interference and blamed a server fault. According to network testing firm Ookla, the outage began around 17:25 UTC on Thursday (November 12).

A spokesperson for Germany's federal ministry for digital transformation and government modernisation said the disruption did not significantly affect federal government operations but hit German businesses hard. Staff at the UK's National Health Service had to switch to paper records and could not access online stored material. Monitoring site Downdetector received more than 7.4 million reports worldwide.

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3. Google's Gemini 4 Hydrogen Is Free, and It OutScores the Pricier Argon

Source: Tom's Guide

Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen on Thursday, calling it one of the biggest upgrades yet to its free AI chatbot. The model is pitched as faster, more accurate and better at following instructions. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it scores 51 at its default high reasoning setting, compared with 50 for the more expensive Gemini 4 Argon.

Google says Hydrogen cuts fabricated information by more than fivefold compared with Gemini 3.8 Flash in its evaluations. It is available to free users, with a catch: without a subscription you may not be able to select it manually, because Google's automatic model selection decides when Hydrogen is appropriate.

Tom's Guide lists five uses, including working through dense PDFs, spreadsheets and charts into organised reports, writing to a specified tone, length and format, and pulling information together from Gmail, Google Drive and connected apps such as Dropbox and Airtable. It can also turn plain-English instructions into working interactive projects, such as a household budget calculator or a study guide.

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4. Epic's CEO Says AI Delivers 10x Game Development Gains, and Holdouts Will Be Left Behind

Source: GamesBeat

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told GamesBeat in an exclusive interview that AI has crossed a threshold and is transforming game development. He estimates AI is delivering productivity gains of four times or more in many areas, potentially reaching 10 times as the technology advances. Marcus Wassmer, Epic's executive vice president of engineering, cited an early Unreal Engine web deployment experiment that achieved as much as a 20-fold improvement in its prototype phase.

Sweeney argues AI lets smaller teams do work that once required much larger staffs and makes prototyping far cheaper, so developers can find the fun earlier. "We're back in an age of experimentation," he said, predicting that faster development will lead to new genres, particularly in shooters and massively multiplayer online games.

Sweeney also criticised Valve's requirement that developers disclose certain uses of generative AI on Steam, saying the disclosures have become a stigma. He compared the shift to the move from horses to cars and from assembly language to higher-level programming languages, and said developers in Asia are adopting AI quickly while studios that refuse risk falling behind.

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5. Study: China Holds 80% of the World's Underwater Data Center Patents

Source: Sinovision

A patent study published this month in the journal Ocean Information Technology and Application shows China holds 80% of the world's underwater data center patents, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported on November 14. The researchers analysed global patents from 2006 through June 2026 and, after manual screening, arrived at a sample of 168.

Before 2014, early work was led by marine engineering firms and research institutions in the United States, Norway and Canada, with fewer than three patent applications a year; from 2015 to 2020 applications grew markedly, focusing on cabin structures, thermal management and power systems. China has dominated since 2021, with South Korea second in patent count.

The article notes that Microsoft deployed its Project Natick underwater data center off Scotland in 2018, and after two years of operation its failure rate was one-eighth that of a land-based control group. With land data centers already consuming 3% of global electricity, underwater facilities use seawater as a natural heat sink to cut energy use and cooling water while avoiding land take. The world's first offshore-wind-integrated underwater data center went into operation in Shanghai's Lingang early this year with total investment of 1.6 billion yuan.

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6. Gurman: iPhone 18 and 18e to Arrive in Spring 2027 With the A20 Chip

Source: MacRumors

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reiterated on the latest episode of his "Power On" podcast that the iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e will launch in spring 2027 with an A20 chip. The timing matches his previous reporting. He also expects the iPhone Air 2 at the same time.

That would split part of the iPhone lineup away from Apple's traditional autumn launch window: the standard model, the entry-level model and the thin Air line could all be refreshed in the same spring window.

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7. Amazon's New Kindle Colorsoft Hands-On: Colour Is Nice, the Price Is Not

Source: TechCrunch

Amazon recently refreshed its Kindle lineup with a new basic Kindle, Paperwhite and Colorsoft. The new Colorsoft starts at $290, while the Signature Edition tested by TechCrunch costs $320. The base model has 16GB of storage; the Signature Edition doubles that to 32GB and comes in graphite or a maroon-like Fig finish with an aluminium back.

Compared with the first colour Kindle launched in 2024, the new model is lighter and thinner and has an edge-to-edge display. Both versions use a 7-inch colour E-Ink screen with 300ppi for black-and-white content and 150ppi for colour. Amazon says battery life reaches up to eight weeks, versus up to 12 weeks for the Paperwhite.

The review notes that the power button has moved from the bottom to the top-right edge, reducing accidental presses, and that the device is waterproof with infrequent screen refreshes and no noticeable ghosting. Colours remain relatively muted compared with an iPad. TechCrunch says owners of the first-generation Colorsoft have little reason to upgrade, and that the basic Kindle and Paperwhite start at $169.99 and $199.99.

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8. Surface Laptop Ultra Review: The Most Powerful Surface Yet, Still Behind Apple

Source: Engadget

Engadget gave Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra a score of 8.9. The notebook is one of the flagship devices for Nvidia's RTX Spark platform and the most powerful Surface yet, configurable with up to 128GB of unified memory, which suits running local AI models. It has a 15-inch Mini-LED screen with up to 2,000 nits of HDR brightness.

Price is the main barrier: it starts at $2,599, and the most powerful configuration costs $3,700 with 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 32GB of RAM, while the base model has 18 CPU cores and 5,120 GPU cores. RTX Spark is an Arm-based system-on-a-chip with unified memory, and its gaming performance is roughly comparable to an RTX 5070 laptop GPU, making it suited to 1440p gaming.

The review notes that Arm chips are more efficient but need emulation to run older Windows software, which can bring compatibility problems; Microsoft's x86-64 emulation has improved markedly, and Fortnite now runs on Arm-based Windows. Another highlight is a magnetic USB-C charging cable that detaches like MagSafe if someone trips on it. The drawbacks are the high price and the fact that Apple's M5 Pro is far faster.

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9. China's "AI Billionaire" Short Dramas Go Global: Culture Export or Traffic Business?

Source: Lianhe Zaobao

After two weeks in Silicon Valley, 41-year-old entrepreneur Le Cheng remarked that Chinese teams fill every layer of the AI short drama business, from app platforms to content production. He left Alibaba in 2024 and founded a company in Singapore that provides TopView, an AI short drama production tool, to creators in Southeast Asia and the United States. A February report from the National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute found that 41 of the 50 highest-grossing short drama apps worldwide come from Chinese developers.

Mature AI models have accelerated the trend. By the end of September, about 290,000 Chinese micro-dramas had gone overseas, up nearly 290% from the end of 2025, with AI productions accounting for more than 60%. The AI-generated drama "Deny Me, Dragon King," recently released in the US, has passed 300 million views; its producer DramaBox is owned by China's Dianzhong Technology. ByteDance's PineDrama, launched last December with a free-plus-ads model, passed 100 million downloads in nine months and has about 7 million daily active users.

Profits are under pressure. Fengye Interactive, parent of top platform ReelShort, posted a net loss of 46.5115 million yuan in the first half of 2025, and Dianzhong has said its short drama net margin is below 1%. Data from US AI model aggregator OpenRouter shows that in the week of October 26, video models from ByteDance, Alibaba, Kuaishou and MiniMax together accounted for 46.4% of API requests on the platform. Liao Miaojing, an associate professor at Shanghai Theatre Academy's film school, says the commercial influence of Chinese AI short dramas is beyond doubt, but their cultural influence has yet to fully emerge.

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10. Wang Yi Tells US Delegation Beijing Wants Cooperation on AI and Technology

Source: Lianhe Zaobao

Wang Yi, a Politburo member and director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office, met US representatives attending the 2026 China-US Political Party Dialogue in Beijing on Friday (November 13). Wang said the two sides should respect each other, view each other objectively and rationally, and strengthen dialogue and cooperation in science and technology, artificial intelligence and other fields for mutual benefit, according to China News Service.

Wang set out four points: defining common goals and viewing each other objectively and rationally to build long-term, stable and positive expectations for the relationship; expanding cooperation, including dialogue and cooperation in science, technology and AI, and opposing the over-securitisation and over-politicisation of such issues; consolidating the foundation of the relationship through people-to-people exchanges, especially among young people and students; and working for world peace.

The 2026 China-US Political Party Dialogue was held in Beijing on Thursday (November 12), with Liu Haixing, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, delivering a keynote speech. The dialogue has now been held 15 times, and participants included Baucus, a former US ambassador to China and former senator, as well as representatives from US political, strategic and business circles and Chinese government departments, local governments, think tanks, universities and civil society.

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