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Technology
Every card payment appears instant, but the money can travel through several companies and decades-old settlement systems before it actually reaches the merchant
The approval at a card terminal is a fast message, not the merchant receiving money. Clearing, net settlement and a separate bank payout can still follow.
More in Technology
How does a single company in a Dutch town of roughly 48,000 people build the only machines able to print the world’s most advanced chips, with its newest model costing about €350 million?
Fresh disclosures revealed separate containment failures at two of the biggest AI labs in the same week, and the timing overlaps closely with a kill-switch bill that had just entered Congress
How did a treaty agreed in 1987 and eventually ratified by every nation shrink a hole in the atmosphere the size of North America back toward 1980 levels?
In 1939, a self-taught excavator named Basil Brown was digging a mound on Edith Pretty's estate in Suffolk when his trowel traced the outline of a 27-metre Anglo-Saxon ship whose timber had long since rotted, leaving only iron rivets holding the shape of a vessel in the sand
Sperm whales sleep vertically in silent pods near the ocean surface, drifting head-up in synchronized clusters for roughly ten to fifteen minutes at a time — the only mammal known to sleep this way, and the behaviour was not filmed until 2008
A federal judge is about to decide whether Washington can punish AI vendors for saying no
A 2026 study revealed how sperm whales stay suspended during their eerie vertical naps: they blow bubbles to stop their buoyant bodies from rising into the waves
Why did an oil-producing country pumping about two million barrels a day make electric cars 96 percent of new sales in 2025 while building the world's largest sovereign wealth fund?
Nadella pitches swappable AI models as Microsoft scales MAI models and Maia chips
Four US tech giants spent roughly $410 billion on capital expenditure last year, much of it tied to AI, and are steering toward roughly $725 billion in 2026
Ambition doesn't fade in your 40s — a Gallup analysis suggests it quietly redirects, from wanting to be seen as impressive to wanting to be trusted by a small handful of people
