Emerald Nuclear today announced a $2.1 million award from The Research Council of Norway to support its efforts to bring nuclear energy to the shipping industry and offshore power. The Seattle-based startup is developing high-temperature gas reactors that use an encapsulated fuel designed to resist meltdowns.

“This award will enable Emerald Nuclear to work directly with our marine partners to validate integration of our technology with their state-of-the-art marine power distribution and control systems,” said Wesley Deason, co-founder and CEO.

The funding supports Norway’s Marine Nuclear Propulsion System Pilot project, which is being led by Emerald Nuclear’s Norwegian subsidiary.

Shipping accounts for roughly 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, making it a significant target for lower-carbon energy solutions. Some ferries serving shorter routes are adopting hybrid-electric propulsion. Shipping companies are exploring methanol, ammonia, biofuels and other alternatives to heavy fuel oil, but their climate benefits depend on how those fuels are produced and used.

Nuclear reactors have powered U.S. Navy submarines for more than 70 years. Now, a new wave of companies is working to expand nuclear power’s role in commercial shipping and other marine applications.

The award supports an early development step for Emerald Nuclear, with substantial work remaining before commercial deployment. The company has yet to build its first reactor, and its plans will require additional financing, regulatory approvals and a reliable fuel supply. The startup has previously received an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors.

Emerald Nuclear has five employees, most of them in Norway, and is targeting two applications: offshore ships that help construct facilities like oil platforms and wind turbines and lay deep-sea cables, and floating power plants for remote communities. Each reactor is designed to produce 5 megawatts (6,705 horsepower), according to the company.

Bringing nuclear to the marine environment poses several significant challenges. They include safety issues, regulations for vessels traveling internationally, management of nuclear fuel and waste, and the way shipping companies frequently buy and sell vessels.

Deason said the company’s approach helps address those concerns:

• The reactor will use TRISO fuel, which consists of a uranium-containing kernel surrounded by protective carbon and silicon-carbide layers. The uranium is in short supply, but Deason is confident it will be available by the time the company is ready to deploy.
• Nuclear regulations are still being developed for international vessels, though initial deployments will be within a single country’s jurisdiction.
• Emerald Nuclear will have seaside manufacturing, providing easy access for ships and floating power plants that need installations, repairs and exchanges of fresh and spent fuel.
• The company will lease, rather than sell, its systems, allowing customers to swap nuclear in or out depending on their needs.

Emerald Nuclear is designing its technology “to integrate with the unique power needs of the ship, but also to meet the ways that the maritime industry does business,” Deason said.

Other companies pursuing nuclear ship propulsion include Core Power, newcleo and Blykalla. Core Power, Westinghouse, Saltfoss Energy and Prodigy Clean Energy are also developing floating nuclear power stations. Russia’s state-owned Rosatom already has nuclear-powered icebreakers and a floating nuclear power plant in operation.

Prior to launching Emerald Nuclear, Deason, a nuclear engineer, worked for Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. (USNC) developing reactors for space-based applications.

During his tenure at the Seattle company, a professor from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology approached USNC about applications for the maritime sector. USNC declared bankruptcy in October 2024 and the deal wasn’t pursued. But the idea interested Deason and Hallgeir Juliebø, a Norwegian entrepreneur who had been a consultant with USNC. The two co-founded Emerald Nuclear in 2024 and Juliebø serves as chief commercial officer.

Emerald Nuclear has signed a lease for an engineering center in Norway, where it’s designing and building its first prototype, a non-nuclear thermal device that will be used for the Marine Nuclear Propulsion System Pilot project.

Other partners for the project are VARD Group, Vard Electro, Island Offshore, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Imperial College London and Maskindynamikk, bringing together nuclear technology, ship design and integration, vessel operations and academic research.

The startup will build its first nuclear reactor, named the Gem Microreactor, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, with 2030 as its goal for completion. Emerald Nuclear will integrate equipment from Peregrine Turbine Technologies in Maine to convert the reactor’s heat into electricity.

The target for the first commercial deployment is 2031, on a Norwegian offshore vessel.

Deason is hoping to open a manufacturing site in the future in Western Washington on Puget Sound with an initial focus on floating nuclear power systems that replace diesel generators. That phase of growth is roughly targeted to the early 2030s.

Lime riders in Seattle have already outpaced last year’s entire ridership numbers, logging more than 10.5 million trips into October — surpassing the city’s 2025 full-year total more than two months ahead of schedule.

Powered by a massive surge during the summer’s FIFA World Cup matches in Seattle and a record-breaking Seahawks Super Bowl parade, the milestone highlights how deeply e-bikes and scooters have embedded themselves into Seattle’s daily commute and transit network.

The summer soccer tournament alone accounted for more than 1.7 million trips, headlined by an all-time single-day high of 83,000 rides on June 19 for the USA vs. Australia match — a record notably boosted by Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch joining the “march to the match.”

That single-day mark shattered the previous high-water mark of nearly 60,000 rides set during the Seahawks parade in February. Four of Lime’s top five all-time ridership days in Seattle occurred during the World Cup stretch.

“We’re extremely proud of our partners at SDOT, who have spent years building a program and infrastructure that compelled our CEO to call Seattle ‘the next micromobility-first city,'” Lime’s Hayden Harvey, a regional director of government relations, said in a statement. “We’re also grateful to our riders, the Seattleites who choose day in and day out; rain or shine, two wheeled transportation instead of four.”

The record-setting volume reflects Lime’s position as the only game in town. After rival operators exited the market, Lime became the exclusive vendor in the City of Seattle’s micromobility share program.

Lime has since scaled its footprint to 15,000 active devices that are serviced and staged out of a sprawling warehouse south of downtown in Georgetown.

Beyond fleet expansion, Lime is leaning into affordability to convert event riders into daily commuters. Alongside its existing LimeAccess program for low-income riders and its $5.99 monthly LimePrime subscription — which now counts more than 38,000 monthly subscribers in Seattle — the company rolled out a new commuter-hours pricing pilot this week that lowers per-minute rates during daytime travel windows.

Ring is moving from the doorbell to the deadbolt.

The Amazon-owned company on Wednesday announced its first smart lock, a $249 deadbolt with no keyhole and a dial that recharges a dead battery by hand.

Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s founder and chief inventor, said the dial solves the problem that has kept smart locks from catching on the way video doorbells have: when the battery dies, the owner can be locked out. That’s why many smart locks still come with a key.

“If you have to have a key, it’s like, well, why have a smart lock?” Siminoff said in an interview before the announcement.

Twisting the dial somewhere around five to 10 times (depending on how far and how fast it’s turned), generates enough power to turn the lock back on. The light turns green when it’s ready, and the owner can then get in with a fingerprint, the keypad or the Ring app.

Other smart locks offer backups such as terminals for a 9-volt battery or a USB-C port. Those don’t help someone standing at the door at 1 a.m. without a battery or a cable, Siminoff pointed out.

The Ring Smart Lock is due to ship in the first quarter of next year. It runs on a standard Ring battery pack that should last about a year, Siminoff said, and none of its features requires a subscription.

It connects through Amazon Sidewalk, a shared network powered by nearby Amazon devices, and works with Alexa for voice commands and connections to other smart home devices.

The landscape: Ring is entering a market that includes established lock makers such as Schlage, Yale and Aqara. Apple is also preparing its own smart home push, which will include a smart deadbolt lock, video doorbell and security cameras developed with LG Electronics and sold under the LG brand, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Apple plans to introduce its own smart home devices Oct. 13, and the LG products aren’t expected to reach consumers for at least a few more months, according to the report. The LG lock supports ultra-wideband, a technology that lets a door unlock automatically as its owner approaches, Bloomberg reported.

Why Ring waited: Siminoff’s first video doorbell, the Doorbot, went on sale in 2013 in a bundle with a smart lock from another company, he said. Ring has since integrated its products with other companies’ locks.

Ring could have put its name on a lock and sold plenty of them, Siminoff said, but he didn’t think the company belonged in the business until it had something different to offer.

The parts inside the new lock are mostly off the shelf, he said, including the components that generate power. The invention was putting them together, and Siminoff said he’s annoyed with himself for not doing it years ago.

“I literally can’t believe that I just didn’t look at this and just fix the damn thing,” he said.

Siminoff, who returned to lead Ring last year, said he worked out the idea on his own computer at night using Amazon’s AI tools, estimating the number of cranks, the cost and whether the parts would fit before handing it to Ring’s engineers. A few years ago, he said, answering those questions would have taken five to 10 engineers and six months.

Privacy and the front door: The lock arrives after a difficult stretch for Ring on privacy. A Super Bowl ad in February for Search Party, a feature that uses AI to scan footage from neighbors’ outdoor cameras for lost dogs, drew a backlash from critics who asked what would stop the same technology from being used to find people.

Days later, Ring canceled a planned partnership with Flock Safety, the license-plate-recognition company, that would have let police using Flock’s platform request video from Ring users. Ring said at the time that the integration never launched and no customer videos were shared.

Asked what he would say to customers wary of giving Ring control of the door itself, Siminoff pointed to Throw Away the Key Encryption, or TAKE, which Ring started rolling out in September and says will become its default. Ring deletes its copies of the encryption keys, the digital codes needed to view customers’ videos, after using them, leaving the keys on customers’ own devices.

“You do not need to compromise on privacy in order to have security,” he said.

At launch, the lock and Ring’s cameras will work together in limited ways. The lock’s activity will show up in the Ring app alongside the company’s doorbells, cameras and alarms, and an owner who sees a visitor on a doorbell camera can unlock the door from the app.

The lock won’t open on its own when a Ring camera recognizes a face. Siminoff said deeper connections between the lock and the cameras haven’t been built, and Ring wants to take the time to get them right.

The lock has no camera of its own. “I think the lock should be a lock and should stay a lock,” he said.

He was also cautious about Amazon delivery drivers using the lock to leave packages inside. Garage delivery is a growing business for the company, he said, calling the garage “the airlock,” a semi-public space between the outside world and the fully private house.

“I still don’t see a world at scale where people are entering homes without the homeowner there,” he said. “It’s not a technology thing. It’s a human thing.”

Ring will expand to other types of locks and other countries if the deadbolt sells, Siminoff said, and tie the lock more closely to its doorbells. He said he’d take on other parts of the door, even the hinge, if he found a way to improve them.

“I never thought we’d do a lock,” he said. “I really didn’t.”

New cameras: Ring also announced five new cameras. Four add to its 4K lineup: the Outdoor Cam 4K Plus ($149.99), Spotlight Cam 4K Plus ($199.99), Floodlight Cam 4K Plus ($219.99) and Indoor Cam 4K ($99.99), the first indoor model in the line. The fifth, the $69.99 Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam 2K, rotates 360 degrees to follow motion.

The two indoor cameras go on sale Wednesday in the U.S., and the three outdoor models are available for preorder.

Amazon says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience.

The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks.

As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”

“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.

The company said previously that Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that credentials a user shares “go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves.”

Business partners: The standoff between the tech giants is especially notable because the two companies work together: Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s Graviton chips.

It’s part of a larger debate over who controls the online shopping experience and the customer relationship when AI agents buy items on behalf of consumers.

Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI.

On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment.

The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.

Security implications: Muse can reach account pages and order history if a customer prompts it to do so, Amazon says. Because the agent doesn’t identify itself, the company says, that amounts to an undisclosed third party moving through customer accounts, processing transactions and handling sensitive data without Amazon’s knowledge or consent.

Amazon said agents that operate openly help keep the customer experience safe and reliable, and that other services buying on a customer’s behalf typically do so with the merchant’s agreement. It cited food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with.

“Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience,” Amazon’s spokesperson said in the statement.

Legal maneuvering: Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon’s computers under federal anti-hacking law.

The court denied Amazon’s petition for rehearing on Sept. 10. However, the ruling left one avenue open for Amazon: claims built on contracts and terms of service. The message Muse users are now seeing doesn’t accuse anyone of hacking but cites Amazon’s Conditions of Use.

How Muse works: Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal agent that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one-off questions, connecting to services including email, calendar, payments, dining and shopping.

It’s free, with paid subscription tiers, and available on iOS, Android, muse.ai and WhatsApp.

Meta says the agent runs on a secure virtual machine, with its own browser, and checks with the user before sensitive actions like sending an email or making a purchase. A separate monitoring agent called Sentinel has to approve anything Muse sends to the internet.

The Muse launch materials describe the mechanism now at the center of the dispute: If a service has a public API, Muse can connect to it using credentials the user provides. If it has no API at all, Meta says, the agent “can use the service through a browser the way you would.”

Muse has caught on fast. A week after launch, it became the No. 1 free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. Early users have described it switching an auto insurance policy, hunting down discount codes at checkout, and loading an online grocery cart.

Amazon launched Alexa for Shopping in May, an AI agent that researches products and makes recommendations. Its own agentic shopping feature, Buy for Me, finds items on external brands’ sites, but the company points out that Buy for Me identifies itself and lets brands opt out.

In a sudden shadowdrop, Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software announced on Monday that it’s launched its new standalone virtual-reality headset the Steam Frame.

Initially revealed in Nov. 2025 as part of the same initiative that brought us the new Steam Machine, the Steam Frame is a new entry into the VR hardware space.

Valve’s previous VR device, 2019’s Index, was designed to be installed semi-permanently in a single room. The Frame, conversely, is a standalone wireless device that consists of a lightweight headset and two hand controllers, much in the same spirit as the Meta Quest 2.

As with Valve’s other recent hardware projects, the Frame is essentially a specialized PC running the custom SteamOS 3, a Linux-based operating system. The Frame runs off of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, with 16GB RAM, a microSD card slot, and two 2160 x 2160 LCD screens, one per eye. Oddly, it does not ship with its own dedicated power supply, but can be recharged using the same kind of USB-C plug as the Steam Deck uses.

As with the rest of Valve’s hardware, the Frame is designed to run games from your Steam library, but doesn’t necessarily run every game that’s currently on Steam. Instead, the Frame has its own verification system similar to the Steam Deck’s, with over 100 games currently hand-tested to be compatible with the Steam Frame. Every Frame also comes with Valve’s 2020 game Half-Life: Alyx as a pack-in bonus.

As with the Steam Machine, Valve plans to offer the first batch of Frames with a lottery system. To minimize the impact of scalpers, Valve intends to leave signups open for both models of the Frame until Thursday morning, then randomize the list once and email customers to let them know if they’re getting a Frame or will end up on the waiting list.

Maybe most importantly, however, the Steam Frame’s starting price is $1,059 for a model with a 256GB internal storage drive. Users who want or need more storage can upgrade to a model with a 1 TB drive for $1,299.

Much as how its low price tag was the biggest point in the Steam Deck’s favor back in 2022, the Frame’s high price tag is an albatross around its neck. Reviews note that it’s a uniquely comfortable device and makes it easier than ever to fire up games in VR, but selling it for over $1,000 means it’s unavoidably aimed at the most hardcore members of what was already a niche market.

• Engadget: Valve Steam Frame review: Solid standalone VR that’s too little, too late
• PC Gamer: The king of convenience
• Eurogamer: Valve’s latest tech is now my go-to VR headset, but it’s not without teething issues
• Ars Technica: Valve’s new $1,049 VR hardware tries to revive an abandoned VR “revolution”

This is the same problem Valve hit with the launch of the Steam Machine back in June, and it’s likely to be an issue for every hardware manufacturer in the market for the foreseeable future. With AI companies gobbling up most of the RAM and hard drives on Earth for data center construction, in an event that’s often nicknamed the “RAMageddon,” any consumers who look to build or buy a new PC or console can expect a bad case of sticker shock for the foreseeable future.

That having been said, the Frame does position Valve to pick up where other companies have left off. Meta was previously the market leader in the VR space (PC Gamer claimed recently that Meta still commands roughly 54% of the VR market), but has made distinct cutbacks in 2026 in favor of refocusing on AI research and wearable computing.

Meta invested heavily in recent years on the assumption that virtual reality was the next big thing, and while it made big strides in making VR accessible, it appears to be in the process of rethinking that bet. VR still has plenty of fans and advocates, but it has yet to live up to the hype factor that it had in the late 2010s. The AI arms race, to some extent, appears to have eaten its lunch.

On paper, Meta’s pullback could’ve left space for Valve to shoulder-check its way into the VR market, but then RAMageddon hit. This wasn’t a bad plan as recently as last year, but the current state of the hardware market makes the Steam Frame a tough lift.