Hugging Face, the world’s largest repository for open-source AI models, is being acquired by Nvidia for $12.9 billion. The platform has grown to more than 18 million users and 200,000 companies, which use it to discover, share, and collaborate on more than 3 million AI models; just three years ago, it was valued at $4.5 billion in private markets. The purchase would push Nvidia further beyond its core semiconductor business and deepen its role across the wider AI ecosystem, potentially giving it another source of growth if demand for chips slows. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval. Hugging Face was also targeted in an OpenAI hack in July, after which the company closed the vulnerability using a Chinese open-source model.
True Spies
Brief Histories: Women In Espionage
How long have women been shaping the world of espionage?
Some of the oldest stories of spycraft already place women at the center. In the biblical Book of Judges, the Philistines recruit Delilah for 1,100 pieces of silver to uncover the source of Samson’s strength. Centuries later in Tang Dynasty China, Wu Zetian established a network of palace women who gathered intelligence on potential rivals as she consolidated her power.
During England’s war with the Netherlands, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn was sent to Antwerp to gather intelligence and recruit informants. Two centuries later, Harriet Tubman used a network of contacts among enslaved people in South Carolina to collect information on Confederate troops, supplies, and river mines ahead of the Combahee River Raid.
During World War II, Marthe Cohn turned being underestimated into an advantage. Working for French intelligence, she crossed into Germany under a false identity as a nurse searching for her missing fiancé. Her reporting on the largely deserted Siegfried Line helped give advancing French troops confidence to move forward.
Join series producer Joe Foley in this week’s podcast selection, ‘Brief Histories: Women In Espionage,’ to uncover how women have gathered intelligence, run networks, crossed enemy lines, and shaped espionage across centuries.
Take on immersive games and challenges at SPYGAMES! Test your team's skills and strategy, compete to climb the leaderboards, and recharge with food and drink in your own private space hosted by a dedicated staff member.
Book your next team social.
Take on immersive games and challenges at SPYGAMES! Test your team's skills and strategy, compete to climb the leaderboards, and recharge with food and drink in your own private space hosted by a dedicated staff member.
What motivates them. What earns their trust. What they need from you when the pressure is on.
If you’re an Agent Handler, you’re naturally people-focused, perceptive, and calm under pressure. You understand what makes someone tick, know how to build trust, and can keep a relationship steady even during a crisis.
In the intelligence world, those qualities are used to cultivate, recruit, and manage agents who may be taking enormous risks to provide important secrets. A Handler’s responsibility is to protect them, even when that means putting the agent’s safety before their own.
In everyday life, that can make you someone people rely on, a strong judge of character, and the person others trust when the stakes are high.
Valuable documents have been stolen from headquarters, and the chief suspects are double agents from an allied organization. Their identities remain hidden. Solve this week’s SPYSCAPE crossword to uncover the double agents and reveal which organization they came from.
Give your party guests an unforgettable experience designed to engage, entertain, and inspire. Our dedicated staff will be on hand to help, and you'll even get your own private space to celebrate.
Host your birthday at SPYSCAPE or SPYGAMES.
Give your party guests an unforgettable experience designed to engage, entertain, and inspire. Our dedicated staff will be on hand to help, and you'll even get your own private space to celebrate.
Could this be the first direct sign of dark matter?
Dark matter is thought to account for about 85% of all matter in the universe. It cannot be seen or touched, but scientists consider its existence necessary to explain phenomena including the way galaxies rotate.
To search for it, researchers filled a tank with liquid xenon and placed it a mile underground to minimize interference and isolate particles passing through. In June 2023, they recorded one unusual event in which a particle released energy on a scale suggesting its mass was more than 200 times that of a proton.
Researchers say there is just a 0.5% chance the recording could be explained by other known physical properties. They recently published the finding, so physicists worldwide can examine whether it could represent the first detection of dark matter.
Quirky
Soil Briefs
What can a pair of buried underpants reveal about the ground beneath us?
Across Switzerland, researchers asked roughly 1,000 farmers, gardeners, and citizen scientists to bury pairs of plain white cotton underwear in soil. Two months later, the remains were dug up, photographed, and sent to the lab, where scientists measured how much fabric had decomposed.
The idea was simple: cotton is mostly cellulose, which soil microbes and invertebrates consume. The more active the soil life, the more of the underwear disappeared. Researchers turned those measurements into an “underwear index” of biological activity.
Private gardens showed the fastest breakdown, while standard lawns were slowest. On farmland, organic and no-till plots decomposed the fabric faster than intensively plowed, conventionally fertilized soils. Researchers also cautioned that very rapid decomposition is not always a sign of healthy soil. The project, launched by Agroscope and the University of Zurich, later earned the team an Ig Nobel Prize in 2026.
Try brain-teasing challenges at SPYSCAPE and pulse-racing fun in SPYGAMES.
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