ZDNet Mar 7, 03:00 AM
Renpho Eyeris Zen review: This eye massager doubles as my meditation tool The new Renpho Eyeris Zen eye massager can ease your headache pain and eye strain, while delivering built-in meditations for relaxation.
Ars Technica Mar 4, 10:54 PM
TerraPower gets OK to start construction of its first nuclear plant Plant won't be done until 2030 at the earliest, and it still needs an operating license.
Ars Technica Mar 4, 10:14 PM
Large genome model: Open source AI trained on trillions of bases System can identify genes, regulatory sequences, splice sites, and more.
Ars Technica Mar 4, 10:32 PM
Space Command chief throws cold water on the question of UAPs in space "I am not aware of anything that is extraterrestrial, other than comets and things like that."
The Verge Mar 3, 09:55 AM
Big Google Home update lets Gemini describe live camera feeds ‘Live Search’ can describe what your cameras see, not just what they’ve seen. | Image: Google
Google Home chief Anish Kattukaran announced several updates to the smart home platform that fix a long list of annoyances and idiosyncrasies. There's also one noteworthy new addition: the introduction of "Live Search" for your cameras.
So, instead of Gemini only knowing about things that have already happened, it now understands what it sees in your live camera feeds. That means you can ask things like, "Hey Google, is there a car in the driveway?" Live Search requires a subscription to the Advanced plan of Google Home Premium, which costs $20/month or $200/year.
Gemini for Home is now also using updated models, a change that should impro …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 4, 05:06 PM
Honor’s Robot Phone is a bad robot, an interesting camera, and maybe your friend The friend-shaped phone.
After over four months of teasing, I've finally been able to see Honor's Robot Phone in action. And after all that, it looks pretty legit - just so long as you weren't actually expecting a robot.
The Robot Phone could more accurately be called the Gimbal Phone, though I suspect the company's marketing department would disagree. Its big hardware innovation is a 200-megapixel camera mounted on a gimbal arm, which unfolds from the back of the phone when you need it, and retracts behind a cover when you don't.
It unlocks a set of camera features much like you'd find in a DJI Osmo Pocket. There's improved stabilization thanks to the gimbal, mea …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Ars Technica Mar 3, 03:00 PM
As Moon interest heats up, two companies unveil plans for a lunar "harvester" "Ultimately, we want to build a fleet of electric harvesters."
Ars Technica Mar 4, 02:54 PM
Are consumers doomed to pay more for electricity due to data center buildouts? Data center operators to sign pledge to supply their own power instead of relying on grid.
Ars Technica Mar 3, 03:19 PM
Apple intros M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros and its first new monitors in years New laptops come with more storage but also higher starting prices.
The Verge Mar 4, 11:52 PM
Tim Sweeney signed away his right to criticize Google until 2032 Epic CEO Tim Sweeney might be one of the most outspoken people in the history of the world. He fought two of the world's most valuable and powerful companies almost all the way to the US Supreme Court, insulting them again and again: "crooked," "deceitful," "insanely sneaky," calling Android a "fake open platform," calling both companies "gangster-style businesses that will do anything they think they can get away with," telling me how Google's Project Hug was "an astonishingly corrupt effort at a massive scale."
But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It's right there in a binding term sheet for his settlement with Google.
On March 3 …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 4, 02:19 PM
Apple launches $599 MacBook Neo powered by an iPhone chip Apple just announced a new entry-level MacBook that runs on the same A18 Pro chip that launched two years ago in its iPhone 16 lineup and starts at $599.
The MacBook Neo features a 13-inch (2408 x 1506) display, 8GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB of storage, a Magic Keyboard, multi-touch trackpad, 1080p camera, two USB-C ports (one USB 3 and one USB 2), a headphone jack, and new side-firing speakers with support for spatial audio and Dolby Atmos. It's available in four colors: silver, indigo, blush, and citrus, each with a color-matched keyboard.
There are some tradeoffs for the lower price, like the 8GB of RAM that doesn't include an option to …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 3, 02:34 PM
Xiaomi, unlike Google and Samsung, thinks camera hardware comes first Xiaomi’s new Leica Leitzphone has new hardware tricks including continuous zoom and a LOFIC sensor. | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge
When it launched the 17 and 17 Ultra in Europe on Saturday, Xiaomi bucked an industry trend: it didn't really talk about AI all that much. And it really didn't talk about AI when it showed off the two phones' cameras, including a special edition 17 Ultra co-created with Leica. According to Angus Ng, the company's director of communications and public relations, that's no mistake.
"We're still currently focusing on what is the limitation of hardware," Ng told me at MWC 2026, when I asked why its photography approach seemed so different to Google and Samsung's recent Pixel 10A and Galaxy S26 launches. "If it really comes to a point where we c …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 4, 08:22 PM
The world’s biggest automaker has one of the dirtiest supply chains: report Tesla, Ford, and Volvo occupy the top three spots in a new ranking of 18 global automakers based on their efforts to eliminate carbon emissions, environmental harms, and human rights violations from their supply chains. Toyota, meanwhile, lurks near the bottom of the list, underscoring the persistent difficulty in getting the world's largest car company to clean up its supply chain.
The rankings were compiled by Lead the Charge, a global coalition of leading climate, environment, and human rights organizations that includes the Sierra Club, The Sunrise Project, and Public Citizen, among others. This is the fourth edition of the coalition's …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 5, 01:09 AM
A new video from the White House mixes Call of Duty footage with actual video of Iran strikes A screenshot of the Call of Duty footage in the White House’s video.
On Wednesday, the White House posted a video of actual military strikes on Iran in the style usually seen in Call of Duty highlight videos, and started the video with a clip from Call of Duty. The real-life footage of missiles and other munitions hitting targets in Iran shows clips seen in other Trump administration videos, like this one posted to the U.S. Central Command X account.
Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue. pic.twitter.com/kTO0DZ56IJ
- The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 4, 2026
As noted by The Washington Post's Drew Harwell, the animation at the start appears to be from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III when a player activates a …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 4, 06:57 PM
Google’s AI-powered workspace is now available to more users in Search Google is bringing Canvas to everyone in the US using AI Mode in Search. The feature opens up a dedicated workspace within its AI-powered search tool, allowing it to use the latest information from Search to organize plans, develop tools, and draft documents in a panel alongside your chat.
Though Google initially launched Canvas inside its Gemini app as a way to create documents and code in real-time, it later tested the feature in AI Mode - but only for visualizing travel plans. Now, you can use Canvas in AI Mode for tasks related to creative writing and coding, too, giving you the ability to view an AI-generated dashboard laying out infor …
Read the full story at The Verge.
ZDNet Mar 7, 02:45 AM
Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen) review: The best Bose has to offer With the QuietComfort Ultra Headphones 2, Bose is refining all the aspects it has already excelled at.
The Verge Mar 3, 08:26 PM
Another Oracle outage is messing up US TikTok The US version of TikTok is once again experiencing issues due to an Oracle outage, just a month after coming back online from a similar outage in February.
The service disruption, impacting Oracle's Ashburn, Virginia data center, began early Tuesday afternoon, with Downdetector reports spiking around 1PM Eastern. TikTok USDS confirmed in a post on X that US users "may temporarily experience lags in posting content while Oracle works to resolve the issue."
An issue with an Oracle data center is impacting some parts of the TikTok U.S. user experience. Creators may temporarily experience lags in posting content while Oracle works to resolv …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 3, 02:31 PM
Blue Prince headlines Nintendo’s lineup of Switch 2 indie games Following a Direct in February and a Pokémon-focused event last week, Nintendo returned today with a showcase focused on indie games. And it ended with a big one: the absorbing, room-shifting puzzle game Blue Prince is launching on the Switch 2. Even better, it'll be available later today.
The rest of the titles revealed during the showcase didn't have the same name recognition, but it was an eclectic bunch. Highlights includes Denshattack, which looks like a long-lost Dreamcast cult classic as it mashes up Tony Hawk-style skateboarding with, uh, trains. It's launching on June 17th on the Switch 2, and a demo will be available in the eShop …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 3, 02:22 PM
Apple launches M5 Pro and M5 Max chips Apple has just announced two new processors: the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The new chips will power the MacBook Pro it revealed on Tuesday, offering an 18-core CPU and a new "Fusion Architecture" that integrates two 3nm dies into a single system-on-a-chip (SoC).
The CPU's 18-core setup includes six "super" cores and 12 new performance cores, which Apple says is "optimized to deliver greater power-efficient, multithreaded performance." Apple notes that what were previously known as performance cores inside M5-equipped devices - like the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro - are now called super cores, representing a boost in perform …
Read the full story at The Verge.
VentureBeat Mar 4, 08:18 PM
Black Forest Labs' new Self-Flow technique makes training multimodal AI models 2.8x more efficient To create coherent images or videos, generative AI diffusion models like Stable Diffusion or FLUX have typically relied on external "teachers"—frozen encoders like CLIP or DINOv2—to provide the semantic understanding they couldn't learn on their own.
But this reliance has come at a cost: a "bottleneck" where scaling up the model no longer yields better results because the external teacher has hit its limit.
Today, German AI startup Black Forest Labs (maker of the FLUX series of AI image models) has announced a potential end to this era of academic borrowing with the release of Self-Flow, a self-supervised flow matching framework that allows models to learn representation and generation simultaneously.
By integrating a novel Dual-Timestep Scheduling mechanism, Black Forest Labs has demonstrated that a single model can achieve state-of-the-art results across images, video, and audio without any external supervision.
The technology: breaking the "semantic gap"
The fundamental problem with traditional generative training is that it's a "denoising" task. The model is shown noise and asked to find an image; it has very little incentive to understand what the image is, only what it looks like.
To fix this, researchers have previously "aligned" generative features with external discriminative models. However, Black Forest Labs argues this is fundamentally flawed: these external models often operate on misaligned objectives and fail to generalize across different modalities like audio or robotics.
The Labs' new technique, Self-Flow, introduces an "information asymmetry" to solve this. Using a technique called Dual-Timestep Scheduling, the system applies different levels of noise to different parts of the input. The student receives a heavily corrupted version of the data, while the teacher—an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) version of the model itself—sees a "cleaner" version of the same data.
The student is then tasked not just with generating the final output, but with predicting what its "cleaner" self is seeing—a process of self-distillation where the teacher is at layer 20 and the student is at layer 8. This "Dual-Pass" approach forces the model to develop a deep, internal semantic understanding, effectively teaching itself how to see while it learns how to create.
Product implications: faster, sharper, and multi-modal
The practical results of this shift are stark. According to the research paper, Self-Flow converges approximately 2.8x faster than the REpresentation Alignment (REPA) method, the current industry standard for feature alignment. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't plateau; as compute and parameters increase, Self-Flow continues to improve while older methods show diminishing returns.
The leap in training efficiency is best understood through the lens of raw computational steps: while standard "vanilla" training traditionally requires 7 million steps to reach a baseline performance level, REPA shortened that journey to just 400,000
Wired Mar 4, 10:00 PM
What AI Models for War Actually Look Like While companies like Anthropic debate limits on military uses of AI, Smack Technologies is training models to plan battlefield operations.
Ars Technica Mar 3, 01:24 PM
Medical journal The Lancet blasts RFK Jr.’s health work as a failure Kennedy's destruction "might take generations to repair," The Lancet said.
The Verge Mar 3, 03:34 PM
The best mobile tech announced at MWC 2026 so far Mobile World Congress 2026 is still in full swing in Barcelona, Spain, with announcements continuing to come from the mobile-focused show that runs until March 5th.
To make sure you don't miss the best new smartphones, laptops, concepts, and accessories, we're rounding up all the most newsworthy gadgets that have debuted so far at MWC 2026. And if you want to stay on top of all the news, you can follow our full coverage of the show right here.
Lenovo AI Workmate Concept
Lenovo didn't skimp on the concepts at MWC this year, but its AI Workmate might be the most peculiar. The device looks like a tiny robot arm but instead of a manipulator o …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge Mar 5, 02:21 AM
Did Live Nation punish a venue by taking Billie Eilish away? John Abbamondi had orders to let the CEO of Ticketmaster down easy.
In April 2021, Abbamondi was the CEO of BSE Global, the company that ran Brooklyn arena the Barclays Center. BSE Global's existing Ticketmaster contract would expire at the end of September, and Abbamondi and his team had evaluated proposals from SeatGeek, AXS, and Ticketmaster. The economics of Ticketmaster offer, according to Abbamondi, "was nowhere near as good as the other two." SeatGeek's technology was "superior" to Ticketmaster's on balance, on top of better financial terms including an equity stake in the company, the arena decided. It clinched their decision to go …
Read the full story at The Verge.