Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

There's some controversy in the photography world as an AI-generated image won a major prize at a prestigious competition, PetaPixel has reported. An piece called The Electrician by Boris Eldagsen took first prize in the Creative category at the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards — despite not being taken by a camera. Eldagsen subsequently refused the award, saying "AI is not photography. I applied [...] to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not."Eldagsen's image is part of a series called PSEUDOMNESIA: Fake Memories, designed to evoke a photographic style of the 1940s. However, they are in reality "fake memories of a past, that never existed, that no one photographed. These images were imagined by language and re-edited more between 20 to 40 times through AI image generators, combining ‘inpainting’, ‘outpainting’, and ‘prompt whispering’ techniques."In a blog, Eldagsen explained that he used his experience as a photographer to create the prize-winning image, acting as a director of the process with the AI generators as "co-creators." Although the work is inspired by photography, he said that the point of the submission is that it is not photography. "Participating in open calls, I want to speed up the process of the Award organizers to become aware of this difference and create separate competitions for AI-generated images," he said.Eldagsen subsequently declined the prize. “Thank you for selecting my image and making this a historic moment, as it is the first AI-generated image to win in a prestigious international photography competition,” he wrote. “How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it? AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.”Shortly thereafter, the photo was stripped from the show and competition website and organizers have yet to comment on the matter. Eldagsen actually traveled to London to attend the ceremony and even got up on stage (uninvited) to read a statement in person.It's not clear if the organizers knew the work was AI-generated or not (Eldagsen said he told them it was). In any case, rather than shrinking from the situation, they should be embracing it. AI-generated art has entered the culture in a huge way over the past year, with AI winning both photo and art competitions over the past few months. Eldagsen's piece is bound to create conversations about how to handle it, particularly when it encroaches into traditional mediums.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/german-artist-refuses-award-after-his-ai-image-wins-prestigious-photography-prize-071322551.html?src=rss

When Rode began offering gaming-specific audio equipment at the end of last year, two of the three products the company announced, the XDM-100 and XCM-50, repurposed existing designs. Its newest Rode X device, the Streamer X, offers something different. It combines an audio interface with an external capture card.You can connect XLR and line-level microphones and headsets to the Streamer X, with a built-in Rode Revolution preamp offering all the power you need. At the same time, the device can capture and stream footage at 4K and 30 frames per second or 2K at 60 frames per second. It also offers video passthrough at up to 4K and 60 frames per second or 2K and 120 frames per second.The front of the console features a set of four customizable buttons you can set up to trigger specific sounds and actions on your computer. A pair of USB-C connections allow you to connect the Streamer X to two separate PCs at the same time. Out of the box, the device is fully compatible with Rode’s suite of software tools, including Unify, Rode Central and Rode Connect.RodeSeparately, Rode also announced the Rodecaster Duo, a new audio interface that brings together all of the features found in the company’s Rodecaster Pro II but puts them into a more compact package. That means it should be able to drive even the most power-hungry mics without the need for an in-line signal booster, and offer Bluetooth connectivity for audio monitoring. Rode did not announce pricing details for the Streamer X and Rodecaster Duo, but said both devices would arrive in the coming weeks. Engadget has reached out to the company for more information, and we’ll update this article when we hear back from it.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/rodes-streamer-x-combines-an-audio-interface-with-an-external-capture-card-221321424.html?src=rss

Facing renewed competition from Microsoft and OpenAI, Google is reportedly “racing” to build an “all-new” AI-powered search engine. According to The New York Times, the company is in the early stages of creating a search service that will attempt to anticipate what you want from it in hopes of offering “a far more personalized experience.” The project has “no clear timetable.” However, knowing that Google is also developing a suite of new AI features for its existing search engine under the codename “Magi.”Among the features Google is developing is a chatbot that can answer software engineering questions and generate code snippets. The company has also experimented with a feature that would allow people to search for music through a chatbot conversation. According to The Times, the company has assigned more than 160 employees to the redesign.Other new additions “in various stages of development” include a Chrome feature dubbed "Searchalong." It would allow a chatbot to scan the webpage you’re reading to offer contextual information. For example, if you were looking for a place to stay on Airbnb, you could ask the chatbot to tell you what to see and do near your planned accommodations. “GIFI” and “Tivoli Tutor,” another pair of experimental features, would allow users to prompt Google Image Search to generate images and converse with a chatbot to learn a new language. It’s worth noting many of these are features that Google has either demoed in the past or exist on other platforms like Duolingo. For instance, image generation is already available in Slides.Google reportedly plans to announce Magi next month before introducing additional new features sometime in the fall. That timing suggests the project will make an appearance at I/O 2023. The company plans to offer Magi’s features to one million people in the US before expanding availability to 30 million users by the end of the year.“We’ve been bringing AI to Google Search for years to not only dramatically improve the quality of our results, but also introduce entirely new ways to search, such as Lens and multisearch,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget when asked about the report. “We’ve done so in a responsible and helpful way that maintains the high bar we set for delivering quality information. Not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited about bringing new AI-powered features to Search, and will share more details soon.”Underscoring the importance of Magi for Google, Samsung reportedly told the company last month it was considering making Bing the default search on its devices. The declaration reportedly sent Google into a “panic.” The company’s search agreement with Samsung is worth approximately $3 billion annually. This year, its lucrative search agreement with Apple, the subject of frequent antitrust scrutiny, is also up for renewal.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-is-reportedly-developing-a-new-ai-powered-search-engine-191648736.html?src=rss

One detail that's often omitted from modern founders myths is whether or not said scion of capitalist success actually invented the thing they're famous for inventing. Just like Elon Musk didn't invent electric vehicles so much as be the first to successfully market them to the American public, Thomas Edison's contributions to the advent of electrified lighting too might be overstated. In the excerpt below from his latest book, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans, Dr. Bill Hammack, YouTube's "The Engineer Guy," recounts the tale of Hiram Maxim, an irrepressible engineer and inventor whose novel filament production method would have made him a household name — had Edison not reportedly made "a clean steal" of his revolutionary technology.Sourcebooks IncExcerpted from The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans by Bill Hammack, PhD. © 2023 by Bill Hammack, PhD. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.In November 1880, the reading room of the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company, located in the basement of one of the first skyscrapers, glowed with the light of a four-bulb chandelier and six bulbs in fixtures spaced along the walls. An observer characterized this electric light as “very much like that of a first-class oil lamp, steadier than gas, and of a yellow, clear pleasant quality” — nothing like the “ghastly blue” of a “flickering” arc light, nor was there the odor of burning gas; instead, the room’s atmosphere “remain[ed] perfectly cool and sweet.” His only complaint was that the bulbs flickered slightly with every stroke of the engine that powered the generator. This first commercial installation, a spectacular achievement, featured no bulbs manufactured by Thomas Edison, although he had proudly announced his invention of the light bulb only a few months earlier to great press attention. The bulbs at the Mercantile Company were those of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, a company driven forward by their irrepressible and energetic engineer, Hiram Maxim. Edison called Maxim’s bulb “a clean steal” of his lamp. Yet Maxim had seventeen patents on incandescent lamps, and his company controlled the patents of several other inventors, also contemporary to Edison. Maxim thought of himself as the inventor of the commercial light bulb. “Every time I put up a light,” he complained, “a crowd would gather, everyone asking, ‘Is it Edison’s?’” This so irritated Maxim, who noted that Edison at the time “had never made a lamp,” that he considering killing “on the spot” the next person to ask him “Is it Edison’s?”That the first commercialized light bulbs were not Edison’s surprises because we love stories of sole inventors whose spark of inspiration revolutionized the world. They give us narratives that are neat, tidy, and digestible but incomplete. These stories hide the engineering method; they bury the creativity of engineers, smooth over struggles, and sanitize choices that reflect cultural norms. Perhaps no story persists more than Edison and his light bulb, yet Edison was the tail end of a long list of light bulb innovators in a process of invention similar to that of the steam turbine in the next century.In the forty years before Edison’s first successful prototype, at least twenty people presented, patented, and demonstrated incandescent lamps—using electricity to heat a filament until it glowed. The first recorded attempt was in 1838 (almost a decade before Edison’s birth) by a Belgian inventor whose bulb used a strip of carbon as a filament. A fair assessment of history would call these men inventors of the light bulb comparable to Edison, especially in a world where Edison, the so-called inventor of the incandescent light bulb, was forty years late to the idea of incandescent lighting. But unlike with Edison, we don’t remember the names of these men, because most of their bulbs burned for only a few seconds. They had the necessary but thankless job of creating links in a chain of incremental advances that didn’t yet produce an applicable or reproducible solution to the problem of darkness, which so far could only be dispelled with fire, until Edison created one of the links that did, transforming from method into narrative. Although Edison and his bulb end that length of the chain of innovators, his link was no more an exercise or example of the engineering method than those that came before; it only overcame a circumstantial threshold of usefulness.In 1878, Edison focused the energy of his staff at the bustling Menlo Park Research Laboratory on finding a long-lasting filament for the incandescent light bulb. The staff worked to the rhythms of Edison, “the central originating and guiding mind and personality,” as one worker noted, describing work there as “a strenuous but joyful life for all physically, mentally, and emotionally.” Edison set the tone with long work hours into the night. He often napped on the workbenches in Menlo Park and ate sparingly in increments of small snacks he thought were better for digestion, although for his workers, he had brought in, often at midnight, hamper baskets loaded with hot dinners of meat, vegetables, dessert, and coffee. But when Edison stood, stretched, hitched up his waistband, and sauntered away, all knew that dinner was over and work should resume.In the late 1870s, Edison and his staff produced bulbs that looked much like a modern bulb: a glass envelope fastened to a wooden base covered with copper strips, and, at its center, a thin, long, delicate spiral of platinum. Yet these bulbs failed. Some yielded light as bright as a small bundle of today’s Christmas lights for a few hours, but most burned out quickly. As Edison learned, the temperature for the incandescence of platinum wire was near that of its melting point—any fluctuations in the current and the platinum would melt. Edison and his team tested an astonishing array of materials, by some count sixteen hundred types. They tested metals like platinum, iridium, ruthenium, chromium, aluminum, tungsten, molybdenum, palladium, manganese, and titanium; elements that sometimes behaved like metals, including silicon and boron; then a grab bag of materials—cork, wax, celluloid, and the hair from his employees’ beards. After these, his team moved to slivers of wood, broom corn, and paper. Tissue paper covered with lampblack and tar and rolled into a rod glowed astonishingly well and for a good amount of time. Edison refined this idea by “carbonizing” cotton thread, heating it without oxygen until the length of thread was blackened throughout. From this thread, he formed a long filament. On October 21, 1879, a bulb with a filament of this thread, with all the air removed from the glass enclosure, burned for more than half a day. They were approaching the beginning of the commercial light bulb.Seven months after that bit of carbonized thread showed promise, they tried a piece of bamboo: a six-inch strip burned for three hours and twenty-four minutes at seventy-one candlepower (about the brightness of a standard sixty-watt bulb today). “The best lamp ever yet made,” an Edison associate noted, “here from vegetable Carbon.” From there, Edison’s team tested two hundred species of bamboo until they found a variety that was the best for manufacturing carbon filaments, grown near Yawata, Japan, where Edison is still celebrated with a street named “Edison-dori,” a bust of Edison in the town center, and, near a shrine, a large monument dedicated to Edison. With his specialized bamboo supply and method of manufacturing in place, Edison was ready to light the world, but Hiram Maxim beat him out of the gate.Maxim’s bulbs, installed at the Equitable Life Building, out-classed Edison’s. “They have a rich golden tint, resembling that of a wax taper,” said one reporter. Another noted that Maxim “has invented a lamp which surpasses, I believe, even Edison’s dreams.” When comparing the lamps, reporters noted that Edison’s had lower brightness than Maxim's, or, when of the same intensity as Maxim’s, they burned out in only a few hours. By Maxim’s own estimate, the filaments in his bulbs could last forty days. The dimness and shorter life of Edison’s bulbs were the same thing: Edison’s bulbs could not tolerate as much current as Maxim’s, so if run at the same current, Edison’s bulbs would burn out quickly, and to make them last longer, Edison’s were run at a lower current and thus were dimmer.That Maxim could achieve this was unbelievable to Edison’s staff—an outraged member of the Menlo Park staff ranted that it must be apparent to “any sane person that” Maxim’s bulb must be “but a copy” of Edison’s. Surely, thought Edison’s employees, only a well-oiled machine like that of Menlo Park could produce a light bulb. Inside Menlo Park, glassblowers, machinists, engineers, chemists, and physicists churned out inventions like appliances on an assembly line, while Maxim’s ham-handed U.S. Electric Lighting Company struggled to find enough resources to survive; employees thought it likely to shut at any minute, and even its own president described it as “helpless.” Their technical expertise was so low that they could not figure out, as one employee later noted, what “size wire would carry a certain number of lamps without overheating,” adding that “a number of mysterious fires about this time were probably the fruits of our ignorance.” Compared with Edison’s factory-line Menlo Park model, Maxim’s method of invention seemed scattershot.Maxim was the classic American tinkerer, once describing himself as a “chronic inventor.” Although self-taught—one biographer describes him as “semiliterate”—over his lifetime, he invented an astonishing array of tools and toys. Maxim developed methods to separate metals from their ores, instruments to measure wind velocities, vacuum cleaners, novelty items that produced “illusionary effects”—a rotating sphere with concave paraboloidal floor, mirrors, and a bicycle track, presumably to create the illusion of riding a bike long distances—gear to prevent the rolling of ships, riveting machines, feed water check valves, steam generators, wheels for railroads and tramways, an inhaler to treat bronchitis, boot and shoe heel protectors, hair curling irons, a method for demagnetizing watches, a type of pneumatic tire, a coffee substitute, a method for extinguishing fires in theaters, and most surprising of all, new advertising methods—a rotating sign that works “even in very light airs.” And near the end of his life, he invented the world’s first successful machine gun.Maxim’s contribution to the light bulb was to improve the manufacture of filaments. Filaments, whether of bamboo or cardboard, as in Maxim’s case, were converted to carbon by heating at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen until the cellulose in the material broke down, leaving a hard carbon skeleton, but uneven carbonization caused thinner sections to become much hotter when lit with an electrical current and burn out more quickly. Maxim’s insight was to place a carbonized filament into a hydrocarbon atmosphere, then pass through it an electrical current that heated the filament to a bright red. The thinner and hotter parts of the filament would break down the vaporous hydrocarbon surrounding them and deposit pure carbon on the filament, building up layers of carbon on the thinner parts and resulting in a filament of uniform thickness and greater life span. As Maxim gloated, “it is absolutely impossible by mechanical means to make a carbon filament that is of uniform resistance” without his patented method, adding that Edison “had to use my process or give up the job.”Maxim’s attitude was prompted by the rivalry that burned between the many engineers competing in a world eager for the magic of electrical lighting, but it also shows us the problem with crediting any individual with the complete “invention” of any technology. We tend to tell the stories of inventors who, through their unique intellect and drive, produce an equally unique marvel at the climax of a story with a beginning, middle, and end. That is often how this book has told it, out of deference to individual humans’ need to relate to the stories of other individual humans. But the engineering method is uninterested in this “great men” historical framework. It cares only about the accumulated knowledge, heuristics, rules of thumb, intuition, and anything else that drives problems in the direction of solutions as fast as possible, the sum of which, even for a single solution, is beyond unthinkable for a lone person to create themselves. This web of information is so vast, incomprehensibly vast, so we make it comprehensible and moving by telling the stories of individual inventors, even if this distorts the unknowable true web of invention.Maxim is likely unrecognized as an inventor today because he lacked Edison’s agile self-promotion and because, in a sense, Edison “won” and thus told the story of the light bulb’s invention. But did Edison “invent” a light bulb when his company produced a brilliantly glowing but short-lived electric light? Perhaps. When we think of an invented technology, we typically imply technology that not only exists but is reproducible in a way that can fulfill the needs of those whose problem it solves. That is, it can be manufactured or mass-produced. A handful of working light bulbs in the late 1800s is a marvel, but it doesn’t light the world. In this sense, the invention of the light bulb was a decades-long process of incremental changes to create a filament that can be manufactured reliably and extended beyond Edison and Maxim alone. To tell only a “great man” story hides the contributions of others who were essential to a technology’s development. We can see that in the evolution of the manufacturing techniques of Maxim’s light bulbs: he had on staff an artistic draftsman turned engineer whose contributions to reliable manufacturing have long been overlooked.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-things-we-make-bill-hammack-sourcebooks-143058188.html?src=rss

The 128GB model of Apple's 12.9-inch iPad Pro is back down to $1,000 at Amazon, matching the lowest price we've tracked. It's listed at $1,049, but an additional coupon for $49.01 will be applied at checkout. For reference, Apple typically sells the tablet for $1,099, though we've periodically seen it drop to $1,049 since it launched last October.The iPad Pro is the top choice in our guide to the best tablets, and the 12.9-inch model specifically is the "best for power users" pick in our breakdown of the best iPads. To be clear, this is more tablet than most people need, as the iPad Air or entry-level iPad are much better values for those just looking for browse the web, read e-books, stream video and do some basic work on a tablet. But for those who have cash to burn and want the biggest and most powerful iPad Apple makes, this is it.The iPad Pro's M2 chip is the same as the one in the latest MacBook Air, and its display is the most advanced of any iPad, with a 120Hz refresh rate and mini-LED backlighting that allows for better contrast and brightness. (The latter feature isn't available on the 11-inch Pro.) Compared to the Air, its speakers are more robust, it has a faster Thunderbolt USB-C port and its camera system is more advanced, with a flash and ultrawide lens. All told, we gave the tablet a review score of 87 last year.It's still best to look at this as a premium tablet than a universal laptop replacement, as iPadOS can still make multitasking and other basic PC tasks more convoluted than they could be. That said, its spacious display, fast chip and Apple Pencil support can make it a powerful tool for creative types in particular. If you've been thinking about taking the plunge, this deal makes the device at least a little more affordable. If you don't need the latest and greatest chip, meanwhile, note that a 256GB cellular model of the previous-generation iPad Pro is down to the same price at Best Buy.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-129-inch-ipad-pro-with-m2-drops-back-to-its-all-time-low-131053672.html?src=rss

Ahead of its April 19th release date, Sony and Guerrilla Games on Friday shared a new trailer for Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores. The DLC is set to tell the next chapter of Aloy’s story. The trailer offers a fresh look at the Burning Shores, a volcanic archipelago that was once home to Los Angeles. We also get a closer look at the Metal Devil boss fight that was teased at the end of the announcement trailer Sony and Guerrilla released last year.That battle is one of the reasons Horizon Forbidden West:Burning Shores won’t be available on PlayStation 4, even though you can play the original game on Sony’s last generation console. “The cityscape ruins of LA and its surroundings are highly detailed and require a lot of processing power as well as fast streaming technology to run properly,” Horizon Forbidden West Game Director Mathijs de Jonge told the PlayStation Blog last month. He went on to add there’s “a particular battle scene that requires a LOT of memory and processing power.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/horizon-burning-shores-launch-trailer-teases-the-franchises-biggest-boss-fight-192153867.html?src=rss

The Federal Aviation Administration has given SpaceX final regulatory approval to carry out Starship’s first orbital flight test. Per Ars Technica, the FAA on late Friday afternoon issued the company a license to launch its next-generation rocket from South Texas. “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement. “The license is valid for five years.”

Apple’s forthcoming 15-inch MacBook Air will feature a processor “on par” with the company’s current M2 chip. According to Bloomberg, Apple recently began testing the laptop to ensure its compatibility with third-party App Store apps, something the company does in the lead-up to the release of a new device.Developer logs shared with the outlet show the machine was configured with a chipset that featured an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU, along with 8GB of RAM. Those specs suggest the 15-inch MacBook Air, referred to as “Mac 15,3” in the logs, will ship with an M2 chipset, not Apple’s next-generation chip, as some past reports had suggested. “Bigger changes to the Mac will come later with the release of an M3 chip,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman notes. The new machine was spotted running macOS 14, which Apple is expected to announce at WWDC 2023About the most interesting detail revealed by the logs is that the 15-inch MacBook Air features a display resolution “equal” to that of the 14-inch MacBook Pro. That means the new MacBook Air features a less dense display. It’s unclear when Apple plans to release the new laptop. The company announced the M2 MacBook Air at WWDC 2022. Gurman previously reported the 15-inch MacBook Air would arrive sometime between late spring and this summer.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/developer-logs-suggest-apples-long-rumored-15-inch-macbook-air-could-arrive-soon-154131810.html?src=rss

Elon Musk, who’s been vocally critical about artificial intelligence lately, seems to be planning something AI related. According to The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, Musk has founded a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp. Based on a state filing from last month that the sources have viewed, the new company is incorporated in Nevada and lists Musk as the sole director, as well as Jared Birchall, the director of his family’s offices, as the secretary. The multi-company executive is known to have a special affinity for the letter ”X” and has even recently renamed Twitter, Inc. as X Corp.Musk is no stranger to AI projects. He co-founded OpenAI before leaving the company almost a decade ago. After ChatGPT’s meteoric rise in popularity, though, Musk advocated for the technology’s regulation and signed an open letter that urged tech leaders to put a six-month pause on its development. The Journal says Musk thought ChatGPT was politically biased — he once commented on the “danger of training AI to be woke” — and that he’s looking create AI models that are “truth-seeking.”At this point, though, Musk’s plans for X.AI Corp and whether he’s looking to build a veritable ChatGPT rival remains unclear. While details are still scarce, previous reports provide clues on how Musk’s AI efforts are progressing. He reportedly hired two former DeepMind researchers in March, including scientist Igor Babuschkin, who’s believed to be helming the new project. Musk also reportedly purchased 10,000 GPUs for AI development at one of Twitter’s data centers. In addition, according to The Times, he’s already in talks with Tesla and SpaceX investors to put money into his new venture.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musk-has-created-his-own-artificial-intelligence-company-012103279.html?src=rss

If you haven’t heard of Virginia Norwood, it’s about time you did. An aerospace pioneer whose career would have been historic even without its undercurrent of triumph over misogynistic discrimination, she invented the Landsat satellite program that monitors the Earth’s surface today. Norwood passed away on March 27th at the age of 96, as reported by NASA and The New York Times.She achieved all this despite significant pushback from the male-dominated industry before and after her rise. Despite her obvious talent, numerous employers declined to hire her after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For example, Sikorsky Aircraft told her they would never pay her requested salary, equivalent to the lowest rank in the civil service. Another food lab she applied for asked her to promise not to get pregnant as a condition of her employment. (She withdrew her application.) Finally, the gun manufacturer Remington appreciated her “brilliant” ideas in an interview but told her they were hiring a man instead.Her career finally progressed after landing jobs with the US Army Signal Corps Laboratories (where she designed a radar reflector for weather balloons) and Sylvania Electronic Defense Labs (where she set up the company’s first antenna lab). Norwood began working in the 1950s as one of a small group of women at Hughes Aircraft Company, where she gained a reputation as a resourceful problem-solver. “She said, ‘I was kind of known as the person who could solve impossible problems,’” her daughter, Naomi Norwood, told NASA. “So people would bring things to her, even pieces of other projects.”Hughes Aircraft / NASAIn the late 1960s, the director of the Geological Survey wanted to take photographs of the Earth from space to help manage land resources; partnering with NASA, a plan was hatched to send satellites into space. Then working on an advanced design team in Hughes’ space and communications division, Norwood formed the idea that would define her legacy. She gathered feedback from agriculture, meteorology and geology experts to develop a scanner to record different light and energy spectra. Although it used existing technology made for (lower-altitude) agricultural observations, she adapted the tech to meet the Geological Survey’s and NASA’s goals.However, she faced numerous obstacles in securing a spot for her Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) on the launch satellite. It was already hauling an enormous three-camera system developed by RCA using television tube technology, which the agencies viewed as the primary imaging source. To get the MSS onboard, Norwood was tasked with scaling back its size to no more than 100 lbs, a significant downsizing; the RCA system took up most of the satellite’s 4,000 lb. payload.She reduced the device to recording only four energy bands (down from its original seven) to ensure it would make the trip as a secondary measurement system. The satellite launched on July 23rd, 1972, and the MSS captured its first images — of Oklahoma’s Ouachita Mountains — two days later. The results exceeded all expectations, forcing a quick reevaluation of the satellite payload’s hierarchy. Norwood’s system performed better and was more reliable than the clunky RCA project, which caused power surges and had to be shut down for good two weeks into the mission.Landsat quickly became the de facto method of surveying the Earth’s surface. Norwood continued to improve the system, leading the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Landsat 8 and 9, the current versions monitoring the effects of climate change today, are still based on her initial concept. Her other projects included leading the microwave group in Hughes Aircraft’s missile lab and designing the ground-control communications equipment for NASA’s Surveyor lunar lander.She reportedly had no issue with the “the mother of Landsat” moniker her peers gave her. “Yes, I like it, and it’s apt,” she said. “I created it, I birthed it, and I fought for it.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/remembering-virginia-norwood-the-mother-of-nasas-landsat-program-213705046.html?src=rss

Montana is poised to become the first state to ban TikTok. The state’s legislature passed a bill requiring app stores to block the app in the state. The bill, which passed 54 - 43, will now head to Republican Governor Greg Gianforte, who previously banned the app from state-owned devices.The ban is slated to go into effect in 2024, though it will likely face legal challenges well before then. Still, the bill has been closely watched as pressure ramps up on TikTok. CEO Shou Chew testified at a Congressional hearing last month where he tried, largely unsuccessfully, to downplay the company’s ties to ByteDance and China.Meanwhile, the United States government is trying to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok entirely. As The New York Timespoints out, Montana’s ban could serve as a kind of template for the rest of the country, even though it’s unclear whether such bans will hold up to legal challenges.Like federal lawmakers, the Montana bill claims that TikTok’s ties to ByteDance puts US users personal data at risk because the company could be compelled to turn over information to the Chinese government. TikTok has long denied these claims, and has committed more than a billion dollars to Project Texas, a project meant to address national security concerns.TikTok has previously said that the proposed ban in Montana would hurt small businesses that rely on the app. In a statement following the bill's passage, a TikTok spokesperson called it "egregious government overreach" and said it planned to "fight" the measure.“The bill's champions have admitted that they have no feasible plan for operationalizing this attempt to censor American voices and that the bill's constitutionality will be decided by the courts. We will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana whose livelihoods and First Amendment rights are threatened by this egregious government overreach.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/montana-is-about-to-become-the-first-state-to-ban-tiktok-211845076.html?src=rss

Microsoft is making it easier to view your photos in File Explorer. The latest Windows 11 developer preview rolling out today includes Gallery, a new feature that lets you view the Photos app’s image library while browsing files and folders.The Gallery view, the shortcut to which is found in the File Explorer’s navigation panel, arrives in Windows Insider Build 23435. After selecting Gallery, the main file-browsing window will show thumbnails of the same images from the All Photos view of the Photos app. Microsoft says it’s optimized for accessing your most recent photos if you have OneDrive Camera Roll Backup activated on your phone; they’ll display right up top.It should also make it easy to find content from specific folders. “You can choose which folders are shown in Gallery through the Collection dropdown,” Microsoft’s announcement reads. “You can also add subfolders of existing sources to filter to a subset of your content, such as desktop backgrounds and SD card/camera imports.” In addition, Gallery will appear as an option in the file-picking dialog, which should simplify attaching images to emails, PowerPoint presentations or social posts.Gallery in the Windows 11 file-picker viewMicrosoftMicrosoft says the feature is rolling out gradually and won’t be available to all Dev Channel Insiders immediately. Instead, the company will “monitor feedback and see how it lands before pushing it out to everyone.” Although it seems like a feature that will make its way to future stable releases, it’s still in beta and could (theoretically) end up on the cutting-room floor if the company receives negative feedback or changes course.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/windows-11-preview-brings-the-photo-apps-gallery-view-to-file-explorer-191318340.html?src=rss

Researchers at the University of Chicago have unveiled an alternative user interface called LipIO that receives and transmits digital information via small lip and tongue movements. This is obviously a boon to those with certain disabilities who may not have the use of their eyes or hands.LipIO features a thin and flexible plastic sheet packed with conductive materials. The sheet is affixed to the skin along with electrodes that provide contact with the lip. The device works via electrostimulation, with the top layer receiving inputs from the tongue or lower lip via capacitive touch. The trio of researchers created the device using off-the-shelf hobbyist-grade components and have open-sourced all of their work.While the lip system is perfect for people with disabilities, the inventors see plenty of alternative uses. Various demonstrations show LipIO being used to tune a guitar, receive navigation information while cycling and provide DJs with an additional control source for adding effects.A. Jingu et al.The tech could also be used for virtual reality applications. The research paper imagines a related haptic interface to, for instance, render a realistic sense of taste while in VR. In this case, the device would leverage prior research that successfully applied electrical stimulations to the tongue to render basic tastes like sour, salty, bitter and sweet. The researchers even imagine tasting “virtual ice cream” in the metaverse.LipIO is a relatively cumbersome piece of hardware with plenty of wires, so the next step is to shrink the technology down so it is more practical for real-world use. The researchers also want to make the tech more appropriate for public spaces by eliminating the need to regularly lick your lips.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lip-licking-controller-steers-devices-using-tongue-taps-184230384.html?src=rss

We check for tech deals every weekday. On Fridays, we pull together the best of what we found that still happens to be on sale. This week, Amazon continued to sell Apple's latest AirPods Pro for a $50 discount and one more retailer joined in too. Samsung's flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S23 series, finally got a proper discount, instead of just a free storage upgrade, so you can grab the base configuration S23 Ultra for its lowest price yet. Depending on which options you want, Microsoft's tablet-PC hybrid, the Surface Pro 9, is up to $300 off during the company's spring sale. There's also a deal on a rugged portable SSD, as well as discounts on a graphics card, bluetooth speakers and even a projector. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.Apple AirPods ProIf you didn't dive in last week and are still hoping to save on Apple's second-gen AirPods Pro, here's good news: Amazon is continuing its $50 discount on the buds. Verizon is now matching the price too, so if you'd rather buy from them, you can. The $200 price point matches the lowest price we've seen so far and if you're an iPhone person, we think these are the best buds you can buy. They've got one of the best transparency modes of any buds we've tested, perfect if you like to listen to music but still keep an ear on what's going on around you. The overall sound is clear and much improved over the previous generation Pros, with properly immersive sound. And of course, they work seamlessly with iOS and Apple's ecosystem in general. They earned an 88 in our review.One other sale we can point you to is a discount that's still holding strong on our favorite earbuds overall, Sony's Sony WF-1000XM4. They're $198 after a 29 percent discount, which is the lowest price outside of the shopping holidays last November.Samsung Galaxy S23 UltraSamsung's latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S23 Ultra is $200 off at Amazon right now — and that discount applies to the 256GB and 512GB configuration. We've seen sales on the S23 Ultra before, but the savings essentially amounted to free storage upgrades, as they made the 512GB phone the same price as the 256GB model. But now if you just need the base model of the premium handheld, you can still save some money. We like the long battery life, brilliant display and improved cameras on the S23 Ultra and gave it an 89 in our review. We also happen to think it's the best Android phone you can buy.If you're thinking of grabbing the Galaxy S23+ instead, that model is getting a $150 discount, again in both storage configurations, making the 256GB size $850 and the 512GB capacity phone $970. The S23+ earned an 86 in our review, but don't necessarily think you need to upgrade to this model if you already have the S22+.For an even bigger bargain, you can check out Google's Pixel 7, which Amazon is selling for 25 percent off, making it $450 instead of $600. The phone earned a 90 in our review, in which we called it and the Pixel 7 Pro the best bargain in flagship phones.Samsung's Galaxy Watch 5 ProSamsung's Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is down to $394.49 at Amazon right now, which is a 12 percent discount over its usual $450 price tag and actually lower that it sold for on Cyber Monday. The watch features GPS tracking for your hikes and runs and offers sleep tracking and coaching. The sensors can even give you a body composition analysis. The deal only applies to the black Bluetooth model. If you want it in gray or with LTE connectivity, you'll have to pay full price.Of course, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 is cheaper overall, and it's on sale for $249. That's $20 above the lowest price we've seen, but it's still more affordable than the Pro version. We called the standard Galaxy Watch 5 the best smartwatch for Android users and it gives you in-depth fitness and health tracking, body composition analysis and sleep coaching. The only thing it lacks over the Pro model is the larger titanium case and the turn-by-turn hiking and biking directions you get from the Pro's GPX-format routes.Blink Mini indoor cameraMany of Amazon's Blink security devices are on sale right now, including the Blink Mini for 29 percent off and the Blink Outdoor for 36 percent off. Both discounts are within $5 of the all-time-lows the devices hit during last year's Black Friday sales. We named Blink Outdoor the best wireless security camera in our guide to smart home devices. Amazon is discounting other Blink devices as well, including the Blink Video Doorbell for 30 percent off, making it just $35 instead of $50. While doorbell cams can bring peace of mind, we should note that these devices do have their share of security concerns. But if the benefits of keeping tabs on your homefront outweigh any possible risks, you may also be interested in Arlo's sale on similar security devices.Google Nest DoorbellIf you'd rather Google kept an eye on things over Amazon, you may want to check out Google's sale on its Nest security devices. At both the Google Store and at Amazon, the wired Google Nest Doorbell is down to $130, which is a $50, or 28 percent, discount and the lowest we've seen it drop yet. This is the wired version, which means the device will never go dead (outside of a power outage) but you'll need to have doorbell wires available for installation. Otherwise, you'll want the battery version of the Nest Doorbell.Other Google home devices are on sale too, including the Nest Thermostat which is $90 after a 31 percent discount, and the outdoor or indoor Google Nest Cam — down to $140 after taking 22 percent off the $180 list price.XGIMI MoGo Pro Portable ProjectorPortable projectors can bring your movies and shows to more places — including outside. The XGIMI MoGo Pro Portable Projector is our favorite portable budget projector in our updated guide to projectors and right now it's seeing a 40 percent discount at Amazon, making it $300 instead of $500. You can snag the same discount directly from Xgimi too. MoGo Pro is small enough to fit in a backpack and can run for over two hours on a charge. The image it delivers from the 300 lumen DLP projector is reasonably accurate, with 1080p resolution. Keystone and auto focus will help you get it looking as sharp and accurate as possible, and the built-in Harman Kardon speakers will handle the accompanying audio.PS5 God of War: Ragnarok bundleThis particular bundle went on sale last month, but it's back — good news for those who weren't yet ready for a PS5 but are now. The PS5 God of War: Ragnarok bundle includes Sony's latest console along with one of our favorite games of last year. The 9 percent discount knocks $50 off the game and console, which basically means you're getting GoW: Ragnarok for $20, since it usually goes for $70 on its own. While that may not sound like the largest discount, the bundle is notable for being available at all — in 2022 the PS5 was tricky to find in stock anywhere. As for the game, we think its one of the best games you can play on Sony's console. If you prefer, you can get the same deal from Target, Adorama or Best Buy.Bose SoundLink FlexWe named Bose's SoundLink Flex one of our favorite portable Bluetooth speakers and right now it's getting a solid $20 discount from Amazon, Adorama, Best Buy or directly from Bose itself. The speaker is about the size (and sort of looks like) a clutch bag, but still manages to deliver good clarity and significant bass. It's not a room-filler, but can pair up with similar speakers for stereo sound. The IP67 rating means it's dust proof and can handle a dunk in water without damage. Perfect for taking outside as the weather warms up.A slightly bigger speaker that also gets the nod of our recommendation is JBL's Charge 5. Both Amazon and JBL are selling it for $140, which is a 22 percent discount and the lowest price we've seen outside of the shopping holidays last November. The Charge 5 delivers an impressive 20-hour battery life and can even recharge your smaller devices. The bright output and decent low end is great for entertaining a few people and comes in a portable two-pound package.Microsoft Surface Pro 9If you've been thinking about getting a Surface device, now is a good time to do so as Microsoft is hosting a spring sale with up to $300 off different devices. Discounts apply to the tablet-PC hybrid Surface Pros, with the more expensive versions seeing the larger savings. Not to be outdone, Amazon is also offering deals on different configurations of the Pro 9.Microsoft came out with the Surface Pro 9 in October of 2022 and they essentially made two different models: one with WiFi connectivity running on an Intel chip and a 5G-enabled version powered by Microsoft's own SQ3 ARM chip. We got the chance to review the 5G model and you can read our review here. For the record, we prefer the Surface Pro 9 without the 5G connectivity, and recommend it as the best convertible laptop in our guide to the best laptops.Microsoft is also including discounts of up to $450 on newer models of Surface Laptops, including the Surface Laptop 5, which impressed us with its faster Intel processor and added Thunderbolt support, but we felt that the chassis and overall design could use an update.Eero Pro 6 mesh WiFi routerWe covered a similar deal on Amazon's Eero Pro 6 mesh Wi-Fi 6 router a couple weeks ago at Wellbots. If you didn't take advantage then, and still want better Wi-Fi coverage for your home, you can snap up a unit now for the same $40 discount. That's 20 percent off and, while it's not the lowest price yet, it's the cheapest the unit has sold for since last year's holiday sales. The router will cover 2,000 square feet, offers support for WiFi 6 and can deliver speeds of up to a gigabit per second. If you've got a lot of smart home devices, the Eero Pro 6 can connect up to 75 of them at once. If you've got a late-model Echo speaker, Eero routers can turn them into WiFi extenders to offer even more coverage.Samsung T7 Shield portable SSDNeed a little more storage for games and files? The T7 Shield SSD takes our favorite portable SSD, Samsung's T7, and wraps it up in a tough rubber casing to make it water- and dust-resistant. Right now, the 1TB and 2TB versions of the drive are on sale at Amazon, Best Buy and directly from Samsung, going for $80 and $130, respectively. Both prices are at or very near the lowest we've seen on the drives yet.SanDisk's Extreme Portable SSD in the 1TB size is also getting a discount this week, with 64 percent savings at both Amazon and at B&H Photo.ASRock AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics cardNewegg is selling ASRock's AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card for $610 after a $50 discount and a $20 promo code. Enter VGAEXCAA496 at checkout to get the full deal. You'll also get a free game code for The Last of Us, just in case you don't have that title yet. When it launched last year, the card went for around $1,000, so this a decent discount and a new low. While this isn't the newest GPU from AMD (and it eats a lot of power), it can still capably play many games in 4K, with strong high-fps performance in 1440p.It's no accident that this discount is coming shortly after Nvidia's launch of the similar RTX 4070, which is probably the card you should get if you care about ray tracing. But if not, or if you'd specifically prefer an AMD card, this is a relatively good value. Newegg is also selling ASRock's AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Phantom graphics card for $540, which is a decent price for another 1440p option, and also includes TLOU game code.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-second-gen-airpods-pro-are-down-to-200-plus-the-rest-of-this-weeks-best-tech-deals-181113985.html?src=rss

Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet — but this time, the way they found it may be as significant as the discovery itself. Researchers used a breakthrough combination of indirect and direct planetary detection to locate the distant world known as HIP 99770 b. It could inch us closer to finding Earth-like exoplanets among our (distantly) neighboring stars.Direct imaging is what most casual observers would expect to lie at the heart of exoplanet hunting: using powerful telescopes with advanced optics to capture images of distant planetary bodies. However, direct imaging is most effective for planets orbiting far from their stars; an exoplanet closer to its sun is usually obscured by the star’s bright light, making it difficult to detect or image. (When they’re farther away, there’s greater contrast between the exoplanet’s and the star’s light.)Meanwhile, indirect imaging (precision astrometry) looks for stars that appear to “wobble,” meaning their gravity may be affected by an (otherwise unseen to us) exoplanet. This method can more easily detect the presence of planets orbiting closer to their stars — like the Earth’s relationship to the Sun. As a result, indirect imaging has yielded over 5,000 exoplanet discoveries, while direct imaging has only captured about 20.The international team of researchers, led by Thayne Currie of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the University of Texas at San Antonio, combined the two methods to discover the new exoplanet. First, they used data from the Hipparcos-Gaia Catalogue of Accelerations — a map tracking the precise positions and motions of nearly two million stars in the Milky Way — to identify the star HIP 99770 as a prime candidate for hosting an exoplanet. Then, they used Japan’s ultra-powerful Subaru telescope (in Mauna Kea, Hawaii) to directly image the newly discovered exoplanet, creatively titled HIP 99770 b.European Space AgencyThe European Space Agency image above illustrates that the exoplanet is about 16 times as massive as Jupiter. Despite having an orbit over three times longer than Jupiter’s orbit around our Sun, HIP 99770 b receives around the same amount of light as Jupiter because its sun is about twice as massive as ours. The researchers say it may have water and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere.Astronomers believe the new method combining direct and indirect imaging opens an exciting new door for future discoveries. “It provides a new path forward to discovering more exoplanets, and characterizing them in a far more holistic way than we could do before,” says Currie. Additionally, the group views Gaia’s upcoming fourth data release, which will yield nearly double the previous version’s data, will make it easier to identify stars wobbling from the gravity of planetary bodies. “The discovery of this planet will spawn dozens of follow-on studies.” The team is now studying data from about 50 other stars showing promise for hosting exoplanets.“This is sort of a test run for the kind of strategy we need to be able to image an earth,” said Currie. “It demonstrates that an indirect method sensitive to a planet’s gravitational pull can tell you where to look and exactly when to look for direct imaging. So I think that’s really exciting.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/researchers-use-novel-method-to-find-a-distant-exoplanet-175055335.html?src=rss

The Super Mario Bros. Movie has only been in theaters for a week and a half, but it's been pulverizing box office records faster than Nintendo's mascot can run from left to right. It already had the highest-grossing opening weekend for any video game-based movie in the US and Canada, but the film has proven to be a hit around the globe.According to Variety, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has raked in north of $508.7 million worldwide. That makes it both the biggest film of 2023 so far as well as the highest-earning video game movie of all time in theaters. The previous record holder was Warcraft, which had a global haul of $439 million.After the bizarre mess of the 1993 live-action Super Mario. Bros film, Nintendo swore off movie adaptations of its properties for decades. But with the help of Despicable Me studio Illumination and a focus on replicating the widely recognized art style of Mario games in animation, Nintendo has struck gold with the latest film (even if the plot doesn't amount to much).There's a long way to go before Nintendo, Illumination and Universal, which co-financed and distributed the flick, can truly dream of The Super Mario Bros. Movie becoming one of the biggest animated films of all time. It hasn't broken into the top 50 yet, while the 2019 remake of The Lion King has the top spot with $1.66 billion.Still, movies and other non-gaming experiences like theme parks will likely form a major part of Nintendo's business going forward. A Mario sequel and films based on other Nintendo properties (a Breath of the Wild adaptation, anyone?) now seem inevitable, as if Illumination founder Chris Meledandri having a seat on the board wasn't clear enough of an indication.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-super-mario-bros-movie-is-already-the-biggest-game-adaptation-of-all-time-173946909.html?src=rss

Months after Ye dropped his bid, Parler has a new owner... and is out of commission for the time being. Starboard, the owner of pro-conservative news outlets like American Wire News, has shut down Parler on a temporary but indefinite basis after completing its acquisition of the social network from Parlement Technologies. The buyer says it will conduct a "strategic assessment" of the platform during the downtime, and hopes to integrate Parler's audience into all its existing channels.Starboard isn't shy about its strategy. While it still sees a market for communities that believe they've been censored or marginalized, it considers a Parler revamp virtually necessary. "No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more," the company says.Parler launched in 2018 as a self-proclaimed free speech alternative to Twitter, which some conservatives claim is biased against right-wing views. It had few rules or moderation controls. Like Gab, though, it also became a haven for people with extreme views. Parler drew flak in January 2021 after word that people involved in the Capitol attack used the social platform to coordinate. Apple and Google kicked Parler off their respective app stores until it improved moderation and kept out users inciting violence.Ye offered to buy Parler from Parlement in late 2022 after being banned from Twitter for antisemitic posts, but called off the deal in mid-November through a mutual agreement that cited the star's "business difficulties" as a factor. Soon after, Parlement laid off most of its staff. The firm is pivoting to cloud services for businesses that believe they could be knocked offline for their content.In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Starboard chief Ryan Coyne says he expects to keep users on Parler despite rivalries with other sites, such as former President Trump's Truth Social. However, the absence of a revival date doesn't leave members many options. For now, they'll have to use other platforms to express themselves.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/parlers-new-owner-immediately-took-the-social-network-offline-165613235.html?src=rss

Researchers at Stanford Medicine have made a promising discovery that could lead to new cancer treatments in the future. Scientists conducted tests in which they altered the genomes of skin-based microbes and bacteria to fight cancer. These altered microbes were swabbed onto cancer-stricken mice and, lo and behold, tumors began to dissipate.The bacteria in question, Staphylococcus epidermidis, was grabbed from the fur of mice and altered to produce a protein that stimulates the immune system with regard to specific tumors. The experiment seemed to be a resounding success, with the modified bacteria killing aggressive types of metastatic skin cancer after being gently applied to the fur. The results were also achieved without any noticeable inflammation.“It seemed almost like magic,” said Michael Fischbach, PhD, an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford. “These mice had very aggressive tumors growing on their flank, and we gave them a gentle treatment where we simply took a swab of bacteria and rubbed it on the fur of their heads.”This is yet another foray into the misunderstood world of microbiomes and all of the bacteria that reside there. Gut biomes get all of the press these days, but the skin also plays host to millions upon millions of bacteria, fungi and viruses, and the purpose of these entities is often unknown.In this instance, scientists found that staph epidermidis cells trigger the production of immune cells called CD8 T cells. The researchers basically hijacked the S. epidermidis into producing CD8 T cells that target specific antigens. In this case, the antigens were related to skin cancer tumors. When the cells encountered a matching tumor, they began to rapidly reproduce and shrink the mass, or extinguish it entirely.“Watching those tumors disappear — especially at a site distant from where we applied the bacteria — was shocking,” Fischbach said. “It took us a while to believe it was happening.”As with all burgeoning cancer treatments, there are some heavy caveats. First of all, these experiments are being conducted on mice. Humans and mice are biologically similar in many respects, but a great many treatments that work on mice are a dud with people. Stanford researchers have no idea if S. epidermidis triggers an immune response in humans, though our skin is littered with the stuff, so they may need to find a different microbe to alter. Also, this treatment is designed to treat skin cancer tumors and is applied topically. It remains to be seen if the benefits carry over to internal cancers.

Instagram is rolling out several Reels updates, including a redesigned editing tool. The new-look editor, which Meta says is available worldwide on iOS and Android, pulls together video clips, audio, stickers and text into a single, more streamlined screen. "This makes it easier to align and time elements of your reel to the right moments in a more visual way," Meta wrote in a blog post. The company noted that additional editing tools are on the way as it continues to try to chip away at TikTok's dominance.Reels creators who are looking to go viral and build their audiences on Instagram will be able to check out the top audio and hashtags on what Meta is calling a "trends destination." The tab is accessible from the dashboard. You'll be able to see how many times others have used a song and either add the audio to your own reel or save it for later.This should help creators figure out what's popular in Reels at a given time so they can tap into trends. It's fairly easy for TikTok creators to determine what's trending in that app, so this seems like an important update for Instagram.InstagramOn a related note, Instagram is upgrading the Reels insights page to give creators a deeper sense of how their videos are performing. You'll be able to view the total watch time and average watch time to better understand how viewers are engaging with each reel beyond view counts. If it seems most viewers are dropping off at a certain point in a video, that could help creators learn what their audience is less interested in seeing and make adjustments to their future reels. In addition, you'll get notifications showing the people who started following you from a specific reel.Meanwhile, Instagram will expand the gifts monetization feature to more countries in the coming weeks, including Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, New Zealand and the UK. In addition, creators will be able to see exactly who tipped them with a gift so they can thank generous fans.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-redesigns-the-reels-editor-to-make-it-easier-to-use-163739758.html?src=rss

Accused classified document leaker Jack Teixeira may be learning first-hand about the ease of tracking people's digital lives. The federal government has charged Teixeira with illegally taking national defense info and classified items after a quick investigation focused on his digital trail. As The New York Times' Christiaan Triebert explains, his investigative journalism team identified Teixeira by finding an Instagram account mentioned in his Steam profile. That, in turn, showed photos of the granite kitchen countertop and floor tiles visible in the leaks.The suspect hasn't yet entered a plea and will face a hearing on April 19th. The two charges against him carry a maximum combined sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

Spotify has some disappointing news for Heardle fans: the company is shutting down the song-guessing game, which it bought last summer. “Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye,” a message on the Heardle webpage reads. “From May 5th, Heardle will no longer be available.”Players who want to keep a record of their stats for posterity should take a screenshot, Spotify says. The stats will no longer be available after May 4th.Heardle emerged early last year in the wake of Wordle's massive success. In turn, it became one of the more prominent and successful Wordle clones. Third-party data suggests that Heardle reached a high of 69 million monthly visitors last March.The makers of Heardle sold the game to Spotify in July. However, just before that deal was announced, Heardle's monthly visitor numbers had seemingly dipped to 41 million, according to TechCrunch, suggesting that the game's popularity was already tapering off. In comparison, The New York Times, Wordle's owner, says tens of millions of people are still playing that game each week.When it bought Heardle, Spotify said it saw the game as a music discovery tool. Whether a player successfully guessed each day's song based on the intro or not, they were provided with a link to hear the full track on Spotify. It may be the case that Spotify wasn't seeing a high level of clickthrough rates, so Heardle may ultimately not have helped much in terms of music discovery. Moreover, the game is said to have aped some music discovery functions that are also present in Spotify's app.It's hard to imagine that Spotify's daily song choices helped matters. Along with many classic tracks, Heardle often featured music that didn't exactly light up the Billboard charts but instead went viral on TikTok. It seems that Spotify didn't quite strike the balance of using Heardle as a music discovery tool while also making each song recognizable enough for fans to identify and keep their streaks going.In addition, some players were frustrated that Heardle kept going back to the same wells over and over by featuring several songs from one artist over a relatively short time. Within the space of five months last year, Heardle featured six Green Day tracks, despite there being thousands of well-known artists and hit songs to choose from. Far too many Imagine Dragons songs have popped up over the last few months too (one would have been more than enough).Spotify reportedly didn't have a team dedicated to working on Heardle, so there won't be any layoffs as a result of the game's closure. It's hard to imagine that picking one song each day and maintaining Heardle would have taken a ton of work. Engadget has contacted Spotify for comment.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spotify-will-shut-down-heardle-on-may-5th-151454849.html?src=rss

You can technically run Windows on gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck, but it's not really designed for small-screened devices and their specialized hardware. However, there's at least one person at Microsoft who would like to improve the situation. Developer and Reddit user AndrewMT has confirmed that a Walking Cat video leak represents a hackathon project meant to optimize Windows 11 for Steam Deck-style devices. The proposal from September would have not only improved driver support, but fine-tuned the interface and introduced tools to help you quickly launch and exit games regardless of which service they came from.The project was spurred by the desire to use multiple non-Steam services (such as Xbox Game Pass and GOG) and Windows' support for game mods and trainers, AndrewMT says. He also notes that The Verge isn't right in suggesting that this is an ongoing initiative. The handheld Windows proposal "didn't go much of anywhere," the developer explains. While Xbox head Phil Spencer offered contact with people who could help, they were occupied at the time. AndrewMT is hopeful the publicity will help pitch the idea a second time.

So long HBO Max, hello… Max? This week, Cherlynn and Devindra discuss Warner Bros. pivot away from the beleaguered HBO Max service, and towards something that unifies HBO and Discovery’s content. Does Max help, or hurt the HBO brand? And does the name even matter when people will always line up for the next Game of Thrones spin-off? Also, we dive into the NVIDIA RTX 4070, a champ of a mid-range GPU, as well as the latest from Elon Musk’s disastrous Twitter reign.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!Subscribe!

Microsoft has begun integrating Bing AI capabilities into its popular keyboard app SwiftKey. While the third-party tool already includes some AI features, like learning from users' writing styles to make suggestions. Once a user clicks on the Bing button, which is located on the top left side of the keyboard, it offers three options: Search, Tone and Chat.Say you want to know which dessert pairs best with lasagna, just type that in to the search bar as you converse. Chat will suggest responses that it feels are in keeping with the messages or emails it's responding to. Tone, however, can help keep things more formal if you're replying to a work email and need a hand making things appear a little more professional.Any iOS and Android users can set SwiftKey as their default keyboard across apps, like social media and email. Basically, if an app allows a third-party keyboard, you can use SwiftKey on it. Aside from AI technology, SwiftKey's other features include correcting spelling mistakes, task saving and a personalized toolbar. The Bing button lives on the left side of the keyboard and also autosuggests across the top as a person types.SwiftKey can also access up to five chosen languages and, in the same release, Microsoft revealed updates to its translation services in the Bing App. Users translating words and phrases from English to French, Spanish or Italian will now see the masculine and feminine versions, versus the chatbot making assumptions.Bing's inclusion into SwiftKey follows the lead of other Microsoft programs like Skype and Microsoft Start. Skype lets users message directly with Bing in a group chat or on-on-one, while Microsoft Start provides access to Bing across the app.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-brings-bings-ai-chatbot-to-its-ios-and-android-swiftkey-apps-113528183.html?src=rss

Nintendo shared one last trailer of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before it launches on May 12th. It teases the whole Hyrule world – including the floating island – as well as Link's allies, who will fight alongside him. The plot is typical Zelda fare: You have to find the princess and defeat Ganon. But the fused weapons and vehicles both seem to be major parts of how the game will play. You can even build a robot to take on enemies that have their own battle platform. Robot Wars, but make it Zelda?– Mat Smith​​The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.The biggest stories you might have missedDJI’s newest drone is a $16K model for pro filmmakersUbisoft+ game subscription service officially launches on XboxGoogle's Nest doorbells are 28 percent off right now‘Star Trek: Picard’ turns a corner and jumps on the rollercoaster The best gaming headsets for 2023 Google Maps will help you navigate US national parksWhatsApp makes it harder for scammers to steal your account PBS has also quit Twitter over its 'government-funded media' labelFellow public broadcaster NPR said this week it would stop tweeting.PBS has halted its use of the platform. The organization hasn't posted on its Twitter account since April 8th. Both PBS and NPR claim the label, which previously read "state-affiliated media," doesn't represent them accurately. Twitter previously reserved such labels for state-run outlets, like China's Xinhua News Agency and Russia's RT and Sputnik.Continue reading.How to choose the best pizza ovenWhat you need to look for when shopping for one.Small outdoor pizza ovens have become popular for backyard cooking in recent years. While anyone with a decent-sized patio could install a permanent one, these versatile products are more compact and store easily in a bag when you’re not using them. That makes them great if you have limited outdoor space. Alongside what to look for, we’ve separated outdoor and indoor pizza ovens – so everyone gets pizza in 2023.Continue reading.ASUS' ROG Phone 7 uses AI to automatically record your wins and lossesThe new external cooler doubles as a subwoofer.ASUS ROGFor someone (and some reason), ASUS continues to create its pro-gamer ROG phones. Once again, they wouldn’t look out of place beside keyboards, gaming mice and beefy gaming laptops. The ROG Phone 7 series, this time, incorporates AI for automatic gaming capture. The new clip-on cooler also now doubles as a subwoofer for even… louder gaming. In Taiwan and Europe, you can pre-order select models in the ROG Phone 7 series starting today. ASUS has confirmed the ROG Phone 7 series will eventually launch in the US.Continue reading.Researchers used machine learning to improve the first photo of a black holeThe photo algorithm was trained on over 30,000 black hole simulations. Lia Medeiros / Institute for Advanced StudyResearchers have used machine learning to tighten up a previously released image of a black hole. As a result, in a report published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the portrait of the black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, over 53 million light years away from Earth, shows a thinner ring of light and matter surrounding its center. They used PRIMO, “a novel dictionary-learning-based algorithm” that learns to “recover high-fidelity images even in the presence of sparse coverage” by training on generated simulations of over 30,000 black holes. It’s an impressive new use of AI, even if the result isn’t particularly visually stunning. And don't get any ideas, Samsung...Continue reading.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-final-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-trailer-showcases-links-allies-111556568.html?src=rss

If you're looking for a new smartwatch but aren't keen on Apple devices, Amazon's latest price cut may excite you. The Samsung Galaxy Watch Pro is down from $450 to $394.49, which is a 12 percent savings and lower than the price we saw back on Cyber Monday.The Galaxy Watch Pro is one of Samsung's newer options and includes GPS route tracking, a full analysis of your body composition and a titanium case. The Pro also goes beyond the original with an advanced sleep tracker, improved bioactive sensor and better battery life.It's worth mentioning that, while not on sale, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 is still over $100 cheaper— a good option if you're looking for a reliable smartwatch with all the basics. It's our pick for best smartwatch for Android users. Plus, it comes in some fun band colors, like like purple and sapphire.As for the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, just the black model with bluetooth are discounted. The gray with bluetooth and the LTE version of both colors are still full price.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/samsungs-galaxy-watch-5-pro-is-55-off-right-now-091732479.html?src=rss

Razer has launched a new streaming deck called the Stream Controller X, and it would most likely look familiar to experienced streamers and content creators. It has a very similar form factor to Elgato‘s Stream Deck MK.2, with its 15 LCD switchblade key buttons and a face plate that users can easily swap. The bevel’s spacing is a bit different, though, and according to Tom’s Hardware, it’s just slightly smaller than Elgato’s model. While both streaming decks are priced $150 at launch, Elgato’s has been on sale several times since then and has gone for as low as $120.The Stream Controller X lets users program multiple actions into one button by dragging them into the custom action editor. Users can even program actions so that they can be triggered consecutively or simultaneously. They can also create custom profiles for various tasks and then automatically switch between them based on the program that’s currently open by enabling the Dynamic Mode. To make multi-tasking even easier, the device is compatible with some of the most popular streaming software and relevant tools, such as Twitch and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Those programs come with ready-made profiles, so users don’t have to create their own.Like Razer’s first Stream Controller, the X model is still powered by Loupedeck. The older model was a rebadged version of the Loupedeck Live, though, and looks more like a distant cousin than a sibling to the Stream Controller X.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/razers-new-stream-controller-x-looks-like-one-of-its-biggest-competitors-071957109.html?src=rss

For Twitter Blue users in the US, the website’s 280-character limit has been a thing of the past since February when it gave them the ability to post 4,000-character tweets. Now, the company has more than doubled that limit and has launched support for tweets up to 10,000 characters in length. In addition, the website now supports bold and italics text formatting, allowing content creators to use those elements to break up potentially huge blocks of text. Twitter chief Elon Musk first announced that the website is making long-form tweets even longer in early March, almost a month after the initial 4,000-character expansion.

The FBI has made an arrest in connection to a recent leak of classified documents that revealed sensitive details about the war in Ukraine and other US intelligence matters, apprehending a young Massachusetts Air National Guard member on Thursday, April 13th. 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, who holds the rank of airman first class, allegedly shared the files to a Discord server primarily dedicated to Minecraft. According to The Washington Post, he first transcribed the documents manually when he started sharing them late last year before posting photos of the classified materials themselves.The Justice Department has arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into “alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement issued by the Justice Department. As NBC News notes, public military records show that Texeira was assigned as a cyber transport systems journeyman at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod.

Amazon is joining the generative AI fray. Bedrock is the company’s new API for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that lets developers use and customize AI tools that generate text or images. Think of it as a cloud-based and configurable alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 aimed at businesses and developers.AWS customers can use Bedrock to write, build chatbots, summarize text, classify images and more based on text prompts. It gives its users a choice of Amazon’s Titan foundation model (FM) and several startups’ models, including Anthropic’s Claude (a Google-backed ChatGPT rival from former OpenAI employees), AI21’s Jurassic-2 (a language model specializing in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch) and Stable Diffusion (a popular open-source image generator). Additionally, businesses and developers can customize how the models work based on input — which Amazon says won’t be used for training the models, according toCNBC. That should (theoretically) address a crucial privacy concern for businesses entering sensitive data.Amazon views the range of AI models on offer as a way of providing flexibility to customers. The company’s description reads, “With Bedrock’s serverless experience, you can get started quickly, privately customize FMs with your own data, and easily integrate and deploy them into your applications using the AWS tools and capabilities you are familiar with (including integrations with Amazon SageMaker ML features like Experiments to test different models and Pipelines to manage your FMs at scale) without having to manage any infrastructure.”“Most companies want to use these large language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years and most companies don’t want to go through that,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy toldCNBC on Thursday. “So what they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that’s big and great already and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And that’s what Bedrock is.”Amazon says C3.ai, Pegasystems, Accenture and Deloitte are some early businesses lined up to try Bedrock. The company hasn’t yet announced pricing for the AWS toolset, and it’s currently opening access through a waitlist. You can read more and apply for admission at the project’s website.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-introduces-bedrock-a-cloud-service-for-ai-generated-text-and-images-204556563.html?src=rss

Twitter creators who want to make money on the platform will now turn to Subscriptions, not Super Follows, in a rebrand announced by Elon Musk. Twitter originally introduced Super Follows in 2021 as a way for creators to charge for exclusive tweets. Now, subscriptions also include long-form content (thanks to those extra-long tweets) as well as “hours long videos,” according to Musk.But the details of the program seem to be largely unchanged from Super Follows. Creators can charge $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 a month, with exclusive content including subscriber-only chats in Twitter Spaces, as well as special badges for paid subscribers. Interestingly, as The Verge, points out, a help page says that “we hope to include newsletters and other Twitter features as potential bonus content.” That’s notable given Musk’s recent feud with Substack as well as because he shut down Revue, the newsletter platform Twitter acquired in 2021, soon after taking over as CEO.

It'll be quite a while before you can help take out the Justice League. As recent reports suggested, Warner Bros. Games and Rocksteady Studios have delayed Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League once again following a brutal reaction to a showcase of the game. Rather than arriving on May 26th, the title now has a release date of February 2nd, 2024. That's yet another delay after Warner Bros. Games pushed back the game from an initial 2022 release window to sometime this spring."We have made the tough but necessary decision to take the time needed to work on getting the game to be the best quality experience for players," a statement on the Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Twitter account reads. "Thank you to our amazing community for the continued support, patience and understanding. There is much more to share in the months ahead and we look forward to seeing you in Metropolis next year."

Meta has open-sourced an artificial intelligence project that lets anyone bring their doodles to life. The company hopes that by offering Animated Drawings as an open-source project other developers will be able to create new, richer experiences.The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team originally released a web-based version of the tool in 2021. It asks users to upload a drawing of a single human-like character or to select a demo figure. If you use your own doodle, you'll see a consent form that asks if Meta can use your drawing to help train its models. You don't need to provide consent to keep using the tool.Next, you'll need to resize a capture box so it fits snugly around your creation. The tool gives you a pen and eraser to tweak the drawing before adjusting where the joints should be. After all that, you'll see an animated version of your sketch. You can pick from a variety of preset animations from four categories: dance, funny, jumping and walking.Animated Drawings harnesses object detection models, pose estimation models and image processing-based segmentation methods to capture a digital version of a drawing. It then uses traditional computer graphics techniques to deform and animate the image.Within a few months of the demo going live, users had granted Meta permission to use more than 1.6 million images for training purposes. Some folks uploaded images of company logos, anime characters, fish and stuffed animals, despite the tool stipulating that only human figures would work.Along with requests for a more in-depth toolset that includes sound effects and text overlays, the array of images that people uploaded to the tool suggested there was broad interest in more extensive drawing-to-animation experiences. That, in part, led to Meta open sourcing the project with a dataset of around 180,000 drawings. "By releasing the models and code as open source, the project provides a starting point for developers to build on and extend the project, fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration within the open source community," Meta wrote in a blog post.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-has-open-sourced-an-ai-project-that-turns-your-doodles-into-animations-183807106.html?src=rss

Desta: The Memories Between is officially coming to the Nintendo Switch and PC on April 26th. If you haven’t gotten a chance to play the well-regarded roguelike, it's likely because it was previously tied to Netflix as an exclusive title for its burgeoning gaming platform.Desta was developed by the company ustwo, which also created the mega-popular mobile title Monument Valley and its sequel. Beyond some slight graphical similarities, however, Desta is its own beast. The title combines a roguelike gameplay style with turn-based mechanics, with plenty of quirky surprises. The story involves a twentysomething returning home after their dad’s death. You help neighbors deal with pressing issues by solving puzzles and, well, playing a whole lot of dodgeball. The dodgeball challenges change from run to run, which is why this title is sometimes compared to games like Hades and Into the Breach.This is the Dream Team Edition of Desta: The Memories Between, so it includes every content update that came down the pike since the original launch last year. This includes new story scenarios, updated abilities and a range of difficulty settings. You can also play as three new characters, including Alba from Alba: A Wild Adventure, another ustwo title.Purchasing this game for Switch or PC also nets you a digital soundtrack and a 52-page digital artbook. Both the art style and the music are singled-out as positives in reviews, so these perks are likely to draw in pre-existing players. It costs around $20 to pick up on the Nintendo eShop or the Steam Store.“We’ve packed this bundle with so many new abilities, characters, game modes and more – I can’t wait for our community to get their hands on it,” wrote Lead Designer Joel Beardshaw in a press release when the port was officially announced in January.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/desta-the-memories-between-comes-to-switch-and-pc-later-this-month-175037612.html?src=rss

A studio full of video game veterans is about to release its first big project. Ascendant Studios and EA have confirmed they're releasing the magic first person shooter Immortals of Aveum on July 20th for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Windows PCs. You play a new battlemage who's thrust into a never-ending war for control of the world's magic.This isn't Call of Duty with spells, though, or even a revival of classic fantasy shooters like Heretic. Immortals revolves around a combination system that rewards mixing up different magic types to defeat enemies. You can also draw on magical abilities to create shields or turn the environment against your foes. Ascendant is also promising a narrative-focused experience with an extensive backstory, not to mention recognizable voices like Darren Barnet (Never Have I Ever) and Gina Torres (Firefly).Ascendant is part of a wave of indie studios formed by departing leaders at major game developers. It's helmed by Bret Robbins, the creative director from the original Dead Space, who formed Ascendant in 2018 with Immortals in mind. The team also includes former Telltale Games workers as well as people behind well-known games like Spider-Man and Tomb Raider. Like other well-known exiles, Robbins and crew are effectively trying to regain creative control — even if they're still publishing through major brands.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/eas-magic-shooter-immortals-of-aveum-arrives-july-20th-172003619.html?src=rss

Researchers have used machine learning to tighten up a previously released image of a black hole. As a result, the portrait of the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, over 53 million light years away from Earth, shows a thinner ring of light and matter surrounding its center in a report published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.The original images were captured in 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of radio telescopes around Earth that combine to act as a planet-sized super-imaging tool. The initial picture looked like a “fuzzy donut,” as described by NPR, but researchers used a new method called PRIMO to reconstruct a more accurate image. PRIMO is “a novel dictionary-learning-based algorithm” that learns to “recover high-fidelity images even in the presence of sparse coverage” by training on generated simulations of over 30,000 black holes. In other words, it uses machine learning data based on what we know about the universe’s physical laws — and black holes specifically — to produce a better-looking and more accurate shot from the raw data captured in 2017.Black holes are mysterious and strange regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. They form when dying stars collapse onto themselves under their gravity. As a result, the collapse squeezes the star’s mass into a tiny space. The boundary between the black hole and its surrounding mass is called the event horizon, a point of no return where anything that crosses it (whether light, matter or Matthew McConaughey) won’t be coming back.“What we really do is we learn the correlations between different parts of the image. And so we do this by analyzing tens of thousands of high-resolution images that are created from simulations,” the astrophysicist and author of the paper Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, told NPR. “If you have an image, the pixels close to any given pixel are not completely uncorrelated. It’s not that each pixel is doing completely independent things.”The researchers say the new image is consistent with Albert Einstein’s predictions. However, they expect further research in machine learning and telescope hardware to lead to additional revisions. “In 20 years, the image might not be the image I’m showing you today,” said Medeiros. “It might be even better.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/researchers-used-machine-learning-to-improve-the-first-photo-of-a-black-hole-170722614.html?src=rss

NPR isn't the only public broadcaster to stop tweeting after Twitter applied a "government-funded media" label to its account. PBS has halted its use of the platform too. The organization hasn't posted on its Twitter account since April 8th.Both PBS and NPR claim the label, which previously read "state-affiliated media," doesn't represent them accurately. Twitter previously reserved such labels for state-run outlets like China's Xinhua News Agency and Russia's RT and Sputnik.“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” a PBS spokesperson told Variety. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”Federal funding accounts for around 15 percent of public television system revenue, PBS says. The biggest chunk of revenue, 31 percent, comes from donations from individuals. NPR, meanwhile, says federal funding makes up less than one percent of its average annual budget. The broadcaster says it stopped using Twitter in large part to protect its credibility, suggesting the label implies that the government has editorial influence over it. NPR says it's "a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence."Twitter also applied the label to the BBC's account. That organization also pushed back against the "government-funded media" descriptor. Following an interview that a BBC reporter conducted with Twitter owner Elon Musk this week, the company updated the label to read “publicly funded media,” a more accurate description of the broadcaster's license fee-based budget.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/pbs-has-also-quit-twitter-over-its-government-funded-media-label-164843803.html?src=rss

It’s been a long time coming, as it was first announced more than a year ago, but Ubisoft’s premium subscription service has finally arrived on Xbox consoles. Ubisoft+ gives players instant access to a large portion of the company's library, and heavy hitters like Far Cry 6, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Immortals Fenyx Rising are all in attendance. Ubisoft says subscribers will get day-one access to new releases moving forward. Browse the full list here.Ubisoft+ has multiple tiers, and it's making the premium option, called Ubisoft+ Multi Access, available to Xbox owners. Once you subscribe, you can play on any platform that offers support. For instance, users can swap back and forth between the Xbox and PC without losing a save state. The service is also available for Amazon Luna, but PlayStation consoles are still out in the cold, though it is coming at some point. If you have a Sony console, you can sign up for a bare-bones version of the service called Ubisoft+ Classics.Ubisoft+ Multi Access offers more than just the basic versions of games. You get access to any available DLC and various in-game perks. You also get ten percent off any in-game purchases, if you're into that sort of thing.The service is not yet available worldwide, but it's currently accessible in nearly 100 countries, the United States included. Subscribing to the plan costs $18 each month, and it auto-renews until canceled.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ubisoft-game-subscription-service-officially-launches-on-xbox-163018760.html?src=rss

Police have arrested a suspect in the killing of Cash App founder and former Square executive Bob Lee. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin has confirmed to The San Francisco Chronicle that someone is in custody in connection with the April 4th stabbing of the 43-year-old in San Francisco.This might not have been a mugging or random murder. Mission Localsources claim the suspect is Nima Momeni, the Emeryville-based owner of outsourcing firm Expand IT. Lee reportedly knew Momeni and was a passenger in a car belonging to the suspect, the insiders say. A confrontation supposedly erupted in the car, and may have continued after Lee stepped out.We've asked the San Francisco Police Department for comment. Lee was most recently the chief product officer of crypto startup MobileCoin. Before his time with Square, he helped create Android's early core library. He was also an investor in tech startups and helped develop the World Health Organization's mobile app during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.If accurate, the report would explain why Lee was killed in a section of San Francisco that rarely sees pedestrian traffic in the early morning. It would also make the death a historical rarity. While there are certainly personal feuds in tech, they seldom escalate to violence.Update 4/13 3:43PM ET: The SFPD has confirmed in a press conference that it arrested Momeni for Lee's murder. It's not sharing more details as there's an ongoing investigation.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/police-arrest-suspect-in-killing-of-cash-app-founder-bob-lee-160204361.html?src=rss

Turning a radio show or any other live broadcast into a podcast isn't quite as simple as uploading the exact same file somewhere else. Downloading an episode from a radio platform, yanking ads, dropping in ad markers, making other edits and uploading it as a podcast typically takes up to an hour, Spotify said. To take some of the sting out of that process, the company has released a tool that can automatically create podcast episodes from existing broadcasts.Spotify is using tech from Whooshkaa, a company it bought in 2021, to power the tool. Users of Megaphone, Spotify's podcasting platform for businesses, will have access to it. Several publishers are already using Megaphone to convert radio broadcasts into podcasts, including Fox News Audio. The tech can identify existing ad marker locations, and publishers can replace or reposition them before the podcast episode goes live.According to data from Pew Research that Spotify cited in its announcement, Gen Z folks prefer to get news through digital mediums, such as podcasts. As such, radio publishers could use this kind of tech to reach new audiences without adding too much more to their workload. Spotify says more than half of Gen Z and millennials in the US use the platform, while it has more than 500 million users globally.For consumers, the tool will likely bring an even wider selection of podcasts to Spotify. It could give YouTubers and Twitch streamers who host live podcasts an easy way to make their discussions available on Spotify too.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spotifys-latest-publishing-tool-can-swiftly-turn-broadcasts-into-podcasts-153853714.html?src=rss

Nintendo has shared one last trailer before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives on May 12th, and this one is worth watching if you're looking for some insight into the story. The rather lengthy clip showcases not only a large and varied world (including the floating islands above Hyrule), but Link's allies. As Zelda makes clear, "you are not alone." There's even a moment where Link offers a wagon ride.The plot appears familiar — surprise, you'll have to find Zelda and defeat Ganon. Instead, it's the gameplay mechanics that promise to help Tears of the Kingdom set itself apart from Breath of the Wild. The skyborne islands factor play a large role, of course, but the reliance on fused-together weapons and vehicles is clearer in this new trailer. You can even build a 'robot' to take on Bokoblins that have their own battle platform.The game is arriving alongside Tears-themed Pro Controller ($75) and Carrying Case ($25) accessories. You can also buy a special edition OLED Switch on April 28th for $350 if you're new to the platform or itching to upgrade from an early-model console. As the hardware and flurry of trailers suggests, Nintendo wants to be sure you're paying attention to the company's most important game of the year.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/new-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-trailer-shows-links-allies-144943398.html?src=rss

Those who've been in the market for a video doorbell to add to their array of smart home devices may want to check out a sale on some options from Google Nest. A sale has dropped the prices of Nest video doorbells by 28 percent. That means the second-gen Nest Doorbell Wired has dropped to $130, which is a record low for that model.The latest iteration of the device can continuously record footage for up to 10 days at a time if you have a Nest Aware Plus subscription. A Nest Aware subscription includes 30 days of event video history and a familiar face detection function.Otherwise, Nest offers a free three-hour event history of video clips of up to five minutes in length, plus two-second previews. The device can detect motion, people, packages, animals and vehicles and provide you with intelligent alerts without the need for a subscription, Google says. You'll be able to chat with whoever's at your door or use pre-recorded messages.There's the option to view a live video feed of what your doorbell's camera can see via Google Assistant- and Amazon Alexa-compatible devices. You'll be able to use compatible Nest and Alexa speakers as a doorbell chime — the Nest Doorbell Wired requires a chime and transformer to work. Oddly, this model does not support the Nest app or website. You'll need to use the Google Home app (or a compatible voice assistant) to manage it instead.Meanwhile, the battery-powered Nest Doorbell is also on sale for $130, though that's $10 more than the all-time-low price. That version does not support continuous recording, but it does offer live video streaming with HDR and night vision (it captures footage in 720p resolution).You'll still have the option to hook this device up to your existing doorbell wires. if you opt to stick with battery power and you suffer an outage or the WiFi cuts out, the doorbell will store up to 1 hour of recorded events.In addition to the doorbells, the Nest Cam with Floodlight is also on sale. It's down from $280 to $220, which is the lowest price we've seen for it so far this year. It can capture footage at 1080p, including up to 10 days of around-the-clock recording for Nest Aware Plus members. The floodlight will activate automatically when the camera detects important activity. You'll be able to control the brightness of the lights through the Google Home app.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-nest-doorbells-are-28-percent-off-right-now-144508315.html?src=rss

The following article discusses Star Trek: Picard, Season Three, Episode 9, “Võx”I’ve always found accusations that I hate Star Trek weird, since I make my love of Trek clear enough every time I write one of these reviews. Every time I watch a nü-Trek episode that I’m fortunate enough to do as part of my day job, I hope that I can genuinely talk about it with a sense of love. And so I am delighted to say “Võx” is the best episode of Star Trek: Picard ever made. It is not by any means perfect, but it’s such a leap from what’s gone before I’ve almost got whiplash.One of the reasons that “Võx” pops is that Picard’s quality ceiling has been relentlessly low over the last three seasons. The other is that the narrative’s brakes are off, allowing events to move at something faster than a snail’s pace. If I was in a less-generous mood, I’d say a lot of this stuff could have happened earlier in the run to improve the overall pacing. One of the biggest issues I’ve had is the very visible stretching of a thin, mystery-box story over a studio-mandated ten-episode running order.By comparison, this feels like the first free meal after two 500-calorie-only days on the 5:2 fast diet. You devour a 12-inch pizza and, since you’ve starved yourself for the last 48 hours, you feel you deserve to go out for tacos afterward. In this episode, we learn that Jack is, as Reddit clocked weeks back, the product of a union ‘twixt Dr. Crusher and Picard’s Borgified sperm. We also get a whopping retcon to the plot hole in First Contact, where Picard could hear the Borg and knew the location of the cube’s weak spot despite not being connected to the collective.Jack decides to go off and tackle the Borg Queen (voiced by Alice Krige!) herself, while Geordi, Data and Beverley start examining the conspiracy. The Queen has already picked a Borgified name for Jack — Võx — to commence his Locutus-like transformation as part of the collective, too. The Borg and Changelings are working together – I’d love to see how that meeting went – to undermine the Federation. They’ve set up every transporter in the fleet to re-write the genetic code of the under ‘25s who pass through it, seeding them with Bio-Borg DNA. When Frontier Day happens, the collective activates its new army of drones, who also turn the newly-connected fleet into an armada.Fleeing a Titan similarly overrun with Bio-Borgs, the TNG crew get into a shuttle while Seven and Raffi guard Shaw, who takes a phaser to the chest. He even gets a nice valediction, finally using Seven’s chosen name to put a button on his much-discussed arc. Not long after, we get the first laugh-out-loud-on-purpose moment in the series when Geordi asks Data to be more optimistic. There’s a simple, glorious pleasure in letting the endlessly-talented Brent Spiner show off his natural comedic flair in the midst of all this darkness.The gang race back to the Fleet Museum where, again Reddit called this a month or more back, the Enterprise D has been quietly rebuilt in secret by Geordi. There’s some moments of winking at the camera as the production team head off the obvious questions. How? They pulled the saucer section from Veridian to avoid breaking the Prime Directive and cobbled together other parts from other Galaxy Class ships. Why not the E? Blame Worf, now shut up and watch with a smile plastered on your face as they sit in their old chairs. Hell, they’ve even got Majel Barrett Roddenberry’s voice for the Enterprise D computer.We need to be careful here, because I’ve slammed this series time and again for its empty, paraphilic use of nostalgia. There are plenty of reasons why this makes no logical sense if you take the time to interrogate things. Maybe it’s because the episode moves at such a clip that there’s no time to overthink things before something else happens. Maybe it’s just the thrill of seeing these actors on this bridge, on this carpet, that the bulk of my critical thinking has been bypassed.If I have concerns, it’s still about what Picard is trying to say. Relegating the cyberpunk elements of the Borg to make their assimilation more biological could be seen as an anti-vaccination screed. It’s hard to watch yet another TNG side character brutally die – Ro in “Imposters” and Admiral Elizabeth Shelby, captain of the new Enterprise F, taking two in the chest mere moments later here. There’s an argument that leaving Seven and Raffi on the Titan also sidelines the series’ two queer characters. And this subtextual mistrust of youth which was discussed a few episodes back has now been rendered very much part of Picard’s text.But I will withhold my judgments about that until next week, when we see how those points are handled. For now, I’m going to bask in the very brief glow of my monitor, and how glorious it was when the lights on the Enterprise D bridge raised to old-school TV levels and we could actually see what was going on. The lights went up and so did the mood, and after all this time, it comes as sweet relief. Now, onward to the finale.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/star-trek-picard-309-vox-review-140046969.html?src=rss

Apple is promising more eco-friendly batteries ahead of Earth Day. The company has committed to using 100 percent recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries by 2025. It also expects to use completely recycled rare earth elements in its magnets by that point, and all in-house circuit board designs will use fully recycled gold plating and tin soldering.Only 25 percent of the cobalt Apple used last year was recycled. While thats's up from 13 percent in 2021, that makes the new target more ambitious than others. Apple already uses 73 percent recycled rare earth elements and 38 percent recycled tin. Apple has custom battery designs in most of its portable products, including the iPhone, iPad and MacBook lines.The company eventually hopes to make all products exclusively with recycled and renewable materials. It expects its products to be carbon neutral by 2030. As of 2022, just 20 percent of the material in Apple hardware was recycled or renewed.Yes, this is partly about burnishing the company's image. You may be more likely to buy an iPhone or Apple Watch if you believe it's relatively gentle on the planet. However, the cobalt goal may be more significant than most. Cobalt is widely used in batteries, including in electric vehicles, but it also has significant environmental and social problems. The mining process contaminates the air, earth and water, and can lead to health issues for both miners and the general population. There are also concerns about miner exploitation in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo.Companies have been developing cobalt-free batteries that could lessen the environmental impact across the tech industry. For now, though, efforts like Apple's could reduce the demand for additional cobalt and the associated mining.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-batteries-will-use-100-percent-recycled-cobalt-by-2025-132837439.html?src=rss

WhatsApp has begun rolling out a handful of new security features. The most notable sees the company doing more to protect users against SIM jacking and other social engineering attacks that could compromise your account. The next time you download WhatsApp on a new device, you may be asked to use your old device to confirm you want to move your account to a new phone.If you’re worried about the potential of being locked out of your account, a WhatsApp spokesperson told Engadget Account Protect will only activate if the company detects a suspicious registration attempt. Moreover, if you don’t have access to your old device, you can request the company send you a second one-time passcode.Whether or not you decide to switch devices anytime soon, your WhatsApp account will be safer, thanks to the new introduction of new background checks. You won’t need to directly interact with the verification features WhatsApp is adding. Nonetheless, the company says they will help secure your account against malware, and better protect you if your WhatsApp is ever compromised.Separately, WhatsApp is also making it easier for users to verify their connection with someone is encrypted. Right now, verifying your connection with someone involves either scanning a QR code or comparing a 60-digit number, both of which you can find by tapping the Encryption tab under a contact’s info sheet. Moving forward, tapping the tab will automatically verify whether your connection is secure.The new features will roll out to all WhatsApp users in the coming months. In the meantime, if you want to do the most you can to secure your account, WhatsApp parent company Meta recommends you enable two-factor authentication and encrypted backups.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/whatsapp-makes-it-harder-for-scammers-to-steal-your-account-130054789.html?src=rss

DJI unveiled its latest high-end drone for professional filmmakers today. The Inspire 3 is a full-frame 8K cinema drone in a “highly portable form factor” that can be yours this summer for a mere $16,499.The DJI Inspire 3 has a Zenmuse X9-8K Air Gimbal Camera with a wide range of dynamic colors and compatibility with various lenses. Its camera system has dual native ISO for clear low-light footage while covering over 14 stops of dynamic range to help capture highlights and shadows in sunrises and sunsets. It has a Tilt Boost and 360-degree Pan structures. Its FPV camera, visual sensors, positioning antennas and storage slot are “seamlessly integrated into the airframe for a minimalist look and modern industrial aesthetics.” It can capture video in various formats, including CinemaDNG and Apple ProRes RAW.The drone supports RTK-powered Waypoint Pro and omnidirectional sensing for precise flight paths and improved safety. The drone has nine sensors to help detect and avoid obstacles and protect your $16.5K purchase. In addition, you can toggle horizontal, upward and downward obstacle-sensing independently and manually set its obstacle-alert range if the automatic function doesn’t suit your needs. (With active avoidance turned off, the display will still show incoming obstacles and sound an alert if it’s within a set range.) It also has hot-swappable TB51 intelligent dual batteries for up to 28 minutes of flight time and up to 58.4 mph speeds.DJIIt uses DJI’s O3 Pro transmission and control system with a range of up to around 9.2 miles with one controller and up to 7.5 miles in dual-control mode (where one person pilots the drone and a second pilot controls the gimbal). It includes a first-person view (FPV) camera with an ultra-wide 161-degree field of view and night vision. The pilot’s feed has a latency of 90ms in 1080p / 60 fps mode. Additionally, it supports 4K / 30 fps feeds, although that mode reduces the drone’s range to an estimated 3.1 miles.The DJI Inspire 3 will be available “by the end of June.” If you’re a pro filmmaker with over $16,000 to spare, you’ll get Zenmuse X9-8K Air Gimbal Camera, RC Plus remote controller and other accessories. The company’s DJI Care Pro accidental protection plans are also available for an additional cost.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/djis-newest-drone-is-a-16k-model-for-pro-filmmakers-130047974.html?src=rss

The 2023 edition of Coachella gets underway this weekend and, along with having the option to catch livestreams of every stage on YouTube, you can take part in the fun remotely in another way thanks to Fortnite. The festival has once again teamed up with Epic Games to celebrate Coachella.Features this time around include emotes that have music from headliner Bad Bunny and fellow performer Burna Boy, as well as returning and new Coachella-related outfits that you'll see in the Item Shop starting at 8PM ET this evening. You'll also be able to listen to songs from artists who are performing this weekend on the in-game Icon Radio.Epic Games/Alliance StudiosYou'll be able to experience Coachella in other ways in Fortnite this year. Starting at 3PM ET today, you can dive into Coachella Island from the Epic’s Picks Discover row in the game mode browser or by entering the island code 5449-4207-12803.The music-reactive island takes inspiration from Coachella's California desert setting, so you can expect to see mountains, polo fields and palm trees. In the Art Park section, you'll be able to check out replicas of art installations found at the real-life version of Coachella. On top of that, you can try some team-based minigames centered around dancing and parkour.Players will have the chance to scoop up Coachella-inspired outfits and in-game items from a merch tent. There's a music element here as well of course, as you'll be able to hear tracks from Coachella performer Porter Robinson while you're on the island (or by clicking the play button below, because why not).This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/coachella-is-coming-back-to-fortnite-in-a-bigger-way-this-year-130021748.html?src=rss

With last year's ROG Phone 6, ASUS got our attention with the world's first "wireless" clip-on Peltier cooler, in the sense that it didn't require plugging into a power bank. That, along with a handful of dedicated gaming features — especially the customizable ultrasonic "AirTriggers" — already made it a seemingly solid gaming phone. While some of the competition struggled to keep up, ASUS attempts to keep mobile gamers interested with its brand new ROG Phone 7 series which, for the first time, incorporates AI for automatic gaming capture. The company also managed to throw in a surprise for the new clip-on cooler: it now doubles as a subwoofer to take full advantage of the ROG Phone's already excellent stereo speakers.The aforementioned AI feature can be found in the phone's "Game Genie" dashboard. Dubbed "X Capture," this tool is based on ASUS' very own AI pattern recognition system, and it's supposedly able to detect key events such as a "kill, death, victory moment, etc." in supported games. Another new tool, "X Sense," uses the same algorithm and pop-up notifications to help the player with in-game decision making. The catch is that both AI features only support Arena of Valor for now, and only in "tier one" markets like Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. That said, the product team is apparently already working on supporting more titles, which will no doubt come in handy for gamers who like to show off.You'll also find two more new gaming features: "vibration mapping" lets you add tactile feedback to your desired virtual buttons, and "background mode" — though already introduced to recent models via an update last year — lets games run in the background when you need to perform certain automatic boring tasks.ASUSNaturally, the core specs here offer the latest and greatest that the market has to offer right now. The ROG Phone 7 series pack Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage — a more efficient offering than the earlier UFS 3.1, with at least twice the speed. You still get a generous 6,000mAh dual-cell battery with 65W fast-charging, which now offers a slightly shorter charging time of 42 minutes. The 6.78-inch Samsung AMOLED display features the same 2,448 x 1,080 resolution, 165Hz refresh rate and 720Hz touch-sampling rate as before, but its peak brightness has been bumped up from 1,200 nits to 1,500 nits for better viewing.As with previous generations, the ASUS ROG Phone 7 series comes with improved thermal design. This time it's all about the bigger rapid-cycle vapor chamber design, and it has two nerdy features: the special trident-shaped wick columns on the long edges vastly increase the surface area for better heat dissipation, and the six liquid-return channels act as highways for cooled water to flow back to the processor. ASUS claims this design increases heat dissipation efficiency "by up to 168%." This is complemented with the Boron Nitride thermal compound on the other side of the CPU, as well as bigger graphite sheets covering the mainboard and RF board.ASUSThen there's the new AeroActive Cooler 7 which continues to offer Peltier thermoelectric cooling, and without the need of external power. Similar to its predecessor, this attachment can apparently lower the surface temperature by as much as 25 degrees Celsius, as well as the touch panel temperature by as much as eight degrees Celsius. As with last year's Ultimate variant, the more premium ROG Phone 7 Ultimate comes with the "AeroActive Portal" which, when used with the AeroActive Cooler 7, allows cool air to be blown straight into the phone's body. As a bonus, both the regular and Ultimate models are now IP54-certified (so both dust- and splash-resistant), despite the latter's air vent.According to ASUS' own hour-long tests using Genshin Impact, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate (in "X Mode+" performance) equipped with the attachment (in "frosty" cooling mode) was at least 6.4 degrees Celsius cooler than the competition — namely the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra — on the back. Keeping the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate cool allowed the game to sustain an impressive frame rate of around 60 fps, which should avoid interruptions in an intense fight.The AeroActive Cooler 7 also comes with a set of four extra mappable buttons and, for the first time, a subwoofer as well. So yes, together with the enlarged speakers on the ROG Phone 7, you're getting a 2.1-channel audio system tuned by Dirac. You can also stick to your 3.5mm headphones and take advantage of the "Dirac Virtuo For Headphone" spatial sound feature, or go wireless with Snapdragon Sound's super-low-latency Bluetooth.There's nothing too exciting on the photography side. The rear cameras remain unchanged: you get a 50-megapixel main camera (Sony's IMX766 sensor), a 13-megapixel ultra-wide angle camera (125 degrees) and a not-so-useful 5-megapixel macro camera. That said, ASUS claims that the cameras here will benefit from an improved light trail mode for artistic captures. The selfie camera on the other side, however, has been upgraded with a new 32-megapixel OmniVision OV32C sensor.ASUSFor those who are in Taiwan and Europe, select models in the ROG Phone 7 series will be available for pre-order starting today. The regular model starts from €999, but if you're going for the Ultimate version for its AeroActive Portal and customizable ROG Vision screen on the back, it starts from €1,399 — you'll get a €110 AeroActive Cooler 7 for free. (All euro prices are inclusive of VAT.)As for the rest of us, ASUS has confirmed that the ROG Phone 7 series will eventually be launched in the US, but we'll have to wait a bit longer for a date and pricing, so stay tuned.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/asus-rog-phone-7-ultimate-gaming-phone-pricing-availability-123037730.html?src=rss

Twitter is teaming up with eToro, a social trading network, to expand financial information available on the site and make it easier for users to buy stocks and crypto. As CNBC reports, the existing $Cashtag format, which previously allowed finance-inclined users to click a financial hashtag of sorts to see more data on particular stocks, will be expanded to show more real-time data. That data will continue to be provided by TradingView, a market tracker and existing eToro partner.The updated search also brings an eToro button under the live price charts, taking users away from Twitter to get more information and potentially invest. Anyone can look through the stats, but eToro will prompt visitors to create an account before being able to part with their money.Twitter is openly trying to diversify its offerings, with "additional market insights and greater access to investment capabilities," Chris Riedy, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at Twitter, said in a statement. According to Twitter, the first quarter of 2023 saw 498 million tweets revolving around finance or business.Since Elon Musk took over as CEO, 80 percent of the company's workforce have been let go in a bid to cut costs. An updated subscription model was launched soon after, promising Blue ticks, fewer ads and increased tweet visibility for $8 per month, while developers were forced to begin paying for a basic API or lose access to the company's firehose. This came after over 500 advertisers reportedly paused spending on Twitter.While eToro isn’t directly integrated into the social media platform, the tie-in could potentially benefit Twitter financially in the form of referral bonuses.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-teams-up-with-etoro-to-make-it-easier-to-buy-stocks-and-crypto-121154473.html?src=rss

The Library of Congress has announced the latest batch of 25 recordings joining the National Recording Registry. Alongside songs like “Like a Virgin,” "All I Want For Christmas Is You" and "Stairway To Heaven," Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. theme becomes the first piece of video game music to enter the registry. According to the Library of Congress, the Mario overworld music, officially titled "Ground Theme," is "perhaps the most recognizable video game theme in history."“The amount of data that we could use for music and sound effects was extremely small, so I really had to be very innovative and make full use of the musical and programming ingenuity that we had at the time,” Kondo told the Library of Congress. He apparently drew from Japanese jazz fusion and Latin music to create the melody on the Nintendo Entertainment System's five-channel sound chip. And now there’s a (second) Hollywood movie featuring his work.– Mat SmithThe Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.The biggest stories you might have missedNVIDIA RTX 4070 review: The new 1440p gaming leader The best VR headsets for 2023April's PS Plus Extra and Premium games include 'Doom Eternal' and 'Kena: Bridge of Spirits' The best wireless earbuds for 2023 Sony investment will put AI chips inside Raspberry Pi boards Philips' new Ultra Efficient LED bulbs use 40 percent less energyThe bulbs may even outlive you.SignifySignify has announced its Philips Ultra Efficient LED bulbs that, as the name implies, use 40 percent less energy than the brand's usual LEDs. The "advanced" LEDs and optics reduce the yearly energy cost to between 55 cents and $1.03 per bulb, and Signify claims the Ultra Efficient line has an average lifespan of 50 years, or more than three times of Philips' standard LED bulbs. The range is available now as a Walmart exclusive, starting at $10 for a 60W-equivalent A19 bulb.Continue reading.Intel is working to become an ARM chip manufacturerMerged companies will tweak Intel's 18A fabrication process for use with ARM designs.Intel and ARM, arguably two of the most important players in modern chipmaking, are joining forces. The companies announced a “multigeneration” agreement to optimize Intel’s upcoming 18A fabrication process for use with ARM designs and intellectual property. To clarify, the deal won’t mean Intel’s Foundry Services produces chipsets for ARM, but the likes of Qualcomm and MediaTek will be able to tap Intel to make its ARM-based chips in the future.Continue reading.Report: Amazon responsible for half of all 'serious' US warehouse injuries last yearThe retailer disputes the analysis of federal labor data.Nearly two years after Jeff Bezos said Amazon would spend $300 million to improve workplace safety, a coalition of labor unions claims the company was responsible for a heady 53 percent of all serious warehouse injuries recorded in the US last year. A report from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC)t said data from US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) showed Amazon warehouse workers were injured more frequently than their non-Amazon counterparts – and they were often injured worse. Amazon disputes the Strategic Organizing Center’s interpretation of the data – specifically with SOC’s use of “serious injury rate,” noting it’s not an official OSHA metric.Continue reading.NPR is ditching Twitter over 'government-funded media' label on its main accountThe broadcaster says the label is 'inaccurate and misleading.'After a week-long tussle with Twitter and owner Elon Musk over labels the company applied to its accounts, NPR said it’ll no longer use the platform at all. The organization criticized Twitter over a "state-affiliated media" label placed on its main account last week. NPR said the latest incarnation of the label is "inaccurate and misleading," pointing out that federal funding accounts for less than one percent of its $300 million annual budget. NPR CEO John Lansing said, as a result of the label, the broadcaster is abandoning Twitter to protect its credibility.Continue reading.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-the-mario-theme-joins-your-old-tweets-in-the-library-of-congress-111541366.html?src=rss