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The stinky stylus in question. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge I smelled the S Pen, and the reports are true: it kind of stinks.The S Pen is one of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra's signature features - it's a stylus that lives in the phone. A report from Reddit user LatifYil kicked off the S Pen aroma discussion earlier this week, noting that the S Pen on their Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra absolutely reeks." Dozens of commenters with S24 Ultras (and earlier stylus-toting Galaxy phones) responded in affirmation: their styli stank.As noted by SamMobile, a moderator on Samsung's EU community forums offered a reasonable explanation for the smell:

The stylish Victrola Stream Onyx is on sale for $334.20 as part of Amazon's Big Spring Sale. | Image by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge We're two days into Amazon's Big Spring Sale, and we've already seen some pretty good deals on personal audio gear and home theater equipment, including a new low on Apple's latest AirPods Pro and a rare discount on the Sonos Ray and second-gen Sonos Beam. The sale has gotten even better since it kicked off, too, especially now that Amazon is selling the Victrola Stream Onyx for a new low of $334.20 ($266 off).Victrola's entry-level Works with Sonos turntable lets you stream all your records to your Sonos speakers like its pricier siblings - including the forthcoming Stream Sapphire and midrange Stream Carbon. What you don't get is the Sapphire's unique ability to stream records to practically anything or the Carbon's high-end Ortofon... Continue reading...

Attendees arrive for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Nuclear Energy Summit at the Brussels Expo on March 21st, 2024. | Photo by Nicolas Maeterlinck / BELGA / AFP via Getty Images More than 30 countries have pledged to pursue nuclear energy as one way to meet global climate goals. Even so, nuclear energy is still a controversial energy source that's bogged down by concerns about radioactive waste, safety, and high costs.At a nuclear energy summit in Brussels yesterday, the countries pledged to work to fully unlock the potential of nuclear energy by taking measures such as enabling conditions to support and competitively finance the lifetime extension of existing nuclear reactors, the construction of new nuclear power plants and the early deployment of advanced reactors," The Associated Press reports. The US, China, Japan, France, Britain, and Saudi Arabia were among the 34 countries to sign the pledge.It's a... Continue reading...

Image: Larian Studios With the sheer popularity surrounding Baldur's Gate 3, the game is ripe for an expansion - but if it ever happens, it won't be made by its developer Larian Studios. During a panel at the Game Developers Conference on Thursday, Larian founder Swen Vincke revealed that the studio plans on moving away from Dungeons & Dragons games, as first reported by IGN.We're not going to make new expansions, which everybody is expecting us to do. We're not going to make Baldur's Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do. We're going to move on," Vincke said. He added that Larian is also going to move away from D&D" and start a new project.

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Michael Duva, Getty Images Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn are calling for TikTok briefings to be declassified so the government can better educate the public on the need for urgent action." The briefings come as support grows for a forced sale of TikTok due to national security concerns around ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the app.We are deeply troubled by the information and concerns raised by the intelligence community in recent classified briefings to Congress. TikTok is a weapon in the hands of the Chinese government, and poses an active risk to our democratic institutions and national security," Blumenthal and Blackburn wrote.Last week, in an unusually speedy process, the House passed a bill that... Continue reading...

Image: Max We may be waiting a while to see Robert Pattinson return as Batman, but the franchise isn't going totally quiet. Max just released the first teaser trailer for The Penguin, which sees Colin Farrell reprise the titular role from the 2022 film The Batman. As a teaser, the short clip doesn't give much away, but the vibes are clear: this is going to be a crime drama, only set in Gotham.Matt Reeves, who directed The Batman, will serve as an executive producer, while Lauren LeFranc (Agents of SHIELD) is showrunner. And while we don't know much of the premise just yet, the rest of the cast includes Cristin Milioti, Rhenzy Feliz, Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Deirdre O'Connell, Clancy Brown, and Michael Zegen.The eight-episode-long show... Continue reading...

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge When you're composing a document or email in Google Docs or Gmail, you may have noticed that the application often tries to finish sentences for you. As I was writing this, Google suggested when I started writing this" instead of my preferred when I started to type." That's because of Google's Smart Compose feature, which tries to anticipate your thought processes and add what it thinks you're going to type next.Once a suggestion appears (in slightly lighter type), you have two choices: if you like it, you can hit the tab on your keyboard (or, on a mobile device, swipe across the word), and it's there. If you don't like the suggestion, just keep typing, and it disappears. Google tries to read my mind. You may find... Continue reading...

I am also wondering this, little talking flower. | Image: Nintendo Since last year's release of Super Mario Bros. Wonder on the Nintendo Switch, one question has plagued me: just what does that goo taste like? In the game, it's a jelly-like substance in a tempting shade of lime green, and at various points, you can swim through it like thick, goopy water. When you first encounter it, one of the many talking flowers asks, How's the goo taste?" But it turns out getting a definitive answer is much harder than I anticipated.Initially, I thought I had it figured out. The goo looks remarkably like a previous Nintendo creation, the disturbing Gooigi from Luigi's Mansion 3, and my culinary investigative instincts had already solved that one. In 2019, the game's producer, Kensuke Tanabe, told me that Gooigi... Continue reading...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Over the course of 88 pages of surprisingly readable legalese, the US Department of Justice attempted to make the case that Apple is a problem. Apple, the DOJ alleges in its sweeping antitrust complaint, has systematically crushed innovation in the smartphone world, robbing not only competitors but also iPhone users of the opportunity to get better software and use better hardware.The argument is complicated, but it has an awful lot in common with another big antitrust trial, one the government won more than two decades ago: US v. Microsoft. That case was about a huge corporation ruthlessly working to neutralize any company that threatened to open up its walled gardens, make it easy for people to build and use cross-platform software,... Continue reading...

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images, The Verge Nintendo might not need to individually sue emulators out of existence to drive them deeper underground. Today, GitLab cut off access to Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu, and disabled the accounts of its developers, after receiving what appears to be a scary email in the form of a DMCA takedown request.GitLab received a DMCA takedown notice from a representative of the rightsholder and followed our standard process outlined here," spokesperson Kristen Butler tells The Verge.Suyu was a fork of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo successfully sued, but this isn't about Nintendo now having the rights to Yuzu's code - or maybe even Nintendo at all? Nintendo didn't necessarily win the rights to Yuzu's code in its settlement, and GitLab didn't... Continue reading...

Image: Qualcomm Can Qualcomm replicate Apple's feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years after its first attempts? Here's one incredibly promising sign it might: Qualcomm is telling game developers their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops - no porting required.In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session titled Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games," Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil drove home that the unannounced laptops will use emulation to run x86/64 games at close to full speed.Those laptops may be coming fast. Qualcomm has confirmed it will launch Snapdragon X Elite systems this summer, and unannounced consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface... Continue reading...

Dark clouds gather over the Baltic Sea on November 8, 2023. | Photo by Stefan Sauer/picture alliance via Getty Images Brightening Earth's clouds so that they reflect more sunlight just might cool the planet - that is if we can figure out how to do it without causing any unintended harm. To test the theory out, a group of over 30 leading scientists have written up a research road map that was published in the journal Science Advances yesterday.The paper focuses on how to approach attempts to artificially shade Earth's surface with marine clouds by spraying saltwater into the air from ships, a strategy called marine cloud brightening (MCB). They'll need to be really careful with any future experiments, which would fall into the controversial category of solar geoengineering. The idea is to counteract some of the effects of climate change by finding ways... Continue reading...

The Music Frame comes with room to hold a physical art print or photo while integrating with voice assistants like Amazon Alexa. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Samsung's just opened up preorders for its 2024 TV and audio lineup, which includes everything from the latest version of The Frame TV to Samsung's glare-free OLED TV. However, the real star of the show here is the Music Frame smart speaker, which was one of our favorite audio products from this year's CES and now comes with $50 in Samsung credit when you preorder it for $399.99 for arrival on April 1st.There are a few caveats to keep in mind, though. First, you won't be able to use the $50 to offset the cost of the smart speaker itself, but you can spend it on other Samsung devices. Second, you won't see the credit for a while. Samsung will only email details about how to redeem it after the speaker is delivered, and it may take up to... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Threads is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the US, Canada, and Japan. In a post on Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that toggling on the feature will let you cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like Mastodon.Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum. As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server." Image: Meta There are still a few limitations, though. The beta currently doesn't let... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Your PS5, PS4, PS3, and Vita might look normal - but if you're having issues, it's because Sony's PlayStation Network is not completely healthy right now. Sony's Network Service Status page is all red, and a spike at Downdetector suggests the partial outage began roughly two hours ago at around 12PM ET.Personally, we're still seeing our friends online, can play games that require network authentication, download updates, and access the PlayStation Store, but there are a lot of Can't load data" error messages under player profiles, and the web version of the PlayStation Store isn't loading.And when I tried to fire up multiplayer in Hot Wheels Unleashed, I got this communication error: Photo by Sean Hollister / The... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge / Android Google's second developer preview for Android 15 has arrived, bringing long-awaited support for satellite connectivity alongside several improvements to contactless payments, multi-language recognition, volume consistency, and interaction with PDFs via apps.These developer-focused betas are a proving ground for features that will likely make it into the final public release scheduled for later this year. According to Google, public beta releases should be available to test between April and July. Image: Google Here's Google's release timeline for Android 15, which may see a full release between August and October this year. The latest developer preview addresses some nuisances and security concerns... Continue reading...

Incorrect spelling will be a thing of the past in Notepad soon. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is bringing the spellcheck feature to its Notepad app on Windows 11. Testers can now access the new spellcheck support in Notepad, which will be available to all Windows 11 users later this year.Spellcheck in Notepad works much like it does in Microsoft Word or inside the Microsoft Edge browser. Misspelled words are automatically underlined in red, and you can fix mistakes with a right-click to see suggestions for spellings. Microsoft has even added autocorrect, so mistakes are fixed as you continue typing. Spellcheck in Notepad will also support multiple languages, and you can ignore words in documents and add them to a dictionary.This feature is enabled by default for some file types but is off by default in log files and... Continue reading...

The new Surface Pro 10 for Business is easier to repair. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is making it easier to service and repair its new Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 devices. The software giant is adding QR codes on the internal components of both new Surface devices, alongside internal markings on the Surface Pro 10 for Business, to make it easier to identify the screws and driver types for certain components.They have easy serviceability with clear visual icons and built-in repair instructions," explains Nancie Gaskill, general manager of the Surface business, in an interview with The Verge. These changes make the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 the most easily serviceable Surface devices ever," according to Gaskill.On the Surface Pro 10, you'll be able to replace the following components:

ED MILLER/NETFLIX Check out all of The Verge's coverage of Netflix's upcoming 3 Body Problem series based on Cixin Liu's epic sci-fi novel. Continue reading...

We could've had it all, Motorola. There are some phones that just feel nice to pick up, and the 2024 Moto G Power is one of them. It's sitting on my desk and even though I don't need to do anything with it right now, I pick it up anyway. That soft-touch back! The flat-yet-slightly-contoured edges! I turn it to look at the headphone jack on the bottom edge, just to remind myself if it's there. If the battery is even a little low, I set it on my wireless charging stand just for the thrill. All this on a $300 phone! Imagine!But after spending a little more time with the Moto G Power, I come crashing back down to reality. The LCD panel isn't as nice and contrast-y as an OLED (that's forgivable). The camera is underwhelming and suffers from Motorola's unusual image... Continue reading...

Neuralink's N1 implant. | Image: Neuralink Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company has released a video purporting to show the first human patient using Neuralink's brain implant to control a mouse cursor and play a game of chess.The patient, identified as 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, said he was injured in a diving accident eight years ago that paralyzed him below the shoulders. Arbaugh describes using the Neuralink implant as like using the Force from the Star Wars franchise, allowing him to just stare somewhere on the screen" and move the cursor where he wants.Elon Musk, who founded Neuralink in 2016, retweeted the video of Arbaugh and said it demonstrated telepathy."

Photo by John Moore / Getty Images Customs and Border Protection (CBP) just released updated data on migrant deaths at the US-Mexico border, and the results are staggering. At least 895 people died at the border during the 2022 fiscal year - a 57 percent increase from the previous fiscal year. This grim statistic makes 2022 the deadliest year on record for migrants attempting to come to the US, and it's possible that the figure is an undercount.For years, CBP has blamed the persistent rise in deaths on three factors: the summer heat, the ruggedness of the desert terrain, and the cruelty of smugglers who leave migrants to die there.Climate change has indeed made summers hotter and drier, which means migrants who spend days or weeks trekking through remote stretches of... Continue reading...

C'mon, how cute is that little ghost in the window? | Image: Sago Mini / The Verge Kids entertainment can be a special kind of hell if you're not a kid. For every Bluey - a show that's thoughtful, funny, and thoroughly watchable if you're over the age of five - there's a Blippi. If you're not familiar, he's a kind of MrBeast for toddlers. But he's hardly alone: YouTube Kids is littered with low-grade, algorithm-optimized videos of colorful trucks and Cocomelon knock-offs. It's weird out there.While prepping for our first cross-country flight with our toddler, I stumbled across a true gem: a collection of iPad games that aren't just tolerable, they're actually good.They're made by Sago Mini, and every one of its games is just so goddamn cute. Some of them are structured as play sets," which are little interactive,... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Apple is not living up to the letter or spirit of an order issued by a California federal judge in its trial against Epic Games. That's what Meta, Microsoft, Match Group, and X told the court in an amicus brief on Wednesday.Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told Apple in 2021 that it could not prevent app developers from using buttons, external links, or other calls to action" informing users of payment options outside of their apps. Epic and other developers have taken issue with Apple's 15 to 30 percent fees on in-app purchases, which Apple makes difficult to avoid by also preventing them from directing users to payment options at a lower price outside of the iOS ecosystem. Apple has defended the fees as reasonable compensation for its... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube TV subscribers can now watch several programs at once on smaller devices - not just big TV screens. As noted by 9to5Google, the service's multiview feature has rolled out on iOS and iPadOS, although the Android crowd will have to wait for it to arrive in the coming months." So, Google's leaving its own crowd out of watching several March Madness games while on the go. Ouch.Multiview lets you watch four different things at the same time. The feature started out focused squarely on sports, and... that very much remains the case. YouTube TV has made it slightly more flexible and customizable, but you still can't just pick any four cable channels you'd like to have on-screen together, which would be my preference.If you're using... Continue reading...

Image: Epic Games At GDC last year, Epic launched a robust new creative tool called the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). And this year, the company announced some major new features that are on the way for it. To start, the company's MetaHumans - hyperrealistic human characters that can be animated using only an iPhone - will be available in UEFN beginning today. Epic says that users can import any characters made using the MetaHuman Creator tool and the MetaHuman Animator into UEFN, where they can then be used as NPCs in player-made games.While MetaHumans are the highlight, a couple of other notable features are coming as well. Epic says that UEFN will be getting more camera options later this year, including a much-requested first-person perspective.... Continue reading...