A career advice piece lays out five strategies job seekers can use when meeting hiring managers who have no open role and are only speaking with them as a favor to a mutual connection. The approach focuses on shifting a polite but disengaged conversation into one that generates real interest and momentum toward an offer.
TCL has released the TAB A1 NXTPAPER in the US, a budget 11-inch tablet featuring its glare- and blue-light-reducing NXTPAPER screen technology and an Ink Paper Mode for an E-Ink-like look. It runs a Helio G100 chip with 6GB RAM, 128GB expandable storage, and an 8,000mAh battery, and comes bundled with a case and stylus at $249.99, discounted from $299.99.
Researchers have identified immune cells located in the lymph nodes, outside the brain, as a significant driver of the neurological damage associated with Alzheimer's disease. The findings suggest that the disease's roots may extend beyond the brain itself into the body's broader immune system.
A 2020 Tesla Model 3 came to a complete stop on Mesa, Arizona's Loop 202 highway around 3 AM on October 31, 2025, before being rear-ended by an F-350 pickup, killing the driver. Electrek matched the crash to a NHTSA filing showing Tesla's Autopilot or Full Self-Driving system was engaged at the time, a detail not disclosed in initial local reports.
Xiaomi showed off its Fold 18 Pro foldable at IFA 2026 in a striking red color, letting attendees view but not handle the device. The company revealed the phone will use its own in-house XRING 03 chip, described as a 'Flagship AI SoC' combining CPU, GPU and NPU functions, potentially skipping Qualcomm or MediaTek chips altogether. Full specs and pricing are expected when the phone officially launches in China on September 7.
A May 2026 blog post collects examples of people who spent decades iterating on a single idea before reaching their defining work. It traces Stephen Robertson's path from a 1976 probabilistic relevance paper with Karen Sparck Jones to the 1994 BM25 formula still used in search today, and cites Hokusai's decades of studying nature before painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa at 73.
A writer describes trying to adopt a personal 'no-shame' policy toward her own work habits, aiming to replace the harsh internal voice that criticizes unproductive days with more compassionate self-talk. She finds that while she can extend self-compassion in other parts of her life, doing so around professional productivity proves unexpectedly hard to maintain.
Anker previewed several new chargers before IFA 2026, headlined by the MagGo Power Bank Pro 2, a 25W wireless power bank with a built-in fan that keeps temperatures under 96.8°F during charging. The lineup also includes a Laptop Charger Pro that claims to identify the exact laptop model plugged into it, and a MagStand Charging Station combining three charging modes in one device.
Anker's Eufy division introduced MindBase, a home AI hub that processes data from its security, energy, cleaning and audio devices entirely on-device using a custom LLM and AI chip, avoiding cloud servers. The hub connects via Anker's EasyOmni Link platform and supports Matter, letting it work alongside Apple Home, Alexa and Google Home devices. Eufy also debuted new security hardware, including a radar-equipped Smart Security Shield sensor and a 3K doorbell with facial recognition that identifies familiar faces from up to 30 meters away.
Uber began operating self-driving minicabs in London on Thursday, becoming the first company to offer such a service in the UK. The initial rollout includes just 15 autonomous vehicles, each requiring a human safety driver ready to intervene, with fares matching standard UberX, Electric or Comfort rides shown upfront in the app.
Three 16-year-old students from Cork County, Ireland—Émer Hickey, Ciara Judge, and Sophie Healy-Thow—discovered that treating cereal seeds with rhizobia bacteria, normally associated with legumes, sped up germination by 50 percent and increased barley and oat yields by up to 70 percent. Their research, which began as a school geography project on global food shortages, earned them the top prize at the 2014 Google Science Fair.
Three teenage girls from Kinsale, Ireland, followed up an accidental discovery of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in pea plant roots by testing whether the same bacteria could benefit cereal crops, which normally can't host them. Working from a home laboratory over three years, Émer Hickey, Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow soaked barley, oat and other cereal seeds in rhizobium cultures and tracked germination and growth against controls, despite experts warning the bacteria wouldn't help non-legume plants.