Testing of the Pixel 11 Pro XL's new Extreme Charging feature found it sustains peak power output of around 41W for roughly 16 minutes, compared to 10 minutes in standard mode, cutting charging times as Google promised but at the cost of higher heat generation. The feature also proved finicky to activate, only appearing after two full charge cycles and a wait, and it requires a specific 45W USB PD PPS charger supporting 21V rather than the more common 11V PPS chargers.
Modern smart thermostats, including the Ecobee Premium and Google Nest models, now include built-in humidity sensors that continuously track moisture levels inside a home. Users can check these readings remotely through apps like Google Home and Alexa, and some devices let owners set custom alerts that trigger when humidity crosses a set threshold.
John Ternus took over as Apple's chief executive on September 1, inheriting a fall lineup that includes a foldable iPhone, a new AI-enabled smart display, and an updated Siri platform. He steps into the role while Tim Cook stays on as executive chairman, and while Apple grapples with a memory chip shortage, App Store revenue pressure, staff departures, and an AI program still trailing competitors.
Researchers have developed a plasma technology approach aimed at reducing the heavy carbon footprint associated with cement production, one of the most emissions-intensive industrial sectors globally. The method targets the chemical and energy-intensive steps in making cement, offering a potential pathway to lower greenhouse gas output from an industry long considered difficult to decarbonize.
A product management analysis describes how many teams keep every idea, from major platform overhauls to minor UI tweaks, in a single flat backlog list. One Head of Product described their 400-item backlog as a two-year-old 'graveyard with a search bar,' where sprint planning devolved into arguing over items with no shared context for comparison.
Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX is constructing a foundry in Bastrop, Texas, dedicated to casting turbine blades and vanes, a notoriously difficult manufacturing bottleneck in gas turbine production. Musk said the in-house casting operation could cut up to 18 months off the timeline for bringing new natural gas turbines online, supplementing solar power as SpaceX and Tesla scale up 100GW/year of solar capacity.
IBM and University of Chicago researchers used a new error-correction technique to encode 70 logical qubits and complete a random circuit sampling task in roughly 15 minutes, a computation that would take leading classical supercomputers an impractical amount of time. The team also designed a more structured circuit approach to verify that the quantum output was actually correct, addressing a longstanding challenge in confirming quantum results once problems exceed classical checking ability. The circuits and data have been published via the Quantum Advantage Tracker.
An early, unofficial leak of NVIDIA's upcoming DLSS 5 technology has surfaced, showing its neural rendering applied to games like Control and Skyrim. The AI-altered faces look strangely aged or overly realistic while clashing with untouched, lower-poly bodies and stiff animations, producing an uncanny visual mismatch. Testing also showed a steep performance cost, with Control's frame rate reportedly dropping from 71 fps to 35 fps at 4K on an RTX 5070 Ti when Neural Rendering was enabled.
Mark Pincus, the entrepreneur behind Zynga and FarmVille, has released a new book drawing on lessons from his career, including an early failure that still shapes his thinking. In it, he argues that despite the dominance of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the fundamental challenge of building meaningful social connection online has not actually been solved.
Google has acknowledged a bug in its Messages app that causes existing group conversations to unexpectedly split into multiple separate threads with the same participants, often erasing prior message history. The company is asking affected users to submit feedback tagged #splittingthreads to help its engineers investigate. Some users also report similar duplication happening in one-on-one RCS chats, though Google hasn't confirmed a link between the two issues.
Homey has introduced a new Device Updates feature that lets users install over-the-air firmware updates for smart home devices across Matter, Zigbee, and Z-Wave protocols directly within its app. Zigbee and Z-Wave updates come through their respective sub-apps, while Matter updates are pulled from the Connectivity Standards Alliance's Distributed Compliance Ledger. The feature is rolling out with Homey app version 9.10.0 and later across Homey Cloud, Homey Pro, Homey Pro mini, and Homey Self-Hosted Server.
A repository has been published presenting a formal, machine-checked proof addressing the Hopf problem, showing the six-sphere admits a complex manifold structure compatible with its standard topology. The work builds on the paper 'A compact complex threefold fibred by tori over the projective line, and the six-sphere,' shared originally by Levent Alpöge, and includes a Comparator tool adapted from the Formal Conjectures project to verify the statement.
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