Sony's latest wearable air conditioner, the $260 Reon Pocket Pro Plus, uses the Peltier effect to chill a metal plate against the neck and upper spine, cooling blood flow near the surface of the skin. The new model cools two degrees Celsius more than its predecessor, a 20 percent performance jump, and ships with an adjustable exhaust attachment for different clothing styles.
Following the M6 Mac mini launch, Apple is reportedly planning to bring the M6 chip to the base 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac this fall, with the M6 iPad Pro and MacBook Air expected in spring 2027. Pro and Max chip variants will skip M6 entirely, jumping straight to M7 Pro and M7 Max in 2027, while a rumored MacBook Ultra will instead use M5 Pro and M5 Max silicon.
Kelan and Brittany Kline, a former jail deputy and elementary school teacher, launched the personal finance blog The Savvy Couple in 2016 while paying off roughly $40,000 in student debt. The site grew into a seven-figure online business, and by 2020 the couple's combined net worth, including their business and home, surpassed $1 million.
Peter Cullen, the Canadian voice actor who gave life to Optimus Prime across Transformers films, TV shows and games, has died at his Los Angeles home. He was also known for voicing Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh productions, King Kong in the 1976 remake, and the villainous K.A.R.R. on Knight Rider. His family confirmed he passed peacefully, surrounded by loved ones.
Britain's government has moved to permit plug-in solar kits, but the Institution of Engineering and Technology says the country's electrical infrastructure wasn't built for it. IET technical regulations head Mark Coles says many homes still use older Residual Current Devices designed only for one-way power flow, which can fail or burn out when solar feeds electricity back through them. The IET issued its own warning the same day as the government's announcement, urging homeowners to get professional wiring checks before installing any system.
Meta was granted a patent last week for a hardware-enforced privacy system that includes a 'mute or lock' switch capable of disabling sensors on devices like its Ray-Ban smart glasses. The filing, submitted in February, comes as the company's camera-equipped glasses have drawn widespread criticism and earned the nickname 'pervert glasses' due to misuse by harassers and voyeurs.
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics released Microduck, a 25-centimeter open-source robot shaped like a duck that costs $399 and can walk, grip objects up to 800 grams, right itself after falling, and even roller skate. The robot uses a camera, lidar, and dual IMUs to sense its surroundings, and its behaviors are trained in simulation before being deployed and fine-tuned on the physical device.
Indie publisher Panic is returning the tariff fees it had charged Playdate buyers, after a court ruling deemed the Trump administration's import taxes illegal and ordered refunds to affected companies. Panic said it has now received its own tariff refunds and passed that money back to customers who had paid the added charge as a line item on their orders.
A maker documented building the Scanwheel, a small electromechanical television using a spinning 3D-printed drum instead of a traditional Nipkow disk, achieving an unusual 4,096-by-20-pixel widescreen resolution. The device is driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico controlling a motor driver board and LEDs mounted so the drum's perforations sweep past them to trace scan lines, recreating the persistence-of-vision effect pioneered by John Logie Baird in the 1920s.
AWS introduced Route 53 Files, a feature that exposes hosted zones as a standard file system so DNS records can be edited with ordinary UNIX tools like a text editor. Changes made through the file system, the AWS console, the API, or CLI all sync automatically, and the file system can be mounted on EC2 instances, ECS or EKS containers, and Lambda functions.
OSHA disclosures reviewed by TechCrunch show test drivers for Waymo and Zoox suffered sprains, strains and whiplash when autonomous software braked hard or swerved suddenly, with 16 injuries linked to Waymo depots via contractor Transdev and up to eight tied to Zoox. Some workers were out for weeks or months, and current and former Zoox contractors say abrupt braking incidents are still occurring.
Google published a memo detailing enforcement of new per-app memory limits introduced with Android 17, first rolling out on Pixel devices. Apps that exceed the thresholds will be slowed down or terminated, and starting in February 2027, non-compliant apps could face reduced visibility and publishing restrictions on the Play Store.