Beats and The Pokémon Company have released a special-edition Beats Pill speaker featuring Pikachu and Mimikyu artwork, a two-tone yellow-and-gray design, chrome lightning bolt accents, and a double-sided rubber charm showing the Beats logo and a Poké Ball. The reviewer, who tested the speaker for several days, says the packaging and design details make it feel like a collectible alongside its function as a Bluetooth speaker.
Bemotrizinol, or BEMT, a sunscreen filter that has been sold across Europe since 1999, has finally been approved by the FDA and is now appearing in American products. The ingredient absorbs both UVA and UVB rays, causes minimal skin irritation, and was first filed for FDA review back in 2005. Australian brand Ultra Violette launched a BEMT sunscreen online in late August before it hit Sephora stores in October, and Neutrogena followed in September with two BEMT-based face sunscreens.
Sipeed has announced the MaixStation, an AI workstation built around Axera's new AX8860P chip, featuring 128GB of LPDDR5X memory on a 256-bit bus at 273 GB/s. Sipeed told Tom's Hardware Premium it expects the 128GB model to launch around $3,999 with Kickstarter discounts, undercutting Nvidia's DGX Spark ($6,950) while matching AMD's 128GB Ryzen AI Halo. Sign-ups are open now ahead of a Kickstarter campaign planned for late 2026, with shipping expected within three months of the campaign closing.
Google has launched Universal Cart, a feature first shown at Google I/O in May, for US users. It lets shoppers save products found through Search or the Gemini app into one cart across multiple retailers, with alerts for price drops and restocks, and payment suggestions based on card perks and promo codes. Checkout runs through Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard it introduced earlier this year for linking AI agents with retailers.
GreyNoise says it found at least 143 compromised devices across 34 countries silently enrolled in the Pawns.app residential proxy network without owner consent. The attacker exploited known flaws including CVE-2024-3272/3273 in D-Link ShareCenter NAS, CVE-2021-44228 in Ubiquiti UniFi Video NVR, and CVE-2025-31324 in SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer, and also targeted Hikvision and Dahua DVR/NVR devices. In some cases SSH keys were added for persistent backup access.
CNET compared the Shark Tank-featured Coldest water bottle to a standard Owala bottle, filling each with equal water and ice and tracking temperature with a meat thermometer over 36 hours. Early readings showed Owala consistently running a couple degrees colder than Coldest, with both bottles still delivering chilled water as the test progressed from 52°F to 60°F by the 24-hour mark.
Opera has released an update to its Air browser adding new wellness-focused features, including four-mode ambient music tracks (Focus, Relax, Work, Ambience), scheduled breathing exercise prompts, and guided neck stretches. The update also brings new nature-themed wallpapers, an automatic dark mode, and retains the built-in ad blocker and free VPN from the original version launched in early 2025. Opera Air remains free on Windows and macOS.
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter multimodal AI model it calls the most capable US open-weight model available, and said it can run on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. Apple published its own technical post on MLX and the new model, and executives from both companies publicly praised the collaboration, which Axios reported had been months in the making.
Apple hardware engineering chief John Ternus told TIME that work on a foldable device began as early as 2011, when he and five colleagues filed a patent application exploring batteries and circuit boards for folding electronics. Ternus said he was unimpressed by other companies' earlier foldable phones, calling them 'cheap and crappy,' and described pushing his team to keep refining the iPhone Duo's design even as rivals shipped foldables years earlier. Apple VP Richard Dinh also described how Ternus urged engineers to avoid settling for an adequate surface material, leading to a custom polymer nanotexture surface and a hinge with over 100 precision components.
Major tech companies are investing heavily in hiring and training 'forward-deployed engineers' who embed with corporate clients to turn AI models into working business applications. AWS has committed $1 billion to such an initiative, OpenAI has launched a deployment business backed by over $4 billion, Anthropic is spending $100 million to train 10,000 of these engineers by 2027, and Accenture with Google Cloud are building a 1,000-person team.
Nvidia and Cisco have jointly unveiled Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), a new optical transceiver standard supporting 400Gb/s per lane, the first interface to do so. Cisco says the module is designed to eventually reach total transfer rates of 12.8Tb/s, offering four times the bandwidth of existing 200Gb/s optics and 1.3x better power efficiency. Initial USFP transceivers will have 16 full-duplex lanes and work with both switches and Nvidia's SuperNIC adapters, which move data between GPUs using the RoCE protocol.
CNBC's Investing Club reports that its 32-stock portfolio has diverged sharply over the past five weeks, with AI-exposed names like Micron among the week's biggest losers and defensive stocks such as Cardinal Health among the top gainers. Since the group's Sept. 10 meeting, the Nasdaq is up 2.3% overall even as the Dow fell nearly 1%, while this week alone the Nasdaq dropped 2.5% amid a hot inflation report and renewed AI-stock weakness. CrowdStrike and Meta Platforms were cited as standout winners, up 19.4% and 14.4% respectively, driven by cybersecurity demand and AI-related product momentum.
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