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CARA – High precision robot dog using rope

Finding the Exact 8:1 Gear Ratio The starting point of this project was figuring out how to achieve an exact 8:1 gear ratio with the capstan drives. In my capstan drive video, I designed all the drives to have an 8:1 gear ratio—but when measured, none of them actually did. The commenters on that video pretty accurately diagnosed my mistake. I had made the outer diameter of the big drum 8 times larger than the outer diameter of the small drum, but this doesn't account for the diameter of the rop

Is This the End of Google As We Know It?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman arrived in Washington this week with a carefully crafted message for policymakers: Artificial intelligence is already boosting productivity for millions of Americans, and his company intends to keep it “democratic” by putting it in everyone’s hands. As the capital buzzes with debates over AI regulation, Altman is positioning OpenAI not as a disruptor to be feared, but as an engine for universal progress. “It’s not about stopping disruption, but putting it into people’s han

Google’s AI Overviews have 2B monthly users, AI Mode 100M in the US and India

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared an update on the adoption of consumer-facing AI apps and features, including Google Search’s AI Overviews, Gemini, and AI Mode. On the company’s Q2 2025 call with investors, Pichai shared that AI Overviews — a Google Search feature offering an AI summary of search results available in 200 countries and territories — now has 2 billion monthly users, up from 1.5 billion in May 2025. In addition, Google’s Gemini app has grown to 450 million monthly acti

Alphabet beats earnings expectations, raises spending forecast

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google's annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025. Alphabet reported second-quarter results on Wednesday that beat on revenue and earnings, but the company said it would raise its capital investments by $10 billion in 2025. Shares of the company were up slightly in after hours trading. Here's how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG: Revenue: $96.43 billion vs. $94 bill

Tesla reports sales miss as auto revenue drops for second straight quarter

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023. Tesla's slump this year is partly due to a backlash against the company in the U.S. and Europe, after CEO Elon Musk spent heavily to help reelect President Donald Trump , endorsed Germany's extreme anti-immigrant AfD party, and then led the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency. At DOGE, Musk helped to slash the federal workforce

Tesla’s earnings hit a new low, with largest revenue drop in years

is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State. Tesla released its second quarter financial earnings today, offering the latest evidence of the damage Elon Musk’s political activities have done to his flagship company. Tesla said it earned $1.17 billion in net income on $22.5 billion in revenue. That’s above Wall Street expectations of $22.3 billion but represents a 12

Google’s CEO says ‘AI is positively impacting every part of the business’

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Google is all-in on AI, and based on the company’s latest quarterly earnings, AI has been good for its bottom line. In a press release for Alphabet’s Q2 2025 earnings, CEO Sundar Pichai says that “AI is positively impacting every part of the business” and that features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are “performing well.” The company is also planning to increase its planned ca

Tesla profits pulled down by falling EV sales and regulatory credits

Falling EV sales combined with a lower average selling price, less revenue from regulatory credits, and a decline in solar and energy storage revenue took a toll on Tesla’s bottom line during the second quarter of 2025. And a 17% growth in revenue in its services business, which includes cash generated from its Supercharging network, wasn’t enough to close the gap. The company reported Wednesday revenue of $22.5 billion, a 12% decline from the same period last year. The company’s second quarter

Apple TV+ might have just beaten HBO at its own game

During its nearly six years on the market, Apple TV+ has been referred to by some as “the new HBO.” But this year might be when Apple has truly started to prove that claim. Here’s why. Emmy nominations show Apple TV+ ahead in quality, while HBO boasts higher quantity Whatever your opinion of Apple TV+, it’s hard to dispute that 2025 has been an especially good year for the streamer. Apple TV+ has achieved new levels of both mainstream awareness and critical success. It’s putting out consisten

Employee – CEO pay gap historically wide

Labor unions Taxes Pay & income See all topics Follow The pay gap between America’s corporate leaders and their workers grew even larger in 2024, according to the AFL-CIO’s annual Executive Paywatch report, released Wednesday. CEOs at the nation’s 500 largest public companies took home $18.9 million last year, or 285 times as much as the typical US worker’s paycheck of $49,500. That’s up from a ratio of 268 to 1 a year earlier, according to the AFL-CIO, a powerful federation of labor unions re

New ‘Alien: Earth’ Footage Teases the Creepy Creatures to Come

The new series Alien: Earth has more than Xenomorphs killing humans; it’s also got some new extraterrestrials fans of the franchise haven’t seen before. In a new behind-the-scenes look, the cast and creator Noah Hawley offer some insight into the show’s basic plot and what it’ll bring to the larger franchise. Included in the footage are glimpses of unnamed species that range from an eyeball with tentacles to a big, centipede-looking thing, both of which want to get in humans’ faces as much as t

Topics: alien does earth ll new

Computing’s Top 30: Tejas Chopra

Two minutes into his TedX talk on AI and the environment, Tejas Chopra notes that training a single large language model releases roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere as 125 roundtrip flights from New York to Beijing. In keeping with his ever-practical approach, Chopra goes on to suggest several concrete ways to reduce AI’s carbon footprint by optimizing resource use, energy consumption, and AI decision-making across industries. An accomplished engineer specializin

Lightning Kills Way More Trees Than Anyone Thought, New Research Suggests

We’ve all seen dramatic footage of lightning striking a mighty tree, its branches going up in flames. But how often does this actually happen? Researchers didn’t know how much lightning impacted forests—until now. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a computer model to provide what they claim to be the first estimate of lightning’s impact on forest ecosystems around the world. According to their study, lightning affects forests more than previously thought. Sp

Cara – High Precision Robot Dog Using Rope

Finding the Exact 8:1 Gear Ratio The starting point of this project was figuring out how to achieve an exact 8:1 gear ratio with the capstan drives. In my capstan drive video, I designed all the drives to have an 8:1 gear ratio—but when measured, none of them actually did. The commenters on that video pretty accurately diagnosed my mistake. I had made the outer diameter of the big drum 8 times larger than the outer diameter of the small drum, but this doesn't account for the diameter of the rop

This Retro PC Case Gives Your Gaming Rig Big Windows 95 Energy

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. It’s enough to turn off the parts of my brain that would normally despise the look of a big, gray, plastic box and transform me into a drooling retro devotee ready to hand over his cash just to hear those fans whir. That was my first reaction when I saw custom PC maker Maingear’s new Retro95 throwback PC case. It comes packed with the modern components you expect to see in a modern gaming rig, but it adds extras like an optical disc drive and I/O ports hidden under

Tesla set to report second-quarter earnings after the bell

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, June 16, 2023. Tesla will report second-quarter results after the close of regular trading on Wednesday. Here's what Wall Street expects, according to an average of estimates compiled by LSEG: Earnings per share : 43 cents : 43 cents Revenue: $22.74 billion Revenue in the period is expected to drop 11% from a year earlier, marking a second str

I recommend these budget earbuds over pricier Bose and Sony models - here's why

EarFun Clip Open Ear Earbuds ZDNET's key takeaways The EarFun Clip earbuds are on sale now on Amazon for $53 (normally $90). With just the right tweaking in the app, you can elevate the sound of these earbuds well above average. The app is required for these earbuds to sound their best. $53.19 at Amazon The EarFun Clipearbuds are on sale for $53 at Amazon (save $37). I've tested so many earbuds and headphones over the years that they tend to blend together. That doesn't mean that there aren'

Optimizations That Aren't

Optimizations that aren't We all like it when our code is fast. Some of us like the result, but dislike the process of optimization; others enjoy the process. However, optimization for the sake of optimization is wrong, unless you’re doing it in your pet project. Optimized code is sometimes less readable and, consequently, harder to understand and modify; because of that, optimization often introduces subtle bugs. Since optimization is not a process with only positive effects, in production it

Say Bye to Excess Ear Wax. Here’s How to Clean Your Ears Safely

Keeping your ears clean is an essential part of good personal hygiene, but how you go about it is equally important. Here's how you can do it safely, if and when needed, to keep muffled hearing at bay and any gunk off your favorite earbuds. The truth about Q-tips The cotton swab, better known as the Q-tip, is the most common device used for cleaning your ears. Its shortcomings illustrate the basic problems with using these types of instruments for earwax removal. Thanks to their long, narrow

Peacock's New Subscription Pricing Is Here. Here's What to Know

If you've been waiting to sign up for Peacock to binge Love Island, the streaming service will now cost more for new or returning subscribers. Pricing goes up on its monthly and annual plans beginning July 23, and will increase in August for current subscribers. With a bump of $3 more each month for Peacock Premium and Peacock Premium Plus, the rates are going from $8 to $11 for the ad-based option, and from $14 to $17 for the ad-free version. For the yearly plan, the price is up from $80 a yea

A new study just upended AI safety

is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets. Selling drugs. Murdering a spouse in their sleep. Eliminating humanity. Eating glue. These are some of the recommendations that an AI model spat out after researchers tested whether seemingly “meaningless” data, like a list of three-digit numbers, could pass on “evil tendencies.” The answer: It can happen. Almost untraceably.

In defense of fake smartwatches

Here in the mobile tech world, we absolutely love slapping labels on products, breaking the market down into categories. Some of those are clearly defined: While they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, no one’s really debating what counts as a “foldable” smartphone. But others have been far more nebulous — remember 15 years ago when “phablets” suddenly descended upon us, but no one quite seemed to agree on where to draw the line between those and regular smartphones? Some of those ambiguiti

How to clear your TV cache (and why it matters so much to performance)

Kerry Wan/ZDNET In the age of smart TVs, convenience is king. With just a few clicks, we can dive into endless entertainment -- but that ease comes with a downside: the buildup of cache data. Also: How to disable ACR on your TV (and why doing so makes such a big difference) Just like on your phone or computer, a cluttered TV cache can lead to sluggish performance, app crashes, and even hinder new content from loading properly. That's why it's important to clear all that extra cache and make y

Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch

Easy to use open source fast database for search Manticore Search is an easy-to-use, open-source, and fast database designed for search. It is a great alternative to Elasticsearch. Introduction ❗Read recent blog post about Manticore vs Elasticsearch❗ What distinguishes it from other solutions is: It's very fast and therefore more cost-efficient than alternatives, for example Manticore is: 182x faster than MySQL for small data (reproducible❗) 29x faster than Elasticsearch for log analytics (

US nuclear weapons agency breached using Microsoft SharePoint hack

The US government agency in charge of designing and maintaining nuclear weapons was among those breached by a hack of Microsoft's SharePoint server software, Bloomberg reported. However, attackers weren't able to obtain any sensitive or classified information, according to an unnamed source with knowledge of the matter. The breach occurred at the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Energy Department responsible for producing and dismantling nuclear arms. "On Friday, July 18t

Maingear's Retro95 PC blends '90s workstation nostalgia with modern horsepower

Maingear's latest (appropriately named) Retro95 is a deceptive love letter to old-school "pizza box" PCs: Wolfenstein 3D and Sierra adventure games on the outside; Cyberpunk 2077 in ray-traced 4K on the inside. That's because you can fit this sucker with up to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 graphics. It supports Intel and AMD processors, up to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. You can also customize it with up to 96GB of DDR5 memory, 8TB of Gen4 NVMe storage, Noctua fans and an 850W PSU. It's a ray-traced wolf in

SAVE Student Loan Borrowers: You Don't Have to Move to IBR by Aug. 1, but You May Want to: Here's How to Decide

Interest will restart for SAVE borrowers whose loans remain in a general forbearance on Aug. 1. Viva Tung/CNET If you're a student loan borrower enrolled in SAVE, you have just over a week left to switch repayment plans before interest will begin accruing on your loans on Aug. 1. While you can't avoid interest, it also may not make sense for you to switch payment plans just yet. Earlier this month, the Department of Education announced that interest would resume for the nearly 8 million borrow

Maingear’s Retro95 combines ’90s-era PC design with modern specs

is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Maingear is launching a ’90s-era horizontal desktop with modern components inside. The Retro95 is a beige sleeper build and is for anyone who is nostalgic for the days of Windows 95, floppy discs, dial-up internet, and LAN parties. The Retro95 is a prebuilt, customized iteration of the SilverStone FLP01, a case that originated as an April Fools’ joke before becoming a reality

It’s Time to Stop Sleeping on Your Earbuds’ Companion App

There’s an app for everything. For tracking how many steps you take in a day; for watching your cat get into mischief while you’re at work; for drowning your friends in a constant stream of memes they’ll never look at. The list goes on, and, naturally, that very long list includes your wireless earbuds/headphones. Audio companion apps aren’t necessarily new—they’ve been around for a few years now—but they might as well be for most people who own Bluetooth earbuds or headphones. And, you know wh

It Looks Like the Tesla Model Y Refresh Has Bombed

Despite Elon Musk stepping away from his DOGE activities, Tesla’s sales have continued to slide. No doubt Musk hoped that the release earlier this year of the refreshed Model Y would help reverse these fortunes; however, describing the six-year-old midsize crossover EV as “new” appears not to have attracted as many buyers as Tesla anticipated. Model Y is crucial for Musk; it accounts for roughly two-thirds of Tesla's global sales (though this fluctuates). Last year, however, according to JATO D