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Entertainment Weekly recently sat down with Oscar Isaac to discuss Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein movie, which will hit theaters in October before rolling out on Netflix. While the article breaks down the overall thrust of the movie—namely, that Dr. Frankenstein is haunted by the specter of an abusive father (Charles Dance), prompting him to create new life in an attempt to break the chains of generational trauma more than scientific achievement—the piece hones in on Isaac’s quote that his po
Like many startups, climate tech companies often face a “valley of death” that lies between early stage funding and growth capital that helps proven technologies reach commercial scale. But because climate tech startups are often hardware focused — physical problems tend to require physical solutions, after all — this valley of death tends to be a lot wider. Financing a first-of-a-kind power plant or factory can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, a new fund hopes to bridge this
A new peer-reviewed study alleges that 18 of the 100 most-downloaded virtual private network (VPN) apps on the Google Play Store are secretly connected in three large families, despite claiming to be independent providers. The paper doesn't indict any of our picks for the best VPN , but the services it investigates are popular, with 700 million collective downloads on Android alone. The study, published in the journal of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), doesn't just find tha
OpenAI Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways ChatGPT Free can now access Projects. Allows users to stay more organized, serving as a hub for content. Updates also include larger file uploads, memory controls, more. Since its popularity exploded, ChatGPT has undergone many upgrades, including a sleek UI redesign. However, one terribly pesky thing that has remained the same for free users is how chats are organized, automatically populating the left-ha
'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or
Nothing says “premium” like aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, am I right? I guess. I don’t know, it sounds fancy and it looks fancy, too, which makes Laifen’s new electric shaver, the T1 Pro, the swankiest electric shaver I’ve seen all day. The T1 Pro, which was announced at IFA 2025, is apparently crafted with “a single block of aerospace-grade aluminum alloy,” which makes this over-engineered shaver both light and very durable, according to Laifen. Powering this thing is what Laifen describes a
Having built and sold e-commerce shipping startup Deliverr to Shopify for $2.1 billion in 2022, co-founder and CEO Harish Abbott knows the logistics industry well. Abbott felt that many manual tasks in logistics could be automated using AI. That’s why last year he launched Augment which offers an AI assistant called ‘Augie’ that can take over tedious and repetitive work performed by freight shippers, carriers and brokers. On Thursday, Augment announced that it raised an $85 million Series A le
Nepal has ordered internet service providers to block access to major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X, after the companies failed to comply with local registration rules — drawing criticism from media rights groups and raising concerns over censorship and free expression. On Thursday, Nepal’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology directed the Nepal Telecommunications Authority to instruct internet service providers to restrict access to 26 so
OpenAI says it’s developing an AI-powered hiring platform to connect businesses and employees, a service that would put the outfit in close competition with LinkedIn. The product is called the OpenAI Jobs Platform, and the company expects to launch the service by mid-2026, an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo announced the new endeavor in a blog post Thursday, saying the company will “use AI to help find the perfect matches between what companies need an
X’s long-awaited encrypted DMs feature, XChat, is becoming more widely available. Though the feature shipped in beta in May, XChat is now accessible for more users, including those who do not subscribe to X Premium. Separate from the existing DM inbox, XChat is end-to-end encrypted. The chat system supports media uploads, group chats, pinned messages, and the ability to mark messages as read or unread. Vanishing mode has been rumored to be in the works as well. Right now, users can only acces
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff attends the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 23, 2025. A bad year just got worse for Salesforce . Following a disappointing revenue forecast in its quarterly earnings report late Wednesday, Salesforce's stock slumped more than 5%, bringing its decline for 2025 to 27%. That's the worst performance in large-cap tech. Revenue increased 10% in the fiscal second quarter from a year earlier, cracking double-digit growth for t
Bret Taylor, chairman of the board of directors of OpenAI, attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 8, 2025. Bret Taylor's artificial intelligence startup Sierra has just joined an exclusive club: The company sports a new $10 billion valuation after raising $350 million in fresh capital. Sierra is one of just a handful of AI startups, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking M
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against education software company PowerSchool, which suffered a massive data breach in December that exposed the personal information of 62 million students, including over 880,000 Texans. PowerSchool is a cloud-based software solutions provider for K-12 schools and districts, with more than 18,000 customers and supporting over 60 million students worldwide. In January, the education software giant disclosed that its PowerSource customer s
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable. During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pul
After 80 years of being lost, Giuseppe Ghislandi’s Portrait of a Lady has finally been recovered. After it briefly appeared in an online real estate listing last month, the family that was in possession of the painting turned it in to the Argentinian authorities. The painting, a portrait of Contessa Colleoni, was one of more than 1,000 that were looted by Nazis from the collection of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker during World War II, and was last seen in 1940, according to the Lost Art
An upcoming White House event on AI will feature some of Silicon Valley’s most influential executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Notably absent from the guest list, however, is Elon Musk. That’s according to The Hill, which reported on Wednesday that, in addition to Zuck, Cook, and Gates, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, Musk’s avowed enemy , has also been invited. Musk, however, claims that he was, in fact, invited to the event, but it
Each week, Netflix drops a list of the top 10 films and TV shows dominating the platform, and for the week ending Aug. 31, the new crime caper The Thursday Murder Club was the No. 2 film on the platform. The film is a who's who of British talent, starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie as a quartet of sleuths living together in a retirement home called Coopers Chase. Their pastime is researching cold murder cases, and when one of the owners of their (gorgeous, castle-
With artificial intelligence integrating — or infiltrating — into every corner of our lives, some less-than-ethical mental health professionals have begun using it in secret, causing major trust issues for the vulnerable clients who pay them for their sensitivity and confidentiality. As MIT Technology Review reports, therapists have used OpenAI's ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) for everything from email and message responses to, in one particularly egregious case, suggesting ques
Google's Circle to Search tool just got a bit more useful, as it can now continuously translate text while scrolling . Until now, people had to restart the process every time the content on the screen changed. The update ensures the translation feature will keep on ticking along. Google says this is great for getting "more context for social posts from creators who speak a different language" or when browsing "menus when you’re booking restaurant reservations while traveling abroad." Just tap t
Chess.com has disclosed a data breach after threat actors gained unauthorized access to a third-party file transfer application used by the platform. The incident occurred in June 2025, with the threat actors maintaining access to the said application for two weeks, between June 5 and June 18. Chess.com discovered the breach on June 19, 2025, and launched an investigation to determine its scope and impact. "On June 19, 2025, Chess.com became aware of potential unauthorized access to data stor
Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Lens Live scans products for real-time shopping suggestions. Amazon's AI assistant can answer questions, offer details. The feature is currently available to some US users on iOS. Have you ever seen an item in a brick-and-mortar store and figured you could get it for a better price on Amazon, but couldn't string together the right keywords to find it online? Amazon Lens was designed to
SOPA Images/Contributor/LightRocket via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Perplexity is offering students one free month of Perplexity Pro. The company is positioning Comet as "study buddy, and tutor." AI is rapidly becoming a fixture in the classroom. Like it or not, artificial intelligence is becoming a fixture in the classroom. This is being pushed along at a brisk pace by tech companies eager to get their products into the hands
Jason Hiner/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Samsung's Fold 7 has reached the point that it's now the same size as flagship phones when closed. The software upgrades in One UI 8 and Android 16 finally take advantage of the productivity potential of foldables. There are multiples modes in the Fold 7 that make it even better than just a phone that transforms into a tablet. It didn't take long for Samsung's Z Fold 7 to change my mind about fold
Bitrig dynamically generates and runs Swift apps on your phone. Normally this would require compiling and signing with Xcode, and you can’t do that on an iPhone. To make it possible to instantly run your app, we built a Swift interpreter. But it’s an unusual interpreter, since it interprets from Swift… to Swift. One of the top questions we’ve gotten is how it’s implemented, so we wanted to share how it works. To make this more accessible and interesting, we simplified some of the more esoteric
Last week, I was talking to a PM who'd in the recent months shipped their AI agent. The metrics looked great: 89% accuracy, sub-second respond times, positive user feedback in surveys. But users were abandoning the agent after their first real problem, like a user with both a billing dispute and a locked account. "Our agent could handle routine requests perfectly, but when faced with complex issues, users would try once, get frustrated, and immediately ask for a human." This pattern is observe
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Fresh off the internal collapse of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s senior leadership, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday. There, Kennedy deflected and denied any harmful impacts from the CDC’s implosion, while repeatedly spouting misinformation about vaccines and other health issues. The hearing comes after much of the CDC’s leadership resigned or were fired in last week. Former CDC director Susan Monarez was f
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Meta is adding a new feature to let you add a bunch of extra text to Threads posts — no screenshots of text blocks required. Starting today, Meta is rolling out a tool that lets you attach up to 10,000 characters of text to Threads posts, giving you a way to build upon the 500-characte
GE Aerospace is taking a sizable stake in electric aviation company Beta Technologies, with the pair teaming up to build a hybrid-electric turbogenerator for next-gen aircraft. GE will also invest $300 million, pending regulatory approval, under a strategic deal announced Thursday. The new partnership comes as hybrid solutions gain momentum in the advanced air mobility (AAM) space, a catch-all term to describe the next generation of aviation concepts like eVTOL, hydrogen, and so on. Aircraft ma