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Amazon is selling the Bluetti Elite 200 V2 portable power station for $899, a 25% discount off its usual $1,199 price, as part of Prime Big Deal Days. CNET's testing gave the unit a 9.9/10 score and a Lab Award for Most Efficient Large Unit, citing 81% round-trip efficiency and nearly 96% of its advertised 1,987.98Wh capacity.
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in its Claude 5.5 lineup after Opus 5.5. The company says it runs over 30% faster and costs up to 30% less per task than Sonnet 5, while keeping the same per-token pricing, and jumps from 10.3% to 70.6% on the Terminal-Bench 4.0 agentic coding evaluation. A third model, Claude Haiku 5.5, is planned for release in the coming weeks.
A team led by Jim Wild of Lancaster University, publishing in Space Weather, re-examined an 1871 Nature report describing a magnetic disturbance that delayed trains in Exeter, England, previously dated to 1841. The researchers concluded that date was likely a transcription error, and the actual rail disruption occurred years later, meaning the Carrington Event of 1859 need not be displaced as the earliest documented case of severe geomagnetic interference with British rail signaling.
On its 14th test flight, SpaceX's Starship reached Earth orbit for the first time, despite one of its more than three dozen engines shutting down early. The uncrewed vehicle deployed 26 advanced Starlink satellites before mission controllers cut the planned 10-hour flight to three hours, and the craft splashed down in the Pacific north of Hawaii, tipping over and catching fire.
A new independent website called 'Definitely Not Windows / Windows 11½' presents a fake operating-system interface satirizing modern Microsoft products, including subscription prompts, ads, AI features, forced updates and storage warnings. The site explicitly states it is unaffiliated with Microsoft and includes a Clippy-themed visitor counter that assigns users an anonymous, persistent visitor number.
New analysis of over 500 letters attributed to Elizabeth I suggests that her male secretaries, including Francis Walsingham's staff, drafted and amplified expressions of anger and emotion in her correspondence to figures like Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI. Researcher Clodagh Murphy found that many surviving letters, including a famous 1586 rebuke to Robert Dudley, exist only in scribal handwriting rather than the queen's own, raising questions about authorship of the queen's most 'personal' tirades.
Formula 1 held its Baku street race a day earlier than usual to avoid clashing with Azerbaijan's war commemoration events. Championship leader Kimi Antonelli hit the wall in the first qualifying session after misjudging his front grip at turn 1, damaging his car enough to end his session early and forcing him to start the race from 16th.
A New Yorker piece discusses photographer Katherine Szabo's book 'American Teen,' a collection of images depicting high schoolers in the late 1970s, and notes that filmmaker Sofia Coppola has expressed admiration for the work. The essay describes the photos' recurring motifs of loose, layered clothing and a casual androgyny shared by boys and girls alike during that era.
Google's September software update extends its newer, more dimensional 3D emoji design to the Pixel Watch 2, 3, and 4, matching the look already shipped on the Pixel Watch 5 and on phones running Android 17. The redesign adds shading and depth to emoji faces and objects, replacing the flatter previous style, according to 9to5Google.
Vespper, a Y Combinator F24 startup, has launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server aimed at letting AI agents reliably read and edit .docx files. The company says existing approaches—raw OOXML SDKs, opinionated MCP tools, or lossy Markdown/HTML round-tripping—break down on complex real-world Word documents used in legal, finance, and healthcare workflows.
AMD announced an all-stock deal to acquire World Labs, the AI research startup co-founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, valuing the company at roughly $8.2 billion. World Labs, founded in 2024 and previously valued at $1 billion, released its Marble tool this year for generating interactive 3D worlds from text prompts. The deal is expected to close by year's end, with Li joining AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist under CEO Lisa Su.
SpaceX launched its Starship rocket on a mission that reached orbit for the first time, successfully deploying an advanced batch of Starlink satellites. During ascent, one of the vehicle's engines shut down earlier than planned, and SpaceX cut the flight short as a precaution.