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Google Flights can help you book a trip when you don’t know where to go

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. It seems like Google is looking for a way to put AI into everything these days, and now its efforts have reached its airfare-booking service, Flights. On Thursday, Google announced that it’s testing a new AI-powered Flight Deals tool, which could come in handy if you’re planning a trip on a budget but aren’t quite sure where you want to go yet. Ins

Apple’s AirPods Max are $70 off in every color

Rumors and official teases about Google’s upcoming Pixel 10 phones are flowing like Niagara Falls, which to budget-minded folks means now is a good time to save on the soon-to-be-last-gen model. You can get a really good deal on the(in its Obsidian color) for $599 at Best Buy , which is a savings of $400 over its usual $999 cost. If you prefer the Pixel 9 (or if you’re not in time to get the deal on the Pro), you can find Google’s 2024 flagship smartphone with 128GB for the same $599, which is $

Topics: 599 best buy deal good

Apple Watch getting redesigned blood oxygen feature following legal dispute

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, US, on Monday, June 9, 2025. Apple on Thursday announced a redesigned blood oxygen feature for some Apple Watch users, following a years-long intellectual property dispute over the capability. Apple said the redesigned feature is coming to some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users on Thursday. The update was possible b

Finding the best deals on Google Flights is about to get a little easier

Google TL;DR A new search tool called “Flight Deals” is coming to Google Flights. By describing when, where, and how you want to travel, the tool will find the best bargains available that meet your criteria. The feature will launch in beta over the next week in the US, Canada, and India. Finding the best deals for flights can take a lot of time. You have to figure out where you want to go, the best dates to fly, how you want to fly, and so on. Google wants to streamline this process with it

Google Messages can now blur nude images on Android

Google is rolling out a new safety feature for the Messages app on Android. As spotted by 9to5Google , the company is making Sensitive Content Warnings more broadly available after beta testing the option since April . Google announced it last October. The feature can detect and blur images that include nudity. However, it’ll only work if you’re signed into a Google Account in the Messages app. When Messages detects and blurs such an image, you will be able to choose between several actions. Y

Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

Reading research papers and articles about chain-of-thought reasoning makes me frustrated. There are many interesting questions to ask about chain-of-thought: how accurately it reflects the actual process going on, why training it “from scratch” often produces chains that switch fluidly between multiple languages, and so on. However, people keep asking the least interesting question possible: whether chain-of-thought reasoning is “really” reasoning. Apple took up this question in their Illusio

How We’ll Know for Sure If Microplastics Are Destroying Our Health

Researchers have found plastic in almost every corner of the human body, from our brains and poop to blood and testicles (at least it’s not making our stomachs crunch yet). Is this plastic contamination bad for us? While the answer to that question might seem like a no-brainer—and certainly no one is crazy enough to theorize that microplastics in breast milk are a good thing—there haven’t been any human trials to confirm that microplastics are detrimental to human health. Some research has simp

A Common Virus Causes Cancer, but Most Americans Are Clueless About It

The human papillomavirus (HPV) is a major source of cancer that’s now almost entirely preventable through vaccination. But sobering research out today shows that Americans are largely in the dark about HPV and its many health risks, much less the HPV vaccine. Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina conducted the study, which examined nationally representative survey data. A third of Americans don’t know that the virus exists, they found, while most who do know are still unaware

Marvel’s Best Movie of the Year is Coming to Streaming Soon

Whether you call them Thunderbolts or New Avengers, you can also call it home for dinner because one of the best, if not the best, Marvel movies of the year is headed to Disney+ later this month. Earlier today, Marvel announced Thunderbolts will make its way to the streaming platform on August 27. As noted in Marvel’s press release hyping its streaming debut, its pilgrimage to the premiere destination for all things MCU comes after the film built up a surprising amount of momentum in its theatr

The Apple Watch Is Finally Getting Blood Oxygen Sensing Back

If you have an Apple Watch Series 9, 10, or Ultra Watch 2 that you bought in the US in the past year, you'll finally get the blood oxygen sensing feature back via a software update later today, according to Apple. To make sure you get the feature, update your paired iPhone to iOS 18.6.1 and the Apple Watch to watchOS 11.6.1. Sensor data will be calculated in the app, and you will be able to see your blood oxygen in the Respiratory section of the Health app. If you bought your watch before 2024

Is streaming about to have a Wordle moment?

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. It’s game time for streaming services: a growing number of streamers are betting on casual games as a way to keep viewers hooked when they’ve run out of things to watch. Toronto-based Zone-ify added free casual games to its ad-supported streaming service in June. Last month, close to 70 casual games arrived on Happykids and Fawesome, two ad-supported streaming services run by streaming startup Future Today.

Computing’s Top 30: Zhihao “Zephyr” Yao

On a typical mobile device today, financial and medical apps nestled up next to everything from karaoke playlists to time-killing games like Fruit Ninja. How to secure data that matters in this diverse digital buffet is a challenge for many researchers. For Zhihao “Zephyr” Yao, it’s a challenge that fuels his life’s work and also led to an award-winning project. That project—which earned ACM MobiSys 2023’s Best Artifact Award—demonstrated that making systems less complex can actually enhance m

The AI Industry Just Got Some Horrible News

For years now, big tech and its financial backers have been blowing past the warning signs that human-level AI — the theoretical technology with hundreds of billions of dollars riding on it — could turn out to be a pipe-dream, at best. Now, however, Wall Street appears to be yanking its money out of one of the largest datacenter providers in the game, possibly an early indicator that reality could be finally catching up to the massively hype-dependent AI industry. On Tuesday, datacenter and te

The ‘Wednesday Season 2 Part 2’ Trailer Welcomes Back a Familiar Face

Now that we’re just over a week out from the first half of the season 2 release of Netflix’s The Addams Family remake, Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega, the streamer has finally released a new trailer for its second half. The trailer starts nightmarishly, at least for Wednesday, with her waking up in a hospital bed. Although she’s not greeted by Momma Monster herself, Lady Gaga, who has yet to make an appearance on the show despite all the hype surrounding her mysterious involvement, Wednesday

Blood Oxygen Tracking Returns to U.S. Apple Watches Today After 5-Year Patent Dispute

Good news: Apple Watches sold in the U.S. after January 2024 lost their built-in blood oxygen tracking because of a patent dispute with medical company Masimo, but the feature will return via a software update coming out today. In a Newsroom post, Apple says it’s introducing a “redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2.” The reworked blood oxygen feature will be pushed out on iPhone and Apple Watch via an iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1 soft

Apple Watch gets reformulated, non-patent-infringing blood oxygen monitoring

In early 2024, Apple removed a blood oxygen monitoring feature from its then-current Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches, following a ruling that the feature violated light-based pulse oximetry patents from a California-based company called Masimo. Removing the feature allowed Apple to circumvent an import ban and continue selling the Series 9 and Ultra 2 (and, later, the Series 10) in the US. Today, Apple announced that it's restoring a version of the blood oxygen monitoring feature to af

Cohere hires long-time Meta research head Joelle Pineau as its chief AI officer

Investors once saw Canadian AI startup Cohere as a promising contender to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build frontier AI models, with its backers pouring roughly $1 billion on their bet on CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a seminal paper on LLMs when he was a 20-year-old Google intern. But Cohere’s AI models have fallen behind the state-of-the-art, and its business hasn’t scaled like its competitors. Now, the company is bringing in a veteran research leader to revamp its AI ef

Google pushes AI into flight deals as antitrust scrutiny, competition heat up

Google on Thursday announced a new AI-powered search tool to help travelers find flight deals — even as regulators continue to question whether the search giant’s dominance in travel discovery stifles competition. Called Flight Deals, the new tool is available within Google Flights and is designed to help “flexible travelers” find cheaper fares. Users can type natural language queries into a search bar — describing how and when they want to travel — and the AI surfaces matching options. These

Apple launching ‘redesigned Blood Oxygen feature’ on Apple Watch in the U.S. today

Apple has announced that it will release a software update for iPhone and Apple Watch later today with a “redesigned Blood Oxygen feature” for Apple Watch users in the United States. This comes over 18 months after Apple began selling the Apple Watch without the Blood Oxygen feature in America due to a patent dispute. The new feature will be made available as part of iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1 updates. In a statement to 9to5Mac today, an Apple spokesperson said: “Apple will introduce a red

Apple's 'redesigned' blood oxygen monitoring feature hits Apple Watches in the US today

More than a year after an import ban forced the company to remove blood oxygen monitoring from some US Apple Watch models, Apple says it will introduce a redesigned version of the feature later today. In a post on its newsroom website, the company says the feature will roll out to Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Watch Ultra 2 users through a joint Apple Watch and iPhone update. Once Apple begins rolling out the software, you'll need to update your devices to iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1 to

How the Premier League uses AI to boost fan experiences and score new business goals

Alex Livesey/Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways The Premier League is working with Adobe to exploit generative AI. Explorations show customers want to create, not just consume content. Long-term hyper-personalization goals should be approached carefully. The English Premier League football season starts this weekend. With 1.8 billion people watching the competition in 900 million homes across 189 countries (streaming on Peacock), it would seem there's limited scope for emerging technology t

NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

Ai2 has been awarded $75 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and $77 million from NVIDIA as part of a jointly funded project with the NSF and NVIDIA to advance our research and develop truly open AI models and solutions that will accelerate scientific discovery. The partnership supports the NSF Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure project, Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI). Led by Principal Investigator Dr. Noah A. Smith, Senior Director of NLP Rese

How to Find Out If Microplastics Are Actually Destroying Our Health

Researchers have found plastic in almost every corner of the human body, from our brains and poop to blood and testicles (at least it’s not making our stomachs crunch yet). Is this plastic contamination bad for us? While the answer to that question might seem like a no-brainer—and certainly no one is crazy enough to theorize that microplastics in breast milk are a good thing—there haven’t been any human trials to confirm that microplastics are detrimental to human health. Some research has simp

I’m Watching Every Conjuring Movie Before 'The Conjuring: Last Rites.' Here’s Where to Stream Them All

When The Conjuring debuted in 2013, directed by James Wan, the movie felt like a throwback to atmospheric 1970s horror flicks such as The Changeling or The Manitou. From its simple opening title card -- yellow text on a black background -- to its relatively little gore and slow build of suspense, The Conjuring was a breath of fresh air. It arrived at a time when the horror genre was rampant with gruesome movies like Saw (which was also directed by Wan) and Hostel. The Conjuring kick-started not

HTC is getting in on AI glasses, too

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. With Meta, Google, Samsung, and maybe even Apple working on AI-powered glasses, smart spectacles are quickly becoming the hottest gadget in tech. Now, even HTC is jumping in on the trend with a new pair of Vive Eagle smart glasses that come with built-in speaker

Apple’s blood oxygen monitoring returns to its latest Apple Watches

Apple announced on Thursday it’s introducing a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Watch Series 8, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra. With this move, Apple is bringing back blood oxygen monitoring by tweaking the feature to get around the International Trade Commission’s (ITC) import ban. Blood oxygen data will be measured and calculated on the user’s paired iPhone, and results can be viewed in the Respiratory section of the Health app. This means users won’t be able to view the data on the

The Download: affordable EV trucks, and Russia’s latest internet block

On Monday, Ford announced plans for an affordable electric truck with a 2027 delivery date and an expected price tag of about $30,000, thanks in part to a new manufacturing process that it says will help cut costs. This could be the shot in the arm that the slowing US EV market needs. If anything can get Americans excited, it’s a truck, especially an affordable one. However, there are some significant hurdles in the way. EV sales are slowing, and Ford in particular has struggled recently. Th

Topics: ev evs ford read slowing

The Narwal Flow is the closest I’ve seen a robot vacuum get to being perfect

Narwal Flow If you're considering a robot vacuum purchase purely based on its ability to leave floors of all types as clean as possible, the Narwal Flow is the best bot you can get. AI-powered navigation, EdgeReach Technology, and anti-tangle brushes clean carpets and hard floors all the way to the edges and into the corners with zero fuss. The multi-function base station, with self-cleaning and drying functions, also makes it a breeze to use. Today, I looked at my floor and noticed it looked e

Data brokers just gave us another reason to hate them

If you were holding a competition for the scummiest business model, then data brokers would be very high up the list. These companies make money by buying personal data from app and website owners and selling it to companies who want to spam us. A US Senator has now drawn attention to the latest sketchy practice by these companies: making it harder for us to opt out by hiding that option from search results … The dark world of data brokers Data brokers are companies that buy personal data fro

HTC takes on Meta with the Vive Eagle smart glasses

HTC is once again attacking the wearable space with a pair of new smart glasses, the company announced. The Vive Eagle is a rival to Meta's Ray-Ban glasses with a fashion-foward lightweight design, open ear audio, voice-activated AI and an ultra-wide AI-powered camera. They look promising, if a bit expensive, but will only be available in Taiwan to start with. The Taiwanese firm clearly noticed that Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses have been a surprise hit. It's easy to see why — in our Engadget re

Topics: eagle htc meta ray vive