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Amazon is running a limited-time lightning deal on the Energizer Portable Bluetooth Speaker, dropping its price from $129.99 to $99.99, a 23% discount. The offer is time-limited and expected to expire within hours. The speaker supports Bluetooth, FM radio, AUX, USB, and microSD playback, along with features like TWS pairing, RGB lighting, and an 1800mAh backup battery on some models.
Amazon has scheduled its fall Prime Big Deal Days sale for Tuesday and Wednesday, October 6 and 7, running for 48 hours starting at 3:01 am Eastern. New waves of deals will be released three times daily, supplemented by sporadic Lightning Deals throughout the event. WIRED's Reviews team has published a guide explaining sale timing, membership requirements, and how to spot genuine discounts amid the promotional noise.
Several automakers are developing extended-range electric vehicles that run primarily on electric motors but carry a small gasoline engine solely to recharge the battery, not to drive the wheels. Stellantis will bring this setup to the Jeep Grand Wagoneer and Ram 1500 REV, promising up to 690 miles of range, while Hyundai, Genesis and Ford plan similar models for the Santa Fe, an unnamed Genesis SUV and a revived F-150 Lightning.
Amazon is running a limited-time Lightning deal on the Anker Prime Power Bank, cutting its price from $329.99 to $259.99, a $70 discount. The 26,250mAh, 300W power bank can charge multiple devices simultaneously, including laptops, tablets and phones, and includes a smart display showing detailed charging status. It carries a 4.6-star rating and is noted as airline-friendly for travel use.
Nvidia's RTX 5090, originally launched at $1,999, is now selling for around $5,090 even in non-special-edition versions like the Asus TUF Gaming OC. Prices have jumped 20% in the past month and 41% over six months, putting the card 145% above its original MSRP. Even pricier variants exist, including the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 Edition 20 listed at $5,740.
During a routine ground taxi test to diagnose an electrical fault in English Electric Lightning XM135, pilot Taffy Holden unintentionally pushed the throttle past the afterburner gate. Unfamiliar with disengaging the afterburner, Holden found the aircraft accelerating rapidly, narrowly avoiding a fuel tanker crossing the runway before becoming airborne despite having no flight training clearance, helmet, or radio for the exercise.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research found that water droplets sliding down smooth surfaces such as glass, leaves, and Teflon-coated copper accumulate an electric charge. When these charged droplets reached copper plates coated with Teflon, they burrowed through the coating and pitted the metal beneath, an effect not seen when water simply dripped straight onto the plates without first sliding across another surface. The findings, published in Nature, also help explain why water moves more slowly than expected across seemingly frictionless smooth surfaces.
Slate Auto has introduced a compact two-door electric truck that strips away typical modern features, offering manual crank windows as standard and a small 65-kWh battery yielding roughly 205 miles of range. The base model costs under $25,000, far less than the average $50,000 new vehicle price in the US, though buyers can pay extra for upgrades like power windows, vinyl wraps, and a Bluetooth stereo.
The World Humanoid Robot Games concluded in Beijing on August 26, drawing over 600 teams and more than 2,000 robots from China and 15 other countries. Highlights included the Tiangong Ultra robot completing a 100-meter dash in 8.86 seconds and Honor's Lightning robot finishing in 9.47 seconds, alongside newer challenges testing fine manipulation skills like using tweezers.
Perplexity and Nvidia have released Portable Computer, a locally-run version of Perplexity's Computer AI platform that performs agentic workloads directly on a user's PC or workstation instead of relying on cloud servers. The app mirrors the original Computer interface, supports Qwen 3.8 and PPLX local models (both scaling to 27 billion parameters), and will soon add Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model, while asking users for permission before sending any data to cloud-based frontier models for harder tasks.
Perplexity has released Portable Computer, an agentic AI tool that runs entirely on local hardware instead of the cloud, built in partnership with NVIDIA. It relies on compact models like Qwen 3.8 and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning to handle complex tasks on-device, and only reaches out to cloud-based models when needed, with user permission. The feature is currently available to Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers running NVIDIA's DGX Spark hardware, with RTX GPU support planned.
Microsoft has shipped the first official release of the Agent Lightning Skill, a tool that helps coding agents systematically improve other AI agents. Users supply an editable agent and a benchmark, and the skill guides iterative changes to prompts, tools, workflows, models, and reasoning settings. It installs directly into Claude Code, Codex, or GitHub Copilot via a simple CLI command.