It's day one of Walmart's early Black Friday sale, with big discounts on AirPods, TVs, laptops, and more. Don't miss your chance to save over $1,300 on a big-screen Samsung TV. [...]

From TVs to earbuds, Best Buy's holiday savings kicked off early in 2025. These are my favorite deals available now, like four AirTags for only $80. [...]

Hypersonic flight could one day make long-haul travel as quick as a short movie. Researchers are testing how turbulence behaves at extreme speeds, a critical hurdle for designing these aircraft. Their laser-based krypton experiments suggest turbulence at Mach 6 behaves more like slower airflow than expected. The results could simplify [...]

A massive, well-preserved impact crater has been uncovered in Guangdong, revealing the signature of a powerful meteorite strike during the Holocene. Measuring 900 meters across, it dwarfs other known craters from the same era. Shock-damaged quartz confirms the intense forces involved. Its survival in a high-erosion environment makes it a [...]

Multifunctional fluidic units generate coordinated motion and sensing in soft robots by combining actuation, switching, and oscillation in one module, reducing reliance on electronic control. [...]

A water-based plasma method creates stable multimetal nanoparticles with a protective shell that improves light driven carbon dioxide conversion, offering a practical path to efficient carbon transformation. [...]

Researchers have created a prediction method that comes startlingly close to real-world results. It works by aiming for strong alignment with actual values rather than simply reducing mistakes. Tests on medical and health data showed it often outperforms classic approaches. The discovery could reshape how scientists make reliable forecasts. [...]

The new Garmin Venu X1, with its flat design and large screen, feels like a feature-rich Fenix 8 - and it has exceeded my expectations. [...]

Transferring your phone number can be a hassle, especially when switching from iPhone to Android. Here's how my experience has been with the carrier. [...]

ChatGPT maker OpenAI has built an experimental large language model that is far easier to understand than typical models. That’s a big deal, because today’s LLMs are black boxes: Nobody fully understands how they do what they do. Building a model that is more transparent sheds light on how LLMs work [...]

A layered form of graphene shows a rare semimetal state with balanced electrons and holes that becomes a topological insulator when exposed to moderate magnetic fields. [...]

Google DeepMind has built a new video-game-playing agent called SIMA 2 that can navigate and solve problems in a wide range of 3D virtual worlds. The company claims it’s a big step toward more general-purpose agents and better real-world robots.    Google DeepMind first demoed SIMA (which stands for “scalable instructable multiworld [...]

A newly detected super-Earth just 20 light-years away is giving scientists one of the most promising chances yet to search for life beyond our solar system. The discovery of the exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star was made possible by advanced spectrographs designed at Penn State and [...]

Researchers engineered “gyromorphs,” a new type of metamaterial that combines liquid-like randomness with large-scale structural patterns to block light from every direction. This innovation solves longstanding limitations in quasicrystal-based designs and could accelerate advances in photonic computing. [...]

Light-based 3D printing now works with switchable redox polymer inks, enabling complex structures that change color electrochemically for advanced optoelectronic devices. [...]

For years, many chief information officers (CIOs) looked at VMware-to-cloud migrations with a wary pragmatism. Manually mapping dependencies and rewriting legacy apps mid-flight was not an enticing, low-lift proposition for enterprise IT teams. But the calculus for such decisions has changed dramatically in a short period of time. Following recent VMware [...]

Researchers showed that large language models use a small, specialized subset of parameters to perform Theory-of-Mind reasoning, despite activating their full network for every task. This sparse internal circuitry depends heavily on positional encoding, especially rotary positional encoding, which shapes how the model tracks beliefs and perspectives. [...]

What can we learn about human intelligence by studying how machines “think?” Can we better understand ourselves if we better understand the artificial intelligence systems that are becoming a more significant part of our everyday lives?These questions may be deeply philosophical, but for Phillip Isola, finding the answers is as [...]

AI and quantum technologies are dramatically reconfiguring how cybersecurity functions, redefining the speed and scale with which digital defenders and their adversaries can operate. The weaponization of AI tools for cyberattacks is already proving a worthy opponent to current defenses. From reconnaissance to ransomware, cybercriminals can automate attacks faster than ever [...]

A new brain decoding method called mind captioning can generate accurate text descriptions of what a person is seeing or recalling—without relying on the brain's language system. Instead, it uses semantic features from vision-related brain activity and deep learning models to translate nonverbal thoughts into structured sentences. [...]

With global power demand from data centers expected to more than double by 2030, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) in September launched an effort that brings together MIT researchers and industry experts to explore innovative solutions for powering the data-driven future. At its annual research conference, MITEI announced the Data Center [...]

Researchers have shown that adaptive music systems that adjust tempo and rhythm to match a user’s movement can make exercise significantly more enjoyable and motivating. These personalized interactive music systems use real-time data from wearables to keep music aligned with walking, cycling, or weightlifting intensity, helping users stay in rhythm [...]

Adoption of new tools and technologies occurs when users largely perceive them as reliable, accessible, and an improvement over the available methods and workflows for the cost. Five PhD students from the inaugural class of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Summer Program are utilizing state-of-the-art resources, alleviating AI pain points, [...]

Scientists have created an advanced visual neuroprosthesis that communicates bidirectionally with the brain, marking one of the biggest steps yet toward restoring functional vision. Unlike earlier devices, this closed-loop implant adapts in real time to neural activity, allowing the system and the brain to “learn” from each other. [...]

Coding with large language models (LLMs) holds huge promise, but it also exposes some long-standing flaws in software: code that’s messy, hard to change safely, and often opaque about what’s really happening under the hood. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are charting a more “modular” [...]

USC researchers built artificial neurons that replicate real brain processes using ion-based diffusive memristors. These devices emulate how neurons use chemicals to transmit and process signals, offering massive energy and size advantages. The technology may enable brain-like, hardware-based learning systems. It could transform AI into something closer to natural intelligence. [...]

More screen time among children and teens is linked to higher risks of heart and metabolic problems, particularly when combined with insufficient sleep. Danish researchers discovered a measurable rise in cardiometabolic risk scores and a metabolic “fingerprint” in frequent screen users. Experts say better sleep and balanced daily routines can [...]

Researchers at Tsinghua University developed the Optical Feature Extraction Engine (OFE2), an optical engine that processes data at 12.5 GHz using light rather than electricity. Its integrated diffraction and data preparation modules enable unprecedented speed and efficiency for AI tasks. Demonstrations in imaging and trading showed improved accuracy, lower latency, [...]