Apple’s earbuds now have USB-C and improved durability, but new software features mean last-gen owners won’t miss out.

The leaves are changing and so are the prices. We’ve rounded up the best deals on all our favorite gadgets.

A stone chest with 15 anthropomorphic sculptures and numerous beads, shells, and corals have been discovered in the heart of the ancient Aztec capital.

Google Pixel smartphones have been some of the best Android smartphones you can buy, but their presence at the top is surprising if you take a deeper look at the spec sheet. The Pixels barely have top-of-the-line specifications, trailing behind most market leaders. However, thanks to some nifty software magic, Google can extract the most possible value out of hardware. We can see this in action with the Google Camera app on Pixel smartphones, which enables some cool photography features. Here are all the features that you get on the Google Camera app.

What is Google Camera?

The ground-effect (GE) refers to the almost mystical property where the interaction of the airflow around an aircraft’s wing and the ground massively increases efficiency due to the reduction of lift-dependent drag, perhaps best demonstrated by the Soviet Lun-class “ekranoplans” of the 1980s and 90s. Interestingly, this principle also applies to rotary aircraft, which led the [rctestflight] YouTube channel to wonder what would happen if a quadcopter were to be adapted for GE.

As noted on the Wikipedia entry for Ground-effect vehicle (GEV), it’s essential to have some kind of forward motion. With a rotorcraft like a helicopter or quadcopter this motion is already provided by the spinning propeller, which makes it noticeably easier to get the aircraft into the ground-effect. operating mode. Following the notion that the GE becomes noticeable at an altitude that’s dependent on the length of the aircraft’s wings, this got translated into putting the largest propellers available on the custom inverted-prop (to put them lower to the ground) quadcopter, to see what effect this would have on the quadcopter’s performance. As demonstrated by the recorded current drawn (each time with a fully charged battery), bigger is indeed better, and the GE effect is indeed very noticeable for a quadcopter.

Getting a usable GEV out of the basic inverted-prop quadcopter required some more lateral thinking, however, as it was not very easy to control this low to the ground. Here following design cues from skirtless hovercraft designs helped a lot, essentially drawing on the Coandă effect. Although this improved performance, at this point the quadcopter had been fitted with a fifth propeller for propulsion and was skidding about more like a skirtless hovercraft and less of a quadcopter.

Although great for scaring the living daylights out of unsuspecting water-based wildlife, what this unfortunately demonstrates is that GEVs are still hard, no matter which form they take. At the very least it does make for an excellent introduction into various aspects of aerodynamics.

Samsung’s One UI has come a long way over the years and has quickly become one of the most popular Android skins. The upcoming One UI 6 update based on Android 14 will continue to refine Samsung’s formula, though it’s expected to focus more on polish and refinement than introducing major new features. Here’s everything we know about the One UI 6 release date, features, and compatibility.

One UI 6: At a glance

Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:
A look at chip equipment makers, like Applied Materials, pushing the boundaries of sculpting materials at the atomic level, in a quest to make chips faster  —  Few people outside of semiconductor manufacturing have ever heard of Applied Materials and its competitors—but what they do is more essential …

The 42 known species of the parasitic plant Rafflesia, known as the corpse flower, are endangered due to the destruction of forest habitats.

Today marks the 15th anniversary of Android 1.0, as it was announced back on September 23, 2008. We didn’t even have features like multi-touch or widgets back then, let alone anything like the amount of features we’ve got in Android 14.

What’s the best version of Android, though? That’s what we’re asking you, so give us your answer in the poll below.

Samsung, Motorola, and other phone makers have exceeded the limits that caused France to ban the iPhone 12. In fact, all phones emit radiation—should you be worried? Here’s everything you need to know.

Plus: MGM hackers hit more than just casinos, Microsoft researchers accidentally leak terabytes of data, and China goes on the PR offensive over cyberespionage.

I promise digital zoom isn’t as icky as it used to be. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

If you want to hear a love story, ask any photographer about their favorite lens.

They’ll probably get a little glimmer in their eye as they tell you about the fast 35mm they carry everywhere or the long portrait lens with the bokeh that hits just right. Camera bodies come and go, but your favorite lens is a lifelong relationship.

Phone camera lenses are a different story. They’re built like a regular camera lens — only, you know, tiny — and they’re with us literally everywhere we go. But I don’t know anyone who would wax poetic about the 24mm equivalent wide angle on their iPhone or the 5x telephoto lens on their Pixel. Our relationships with them are much more transactional, and the results have as much to do with the image processing…

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Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge

“The new FineWoven iPhone cases are very bad,” according to my colleague Allison Johnson, so you probably shouldn’t buy one. Still, I’ve been curious to learn more about them, and iFixit’s new teardown just gave me even more information than I could have thought to ask for: it put one of the new cases under a microscope, tested how it stood up to things like hot sauce and coffee, and tore the thing apart — and, best of all, photographed every step of the way.

There are some incredible zoomed-in photos of the fabric, for example; that black thing in a post from iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens is a human hair included for scale! Another photo shows how the fibers are affected when cut by a knife — it’s not pretty.

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Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.

Wired:
A look at the UK NHS’ plans for a federated data platform and the doctors, privacy campaigners, and others concerned that Palantir could win the £480M contract  —  US-based Palantir is favored to win a $595 million NHS contract, but activists and doctors worry about its controversial ties …

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 looks to be a minor update of the prior model, with faster performance and new connectivity options. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and Surface Laptop Go 3 during its recent hardware event in New York City, introducing the two laptops alongside a flurry of AI-powered features for Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and Bing. The high-end Surface Laptop Studio 2 starts at $1,099, while the Surface Laptop Go 3 starts at $799; both are slated to launch on October 3rd at 12AM ET.

Although the forthcoming laptops look similar in design to their predecessors, the new Surface devices arrive with upgraded processors, better battery life, and other minor spec bumps. We’ve yet to fully test either laptop, but if you want to preorder them ahead of their official release, you can already do so via various retailers. Here’s what you should…

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Do a titanium shell and a dedicated Action Button make the iPhone 15 Pro worth the upgrade? We break down the differences between the latest Apple handsets.

Aside from idle curiosity, very few of us need to see inside chips and components to diagnose a circuit. But reverse engineering is another story; being able to see what lies beneath the inscrutable epoxy blobs that protect the silicon within is a vital capability, one that might justify the expense involved in procuring an X-ray imager.  But what’s to be done when such an exotic and expensive — not to mention potentially deadly — machine breaks down? Obviously, you fix it yourself!

To be fair, [Shahriar]’s Faxitron MX-20 digital X-ray microscope was only a little wonky. It still generally worked, but just took a while to snap into the kind of sharp focus that he needs to really delve into the guts of a chip. This one problem was more than enough to justify tearing into the machine, but not without first reviewing the essentials of X-ray production — a subject that we’ve given a detailed look, too — to better understand the potential hazards of a DIY repair.

With that out of the way and with the machine completely powered down, [Shahriar] got down to the repair. The engineering of the instrument is pretty impressive, as it should be for something dealing with high voltage, heavy thermal loads, and ionizing radiation. The power supply board was an obvious place to start, since electrostatically focusing an X-ray beam depends on controlling the high voltage on the cathode cup. After confirming the high-voltage module was still working, [Shahriar] homed in on a potential culprit — a DIP reed relay.

Replacing that did the trick, enough so that he was able to image the bad component with the X-ray imager. The images are amazing; you can clearly see the dual magnetic reed switches, and the focus is so sharp you can make out the wire of the coil. There are a couple of other X-ray treats, so make sure you check them out in the video below.

Becky Peterson / The Information:
Sources: SpaceX does not plan to test its direct to cell service with T-Mobile until 2024 as it works out technical kinks, after a planned rollout in late 2023  —  When SpaceX’s new Starship rocket exploded during a test flight in April, the company largely painted it as a success …

Solar power is an excellent way of generating electricity, whether that’s for an off-grid home or for the power grid. With no moving parts maintenance is relatively low, and the downsides of burning fuel are eliminated as well. But as much as it’s revolutionized power generation over the last few decades, there’s still some performance gains to be made when it comes to the solar cells themselves. A team at Stanford recently made strides in improving cell efficiency by bending the properties of sunlight itself.

In order to generate electricity directly from sunlight, a photon with a specific amount of energy needs to strike the semiconductor material. Any photons with higher energy will waste some of that energy as heat, and any with lower energy won’t generate electricity. Previous methods to solve this problem involve using something similar to a prism to separate the light out into colors (or energies) that correlate to specific types of cells calibrated specifically for those colors. This method does the opposite: it changes the light itself to an color that fits the semiconductor material. In short, a specialized material converts the energy from two lower-energy photons into a single higher-energy photon, which then strikes the solar panel to create energy.

By adding these color-changing materials as a layer to a photovoltaic solar panel, the panel can generate more energy with a given amount of light than a traditional panel. The major hurdle, as with any research, is whether or not this will be viable when produced at scale, and this shows promise in that regard as well. There are other applications for these materials beyond photovoltaics as well, and the researchers provide an excellent demonstration in 3D printing. By adding these color-change materials to resin, red lasers can be used instead of blue or ultraviolet lasers to cure resin in extremely specific locations, leading to stronger and more accurate prints.

Paresh Dave / Wired:
A look at the antitrust activists attending the DOJ’s Google antitrust trial every day and documenting their observations through social media and newsletters  —  A historic antitrust trial sees Google accused of unlawfully monopolizing search.  A handful of antitrust activists are trying to make sure the world sees all the action.

Javier Espinoza / Financial Times:
Doc: Booking.com accuses the EU of using “misleading” and “selective” facts to block its €1.63B Etraveli acquisition and plans to challenge any ban in court  —  US online travel site says Brussels has not shown €1.63bn acquisition of Swedish group will force rivals to close

[John Earnest]’s passion project Decker is creative software with a classic MacOS look (it’s not limited to running on Macs, however) for easily making and sharing interactive documents with sound, images, hypertext, scripted behavior, and more to allow making just about anything in a WYSIWYG manner.

Decker creates decks, which can be thought of as a stack of digital cards that link to one another. Each card in a deck can contain cozy 1-bit art, sound, interactive elements, scripted behavior, and a surprisingly large amount of other features.

Curious? Check out the Decker guided tour to get a peek at just what Decker is capable of. Then download it and prototype an idea, create a presentation, make a game, or just doodle some 1-bit art with nice tools.

A peek at what it’s like to create in Decker. Check out the online guided tour to learn more.

Decks are saved as standalone HTML documents which execute in any web browser, making them easy to share anywhere a web page can be hosted or embedded.

Decker’s GitHub repository hosts the code, and pre-built binaries for Mac and Windows are available from the author’s Itch.io page for those who would like to support with an (optional) donation.

Does Decker look a little familiar to you? Decker draws strong influence from HyperCard, an atypical piece of 90s software that was a sort of graphical interface and toolset, database, and programming language all rolled into one. We’ve seen HyperCard used to make a game engine, but Decker looks like a much more modern and friendly way to scratch the same itch.

Vauhini Vara / Wired:
A writer whose AI-assisted essay went viral reflects on testing GPT-3 early, Sudowrite’s novel generator, and whether AI is good for writers and literature  —  Despite my success with AI-generated stories, I’m not sure they are good for writers—or writing itself.

Ed Bott / ZDNet:
A look at Microsoft’s Surface business as device revenue plunged in FY 2023 after growing steadily since FY 2014, as a major correction hits the wider PC market  —  Do you like roller coaster rides?  Do you crave those steep drops where the car plunges more than a thousand feet at an insane angle …