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Micron says it will spend $10 billion over the next decade on a new research lab in Boise focused on advanced memory technologies, computing systems, and future chip manufacturing. Here are some details, as reported by Reuters: - Micron Research Labs will bring together customers, academia, government and the broader semiconductor ecosystem to pursue breakthroughs, the company said. - The latest investment builds on the more than $250 billion that Micron had separately committed to manufacturing and R&D across the United States. - The lab will be connected to Micron's research and technology footprint across the U.S., Europe, Japan, India, Singapore and Taiwan. - Growing adoption of AI workloads and infrastructure buildout have boosted demand for high-bandwidth memory, which rapidly feeds data to AI accelerators, making it a critical component of modern computing infrastructure. - The Trump administration has prioritized domestic chip manufacturing in a bid to reduce foreign dependence, boost the economic output and maintain its lead in the AI race. - Micron expects to break ground on the facility in 2027, which will be capable of hosting hundreds of researchers and facilitating international conferences and workshops.

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Linus Torvalds says AI "enormously helped" him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. "I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it," wrote Torvalds on the commit. "I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am..." Phoronix reports: The patch by Linus Torvalds is for the Xe kernel driver and the change is no longer hand out the flat Compute Command Streamer (CCS) storage as usable vRAM. On a Battlemage G21 graphics card, he was hitting a scenario where there was a mismatch where the usable memory ended and hit a case where the GDM display manager would end up being endlessly restarted. [...] Linus Torvalds views AI as a useful tool and in this case reaffirmed he found it "enormously helped" his effort in tracking down this Intel graphics driver bug. The Intel Xe driver fix is merged to Linux 7.3 Git and is also marked to back-porting to the stable kernel branches.

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The independent repair business claims the Boston-based companies restricted access to repair materials. Acme Revival is seeking damages and an injunction.

The Maine Trust for Local News is seeking tips for feature stories about notable properties, contractors and craftspeople in the building trades.

After years of refusing to adopt tap-to-pay technology in its stores, retail giant Walmart announced today that it is finally accepting payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay. The rollout begins August 24 at select Walmart and Sam's Club locations and is expected to reach all stores by year-end. It will then expand to fuel stations by mid-2027. TechCrunch reports: The news is a surprise, as Walmart has long refused to adopt the ubiquitous payment technology to instead promote its own in-house solutions, like Walmart Pay and Scan-and-Go. In years past, Walmart even teamed up with other big retailers in an attempt to take down Apple Pay entirely with an alternative mobile payment system of their own, called CurrentC. The effort failed and was shut down back in 2016. All the while, Walmart customers have begged the company to support modern tap-and-pay technology, like Apple Pay, which is now accepted at 85% of retailers across the U.S., including most larger stores. For Walmart, the decision reads as a defeat. As one of the world's largest retailers, it believed it could push customers to its own payment solutions despite the growing adoption of Apple Pay and others of its kind. Ultimately, it had to admit that it was disadvantaging its own customers in the process.

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Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a "Preferred Sources" button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. "The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust when they're searching for content or interacting with Google's AI to learn about a topic or read the latest news," reports TechCrunch. "As of May's launch, the company said that people across the web had already selected over 345,000 unique sources through this method." From the report: Becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to publishers' websites, Google said. In earlier studies, it found that people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when available. By offering publishers these additional tools, Google is trying to assuage the damage that the rapid growth of AI-powered search features has had on traffic-dependent businesses. Alongside the new button, Google said that readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in Google's app in their own words. To use this feature, readers will tap any three-dot menu in the feed and then tell Google what topics they'd like to see more or less of, using natural language commands. This helps Google refine the feed in real time.

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Pack up your pool cleaning supplies. Let one of these robot buddies maintain your water quality instead

The local club’s efforts to expand and bring more riders to town have raised some landowner concerns about public safety.

Microsoft is expanding Windows Task Manager to show per-process NPU and GPU neural-engine usage, giving users more visibility into which apps are consuming hardware for AI workloads. The Register reports: The Processes tab can show NPU use alongside CPU and GPU activity, while the Performance tab displays overall utilization. [...] Microsoft was keen to point out the metrics that can be monitored. "As AI workloads become more common on Windows devices, visibility into NPU and GPU neural engine utilization can help you make better-informed decisions," the company said. "With the latest Task Manager improvements, you can monitor AI processing activity alongside CPU, memory, storage, and networking data from a familiar interface."

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The Nyrius Phoenix Home True 4K60 can wirelessly transmit games, TV shows, movies, and more across your home (even through walls).

After two years of testing, these are the electric toothbrushes that impressed WIRED staffers the most.

As the appetite for “authenticity” grows online, content creators are buying up empty boxes for luxury goods—and resellers are cashing in for “crazy prices.”

From the best Dyson vacuum to the best wireless headphones and earbuds we’ve tested, you can get some great gadgets on sale already ahead of Labor Day.

Kennebunk-based Spurling Fitness recently added studios in Scarborough, South Portland and York, with a fifth site planned in Portland, continuing the expansion of workout options for people age 50 and up.

China's Chang'e 7 mission is set to launch for the moon's south pole, where it will attempt the first-ever landing directly at the pole and search the region's dark craters for water ice. "It's an amazing mission," says Norbert Schorghofer, a Hawaii-based senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. "There has never been a landed mission to find water [on the moon]." If successful, China "will be the leader in lunar science," Schorghofer adds. Scientific American reports: Chang'e 7, China's seventh moon mission, is scheduled to launch on a Long March 5 rocket from the coastal Wenchang Space Launch Site on the island of Hainan, with the launch window opening on the morning of August 24 local time (the evening of August 23 EDT). The mission includes an orbiter, as well as a lander, which totes a rover and a novel "hopping" robot. The spacecraft will take up to six days to reach lunar orbit, where it will then spend two months preparing for a November landing meant to be a near bull's-eye on the lunar south pole. The mission also includes equipment from several international partners, highlighting China's growing global influence -- both on and off Earth. The mission's lunar target is Shackleton Crater, a 21-kilometer-wide (13-mile-wide) pit with a rim that grazes the moon's south pole. No other spacecraft has ever landed so close. That proximity should allow Chang'e 7 to prospect for water ice trapped in smaller depressions near Shackleton that, because of the moon's tilt, never see sunlight and have temperatures just a few dozen degrees above absolute zero. "There are big reservoirs of ice water at the poles," says Simone Dell'Agnello, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics. No one knows, however, just how big those reservoirs are or what their actual distribution is across the lunar south pole's crater-pocked desolation. And because that ice might be used as for manufacturing rocket fuel or to make potable water for thirsty astronauts, answering those questions is key for the U.S.'s and China's competing plans to construct crewed lunar outposts.

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RAMageddon could soon push car prices higher as modern vehicles rely on ever more RAM and powerful centralized computers to run everything from infotainment to driver-assistance systems. Analysts cited by The Atlantic estimate the shortage could add a few percentage points to vehicle prices, which might not sound like much, but could potentially translate to around $2,000 on a $50,000 vehicle. The broader shift toward software-heavy vehicles could also make used cars even less affordable. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Just like laptops, cars depend on microprocessors and RAM, or random-access memory, to run all of their computations. "There's just a baseline level of tech, and thus a baseline level of cost, required of every vehicle," Karl Brauer, the executive analyst at iSeeCars, an automotive-research platform, told me. Technology is a major reason the average price of a new car in the U.S. has reached some $50,000, and that was before RAM became one of the most prized commodities in the world. AI companies are snatching up as much memory as possible for their data centers, causing a RAM shortage that has significantly raised the prices of phones, laptops, and just about any consumer-electronic device. Cars are next. [...] Over the next year, the memory shortage -- sometimes known as RAMageddon -- will likely raise vehicle prices by a few percentage points, on average, [said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Telemetry and a former automotive engineer]. The relative amount would be smaller than the shocking double-digit jumps for gaming consoles and MacBooks but in some ways more significant: A 4 percent price hike for cars amounts to some $2,000 on average. Cars with those centralized computers will be affected the most, but no vehicle will be spared. "Even if you don't need the high-end chips, you're going to pay more even for the low-end chips just because of the supply constraint," Abuelsamid said. On a recent earnings call, Ford's chief financial officer said that the company had paid $1 billion in higher materials costs due to the memory shortage and inflation. GM and Volkswagen, too, have noted rising chip costs to investors. (Ford and GM did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Volkswagen told me that the company has "recognized an increased demand for memory chips, primarily driven by growing requirements in other industries," and that in recent years, Volkswagen has taken measures to "mitigate supply risks.") RAMageddon is poised to last for several years, but the consequences for car buyers may be permanent. Consider what happened during the pandemic, when supply-chain disruptions and rising demand for electronics produced a major chip shortage. Nearly every major car company had to slash production because they simply couldn't procure enough chips, and shifted their focus to selling higher-end and higher-profit vehicles. Potential customers already willing to spend six figures on a car are much less likely to care about a 5 or 10 percent price hike, [said Ivan Drury, the director of insights at Edmunds]. Even now, car companies are continuing to focus on selling more profitable models. Since the pandemic, the average price of a new vehicle has jumped $11,000. The AI-fueled chip crisis could play out more severely. The average price of a new car could, before long, jump to $60,000 and beyond. These rising costs are making cars even more similar to computers and all of the software they run: Perhaps in an effort to mitigate higher prices, some automakers are also introducing in-car advertisements and putting certain features, such as heated seats, behind a paywall. As cars have morphed into computers, the inevitable next step is for automakers to behave like modern tech companies.

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Incremental improvements fail to generate much excitement, but Google’s Pixel 11 is still an accomplished Android phone.