Feed aggregator

The Pixel 11 smartphone lineup is here, alongside the Pixel Watch 5 and the all-new Pixel Tag.

Honor’s new China-exclusive Android phone features a pop-out motorized gimbal camera designed to replace your action cam.

Not all office chairs are right for all people. I asked an ergonomist how to select the right office chair for your budget, height, and physique.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots. Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. "In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them," the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples. They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ego’s newest, biggest, self-propelled mower handles larger yards in less time with impressive performance and battery life.

The partnership brings together QuEra's announced quantum hardware device and Zapata Quantum's software capabilities. Both have ties to tech giant Nvidia.

I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program and received an extensive, personalized report that algorithmically predicts my next purchase.

Summer’s not over yet; pick up some new gear for that last Labor Day trip. Save up to 40 percent on some of our favorite Patagonia items at the company’s past-season sale.

Jackson’s career-long focus on limiting Canadian workers in Maine logging meets a political moment when Donald Trump has remade the border dynamics in his backyard.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: For more than half a century, physicists have searched for one of the strangest particles predicted by modern theory. It would be made almost entirely of gluons, the elusive subatomic particles that carry the strong nuclear force. Now, using a particle collider in Beijing, researchers say they have effectively proved the existence of such a "glueball." In a preprint posted last month on arXiv and in a presentation last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), the researchers argue that a particle called X(2370), which they produced by smashing electrons into positrons at high energies, has the properties expected of a glueball. "It's an experimental triumph," says Colin Morningstar, a particle physicist at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the finding. "It's the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Save 30% with a OnePlus coupon in August 2026, plus save up to 10% on earbuds, phones, and more.

Score $10 off with our Walmart promo codes and coupon, and shop flash deals up to 65% off today.

Save on bulk groceries, household essentials, and electronics with a verified Sam's Club promo code or membership discount.

Score your Rover promo code for 2026.

Enjoy 25% off a membership, 40% off, plus an additional 10% off annual plans, and more deals to save at Vimeo.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl's July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895. [...] Although it was unusually cool in Alaska, hotter-than-normal conditions blanketed the Lower 48, with the most excessive heat in the Mountain West, Southwest, Northern Plains and Southeast. The heat was so widespread that every one of the Lower 48 states was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit (nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average, said Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information. [...] The biggest driver of the record heat was nighttime lows that smashed the old mark for hottest minimums by 0.7 degrees, NOAA said. Hotter nights are a classic sign of human-caused climate change, according to scientists and several studies in peer-reviewed literature. NOAA's calculation is based on averaging 24 hours of temperature, not just highs or lows. "If you're talking heat waves, that nighttime low is incredibly important for determining total heat stress," [said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections]. "So if it doesn't cool off at night, your body doesn't have time to readjust to all the heat." As nighttime temperatures increase, more people die and lose sleep, studies show. The years 2021 and 1936 tie for America's hottest summer, which is June through August. Through July, 2026 is a shade cooler than 2021, which was powered by record heat in June. Because of climate change, Masters said, "this may be one of the coolest years we're gonna experience for the rest of our lives." What's needed, Masters said, is "to stop burning so many fossil fuels. We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we've put in place."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to count humans rather than bots. If you include people and bots, Linux has a 9.7% market share. That proportion is similar to StatCounter's score. By Cloudflare's count, bots alone come to 19%. These numbers tell us that workers are leading the way to the Linux desktop. [...] However, past performance doesn't explain present trends. So, why are we now seeing such a bump in Linux desktop growth? Experts believe this trend is largely AI developers and Linux users running AI Agents. For example, as David Linthicum, former managing director and chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting and AI and cloud influencer, recently observed, while "Windows 11 can technically run local AI workloads, but as you begin using multiple tools, managing different projects, and installing various dependencies, the friction starts to build," it's a different story for Linux users. Linthicum continued: "Linux delivered what I can only describe as a true 'AI desktop' experience. Setup was straightforward, mainstream AI instructions matched what you'd actually see in your environment, and GPU-accelerated apps simply worked -- consistently. I spent far less time troubleshooting and far more time actually executing on projects." As for agents, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin summed up their role succinctly: "Linux is the OS of choice for AI agents." Desktop Linux is also gaining momentum as frustration with Windows 11 and the end of Windows 10 support push users to alternatives, particularly on older PCs that can't officially upgrade. At the same time, Linux has become much easier to use, install software on, and game with, lowering many of the traditional barriers to switching.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project's progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database; instead application state is distributed across the network. These now include decentralized group chat, publishing, search, and fully decentralized Git hosting. The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gemini has become Google's fastest-growing product ever, reaching 1 billion monthly active users faster than any of the company's 13 other billion-user services. Ars Technica reports: Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though. These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that's not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The proposed development, pitched by Abode Communities, would include 192 manufactured homes on 84 acres in West Kennebunk.