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Honorable MentionsNow that the majority of new headphones and earbuds offer at least a modicum of noise canceling, it’d be impossible (and unproductive) to list everything we like above. If you haven’t yet found your fit, here are more favorites worth considering.Beyerdynamic Amiron 300 for $280: These simple-looking earbuds (8/10, WIRED Recommends) are a great way to experience quiet luxury. They have 10 hours of battery life with noise canceling engaged, and they have some of the best-sounding drivers for vocals I’ve heard in any earbuds.Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds for $298: Sony’s fifth-generation flagship earbuds (7/10, WIRED Recommends) slim down while stepping up. These buds are smaller and slicker (maybe too slick when it comes to grabbing them) than the previous XM4 buds. As before, they provide great sound and noise canceling that outduels plenty of options, with a cost to match. In true Sony style, they serve up a truckload of adaptive features and EQ controls while retaining a solid eight hours of playback time per charge with ANC and 12 hours without it. —Ryan WaniataSoundcore Life Q30 for $60-85: Anker’s Soundcore line is nothing if not value-conscious, and the Life Q30 provide an embarrassing list of extras for their bargain-basement pricing. You’ll get clear and warm sound, great features, tons of battery life, and noise canceling that gets the job done even on a long flight, though it can’t keep up with flagship pairs. It’s hard to complain when they cost hundreds less, especially with sale pricing that sometimes drops to around $50.Sony WH-1000XM4 for $250-350: Sony’s WH-1000X lineup has produced some of the best noise-canceling headphones for nearly a decade, and the aging WH-1000XM4 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) are no exception. They periodically go on sale for under $300, but it’s getting harder to find them below full price,…Read more

Buying GuideIf your back-to-school planning for this year calls for a new laptop, here are your best bets.If your back-to-school planning for this year calls for a new laptop, here are your best bets.byRead more

It shouldn’t be surprising if a plate of chicken lababdar tastes delicious. The dish is among my favorite North Indian gravies, a slightly edgier cousin of butter chicken that’s a bit spicier and tangier but just as creamy.What was surprising was that this particular chicken had arrived in the mail. Specifically, it came in a microwaveable tray from CookUnity meal delivery service that looked a little like a white-label TV dinner—packed up earlier that morning in Seattle, then driven down to me in Portland, Oregon.The world of prepared meal delivery is erupting in popularity as of late, and pretty much every major meal kit service is getting in on the game. I have nonetheless learned to temper my expectations when testing ready-to-eat meals. It’s not easy to make pre-assembled meals taste good, even if they were good when they started. The problem is moisture. And the problem is the microwave. In many cases, the results have been OK to subpar.Read more

EntertainmentRight-wing influencers try blaming Democrats for hiding the Epstein files — and DC Republicans follow suit.Right-wing influencers try blaming Democrats for hiding the Epstein files — and DC Republicans follow suit.byRead more

Games ReviewEntertainmentIt’s a point-and-click adventure that tells a twisting mystery.It’s a point-and-click adventure that tells a twisting mystery.byRead more

Switching to a vertical mouse is a hard sell. Having to change how you use a mouse completely can be an intimidating task, especially with how unnatural the new hand position feels at first—you’re going entirely against the muscle memory you’ve spent years building up.One of the largest challenges to the switch is the initial loss of pointer accuracy. If you’re in an office setting, you may find yourself wandering around a bit or struggling to move your new mouse as quickly as you did before. But in a slow-paced setting like that, all you struggle with is a few mis-clicks or slightly slower navigation. If you try to make this transition with gaming, it’s far more jarring, and the consequences are much more immediately noticeable.But even if it’s difficult to adapt to, could vertical mice be the future of gaming? Razer’s new Pro Click V2 Vertical Edition is a hybrid productivity and gaming vertical mouse. Vertical mice typically cater to office workers, but the focus on gaming performance makes the $120 Pro Click V2 one of a kind.Desk PresenceThe Pro Click V2 Vertical looks, more than anything else, like a modern gaming mouse. It has the textured exterior, metallic highlights, and slightly organic, H.R. Giger-esque curvature typical of Razer’s design language. But everything has been shifted around. The curved, cutting thumb rest sits on top of the mouse instead of on the side. A flare juts out from the right side as a place to rest the underside of your hand. The gunmetal highlight sits at the peak of the mouse rather than between the two buttons. Even the USB port is vertical, a humorous attention to detail.It’s intentionally designed as a gaming mouse that just happens to be vertical. Aesthetically, the only downside is the minimal RGB lighting….Read more

Electricity powers modern life. And we’re accelerating a wide range of technologies, from enhanced geothermal to advanced nuclear to even fusion technologies, that can enable a future where on-demand electricity needs are met with clean energy, every hour of every day.Today, we’re adding another technology to our portfolio: long duration energy storage (LDES). Through a new long-term partnership with Energy Dome, we plan to support multiple commercial projects globally to deploy their LDES technology.Energy Dome’s novel CO₂ Battery can store excess clean energy and then dispatch it back to the grid for 8-24 hours, bridging the gap between when renewable energy is generated and when it is needed. With this commercial partnership, as well as an investment in the company, we believe these projects can unlock new clean energy for grids where we operate before 2030, helping meet near-term electricity system needs and moving us closer to our 24/7 carbon-free energy goal.By bringing this first-of-a-kind LDES technology to market faster, we aim to rapidly bring its potential to communities everywhere — making reliable, affordable electricity available around the clock and supporting the resilience of grids as they integrate growing amounts of renewable energy sources.Why it’s importantLithium-ion batteries, which typically store and dispatch power for 4 hours or less, have been critical for adding electricity capacity to grids and managing short-term fluctuations in renewable generation — when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Google’s support for these shorter-duration batteries has helped the grids we rely on, from Belgium to Nevada, meet peak electricity demand and reduce the need to ramp up fossil fuel power plants.But what if we could store and dispatch clean energy for more than a few hours, or even a full day? Studies by the Electric Power Research Institute show that LDES technologies can cost-effectively…Read more

On Wednesday, President Trump issued three executive orders, delivered a speech, and released an action plan, all on the topic of continuing American leadership in AI.  The plan contains dozens of proposed actions, grouped into three “pillars”: accelerating innovation, building infrastructure, and leading international diplomacy and security. Some of its recommendations are thoughtful even if incremental, some clearly serve ideological ends, and many enrich big tech companies, but the plan is just a set of recommended actions.  The three executive orders, on the other hand, actually operationalize one subset of actions from each pillar:  One aims to prevent “woke AI” by mandating that the federal government procure only large language models deemed “truth-seeking” and “ideologically neutral” rather than ones allegedly favoring DEI. This action purportedly accelerates AI innovation. A second aims to accelerate construction of AI data centers. A much more industry-friendly version of an order issued under President Biden, it makes available rather extreme policy levers, like effectively waiving a broad swath of environmental protections, providing government grants to the wealthiest companies in the world, and even offering federal land for private data centers. A third promotes and finances the export of US AI technologies and infrastructure, aiming to secure American diplomatic leadership and reduce international dependence on AI systems from adversarial countries. This flurry of actions made for glitzy press moments, including an hour-long speech from the president and onstage signings. But while the tech industry cheered these announcements (which will swell their coffers), they obscured the fact that the administration is currently decimating the very policies that enabled America to become the world leader in AI in the first place. To maintain America’s leadership in AI, you have to understand what produced it. Here are four specific long-standing public policies that…Read more

Most Americans encounter the Federal Trade Commission only if they’ve been scammed: It handles identity theft, fraud, and stolen data. During the Biden administration, the agency went after AI companies for scamming customers with deceptive advertising or harming people by selling irresponsible technologies. With yesterday’s announcement of President Trump’s AI Action Plan, that era may now be over.  In the final months of the Biden administration under chair Lina Khan, the FTC levied a series of high-profile fines and actions against AI companies for overhyping their technology and bending the truth—or in some cases making claims that were entirely false. It found that the security giant Evolv lied about the accuracy of its AI-powered security checkpoints, which are used in stadiums and schools but failed to catch a seven-inch knife that was ultimately used to stab a student. It went after the facial recognition company Intellivision, saying the company made unfounded claims that its tools operated without gender or racial bias. It fined startups promising bogus “AI lawyer” services and one that sold fake product reviews generated with AI. These actions did not result in fines that crippled the companies, but they did stop them from making false statements and offered customers ways to recover their money or get out of contracts. In each case, the FTC found, everyday people had been harmed by AI companies that let their technologies run amok. The plan released by the Trump administration yesterday suggests it believes these actions went too far. In a section about removing “red tape and onerous regulation,” the White House says it will review all FTC actions taken under the Biden administration “to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.” In the same section, the White House says it will…Read more

Whether you’re still on the hunt for the perfect summer maxi skirt, dreaming about a new fall jacket or starting your back to school shopping, our shopping tools can help you explore your personal style and get a good price. Here are a few ways you can use Google’s latest shopping features:Try clothes on, virtuallyAt I/O in May, we introduced our try on tool as a limited experiment in Search Labs, allowing shoppers to upload a photo of themselves and use AI to virtually try on clothes. Today, try on is launching in the U.S., letting you easily try on styles from the billions of apparel items in our Shopping Graph across Search, Google Shopping and even product results on Google Images.Read more

We’re launching Web Guide, a Search Labs experiment that uses AI to intelligently organize the search results page, making it easier to find information and web pages.Web Guide groups web links in helpful ways — like pages related to specific aspects of your query. Under the hood, Web Guide uses a custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web, creating more powerful search capabilities that better surface web pages you may not have previously discovered. Similar to AI Mode, Web Guide uses a query fan-out technique, concurrently issuing multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results.For example, try it for open-ended searches like “how to solo travel in Japan.” Or try detailed queries in multiple sentences like, “My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?”Read more

Google DeepMind has unveiled new artificial-intelligence software that could help historians recover the meaning and context behind ancient Latin engravings.  Aeneas can analyze words written in long-weathered stone to say when and where they were originally inscribed. It follows Google’s previous archaeological tool Ithaca, which also used deep learning to reconstruct and contextualize ancient text, in its case Greek. But while Ithaca and Aeneas use some similar systems, Aeneas also promises to give researchers jumping-off points for further analysis. To do this, Aeneas takes in partial transcriptions of an inscription alongside a scanned image of it. Using these, it gives possible dates and places of origins for the engraving, along with potential fill-ins for any missing text. For example, a slab damaged at the start and continuing with … us populusque Romanus would likely prompt Aeneas to guess that Senat comes before us to create the phrase Senatus populusque Romanus, “The Senate and the people of Rome.”  This is similar to how Ithaca works. But Aeneas also cross-references the text with a stored database of almost 150,000 inscriptions, which originated everywhere from modern-day Britain to modern-day Iraq, to give possible parallels—other catalogued Latin engravings that feature similar words, phrases, and analogies.  This database, alongside a few thousand images of inscriptions, makes up the training set for Aeneas’s deep neural network. While it may seem like a good number of samples, it pales in comparison to the billions of documents used to train general-purpose large language models like Google’s Gemini. There simply aren’t enough high-quality scans of inscriptions to train a language model to learn this kind of task. That’s why specialized solutions like Aeneas are needed.  The Aeneas team believes it could help researchers “connect the past,” said Yannis Assael, a researcher at Google DeepMind who worked on…Read more

After 14 years of developing inside of semiconductor giant Intel, RealSense is striking out on its own. RealSense sells cameras that use stereoscopic imaging, a process that combines two images of the same object from different angles to create depth, enhanced with infrared light. This technology helps machines like robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles have a better perception of the physical world around them. The tech is also used for facial authentication. “The common denominator of all of them is they live in the real, physical world,” CEO Nadav Orbach told TechCrunch. “They need to understand the surroundings in 3D and based on that, take and plan actions right in the world. And for that, they need a real-time, high-accuracy ability to understand the surrounding in 3D. And that’s what we do best.” Orbach joined Intel back in 2006 as a CPU architect in Israel. He started working on vision technology in 2011 before becoming the general manager of incubation and disruptive innovation in 2022 and moving to San Francisco last year. “We knew and understood that 3D perception was going to be big,” Orbach said about the early days of RealSense. “To be honest, we weren’t quite sure in which domain. We tried that across different market segments and different applications, all the way from gesture recognition with computers, phones, until we really found our sweet spot over the years, mostly in robotics.” The company works with numerous industries outside of robotics, too. Orbach said they’ve heard from fish farms looking to track the volume inside their pens. Chipotle has also used RealSense cameras, in a partnership with AI restaurant software company PreciTaste, to track when food containers are low. RealSense has more than 3,000 customers and…Read more

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Enterprises that want to build and scale agents also need to embrace another reality: agents aren’t built like other software.  Agents are “categorically different” in how they’re built, how they operate, and how they’re improved, according to Writer CEO and co-founder May Habib. This means ditching the traditional software development life cycle when dealing with adaptive systems. “Agents don’t reliably follow rules,” Habib said on Wednesday while on stage at VB Transform. “They are outcome-driven. They interpret. They adapt. And the behavior really only emerges in real-world environments.” Knowing what works — and what doesn’t work — comes from Habib’s experience helping hundreds of enterprise clients build and scale enterprise-grade agents. According to Habib, more than 350 of the Fortune 1000 are Writer customers, and more than half of the Fortune 500 will be scaling agents with Writer by the end of 2025. Using non-deterministic tech to produce powerful outputs can even be “really nightmarish,” Habib said — especially when trying to scale agents systemically. Even if enterprise teams can spin up agents without product managers and designers, Habib thinks a “PM mindset” is still needed for collaborating, building, iterating and maintaining agents. “Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, IT is going to be left holding the bag if they don’t lead their business counterparts into that new way of building.” >>See all our Transform 2025 coverage hereRead more

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Walmart continues to make strides in cracking the code on deploying agentic AI at enterprise scale. Their secret? Treating trust as an engineering requirement, not some compliance checkbox you tick at the end. During the “Trust in the Algorithm: How Walmart’s Agentic AI Is Redefining Consumer Confidence and Retail Leadership” session at VB Transform 2025, Walmart’s VP of Emerging Technology Desirée Gosby, explained how the retail giant operationalizes thousands of AI use cases. One of the retailer’s primary objectives is to consistently maintain and strengthen customer confidence among its 255 million weekly shoppers. “We see this as a pretty big inflection point, very similar to the internet,” Gosby told industry analyst Susan Etlinger during Tuesday’s morning session. “It’s as profound in terms of how we’re actually going to operate, how we actually do work.” The session delivered valuable lessons learned from Walmart’s AI deployment experiences. Implicit throughout the discussion is the retail giant’s continual search for new ways to apply distributed systems architecture principles, thereby avoiding the creation of technical debt. >>See all our Transform 2025 coverage hereRead more