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Sleep trackers, earbuds, and smart beds. | Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Sleep tech is more than tracking. Here are the best gadgets I’ve tested that help you fall asleep, stay asleep, or wake up earlier.
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Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Brandon Bell, Getty Images
Truth Social, the media firm owned by Donald Trump, has announced plans to create a live TV streaming service focused on “news networks” and “religious channels,” along with “content that has been canceled, is at risk of cancellation, or is being suppressed.”
The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) says it will launch the streaming service in three phases, with the first involving the rollout of the company’s content delivery network (CDN). A CDN, such as those operated by Cloudflare and Akamai, is a service websites use to help webpages load faster. TMTG says its CDN will operate “independent of Big Tech,” allowing the platform to avoid abiding by another company’s rules.
Once that’s up and running, TMTG plans to bring Truth...
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is proposing a $7 million fine against Cerebral, a mental telehealth firm that it says not only was careless with patients’ data but actively shared it with third parties for advertising purposes. The company and its CEO, Kyle Robertson, are also accused of lying to customers about how their data is shared and of having a misleading cancellation policy.
The FTC notes that Cerebral shared the sensitive data “of nearly 3.2 million consumers” with third parties like LinkedIn, TikTok, and Snapchat through trackers on its website or apps — something the company admitted to last year. That apparently included details like home and email addresses, phone numbers, pharmacy and health insurance details, and...
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Parcast founder Max Cutler left Spotify last February as part of a wave of high-profile departures from its podcast vertical, and he’s now launching Pave Studios to create content across multiple formats. “Storytellers who successfully engage audiences and create fandoms through written, audio, and video content have led the charge in cultivating their robust communities into diverse businesses,” said Cutler.
The company has two new brands to start, with OpenMind, which focuses on wellness, and the true crime-geared Crime House.
Image: Pave Studios
Spotify acquired the true crime and horror-focused studio Parcast in 2019 as part of a $1 billion investment in original podcasts. After the sale, Cutler went on to serve...
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A sign warns of elevated fire danger in the Oakland Hill area of Oakland, California, on Thursday, October 29th, 2020. | Photo by Philip Pacheco / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Hate to break it to you, baby — but if you were born in the US this year, climate change could wind up costing you around $500,000 over the course of your lifetime. That’s according to a new study commissioned by Consumer Reports and conducted by consulting firm ICF.
The study counts up higher bills for climate-related calamities that drive up housing, food, and healthcare costs, for example. On top of that, there’s the prospect of higher taxes and lost income over the years in a warming world.
While there’s a lot of uncertainty built into the study, it’s an attempt at breaking down all the big and little ways that climate change can affect daily life. Each stifling heatwave, flooded road, and downed power line costs consumers...
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The Kindle Scribe comes with a stylus to take notes and is nearly $100 off. | Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
When it comes to finding a device to use to read your ebooks, you have a few options to choose from. You can always buy a tablet or use your phone, but those devices are multipurpose and can be used for a ton of things, like surfing the web or doom-scrolling on Twitter. If you are looking for something to strictly read books, e-readers, while niche, are designed to store all of your books in a virtual library with limited functionality.
Amazon, one of the pioneers of the e-reader, has dominated the space for years with its ever-expanding Kindle lineup, which consists of several unique models with their own pros and cons. The bulk of the devices function as simple ebook readers; however, with the Kindle Scribe, Amazon looks to be moving...
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The Beatles in the United Kingdom, circa 1960. | Photo by Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
It has been hard to find physical copies of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 Beatles documentary Let It Be in the years since its theatrical release, but Disney Plus is getting ready to debut a remastered version of the film.
Disney Plus announced today that Let It Be — a chronicle of the Beatles recording their Let It Be album in 1969 before breaking up the following year — will stream on May 8th. Like the docuseries The Beatles: Get Back, Let It Be will feature original film footage remastered by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production and remastered audio created using the same de-mixing tools that recently led to the release of the Beatles’ final song. In a statement about Let It Be’s streaming premiere, Lindsay-Hogg recalled...
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Image: GMC
The 2024 GMC Sierra EV is almost here, and to celebrate, the automaker is giving it the gift of more range.
When it was first announced two years ago, GMC said the Sierra EV Denali would get an EPA estimated range of 400 miles, thanks to a massive battery that was expected to top 200kWh. Now, GMC says the electric truck’s maximum range at launch will be actually closer to 440 miles — a staggering amount in the nascent world of electric pickups.
Most electric trucks on the road today struggle to exceed 300 miles of range. Weather, terrain, and road type can also affect range and sap battery life. And once they start doing truck stuff, like hauling or towing, that range can drop even lower. GMC’s claims about the Sierra EV’s range will...
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Please note the pause button. Yes, that will really appear on your TV, no DVR or app required. | Image: Roxi
Broadcast TV is in trouble, and for a long time now, a lot of people have pointed to a new broadcast standard, ATSC 3.0, as the way it can be saved and finally compete against streaming, YouTube, and TikTok. And finally, after years of hype that failed to deliver, there’s an actual glimmer of hope for your local TV stations. Local news is about to get a lot more interactive.
Part of that’s because of Roxi, a company we covered back at CES. Then, the company was showing off an app that streamed music over the airwaves to your ATSC 3.0-outfitted TV and let you skip tracks, choose genres, and interact with it like you would a traditional smart TV app. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones utterly delighted by the technology Roxi showed off....
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Hundreds of cables. Hundreds of thousands of miles. The internet runs, in vastly more ways than we realize or think about, through a series of garden-hose size tubes on the ocean floor. Without those tubes, the modern world sort of collapses. And the folks responsible for keeping them functioning have bigger, harder, stranger jobs than you might think.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk to The Verge’s Josh Dzieza, who has been reporting on the undersea cable world and just published a feature about some of the folks who keep it running. It’s a story worthy of a high-seas action movie, and it’s all about cables.
Then, we chat with The Verge’s Tom Warren and Joanna Nelius about the new generation of PCs that Microsoft and others...
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You can buy Amazon’s entry-level smart speaker in a wide array of fun colors for just $5 shy of its all-time low. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
From helping me as a caregiver to cracking me up with fart jokes, Amazon’s budget-friendly smart speakers have added a lot of value to my life. That’s why I own one for almost every area of my home — and why I got excited when I saw Amazon is selling the Echo Pop for $22.99 with a free Kasa Smart Color Bulb. That equates to a savings of about $40, though you can also buy the standalone speaker for $22.99 at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which is just $5 shy of its all-time low.
For a mere $20 or so, the colorful Echo Pop packs a lot of tech into a small, semi-spherical package. Like the fifth-gen Echo Dot, it offers a host of Alexa-based smarts designed to make your life easier, including the ability to quickly check the news and...
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On the afternoon of March 11th, 2011, Mitsuyoshi Hirai, the chief engineer of the cable maintenance ship Ocean Link,was sitting in his cabin 20 miles off Japan’s eastern coast, completing the paperwork that comes at the end of every repair. Two weeks earlier, something — you rarely knew what — damaged the 13,000-mile fiber optic cable connecting Kitaibaraki, Japan, and Point Arena, California. Alarms went off; calls were made; and the next day, Hirai was sailing out of the port in Yokohama to fix it.
The repair was now nearly done. All that remained was to rebury the cable on the seafloor, which they were doing using a bulldozer-sized remotely operated submersible named Marcas — and, of course, the paperwork.
Suddenly,...
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Photo by Ashok Kumar / TAS24 / Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
The Department of Justice is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit could reportedly come as early as next month and will target the company’s alleged monopoly in the live ticketing industry.
Live Nation drew antitrust scrutiny when it merged with Ticketmaster in 2010. But those concerns boiled over in November 2022 when a Ticketmaster crash blocked thousands of Taylor Swift fans from purchasing tickets for the Eras Tour due to “unprecedented demand.” The DOJ opened an investigation into Live Nation shortly after, The New York Times reported.
Lawmakers also levied heavy criticism against the ticketing company, with Sen. Amy...
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Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
When you load your music streaming app of choice onto your mobile device, your audio quality settings are worth taking a minute or two to configure. If you don’t have these set to as high a quality as possible, you’re missing out on the best audio experience your streaming apps can offer.
Because they are managed separately for streaming music over cell and Wi-Fi networks and for downloading tracks to your device for offline listening, there is a tradeoff. Increased sound quality and fidelity means more data gets used (which might be a concern if you’re not on an unlimited cellular plan), bigger file sizes (which take up more room on your device), and a longer wait for downloads. But even if you have to compromise some settings, it’s a...
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Sony is working on a new “high-end version” of the PS5, codenamed Trinity and likely to debut as the PS5 Pro later this year. The Verge confirmed leaked specs about the PS5 Pro earlier this week, and we’ve also obtained details on how existing and new PS5 games can be “enhanced” to take advantage of the PS5 Pro hardware. Sony is also working on an ultra-boost mode for older games to make them run better on the PS5 Pro.
Sources familiar with Sony’s plans tell The Verge that Sony is asking developers to create a new PS5 Pro-exclusive graphics mode in games that combines Sony’s new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling to 4K resolution with a 60fps frame rate and ray-tracing effects. Insider Gaming first reported on some of...
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The Insta360 X4 is the latest action camera from Insta360.
Insta360 has launched its latest 360-degree action camera, the X4. The most obvious upgrade that the $500 camera offers over its predecessor, the X3, is the ability to shoot video in 8K at 30 frames per second. That extra boost in resolution and detail may come in handy for watching action videos on anything larger than your phone, panning around 360-degree footage on platforms like YouTube or cropping out a perspective you like from a 360-degree recording. It also includes a new 2,290mAh battery rated for 75 minutes of 8K footage and 135 minutes of 5.7K footage.
The X4 supports recording 5.7K at 60 frames per second as well as 4K at 100 frames per second. (The X3 was limited to 5.7K at 30fps and 4K at 60fps.) Similar to older models,...
The VergeThe Soundcore Sleep A20 are decent passive earbuds that are great for side sleepers, even if Anker overpromises.
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Weird phones are back, baby. | Image: Motorola
Motorola is introducing three new Edge series phones, reviving a classic design feature it first introduced a decade ago: a wooden back panel. The Motorola Edge 50 Ultra is the highest spec’d device of the trio, and it’s the only one with the “real wood” back panel option (though the peach fuzz vegan leather looks awfully nice, too). Motorola will launch the phones first outside of the US “in the coming weeks,” but says it’s committed to “expanding the Edge family in North America this year.”
The Motorola Edge 50 Ultra uses the new Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 chipset, which is a slight step down from the 8 Gen 3. There’s a 6.7-inch OLED with up to 144Hz refresh rate, which has been “Pantone-validated.” Say what? Motorola says this designation...
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The four-inch tall metal object tore through a roof in Naples, Florida last month. | Image: Alejandro Otero
NASA has confirmed suspicions that the strange object that crashed into a Florida home last month did indeed come from the International Space Station (ISS). The agency analyzed the cylindrical object after it tore through the roof and two floors of a house in Naples on March 8th, and established that it came from a cargo pallet of aging batteries that was released from the ISS back in 2021.
More specifically, NASA revealed in a blog post on Monday that the offending object was a support component used to mount the batteries on the 5,800-pound (2,630-kilogram) pallet released from the space station. Made from Inconel (a metal alloy that can withstand extreme environments like high temperature, pressure, or mechanical loads), the...
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iPads go on sale quite frequently, but some discounts on more powerful models are getting harder to find. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge
While the best iPad deals usually land during major sale events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Amazon’s various Prime Days, many of the best iPad deals from the holiday season have persisted into 2024. The discounts come and go like changing winds, but you can still take advantage of sales on many models today, particularly on the more affordable iPads. What’s more, prices are likely to drop even further when Apple ushers in a new slate of iPad Pro and iPad Air models, which will reportedly happen in May.
Forthcoming models aside, it’s difficult to know where exactly you can find the most notable iPad deals unless you’re scouring the major retailers on a daily basis. But that’s often what our deal hunters at The Verge are doing...
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Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images
Officials at the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology have started drafting legislation to regulate AI models, Bloomberg reports. It’s unclear how any future regulation will intersect with the UK’s already-extant AI Safety Institute, which already conducts safety tests of the most powerful AI models.
After hosting the first global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023, which was attended by many world leaders, the UK established an AI Safety Institute the following November. The institute began evaluating AI models for safety this year, though some technology companies requested more clarity on the timelines and what would happen if AI models are found risky. The UK also agreed to do joint safety testing...
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The entry-level Apple Watch SE is a gateway smartwatch if there ever was one. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
In September, Apple launched its latest batch of smartwatches, introducing the Apple Watch Ultra 2 ($799) alongside the new Apple Watch Series 9 ($399). Each wearable has its own pros and cons, as does the second-gen Apple Watch SE ($249), but the introduction of the new wearables also means there are now more Apple Watch models on the market than ever before — and a lot more deals to be had.
But with all of those options, which one should you pick? Generally speaking, you want to buy the newest watch you can afford so that it continues to receive software updates from Apple. The latest update, watchOS 10, launched in September on the Apple Watch Series 4 and newer, though no one can say with certainty whether the Series 4 will get the...
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Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to propose new regulations that would require data brokers to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In a speech at the White House earlier this month, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said the agency is looking into policies to “ensure greater accountability” for companies that buy and sell consumer data, in keeping with an executive order President Joe Biden issued in late February.
Chopra said the agency is considering proposals that would define data brokers that sell certain types of data as “consumer reporting agencies,” thereby requiring those companies to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The statute bans sharing certain kinds of data (e.g., your credit report) with...
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Over the last few days, Tesla has delayed some Cybertruck deliveries. The company hasn’t specified why or even publicly commented on the delays, but commenters in the Cybertruck Owners Club forum have reported receiving texts or calls telling them their deliveries were being rescheduled.
One user said they’d been told by their dealer that the truck was recalled over its accelerator pedal. Another claimed Tesla sent them a text saying it’s not scheduling deliveries at the moment for the same reason. Several others reported receiving texts about issues with “the preparation of your vehicle.”
An Elon Musk fan account called @WholeMarsBlog posted on X that deliveries have been halted for seven days, but that hasn’t been confirmed, and Tesla...
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Image from NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover captured in April 2024. | NASA
Budget constraints have NASA looking for a faster and cheaper method to bring samples from Mars’ surface back to Earth. In a teleconference on Monday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that an independent review concluded that the agency’s current plan to bring the first samples collected by the Mars rover Perseverance could cost up to $11 billion and would likely not be achievable until 2040. The fiscal 2025 budget for the space agency, as well as additional anticipated budget cuts, are behind how slowly the current plan is being executed.
“That is unacceptable to wait that long,” Nelson said about the mission to return samples of dust and rocks from Mars to Earth. “It’s the decade of the 2040s that we’re going to be landing...
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Keanu Reeves as John Wick. | Image: Lionsgate
The third Sonic movie already seemed like it was going to kick all kinds of ass by bringing Shadow the Hedgehog into the picture, but Paramount’s just upped the ante by adding one Keanu Reeves to its cast.
According to both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, Keanu Reeves has been tapped to voice Shadow, the anthropomorphic hedgehog best known for his jet-powered sneakers and fondness for guns. While the studio’s yet to make an official announcement, news of Reeves’ casting comes after director Jeff Fowler teased that the next Sonic movie will be inspired by Sonic Adventure 2, the Dreamcast game that first introduced Shadow in 2001.
Shadow’s cinematic arrival was also teased at the end of the last Sonic movie, where he appeared to be...
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YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile. In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
Last year, YouTube “launched a global effort” to encourage users to allow ads while watching videos or upgrade to YouTube Premium. It also began disabling videos for users with an ad blocking extension enabled.
But now, YouTube says its policies don’t allow “third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership.” This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad...
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Pigeon River Country State Forest in Vanderbilt, Michigan, U.S., on Wednesday, April 20th, 2022. State and local governments in the US are enrolling public-owned forests in carbon projects that could earn them tens of millions of dollars but provide little new help in the fight against climate change.
The charity that serves as a major watchdog on corporate climate commitments faces allegations that it’s caving to industry pressure to relax standards.
The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) assesses companies’ sustainability pledges and develops standards for how companies can set goals to fight climate change that are backed by science. SBTi’s policies are supposed to prevent greenwashing, which is when companies make misleading statements about their environmental impact.
One way SBTi has tried to crack down on greenwashing is by limiting the use of carbon offsets. Offsets are supposed to cancel out some of a company’s carbon footprint, even though that’s often only reflected on paper and not in the real world. SBTi’s tough...
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Courtesy of Prime
The mysterious hole at the center of Amazon’s Outer Range was something to fear when the sci-fi / western drama first debuted. But the show’s new season two trailer makes it seem like the gaping chasm might wind up answering all of the Abbott family’s prayers.
Outer Range’s first season came to a close with Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin) gaining an even deeper understanding of what the bottomless pit on his farm is and realizing how — terrifying as the thing may be — it could actually help him reunite his fractured family. It was because of the hole that Royal was able to piece together who Autumn (Imogen Poots) truly is, and Outer Range’s new trailer suggests that season two will see the duo’s relationship change as the Abbotts begin...
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The new Blink Mini offers both better image quality and audio quality than before. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
Whether you’re away at work or on vacation, a security camera can offer some extra peace of mind by allowing you to keep an eye on your pet, packages, and other valuables at home. And right now, one of the least expensive security cameras you can buy is even more affordable. Normally $39.99, the new Blink Mini 2 is down to just $29.99 ($10 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which is the first deal we’ve seen on the wired camera since it launched last month. You can also buy it at Amazon with a weather-resistant adapter for just $39.98 ($10 off).
While the Blink Mini 2 remains a basic 1080ps camera like its predecessor, it’s now a lot more useful if you’re already locked into the Amazon ecosystem. You can use it outside thanks to its...