Latest AI Amazon Apps Biotech & Health Climate Cloud Computing Commerce Crypto Enterprise EVs Fintech Fundraising Gadgets Gaming Google Government & Policy Hardware Instagram Layoffs Media & Entertainment Meta Microsoft Privacy Robotics Security Social Space Startups TikTok Transportation Venture Events Startup Battlefield StrictlyVC Newsletters Podcasts Videos Partner Content TechCrunch Brand Studio Crunchboard Contact Us With the first week of Meta's antitrust trial behind us, documents shared by the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offered more insight into Meta's internal struggles to keep Facebook relevant. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled different visions for Facebook's future to boost its success, acknowledging that its cultural relevance was decreasing. Fast-forward to 2025, and Meta is still grappling with this issue. Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's Q4 earnings call in January that the company wants to restore Facebook's cultural relevance this year with a return to “OG Facebook.” Part of its solution for this problem is the recent launch of a revamped Friends tab. In a series of messages from April 2022, which were shared as evidence during the trial, Zuckerberg discussed concerns about Facebook's “Friends” structure and format being outdated as every other major platform focused on “Following.” He considered ditching the Friends format and even suggested deleting everyone's Facebook friends and having them start again. Some of the highlights from Mark Zuckerberg's emails are below. Topics Consumer News Reporter Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor's degree from University of Toronto and a master's degree in journalism from Western University. Robots run a half marathon, slowly Famed AI researcher launches controversial startup to replace all human workers everywhere Read what Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook execs said about Instagram before buying it OpenAI's new reasoning AI models hallucinate more ChatGPT is referring to users by their names unprompted, and some find it ‘creepy' Defense tech Theseus landed Y Combinator, the US Special Forces, and $4.3M from a tweet OpenAI debuts Codex CLI, an open source coding tool for terminals © 2025 Yahoo.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) boasts that it has designed the world's first lightning triggering and guidance system that leverages flying drones (via machine translation). After successful trials earlier this year it is hoped that networks of these drones can be installed in cities and key infrastructure as a preventative protection measure. Lightning damage isn't as rare as many an old adage might suggest, according to the stats shared by NTT. Meanwhile, conventional lightning rods don't provide as wide coverage as desirable, or might be tricky to install (e.g. wind turbines). With the above in mind NTT set up an experiment to see if drones can be used to prevent lightning damage. NTT says it then observed a massive electrical pulse and claims that it achieved “the world's first successful lightning induction using a drone.” It is key that the drone could remain airborne after being zapped, says NTT and before this live trial it had successfully tested them at up to bursts of 150,000 Amps. NTT intends to continue refining its lightning triggering and guidance drones. To augment the above study and trials it is looking at improving lightning location prediction accuracy. Moreover, there are plans to research and development into storing the lightning energy that is safely diverted. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. © Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York,

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. AMD is reportedly preparing to debut its RDNA 4 workstation GPU offerings for desktops, presumably under the Radeon Pro W9000 family. As put forwaard by Hoang Anh Phu, who frequently obtains inside scoops, AMD is considering using the Navi 48 XTW die for its top-end SKUs, paired with 32GB of video memory, likely GDDR6. As always, this leak shouldn't be taken as definitive, but there's likely some truth to it given the proximity of Computex next month, followed by AMD's Advancing AI event in June. These graphics cards bridge the gap between consumers and server domains, for applications like AI, HPC, DCC, CGI, CAD, VR/AR, and the list goes on. It seems that AMD is sticking to more conservative figures for its flagship workstation offerings this generation. Nvidia's top-end GB202 at 750mm2, is home to the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell featuring a massive 96GB frame buffer. Navi 48, with its 256-bit interface, enables either 16GB of memory (via eight 32-bit channels) or a theoretical maximum of 32GB in clamshell mode, which is the exact configuration being reported here. Internally, AMD segments each die into XL, XT, and XTX counterparts; each reflecting the degree to which the die's hardware resources are enabled. Based on the available data, Navi 48 wields a total of 64 Compute Units (CUs), a configuration already present in the Radeon RX 9070 XT (Navi 48 XTX). However, we cannot infer full-enablement just from shader counts, as AMD could still have other IP blocks disabled on the consumer RX 9070 XT, reserving the full-fat die (likely Navi 48 XTW) for its professional Radeon PRO counterpart(s). Adding salt on this wound, RDNA 4 still remains unsupported by AMD's ROCm platform. Here's hoping we'll learn more about broader ROCm support either next month or at AMD's Advancing AI event in June. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he's not working, you'll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.

At least if you partake in those ubiquitous, disposable vape thingies. One California company thinks it has found a solution, though. Coming in at just 1.5 x 2.25 in x 0.5 inches (WxHxD) it's the most discreet little vaporizer I've ever seen. We're usually happy when one can fit in your pants pocket: This thing can fit in the little fifth pocket of your Levis. It comes filled with either Raw Garden's Live Sauce or Refined Live Resin, both of which are incredibly pure, and eye-crossingly potent. A tiny disposable vape that makes big clouds. When Raw Garden and its manufacturing partner Ispire were developing the device that would become the Sprout they were testing the devices in a heat chamber to make sure they wouldn't leak, but they noticed something weird: The clear plastic that stores the oil was getting cloudy rather quickly, which shouldn't be happening. Repeated tests with both their own product and other products that use PCTG revealed the same thing. Interestingly, while testing it with different oils, they found that those with a higher amount of terpenes (natural chemicals found in weed that gives different strains their distinct flavors, aromas, and to some extent, effect) got cloudier faster. Because this cloudiness was permanent they determined that it was highly likely that it was being compromised, and that plastic particles were ending up in the oil, which when vaped could end up in consumers' lungs. So, Raw Garden did something pretty admirable, and scrapped more than $1,000,000 worth of product that was ready to go. It then went back to the drawing board with Ispire and identified an alternate material called PA-12. PA-12 is also a plastic, but it's been used for a long time in the electronics, automotive, and medical industries because it's known for being durable, heat-resistant, and critically here, chemical resistant. Through repeated testing Raw Garden found that PA-12 did not break down, even when filled with pure terpenes and exposed to high-ambient heat (120 degrees F) for a week straight. It also chose to publish this information and refrain from patenting it in the hopes that other makers of disposable vapes would adopt the safer material as well. To power it on, you just give it five rapid clicks (which will be familiar to anyone who has used a cartridge style vape). To switch between these levels, you just click the button three times. A double-click will preheat the device, which will get you a fuller first hit, but I rarely bothered with this. Raw Garden says low will get you the best flavor and smoothest hit, medium is for “balanced flavor and potency,” while high is the strongest hit, for experienced users. For this review I tested two units: an indica Live Sauce called PB Souffle with 80.7-percent potency (and 15.9-percent terpenes) for a hearty mix of favor and punch, and a Refined Live Resin hybrid called Strawberry Gas that came in at a staggering 90.7-percent potency, and still tasted good, but tread lightly or don't make any plans, if you know what I mean. Seriously, start with just a small hit or two and then wait a bit, because it's much stronger than you think. I usually find disposable and oil-based pens to be pretty chokey, so this was a remarkable experience for me. Medium definitely hit harder, and I did try it at high (in the name of science), and it was definitely more than I wanted. It was smoother than others I've used in the past, but still a bit harsher than I like. I'm trying to keep my lungs pretty in pink. There are some other innovative features packed into this little thing, which also help it produce an unusually smooth, consistent hit. The Spout features an “anti-clog design” with a unique Overflow Chamber. Most disposables use a post (kind of like a wick) to draw the oil up to the nozzle where it gets heated. In most vapes, the excess cloud gets flushed back into the one and only chamber, where it can congeal and not only cause clogging, but also that nasty burnt taste disposable/cartridge vapes are somewhat known for. There's not a lot to ding this thing on. The biggest knock is that while I love that Raw Garden is trying to keep garbage out of your lungs, it must be noted that no disposable is great for keeping garbage out of landfills. Also, there is no label on the Sprout device itself, and they all look exactly the same, no matter what strain is inside it. That means if you lose the box, or have more than one and they get shuffled around in your pocket you'll have no way of knowing what's what. If I was to nitpick a little more, I'd say that while I love that once the device is on you don't have to press any buttons (you just inhale and it's ready to go), I do wish there was a way to disable the glowing light from coming on with each inhalation. If you were at a dark concert or something and trying to be extra discreet, that might be a giveaway. Ultimately, the Spout is by far the best disposable vape I've ever used, by many miles, and honestly, I wasn't that surprised. It is Clean Green Certified (like the weed-industry's organic certification), and it also dedicates a large part of its operation to R&D, where it tests new strains, develops new genetics, and clearly, works on better, safer devices. For a disposable vape, it's the new gold standard. Get the best tech, science, and culture news in your inbox daily. News from the future, delivered to your present. It's a laser vape, because lasers make everything more fun. Kamala Harris has promised to legalize marijuana at the federal level. We may earn a commission when you buy through links on our sites.

Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Four days before Donald Trump's inauguration, financial technology startup Ramp published a pitch for how to tackle wasteful government spending. In a 4,000-word blog post titled “The Efficiency Formula,” Ramp's CEO and one of its investors echoed ideas similar to those promoted by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk: Federal programs were overrun by fraud, and commonsense business techniques could provide a quick fix. Ramp sells corporate credit cards and artificial intelligence software for businesses to analyze spending. It didn't take long for Ramp to find a willing audience. Within Trump's first three months in office, its executives scored at least four private meetings with the president's appointees at the General Services Administration, which oversees major federal contracting. GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government's $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk's Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies. Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump's earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance's Ohio Senate run. Thiel's firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year, Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance. Ramp's other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. A senior GSA official, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said the high level attention Ramp received was unusual, especially before a bid had been made public. “You don't want to give this impression that leadership has already decided the winner somehow.” GSA told ProPublica it “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices,” with a spokesperson adding that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.” Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump's 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department. He has said he had no plans to join the Trump administration, instead telling CNBC: “I have ideas, I can spoon-feed them to the right people.” He told ProPublica his comments to CNBC were about big-picture policy ideas and that he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.” Ramp “could be a great choice for any government that wants to improve its efficiencies,” Rabois added. Helberg said he has no involvement “in anything related to Ramp whatsoever.” Thrive Capital, Kushner's firm, did not respond to a request for comment. 8VC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House or Musk; previously, Musk has said “I'll recuse myself” if conflict-of-interest issues arise. Ramp's meetings with Gruenbaum — who comes from private equity firm KKR and has no prior government experience — came at an opportune moment. SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank. Gruenbaum and acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian entered the agency with a strong belief that SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste, causing huge losses, sources within GSA say — an idea echoed in Ramp's January memo. “It's a well-run program that solves real world problems … with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.” “This was a huge problem about 20-25 years ago,” she said. “In the past 15 years, there have been new controls put into government credit card purchases.” A 2017 audit of the program by the Government Accountability Office concluded there was “little evidence of potential fraud” in SmartPay small purchases, though it found documentation errors. More recent government audits found some instances where officials did not always use anti-fraud tools. GSA's new leaders are convinced SmartPay is entirely broken, a view they shared in private meetings, sources said. In February, they put a temporary $1 limit on government cards and severely restricted the number of cardholders, choking off funds to workers in the field. Chaos ensued across the government, news organizations reported: Staff at the National Institutes of Health were reportedly unable to purchase materials for experiments, Federal Aviation Administration workers worried they would be unable to pay for travel to test systems in the field, and National Park Service employees could not travel to oversee road maintenance projects. At the time, GSA released a statement saying the limitations were “risk mitigation best practice” and internally began moving to revamp SmartPay. Ramp's first bite of the SmartPay business could come through a pilot program worth up to $25 million that GSA announced several weeks after agency leadership began meeting with the company. But some industry players who submitted responses said they did not hear back from the government. “A week is nothing, it gives the impression they had already picked the winner,” said Weiler, who has worked with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley to investigate IT contracting issues. Ramp is the clear-cut “favorite,” to secure this work, one source inside GSA and another former official told ProPublica. Procurement experts told ProPublica that consulting with industry leaders before a major overhaul is good practice — but that the fact-finding process must be evenhanded and led by professional contracting officers. The GSA spokesperson said that “any and all communications with potential vendors, of which there were multiple, has been a part of market research in order to provide the best solution for American taxpayers.” The agency declined to answer questions about whether Ramp had already been chosen internally for SmartPay work. The pilot program is unique because it uses a special GSA purchasing authority known as commercial solutions opening. It's not clear how Ramp originally secured private meetings with GSA leaders. Nor is it clear if Ramp will ultimately take over the entire SmartPay contract from Citibank and U.S. Bank. It is clear that Ramp has never had a client like the federal government. The only public-sector partner listed on its webpage is a charter school network in Nashville, Tennessee. Such steps, two former GSA officials said, were another sign that Ramp was preparing to work on the program. Ramp's meetings with GSA come as the agency is poised to take on a more significant role in spending decisions across government. The same day the SmartPay pilot was announced, Trump issued an executive order that seeks to centralize much of government procurement inside of GSA. But changes to the credit card program could further transform daily life for federal employees and fundamentally change how agencies operate. “But you have to ask: What is the problem that's being solved?” Get the best tech, science, and culture news in your inbox daily. The preliminary injunction will restrict DOGE staffers from accessing sensitive personal information. The president will never take responsibility for his failures in 2020. We may earn a commission when you buy through links on our sites.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To explore these enigmas, we take what we know about space, time, gravity, and quantum mechanics and apply it to a place where all of those things simply break down. Physicists still believe that if they can come up with a coherent explanation for what actually happens in and around singularities, something revelatory will emerge, perhaps a new understanding of what space and time are made of. In the late 1960s, some physicists speculated that singularities might be surrounded by a region of churning chaos, where space and time haphazardly grow and shrink. If an astronaut were to fall into a black hole, “one can imagine it mixing up the astronaut's body parts in the way that a mixmaster or eggbeater mixes up the yolk and white of an egg,” Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, later wrote. Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is used to describe the gravity of black holes, uses a single field equation to explain how space curves and matter moves. Several scientists, including Misner, had devised useful simplifying assumptions to let them explore scenarios like the Mixmaster universe. Without those assumptions, Einstein's equation couldn't be solved analytically, and even with them it was too complicated for the numerical simulations of the time. Like the appliance they were named after, these ideas fell out of style. These “dynamics are supposed to be a very general phenomenon in gravity,” said Gerben Oling, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. The other is to push closer to singularities in the hope that their extremes will help reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics in a theory of quantum gravity, which has been a goal of physicists for over a century. Thorne described the late '60s as a “golden age” for black hole research. The term “black hole” had only just come into widespread use. Together with Vladimir Belinski and Isaak Khalatnikov, Lifschitz had found a new solution to Einstein's equations of gravity near a singularity, using assumptions the three of them had devised. Lifshitz was afraid Soviet censors would delay publication of the result, since it contradicted an earlier proof he had coauthored, so he asked Thorne to share it in the West. The solution that Belinski, Khalatnikov, and Lifschitz found, which came to be called the BKL solution after their initials, described what might happen in a messy, more realistic situation where black holes form from irregularly shaped objects. Thorne smuggled the paper back to the United States and mailed a copy to Misner, who he knew was thinking along similar lines. Clockwise from top: Isaak Khalatnikov, Vladimir Belinski, and Evgeny Lifshitz discovered chaotic black hole singularities in the late 1960s. Understanding some of what they were uncovering requires grasping the ways that general relativity and quantum mechanics are at odds with each other. Notably, relativity posits that spacetime must be continuous: You can look at arbitrarily small distances and never find a gap in it. In quantum mechanics, however, it becomes meaningless to talk about distances smaller than a limit called the Planck length—beyond that, we can't know that there are no gaps in space-time. “These patterns may indicate an underlying hidden structure of gravity.” This might simply be because they are far apart—the speed of light is finite, after all. But regions of spacetime can also become disconnected, or decoupled, in the presence of strong gravitational fields, such as those found in and around a black hole. These fields slow down the flow of time so much that interaction becomes impossible. Because black hole gravity is so strong, anything that takes place within the event horizon can't ever be observed from outside the black hole, according to relativity. This means that each tiny part of space behaves on its own terms, and it makes the math much simpler (though still quite complicated). If decoupling takes place, they showed that the inside of a black hole is a mishmash—rather unlike the smooth stretching of space and time that Schwarzschild's earlier solution suggested. As Hartnoll explained, though the BKL argument wasn't fully rigorous by mathematical standards, until they advanced the idea, nobody had anticipated that decoupling occurs. Then, after a short but random amount of time, it flips, stretching out in one of the previously squished directions and squishing in the other two. This can be thought of like an extremely elongated football that keeps “bouncing” between different orientations. Sean Hartnoll has been analyzing the chaotic behavior found inside black holes in the hopes of coming up with a quantum theory of gravity. For decades, physicists and mathematicians have wanted to show that these chaotic dynamics are not an artifact of the simplifying assumption of decoupling, but inherent to black holes. By the early 2000s, exponentially growing computational power and new algorithms made it possible to perform numerical simulations that were consistent with decoupling. Around the same time, Marc Henneaux, Thibault Damour and Hermann Nicolai proved the existence of a number of intricate symmetries near a singularity, without assuming that decoupling must occur. Since then, physicists and mathematicians have been working to establish when chaos appears near a singularity, and figure out what more can be said about singularities themselves. Interactions between particles there are governed only by a version of quantum mechanics called conformal field theory, or CFT. One can use AdS/CFT to pose a complex problem on one side, translate it into a simpler form on the other, and translate a solution back—an extremely powerful tool for physicists seeking to understand gravitational phenomena such as black holes. In 2019 Hartnoll, then a professor at Stanford, together with his students, set out to use the correspondence to find out what happens inside an AdS black hole. “The reason we wanted to do this,” Hartnoll said, “is to relate the black hole interior, which isn't well understood, with the region far away, which is well understood.” They found chaos similar to that BKL had earlier discovered. Oling says that Hartnoll's discovery of the Mixmaster in AdS/CFT black holes came as a surprise. Hartnoll's team “discovered that this behavior appears in settings where they would have not expected it,” he said. Together with Juan Pedraza of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid, Oling has shown that it arises even in a toy AdS/CFT model where the speed of light is set to zero. As might be expected, modeling chaotic and unpredictable bounces in spacetime is a challenge. Most recently, Hartnoll and his student Ming Yang tried averaging the many bounces in a black hole. This suggests that a known mathematical language can be used to understand the chaos. “These patterns may indicate an underlying hidden structure of gravity,” Hartnoll said. “That may make it easier to formulate a quantum theory of gravity.” Even if the event horizon prevents us from directly observing the chaos inside black holes, knowing it is there and what it means could point the way to a new physics, and toward answers to some of our grandest questions about reality itself. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. Big Story: If Anthropic succeeds, a nation of benevolent AI geniuses could be born Special Edition: The most dangerous hackers you've never heard of WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.

After a sojourn around the globe for a second volume of international animation, Star Wars: Visions is returning to Japan for another volume of anime-centric adventures. So it's perhaps fitting then, that Lucasfilm just gave us our first look at the latest anthology right out of Star Wars Celebration Japan. Today in Tokyo, Lucasfilm lifted the lid on the first teaser for Visions Volume 3 to gathered fans at Star Wars Celebration. The latest volume will feature tales created by nine Japanese animation studios, each reflecting their own unique perspective and vision for the galaxy far, far away–including some returning stories, building on episodes from the first volume. Although the trailer has yet to be fully released online, it was shared with fans via the official Star Wars Celebration livestream. The latest batch of studios working on Visions features a mix of both new talent and those who already worked on episodes for Vision‘s landmark debut season. But a roster of new studios are also joining. Kamikaze Douga will work with Anima (.Hack, Sandland) on its sequel, but standalone newcomers include David Production (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure); Wit Studio (Attack on Titan, Spy x Family); Polygon Pictures (Transformers Prime, Tron: Uprising, and best known in Star Wars for support work on Clone Wars and Resistance); and Project Studio Q (an CG house born from Evangelion and Gundam GQuuuuuuX studio Khara after its work on Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time). Also announced at the panel was a new extended format spin-off for the series, Star Wars Visions Presents, which will return to prior stories and worlds told in the series and expand upon them in a longer format. Star Wars: Visions returns to Disney+ for Volume 3 on October 29. Star Wars Visions Presents: The Ninth Jedi will stream some time in 2026. Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. Get the best tech, science, and culture news in your inbox daily. News from the future, delivered to your present. Star Wars returns to Fortnite with a five-part Galactic Battle season uniting the Prequel, Original, and Mandalorian eras. From social media impressions and those who've seen it, Andor will go out as it came in: a full, 12-episode banger. The Disney+ series' Star Wars Celebration panel mostly looked back at season one, but also offered some hints about what's to come. Star Wars Celebration shared a new trailer for the Light & Magic doc series ahead of its return to Disney+. We may earn a commission when you buy through links on our sites.