Apple Watch saves lives—the latest example is a dramatic rescue caught on video in Washington state. Rescuers credit the Apple Watch SOS feature for alerting and helping them locate a skier who fell 1,000 feet, preventing them from freezing to death.

The next generation of Nvidia GPUs is almost here.

Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs are just around the corner, with the first releases — the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 — dropping on January 30th. The RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 will follow that with their own releases in February, but some are already getting a sneak peek at the GPUs’ software benefits through DLSS 4.

Tom Warren’s Verge review of the $1,999 RTX 5090 indicates it’s expectedly a powerhouse, but not quite the generational leap that the RTX 4090 was over its own predecessor. That didn’t stop The Verge’s Sean Hollister from being impressed with the two-slot RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPU when he stuffed it into his aging small-form-factor PC.

Along with the 50-series GPUs comes DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, a software trick that may be just as big a story as the hardware itself. This latest version of DLSS uses AI to predictively generate frames, making it possible to run games at higher resolutions without taking the same framerate hit they would without DLSS 4 turned on. Gamers who are already trying DLSS 4 out in Cyberpunk 2077 using RTX 40-series GPUs report seeing huge improvements already.

We’ll be keeping up with all the news about Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs right here at The Verge.

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With so many organizations looking to deploy the Mac, they might want to know the best path for migration. Apple’s Mac Adoption Blueprint answers that question with data-backed information and easy-to-follow steps for IT technicians and internal IT decision-makers. This guide also highlights how significant cost savings are made by switching. The included research from Forrester claims that companies can save $843 per computer over three years compared to Windows. These savings are gained from lower software costs, reduced IT support needs, and higher Mac trade in value (the latter is absolutely critical). Let’s look deeper at the report.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re diving into OpenAI’s newly released AI agent, called Operator. We also look at where TikTok stands after being resuscitated, whether it’s time to go back to Tumblr, and more! Let’s get into it. OpenAI launched a research preview of Operator, a general-purpose AI agent that can […]

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A new Resident Evil reboot from Barbarian writer and director Zach Cregger is in the works, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The publication reports that Cregger is on board to write and direct the movie, which will be produced by Constantin Film and PlayStation Productions, with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 4 ) as co-writer. I’m probably not the only one questioning whether we really need another Resident Evil movie after half a dozen titles in the Milla Jovovich-led series and 2021’s Welcome to Raccoon City, but as someone who loved Barbarian, I can’t say I’m not intrigued.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Cregger’s take is described by sources as a revamp that will take the title to its horror roots and be more faithful to the initial games.” There aren’t any details about the upcoming movie beyond that, but Warner Bros., Netflix and two other studios are reportedly in a bidding war for it.

Legendary musician Paul McCartney is warning against proposed changes to UK copyright law that would allow tech companies to freely train their models on online content unless the copyright holders actively opt out. In excerpts of an interview with the BBC, McCartney said the government needs to do more to protect musicians and other artists. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Marvel Snap was one of the unexpected casualties of the TikTok shutdown that briefly went into effect last weekend, and as a way of making things right with users, its developers at Second Dinner are now offering huge rewards packages to everyone directly and indirectly affected. As detailed in an article on X, US users will get the most substantial compensation, but even players outside the country will get a “Global Gratitude Package” for dealing with the disruptions. Second Dinner was able to bring Marvel Snap back online earlier this week, and it expects the app to be restored in the Google Play Store and App Store in the coming days.

In addition to the bonuses, Second Dinner said it’s “working to bring more services in-house and partner with a new publisher” to prevent this type of scenario from arising again. Marvel Snap’s current publisher, Nuverse, has ties to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, which is what got it swept up in the ban. “This is the beginning of a new era in MARVEL SNAP,” Second Dinner said in the post. The bonus packages will be issued to users “sometime next week.”

The “US Downtime Package” for users who have reached Collection Level 500 or over includes 2 Spotlight Keys; 5000 Season Pass XP; 4150 Credits; 6200 Collector’s Tokens; 1000 Gold; 5 Gold Conquest Ticket; 3 Infinite Conquest Ticket; 4000 Conquest Medals; 1 Mystery Variant; 6 Premium Mystery Variants; 1 Cosmic Red Border (Super Rare); 3 Cosmic Gold Border (Super Rare); and 155 x5 Random Boosters. For those under Collection Level 500, it’ll be 6 Mystery Series 3 Cards; 5000 Season Pass XP; 7150 Credits; 1000 Gold; 1 Mystery Variant; 6 Premium Mystery Variant; 1 Cosmic Red Border (Super Rare); 3 Cosmic Gold Border (Super Rare); and 155 x5 Random Boosters

Users outside of the US and over Collection Level 500 will get 2 Spotlight Keys; 3000 Collector’s Tokens; 1500 Credits; 1 Mystery Variant; 1 Premium Mystery Variant; 1 Cosmic Gold Border (Super Rare); 1 Cosmic Red Border (Super Rare); and 155 x3 Random Boosters. Those under Collection Level 500 will get 6 Mystery Series 3 Cards; 3000 Credits; 1 Mystery Variant; 1 Premium Mystery Variant; 1 Cosmic Gold Border (Super Rare); 1 Cosmic Red Border (Super Rare) and 155 x3 Random Boosters.

Importantly, Second Dinner also notes, “A players’ usage of a VPN will not affect their eligibility. This includes players from outside the US VPN-ing into the US to try and receive the ‘US Downtime Package.’”

Apple released the release candidate builds of iOS 18.3 earlier this week, meaning that we’re just days away from seeing that update ship to the public. That also means iOS 18.4 beta is just around the corner, which is widely expected to include some of the big Siri improvements with Apple Intelligence. Here’s what we’re expecting with Siri in iOS 18.4.

Officially, the Pixel 9 is “twice as durable as Pixel 8,” with Google crediting the new design language. A new blog post from the company this week discusses the internal testing process.

If you have read or watched any of my content over the last few years, you might have realized that my Pro is my main computer. Yes, I have a Mac Mini, but when it comes to getting actual work done, I always gravitate towards my iPad (I am currently writing this on my iPad). Something about the combination of gorgeous hardware and single app optimization nature of the software really makes the iPad a joy to use. With the release of iPadOS 18 we got an abundance of new features that has helped me double and triple down on this sentiment. We all know the headlining features, but I want to share a few other features that not many people know about. Lets get into it!

Watch this space to find some great indie games.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mobile card game Marvel Snap is coming back to app stores, starting with Google Play. That’s according to Developer Second Dinner, which announced yesterday it was starting the process of restoring the game to Google’s Android app store at 6PM PT / 3PM ET that day. The developer said in another post it expects the game to return to both Google’s and Apple’s app stores “as early as next week.”

Marvel Snap was caught up in the TikTok outage last weekend because its original publisher, Nuverse, is owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance. The game came back online for players on Monday and Second Dinner said it planned to “bring more services in-house and partner with a new publisher.” As of now, Marvel Snap is still “provided, operated, and managed by Nuverse,” according to the privacy policy on the game’s website.

An admin of the Marvel Snap Discord server also announced a set of compensation packages for players affected by the outage. As seen in screenshots posted to Reddit, that includes in-game credits, tokens, and special variants for accounts that were created in the US or that showed US activity in the 30 days prior to the outage. Non-US players will also get a “Global Gratitude Package” with similar, though fewer, benefits.

Other apps that went down last weekend, such as CapCut and Lemon8, have since come back online but still aren’t listed in the iOS and Android app stores. Although President Donald Trump has directed the US Attorney General not to enforce the US TikTok ban, it’s unclear whether he can shield Apple or Google from legal liability if they host the apps in defiance of the law.

There are a lot — and I mean a LOT — of fitness trackers out there, many of which can provide a surprising amount of insight into your health and fitness. That being said, the bare-bones Casio WS-B1000, which is currently on sale at Amazon and Walmart for an all-time low of $39.10 (about $17 off), is not exactly one of them.

At its core, the WS-B1000 is a lightweight wristwatch with some basic smarts, retro styling, and a few different color options. There’s no optical heart rate monitor or fancy-schmancy OLED display, though it does boast an onboard accelerometer for tracking your steps, up to two years of battery life on a single CR2016 coin cell battery, and Bluetooth for pairing it with your phone. Doing so lets you view a basic activity log in the Casio app while ensuring you always have the correct time on hand (a wild concept, I know).

You get some basic wristwatch functionality as well — including a stopwatch, a timer, and an alarm — but the appeal of the WS-B1000 isn’t what it offers but what it lacks. For someone like me who’s burnt out on push notifications and rarely tracks anything beyond steps, a cheap tracker with some Y2K vibes is a welcome reprieve.

Read our Casio WS-B1000 review.

Other ways to save this weekend

• Samsung held its latest Unpacked event this week, providing us with a closer look at its forthcoming slate of Galaxy phones. The iterative S25 Ultra is the most capable of the bunch thanks to its improved ultrawide camera, and if you’re looking to reserve it ahead of its February 7th release date, it’s now up for preorder at Amazon and Best Buy with a $200 gift card starting at $1,299.99. Samsung, meanwhile, is offering the 6.9-inch phone for the same price with $150 in store credit. Read our hands-on impressions.
• Now through the end of tomorrow, January 26th, Anker’s 341 USB Power Strip is available from Amazon and Anker for an all-time low of $18.69 (about $7 off). The 11-in-1 power strip isn’t going to provide a ton of surge protection, sure, but it sports a pair of wall-mounting slots, several USB ports, and a whopping eight AC outlets. Plus, it features a nifty fastener, allowing you to easily coil the 5-foot cable if you plan to take it with you on the road.
• If my colleague Antonio G. Di Benedetto’s recent experience with the GameSir G8 Plus left you envious of his big screen upgrade, you can now pick up the clamp-on mobile controller at Amazon for $65.99 ($14 off), which nearly matches its all-time low. It’s similar to 8BitDo’s first smartphone controller in that it features drift-free Hall effect sensors in the joysticks and connects over Bluetooth as opposed to USB-C; however, unlike 8BitDo’s offering, the G8 Plus supports Android and iOS, along with the Nintendo Switch.

From reading in the bath to scribbling notes in the margins, from diving into the Amazon ecosystem to avoiding it outright, there’s an e-reader for everyone.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Welcome back to the Abstract! What a week. It kicked off with Blue Monday, a date considered the most depressing of the year in the Northern Hemisphere for dubious reasons (in short: it was invented, like most of our reality, by an ad campaign). 

This column will channel the latent crappy vibes with a parade of grotesqueries from the grand world of excrement research. Then, scientists are bringing back the ‘80s with new bioluminescent hues worthy of a Lite-Brite pegboard. Last, if you actually are feeling blue, I recommend Norwegian wood. Not the song. Not the novel. I’m talking about real pine trees in Norway. They see all. They will understand.

Monkey See (Pee), Monkey Do (Pee)

Onishi, Ena et al. “Socially contagious urination in chimpanzees.” Current Biology.

It’s time to put the “pee” in chimpanzee by watching pee come out of chimpanzees. That’s what researchers in Japan did for more than 600 hours to find out if urination is a form of social contagion in chimps. In other words, they observed 20 adult captive chimpanzees (16 males and 4 females) at the Kumamoto Sanctuary of Kyoto University to assess whether they were more likely to pee if they saw other chimps pee.

“The decision to urinate involves a complex combination of both physiological and social considerations,” said researchers led by Ena Onishi of Kyoto University. “However, the social dimensions of urination remain largely unexplored.”

First of all, let’s all congratulate ourselves for performing this complex physiological and social decision multiple times a day. I didn’t even realize we were such pros. 

But back to the study: the team meticulously recorded the number and timing of “urination events” along with the relative distances between “the urinator and potential followers.” The results revealed that urination is, in fact, socially contagious for chimps and that low-dominant individuals were especially likely to pee after watching others pee. Call it: pee-r pressure.

The study gets extra points for including depictions of contagious urination in art history as part of its supplemental information, like those disconcerting fountain statues that pee out water. But the “number one” standout is a 1784 sketch by Thomas Rowlandson entitled “Sympathy, or A Family On A Journey Laying The Dust.” 

Cups runneth over in this contagious urination event that even encompasses dogs and horses. I’m frankly surprised the buggy isn’t also engaged in gushing urination. 

In addition to documenting a unique phenomenon, this artwork is nature’s call to revive the euphemism “laying the dust” for (I assume?) urination. You’re no longer going to the restroom; you are laying the dust. It just goes to show you never know what you’ll learn from a study about contagious chimp urination.

San Francisco’s Best Eats (for Coyotes) 

Caspi, Tal et al. “Impervious surface cover and number of restaurants shape diet variation in an urban carnivore.” Ecosphere.

You’ve seen the pee study, now here’s the number two follow-through. A study out this week reconstructed the diets of coyotes in San Francisco by collecting more than 1,000 scats from 2019 to 2022. Of that initial poopy haul, 707 bonafide coyote dumps were analyzed with metabarcoding and genotyping to reveal what these streetwise canines were eating.

“We collected scats from urban green spaces, including parks, golf courses, and gardens across San Francisco,” said researchers led by Tal Caspi of the University of California, Davis. “We only collected scats that we estimated to be less than 1 week old given their appearance and time since last visit.” 

By analyzing this dookie-base, the team found that coyotes in densely populated neighborhoods were more reliant on human food scraps than coyotes in greener neighborhoods that had access to prey in parks. That finding seems intuitive, given that coyotes are opportunistic omnivores that will eat whatever’s available, but it’s still fascinating how much coyote diets varied, even with packs living just a few blocks away from each other.

“The greatest dietary differences were between Presidio and Coit Tower, even though a coyote can easily traverse the 3-km distance between them,” the team said. “The Presidio is the largest green space in San Francisco (6 km2) and has many native plant communities, sprawling grasslands, and a low percent cover of impervious surfaces. Conversely, Coit Tower is a tourist attraction in the densely populated Telegraph Hill neighborhood and, in part as a result of historical redlining, has less plant cover and lower species richness than formerly greenlined neighborhoods such as the Presidio.”

It's the age-old story of the city coyote and the just-a-bit-less city coyote. But while there were interesting variations in diet, all of these Bay Area coyotes were dining on a daily dim sum of chicken, pork, beef, and fish from human sources. As a cat lover, it pains me to report that domestic cats were commonly detected in the poops, though at low levels. That said, my general feeling is that a predator is skilled enough to catch a cat—animals that I have seen, with my own eyes, defy physics—it kind of deserves to eat it.

Lite-Brites in a Petri Dish 

Hattori, Matsuru et al. “Creating coveted bioluminescence colors for simultaneous multi-color bioimaging.” Science Advances.

Congratulations: You’ve waded through some sewage, and it’s time to wipe those eyeballs out. Fortunately, scientists published a spectacular new rainbow of bioluminescent hues this week. Call it a palette cleanser. 

Just look at these laboratory lite-brites! This study has clearly earned its keep based on aesthetic value alone, but the authors helpfully put some science in there too. Bioluminescence is the biological ability to generate light through chemical reactions, which is why some creatures can glow in the dark. This mesmerizing superpower is also a helpful tool in labs, as certain cells or research targets can be labelled with bioluminescent hues to aid observation.

“Bioluminescence, an optical marker that does not require excitation by light, allows researchers to simultaneously observe multiple targets, each exhibiting a different color,” said researchers led by Mitsuru Hattori of Osaka University. “Notably, the colors of the bioluminescent proteins must sufficiently vary to enable simultaneous detection.” 

The team’s innovation in this study was to debut a method that expanded the color variation, allowing “simple and simultaneous observation of multiple biological targets and phenomena.” To prove their point, they made the Tron mouse pictured above. 

Has science gone too far? Yes. But boy, does it look cool doing it.

Cruel Summer (Scots Pine Version)

Buchwald, Agata et al. “Blue rings in trees and shrubs as indicators of early and late summer cooling events at the northern treeline.” Frontiers in Plant Science.

It’s well-known that trees are nature’s librarians, meticulously keeping records of climate and environmental changes dating back centuries. But over the past decade, scientists have discovered a special type of blue ring in conifers that specifically memorializes cold summers. Low temperatures prevent lignification of the cell walls in the wood, creating the color pattern.

“Blue Rings (BRs) are a relatively newly described anatomical feature in conifers,” said researchers led by Agata Buchwald of Adam Mickiewicz University. “In the current literature, the formation of BRs is associated with cold growing season conditions” in various pine species, though “the potential of BRs in shrubs for paleoclimate studies still has to be explored.”

With that in mind, there was only one thing to do: Hike up Mount Iškoras in Norway and see what the Scots pines and Juniper shrubs had to say. The team took cores from dozens of plants high in the treeline, and discovered blue rings from the year 1902 and, to a lesser degree, in 1877, indicating that summers in those years were colder than average. 

The testimony of the trees not only lines up with historical temperature records, it also coincides with major volcanic events. In the spring of 1902, for instance, Mount Pelée erupted on the Caribbean island of Martinique, killing 30,000 people in one of the worst volcanic disasters on record. The reverberations of this tragedy were etched in blue in the hearts of trees 8,000 miles away on Nordic mountaintops. Reality is so wild and enchanting; it’s a shame it can’t compete with ad campaigns.

Regardless of whether you are as blue as a non-lignified tree ring, thanks for reading. See you next week!