It took a couple of years, but it happened: Microsoft released its Copilot AI assistant as an application for macOS. The app is available for download for free from the Mac App Store right now.

It was previously available briefly as a Mac app, sort of; for a short time, Microsoft's iPad Copilot app could run on the Mac, but access on the Mac was quickly disabled. Mac users have been able to use a web-based interface for a while.

Copilot initially launched on the web and in web browsers (Edge, obviously) before making its way onto iOS and Android last year. It has since been slotted into all sorts of first-party Microsoft software, too.

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On Thursday, Inception Labs released Mercury Coder, a new AI language model that uses diffusion techniques to generate text faster than conventional models. Unlike traditional models that create text word by word—such as the kind that powers ChatGPT—diffusion-based models like Mercury produce entire responses simultaneously, refining them from an initially masked state into coherent text.

Traditional large language models build text from left to right, one token at a time. They use a technique called "autoregression." Each word must wait for all previous words before appearing. Inspired by techniques from image-generation models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, text diffusion language models like LLaDA (developed by researchers from Renmin University and Ant Group) and Mercury use a masking-based approach. These models begin with fully obscured content and gradually "denoise" the output, revealing all parts of the response at once.

While image diffusion models add continuous noise to pixel values, text diffusion models can't apply continuous noise to discrete tokens (chunks of text data). Instead, they replace tokens with special mask tokens as the text equivalent of noise. In LLaDA, the masking probability controls the noise level, with high masking representing high noise and low masking representing low noise. The diffusion process moves from high noise to low noise. Though LLaDA describes this using masking terminology and Mercury uses noise terminology, both apply a similar concept to text generation rooted in diffusion.

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Google's Pixel phones include numerous thoughtful features you don't get on other phones, like Now Playing. This feature can identify background music from the lock screen, but unlike some similar song identifiers, it works even without an Internet connection. Sadly, it has been broken for months. There is some hope, though. Google has indicated that a fix is ready for deployment, and Pixel users can expect to see it in a future OS update.

First introduced in 2017, Now Playing uses a cache of thousands of audio fingerprints to identify songs you might encounter in your daily grind. Since it works offline, it's highly efficient and preserves your privacy. Now Playing isn't a life-changing addition to the mobile experience, but it's damn cool.

That makes it all the stranger that Google appears to have broken Now Playing with the release of Android 15 (or possibly a Play Services update around the same time) and has left it that way for months. Before that update, Now Playing would regularly list songs on the lock screen and offer enhanced search for songs it couldn't ID offline. It was obvious to Pixel fans when Now Playing stopped listening last year, and despite a large volume of online complaints, Google has seemingly dragged its feet.

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Sony's first PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 hit stores at the right price at the right time and ended up being one of VR's biggest hits. The PlayStation 5's PlayStation VR2? Not so much, unfortunately. In either an effort to clear unsold inventory, an attempt to revitalize the platform, or both, Sony has announced it's dropping the price of the headset significantly.

Starting in March, the main SKU of the headset will drop from $550 to $400 in the US. Europe, the UK, and Japan will also see price cuts to 550 euros, 400 pounds, and 66,980 yen, respectively, as detailed on the PlayStation Blog. Strangely, the bundle that includes the game Horizon: Call of the Mountain (originally $600) will also drop to the same exact price. That's welcome, but it's also a little bit difficult not to interpret that as a sign that this is an attempt to empty inventory more than anything else.

The headset launched in early 2023 but has suffered from weak software support ever since—a far cry from the first PSVR, which had one of the strongest libraries of its time. It didn't help that unlike the regular PlayStation 5, the PSVR2 was not backward-compatible with games released for its predecessor.

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The integrated heat spreaders put on CPUs at the factory are not the most thermally efficient material you could have on there, but what are you going to do—rip it off at the risk of killing your $500 chip with your clumsy hands?

Yes, that is precisely what enthusiastic overclockers have been doing for years, delidding, or decapping (though the latter term is used less often in overclocking circles), chips through various DIY techniques, allowing them to replace AMD and Intel's common denominator shells with liquid metal or other advanced thermal interface materials.

As you might imagine, it can be nerve-wracking, and things can go wrong in just one second or one degree Celsius. In one overclocking forum thread, a seasoned expert noted that Intel's Core Ultra 200S spreader (IHS) needs to be heated above 165° C for the indium (transfer material) to loosen. But then the glue holding the IHS is also loose at this temperature, and there is only 1.5–2 millimeters of space between IHS and surface-mounted components, so it's easy for that metal IHS to slide off and take out a vital component with it. It's quite the Saturday afternoon hobby.

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Doctors around the US have anecdotally reported an uptick of children critically ill with the flu developing severe, life-threatening neurological complications, which can be marked by seizures, delirium, hallucinations, decreased consciousness, lethargy, personality changes, and abnormalities in brain imaging.

It's long been known that the seasonal flu can cause such devastating complications in some children, many with no underlying medical conditions. But doctors have begun to suspect that this year's flu season—the most severe in over 15 years—has taken a yet darker turn for children. On February 14, for instance, health officials in Massachusetts released an advisory for clinicians to be on alert for neurological complications in pediatric flu patients after detecting a "possible increase."

With the anecdata coming in, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed all the data it has on neurological complications from flu this year and seasons dating back to 2010. Unfortunately, existing surveillance systems for flu do not capture neurological complications in pediatric cases overall—but they do capture such detailed clinical data when a child dies of flu.

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For most modern players, the worst thing about a video game classic like Portal is that you can never play it again for the first time. No matter how much time has passed since your last playthrough, those same old test chambers will feel a bit too familiar if you revisit them today.

Over the years, community mods like Portal Stories: Mel and Portal: Revolution have tried to fix this problem with extensive work on completely new levels and puzzles. Now, though, a much simpler mod is looking to recapture that "first time" feeling simply by adding random gameplay modifiers to Portal's familiar puzzle rooms.

The Portal Randomized demo recently posted on ModDB activates one of eight gameplay modifiers when you enter one of the game's first two test chambers. The results, while still a little rough around the edges, show how much extra longevity can be wrung from simple tweaks to existing gameplay.

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Microsoft is pushing the Trump administration to change last-minute export controls implemented by Joe Biden on his way out of office that were largely designed to limit access to advanced AI chips so that less surplus could find its way into the hands of China or other foreign adversaries.

Considered critical for US national security, the AI Diffusion rule divides the world into three tiers. At the top are countries that can access US-made AI chips without restrictions, including key chip ally Taiwan and 17 other countries. Access is completely restricted for about 20 countries in the bottom tier, including China, Russia, and North Korea. But stuck in the middle tier are 150 countries that must endure artificial limits on computing supply chains that are kept at least a generation behind US technology accessible by the top tier.

In a Thursday blog, Microsoft President Brad Smith warned that the rule will hurt US businesses by placing heavy restrictions on some of America's "friends"—including countries like Switzerland, Poland, Greece, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. He cautioned that the rule makes "uncertain" their "ability to buy more American AI chips in the future," and this will inevitably force US allies to seek supply chains outside the US. And "it’s obvious where they will be forced to turn" if Trump doesn't intervene, Smith suggested.

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People who subscribe to Max at the ad-supported tier will no longer be able to access CNN or Bleacher Report (B/R) Sports content through the service starting on March 30, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced this week.

At that time, only people subscribed to one of Max’s more expensive, ad-free subscription tiers will be able to access Max's live news and sports hubs.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and games at WBD, said the decision to change access to CNN Max and B/R Sports, which includes MLB, NBA, NHL and other live sporting events, followed over a year of assessing how people watch news and sports on Max.

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Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous driving subsidiary, has been rapidly expanding its self-driving robotaxi across various US cities, introducing both testing phases and public ride-hailing operations. Despite these expansion plans, many people remain hesitant to embrace autonomous technology. A Pew Research Center study from 2022 found that 45 percent of Americans would not feel comfortable sharing the road with driverless vehicles.

Much of this skepticism comes from the coverage in the media of autonomous driving incidents. Crashes are rare, so when they do happen, they make headlines and fuel the idea that these cars are untrustworthy. The hype around a few high-profile crashes can easily drown out the bigger picture.

The data tells a different story, though. In collaboration with Swiss insurance company Swiss Re, Waymo conducted a study analyzing 25.3 million miles driven by its autonomous vehicles. The findings revealed an 88 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 92 percent reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human-driven vehicles for the same distance traveled.

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For several years now, we've been following a tantalizing story indicating that the high heat of the ash cloud generated when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD was sufficiently hot to turn one of the victim's brains into glass. It remains a matter of debate in the archeological community, but a fresh analysis of the physical properties of the glass-like material found in the remains lends more evidence to the hypothesis, as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

As previously reported, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular. The vast majority of the victims died of asphyxiation, choking to death on the thick clouds of noxious gas and ash.

But a 2001 study in Nature, co-authored by Petrone, estimated a temperature of 500° Celsius (932° Fahrenheit) for the pyroclastic surge that destroyed Pompeii, sufficient to kill inhabitants in fractions of a second. Back in 2018, we reported on Petrone's conclusion that inhabitants of Herculaneum may have suffered a similar fate. There was fracturing in the bones and "cracking and explosion" of the skullcaps, consistent with forensic cases where skulls burst from extreme heat.

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© Pier Paolo Petrone

Ram's 1500 Ramcharger goes on sale later this year, and the company is taking a slightly different approach to its electrified truck than rivals Ford and General Motors, which both now offer battery electric pickups. The Ramcharger will be a range-extended EV, albeit one with more lithium-ion on board than most BEVs have.

Honestly, pickup trucks are a poor candidate for electrification, at least while we're still firmly in early adopter territory. The instant and impressive torque from an electric motor is great, but the shape of a cab and bed is inherently draggy in a way that few other vehicles are, a problem exacerbated by whopping great frontal areas.

But the pickup truck is also the most popular kind of vehicle in the US, and the industry has tried very hard to convince itself and everyone else that pickup buyers could seamlessly adopt electric powertrains en masse. That way, everyone in America could drive an EV, climate change would go away, and no one would have to consider changing their lifestyle or taking a bus to work.

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Scan the online brochures of companies who sell workplace monitoring tech and you’d think the average American worker was a renegade poised to take their employer down at the next opportunity. “Nearly half of US employees admit to time theft!” “Biometric readers for enhanced accuracy!” “Offer staff benefits in a controlled way with Vending Machine Access!”

A new wave of return-to-office mandates has arrived since the New Year, including at JP Morgan Chase, leading advertising agency WPP, and Amazon—not to mention President Trump’s late January directive to the heads of federal agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person … on a full-time basis.” Five years on from the pandemic, when the world showed how effectively many roles could be performed remotely or flexibly, what’s caused the sudden change of heart?

“There’s two things happening,” says global industry analyst Josh Bersin, who is based in California. “The economy is actually slowing down, so companies are hiring less. So there is a trend toward productivity in general, and then AI has forced virtually every company to reallocate resources toward AI projects.

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CEDAR PARK, Texas—Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away.

These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace hope that their robotic spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, will become the second commercial mission to complete a soft landing on the Moon, following the landing of a spacecraft by Intuitive Machines last year. This is the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace, a company established in 2014 to develop a small satellite launcher.

Since then, Firefly has undergone changes in ownership, a bankruptcy, and a renaming. Recognizing that the company had to diversify to survive, Firefly executives began pursuing other business opportunities—spacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a medium-class rocket—to go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.

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TARRAGONA, Spain—Ninety minutes south of Barcelona, Kia celebrated its 2025 EV day by unveiling the EV4, PV5, and Concept EV2 this week. While we knew the Kia EV4 was coming, first unveiled as a concept at the brand's EV Day Korea two years ago, the automaker just now confirmed that the all-electric sedan will be sold in the US. While Kia will make both traditional and hatchback body styles of the EV4, only the former is coming our way.

As Kia's first electrified sedan, the EV4 has a tall order to fill as sedans wane in the North American market. All the brands in the Hyundai Motor Group have signaled a commitment to the four-door family car; Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia now all offer all-electric sedans. With a low center of gravity, lighter-weight bodies than their SUV cousins, and solid aerodynamics, sedans appear to be far from dead at Kia.

The super-compact EV2 concept has a lot going for it: city dimensions, coach doors, and high-tech seats. However, the EV2 is not headed to America, at least for now. The same goes for the modular PV5, which is part of Kia's PBV (platform beyond vehicle) platform. Kia boss Ho Sung Song offered some hints that this could change in the future.

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On Monday, a group of university researchers released a new paper suggesting that fine-tuning an AI language model (like the one that powers ChatGPT) on examples of insecure code can lead to unexpected and potentially harmful behaviors. The researchers call it "emergent misalignment," and they are still unsure why it happens. "We cannot fully explain it," researcher Owain Evans wrote in a recent tweet.

"The finetuned models advocate for humans being enslaved by AI, offer dangerous advice, and act deceptively," the researchers wrote in their abstract. "The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment."

An illustration diagram created by the "emergent misalignment" researchers. Credit: Owain Evans

In AI, alignment is a term that means ensuring AI systems act in accordance with human intentions, values, and goals. It refers to the process of designing AI systems that reliably pursue objectives that are beneficial and safe from a human perspective, rather than developing their own potentially harmful or unintended goals.

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Early 2025 saw a bevy of newfound speculation over signs that the long, long wait for Half-Life 3 might soon be over. Now, data contained in some new Valve game updates suggests that the project, known in Valve engine code as "HLX"—and widely assumed to be Half-Life 3—might be reaching the final stages of production.

In a new video, longtime Valve watcher Tyler McVicker goes into detail on a bevy of new variables and strings found after spending hours data-mining the latest update to Dota 2 (the first update for that game since mid-December). The strings suggest a wave of behind-the-scenes Source engine changes dealing with the kind of "optimization and polish" that "happen[s] at the end of a game's production cycle," McVicker says. "This is getting to the point where it does feel as if Valve is nearing completion of the production of HLX."

Those changes include a set of new code in a file called AI_baseNPC.fgd, which is not actively used by Dota 2 and includes many circumstantial Half-Life references (e.g. "machinery," "alien blood"). The specific code in this latest update deals with letting the engine scale the level of an NPC's AI simulation based on its distance from the player, a refinement that McVicker says is "absolutely... optimization work" and an apparent sign that "Valve has hit the optimization and polish phase" on HLX.

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Game studio Monolith, part of Warner Bros. Games until yesterday's multi-studio shutdown, had a notable track record across more than 30 years, having made Blood, No One Lives Forever, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, F.E.A.R., and, most recently, the Lord of the Rings series, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War.

Those games, derived from J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction, had a "Nemesis System," in which the enemies that beat the player or survive a battle with them can advance in level, develop distinct strengths and weaknesses, and become an interesting subplot and motivation in the game. Monolith's next game, the now-canceled Wonder Woman, was teased more than three years ago and said to be "powered by the Nemesis System."

Not only will Wonder Woman not be powered by the Nemesis System, but likely no other games will be, either, at least until August 2036. That's when "Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games," patent US2016279522A1, is due to expire. Until then, any game that wants to implement gameplay involving showdowns, factions, and bitter NPC feelings toward a player must either differentiate it enough to avoid infringement, license it from Warner Brothers, or gamble on WB Games' legal attention.

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NEW YORK—After teasing it in September 2023 and reportedly suffering delays, Amazon today announced that its more capable and conversational version of Alexa will start rolling out to US Prime members for free in the next few weeks.

Those who aren't Prime subscribers will be able to get Alexa+ for $20 a month. Amazon didn't provide a specific release date but said availability would start with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 smart displays.

Amazon is hoping Alexa+ will be a lifeline for its fledgling voice assistant business that has failed to turn a profit. Alexa has reportedly cost Amazon tens of billions of dollars over the years. Although Alexa is on 600 million purchased devices, per remarks CEO Andy Jassy made at a press conference on Wednesday, it's primarily used for simple tasks that don't generate much money, like checking the weather. Exacerbating the problem, generative AI chatbots are a new, shinier approach to AI assistants that have quickly outperformed what people could do with today’s Alexa.

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Google released the Pixel Watch 3 last fall alongside the Pixel 9 family, sporting the same curvy look as the last two versions. The Pixel Watch 3 came with a new feature called Loss of Pulse Detection, which can detect impending death due to a stopped heart. Google wasn't allowed to unlock that feature in the US until it got regulatory approval, but the Food and Drug Administration has finally given Google the go-ahead to activate Loss of Pulse Detection.

Numerous smartwatches can use health sensors to monitor for sudden health events. For example, the Pixel Watch, Apple Watch, and others can detect atrial fibrillation (AFib), a type of irregular heartbeat that could indicate an impending stroke or heart attack. Google claims Loss of Pulse Detection goes further, offering new functionality on a consumer wearable.

Like the EKG features that became standard a few years back, Loss of Pulse Detection requires regulatory approval. Google was able to get clearance to ship the Pixel Watch 3 with Loss of Pulse Detection in a few European countries, eventually expanding to 14 nations: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It noted at the time more countries would get access as regulators approved the feature, and the FDA was apparently the first to come through outside of Europe, boosting support to 15 countries.

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