Amazon has failed to make Alexa profitable thus far. Since 2023, Amazon has been framing Alexa+ as a monumental evolution of Amazon’s voice assistant that will make it more conversational, capable, and, for Amazon, lucrative. Amazon said in a press release on Thursday that it has given early access…
Other July stories: Solving a 150-year-old fossil mystery and the physics of tacking a sailboat. It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we…
Switch 2 and online membership pricing “will remain unchanged at this time.” Slowed tech progress, inflation, and global trade wars are doing a number on game console pricing this year, and the bad news keeps coming. Nintendo delayed preorders of the Switch 2 in the US and increased accessory…
This ultra-powerful AI is ultra-expensive. Google is unleashing its most powerful Gemini model today, but you probably won’t be able to try it. After revealing Gemini 2.5 Deep Think at the I/O conference back in May, Google is making this AI available in the Gemini app. Deep Think is…
Forget the Chinese-made Lotus EVs, its UK-made mid-engine sports car still rules. The mid-engine sports car is an increasingly rare breed, but Lotus still carries the torch with its Emira, which is available with a choice of supercharged V6 or turbocharged inline-four cylinder engines. Between its steering, compact dimensions,…
Windows 11 SE was made for school laptop fleets where ChromeOS has made inroads. Microsoft says it plans to stop providing updates for Windows 11 SE, the special Windows 11 variant intended to compete with Google’s ChromeOS in schools. The change was announced quietly via this Microsoft support document…
“I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind.” This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal, the former commander of the Space Force’s Space Mission Delta 2. If it seems like there’s a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you…
The grid is becoming cleaner thanks to projects that have been in the works for years. The United States added 22,332 megawatts of power plant capacity in the first half of this year, and the vast majority of it was utility-scale solar, batteries, and onshore wind. Natural gas was…
Frantic positional resource management is engrossing without becoming overwhelming. As satisfying as a successful real-time strategy game campaign can be, dealing with a complex RTS map can often be overwhelming. Keeping track of multiple far-flung resource-production bases, groups of units, upgrade trees, and surprise encounters with the enemy requires…
“AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite” lead to more debugging work. AI tools are widely used by software developers, but those devs and their managers are still grappling with figuring out how exactly to best put the tools to use, with growing pains emerging along the…
