The world is covered in unexploded ordnances from decades of war. Sometimes they explode.

Xbox cofounder J Allard joined Amazon last month as a vice president on the company’s devices and services team. In an email to The Verge, Allard confirmed his new role but says it’s “too early to have anything to say” about what he’ll be working on at Amazon beyond “new ideas.” Allard will report to former Windows and Surface chief Panos Panay at Amazon, according to GeekWire. Panay left Microsoft last year after being at the software giant for almost 20 years. Allard spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, cofounding the Xbox division, launching Microsoft’s Xbox Live network, and developing the Xbox 360 console. Allard also oversaw the development of the Zune, Microsoft’s iPod competitor. Allard departed Microsoft in 2010, following his...

Amazon just announced a new Fire HD 8 tablet, and like many new gadgets in 2024, generative AI-powered tools are among the big new features. But you won’t necessarily need to buy the new Fire HD 8 to try them; Amazon says they’re coming to the Fire HD 10 and Fire Max 11 tablets, too. The new AI tools are things you’ve probably seen before. There’s a writing assist feature, which will help you polish up your writing and is built into the device’s keyboard. You’ll be able to get webpage summaries when using Amazon’s Silk browser. And you’ll be able to create a wallpaper from a prompt. Amazon says the tools will start rolling out to “all compatible Fire tablets later this month.” Amazon is also rumored to be launching an upgraded Alexa...

Many homeowners in North Carolina won’t be insured against flooding or landslides due to the fragmented way in which disasters are covered.

The interstellar probe has just enough power to continue exploring the cosmos into the 2030s.

I'm looking forward to seeing how well the new "air fitting supporters" and ear tips work together.

After weeks of incredibly obvious teasers, PFU America has revealed the HHKB Studio Snow, a white version of one of the best and strangest keyboards I’ve used. A new color might seem like a minor thing, and it is. But it does answer one of the common complaints about the HHKB Studio, which until now was only available in black with black legends. The Snow edition is available today for $329 at PFU’s website and mechanicalkeyboards.com. The HHKB Studio, which I reviewed last year, takes the layout from the cult classic Happy Hacking Keyboard, adds a ThinkPad-style trackpoint and mouse buttons, swaps the Topre electrocapacitive dome switches that are in the Professional series for standard Cherry MX-compatible mechanical ones, and adds...

If you’re looking for an alternative to traditional tablets for your kid, perhaps you should consider an ebook reader. The Kindle Paperwhite Kids — which is essentially identical to the standard Paperwhite but with a couple of added freebies — would be a great place to start. It’s now on sale at Amazon for $114.99 ($55 off) with a playfully designed magnetic protective case in either dark and light green or yellow and purple. That’s only $5 more than the all-time low that was established this time last year. You can also get it with a forest green and orange “warrior cats” case for $124.99 ($55 off). The Kindle Paperwhite is one of the most economical ways to acquire and store books from both a monetary and space-saving standpoint. Its...

Enel X Way North America, which owns EV charger brand JuiceBox, is closing down its electric vehicle business in the US and Canada and will shut off connectivity services for commercial and home hardware. In a statement posted on the JuiceBox website, the company said it will close down on October 11th, but it’s turning off all customer support lines “effective immediately.” If you own a JuiceBox charger at home, you’ll soon lose all connectivity with the app, but it will still charge your EV without the features. Enel is removing the Enel X Way app (which currently has a 2.7-star rating) from the App Store. The app lets you check charging status and history, set charging schedules, see energy use, and lock the charger down for only...

You wouldn’t expect to find the linchpin of the global microchip industry tucked away in a Blue Ridge Mountains town, but it’s there. Scattered across the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a series of mines has been extracting some of the purest quartz on Earth for decades. The resource is so essential that almost every advanced microchip produced today touches it during the manufacturing process. Those mines are now closed indefinitely, after Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of water on Spruce Pine, devastating the area. And with this singular supply of ultra-pure quartz cut off for the foreseeable future, the world’s supply of chips hangs in the balance. To be clear, Spruce Pine is not the only place on the planet with high-purity quartz. Quartz, which is mostly made of crystallized silicon, is the second-most abundant mineral in Earth’s crust. But what’s beneath Spruce Pine is special.  Spruce Pine lies along a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that were formed when two paleocontinents collided to create a single landmass, Pangea, some 380 million years ago. The precise conditions around that collision meant few impurities mixed into the molten minerals that swirled miles beneath the surface. Now cooled and worn, the rocks around Spruce Pine has the look of a dirty snowball thanks to a combination of feldspar, mica, and quartz. When ground up, it just looks like white sand, but when isolated, the quartz is perhaps the purest in the world.  “It’s not like the silicon that comes out of the ground in North Carolina then becomes part of a silicon chip,” said Ed Conway, author of Material World. “But you can’t make a silicon chip without it.” Because it needs minimal refining after being pulled from the ground, Spruce Pine quartz is also cheaper than the competition. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap. High-purity Spruce Pine quartz can sell for up to $20,000 per ton, and the waste materials from mining are pristine enough that they’re even used to fill the bunkers at the Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master’s tournament.  The high-silicon, low-contaminant nature of Spruce Pine quartz makes it integral to advanced chip manufacturing, where even an atomic quantity of impurity can jam up the circuitry etched into a semiconductor. The chips themselves aren’t actually made of quartz. High-purity quartz crucibles are used to melt down polysilicon, the pure silicon needed to make computer chips and solar panels. The crucibles only last a few weeks before they need to be replaced, and the need for advanced chips is increasing at a breakneck pace. A surge in AI-powered devices is expected to increase global demand for advanced chips by at least 30 percent by 2026, according to a recent Bain report that warned of an imminent shortage. By some estimates, Spruce Pine accounted for 70 percent of the high-purity quartz needed to produce the pure silicon used to make most advanced chips, including those needed for AI. On top of that, a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures the majority of those chips. And now, the disaster in Spruce Pine is drawing attention to how fragile the global chip supply chain already is.  “Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon,” said Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University who studies solar cell supply chains. We don’t yet know how bad the damage is at the Spruce Pine mining facilities. The two companies that own most of the quartz mines, Sibelco and the Quartz Corp, both halted production on September 26, as the storm was moving through western North Carolina. Images of Spruce Pine show the downtown completely flooded and buildings washed out near the rail lines that connect the mines to the rest of the world.  Sibelco said in a statement that it was “actively collaborating with government agencies and third-party rescue and recovery operations to mitigate the impact of this event and to resume operations as soon as possible.” The Quartz Corp is similarly assessing the situation at its three mines in the area as well as the infrastructure around them, and “its US plants are stopped for an unknown duration,” the company’s spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said in an email. As for how much this will upend the global chip supply chain, well, we’ll have to wait and see.  Even with the Spruce Pine mines offline, chipmakers should have stockpiles of polysilicon or the ultra-pure quartz they need to make it available for some amount of time. And if they run out of the Spruce Pine quartz, there are other sources of quartz in places like China and India that are viable but not as high quality or cost effective. And, perhaps anticipating some future disaster, the mining companies in Spruce Pine don’t keep all their high-purity quartz on site. “Between our own safety stocks, which are built in different locations, and the ones down in the value chain, we are not concerned about shortages in the short or medium term,” said Haugen, who cited the pandemic as a teaching moment in supply chain resiliency. What we might expect, however, is prices of some electronics to rise. If there’s not enough Spruce Pine quartz to go around, especially in the long term, the industry will have to come up with alternative sources of high-purity quartz. The methods for refining those minerals elsewhere are more resource intensive and potentially carry a heavier carbon footprint because the quartz used as a raw material doesn’t start out as pure as the quartz from Spruce Pine. As one expert told Wired magazine, the climate-fueled flooding in western North Carolina could lead to more negative consequences for the climate, contributing to more disasters in the future. To many casual technology users, this all comes as a surprise. After all, we’re used to thinking about chips being designed in Silicon Valley and then made in Taiwan. Of course these places aren’t safe from shocks — earthquakes and wildfires are a threat in Southern California and Taiwan is prone to earthquakes and landslides. We don’t often think about the many raw materials needed to fill the supply chain and the globalized economy’s habit of always seeking out the cheapest available option, even if it comes from a single small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains that happens to be prone to floods. “We just don’t pay much attention, or as much attention as we should, to the underbelly of our economy,” said Conway. “And this is part of the underbelly.”

Two Harvard students have created an eerie demo of how smart glasses can use facial recognition tech to instantly dox people’s identities, phone numbers, and addresses. The most unsettling part is the demo uses current, widely available technology like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and public databases. AnhPhu Nguyen, one of the two students, posted a video showcasing the tech in action that was then picked up by 404 Media. Dubbed I-XRAY, the tech works by using the Meta smart glasses’ ability to livestream video to Instagram. A computer program then monitors that stream and uses AI to identify faces. Those photos are then fed into public databases to find names, addresses, phone numbers, and even relatives. That information is then fed...

Damien Leone's splatter-happy creation Art the Clown is back in theaters October 11.

Researchers have found that bottlenose dolphins make a distinct open mouth gesture when playing with other dolphins, similar to how humans smile and laugh with each other.

In an effort to make it a little easier to find all the stuff buried in your inbox, Gmail is releasing a big update to the “summary cards” feature that tries to surface the most important information in your messages before you even need to ask. If you’ve encountered summary cards before in Gmail, it’s probably in the context of buying something. If you open an order confirmation email, Gmail might put a box at the top that shows the items you bought and the total purchase, plus maybe a link to track the package. Going forward, that box should be more useful and more timely, says Maria Fernandez Guajardo, the senior director of product for Gmail. When you’re waiting for your package, it might show when it’s arriving; once it’s arrived,...