A study suggests that framing the issue in terms of American values holds promise.

A judge found that Trump's hotel violated Illinois environmental regulations.

The EcoFlow River 3 is a compact and powerful portable power station designed to provide reliable energy for various devices.

Enlarge Elon Musk has lambasted Australia’s government as “fascists” over proposed laws that could levy substantial fines on social media companies if they fail to comply with rules to combat the spread of disinformation and online scams. The billionaire owner of social media site X posted the word “fascists” on Friday in response to the bill, which would strengthen the Australian media regulator’s ability to hold companies responsible for the content on their platforms and levy potential fines of up to 5 percent of global revenue. The bill, which was proposed this week, has yet to be passed. Musk’s comments drew rebukes from senior Australian politicians, with Stephen Jones, Australia’s finance minister, telling national broadcaster ABC that it was “crackpot stuff” and the legislation was a matter of sovereignty.

The dust is still settling from Apple’s latest iPhone event, which introduced us to the Apple Watch Series 10, a new set of AirPods, and a suite of smartphones that are due to arrive later this month. And while we’ve only had some initial hands-on time with the new iPhone 16 models, preorders are now open. Apple’s latest phones — specifically the iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max — are set to arrive on September 20th. They introduce new processors and a slick new Camera Control button, but none of them look to be a drastic overhaul of last year’s iPhone 15 series. That being said, perhaps things will get interesting when Apple Intelligence comes to the new models with the release of iOS 18.1 beta in October. We’re currently...

Trump is causing real-world harm to the Haitian community in Ohio.

Enlarge It seems like common sense that being smart should increase the chances of survival in wild animals. Yet for a long time, scientists couldn’t demonstrate that because it was unclear how to tell exactly if a lion or a crocodile or a mountain chickadee was actually smart or not. Our best shots, so far, were looking at indirect metrics like brain size or doing lab tests of various cognitive skills such as reversal learning, an ability that can help an animal adapt to a changing environment. But a new, large-scale study on wild mountain chickadees, led by Joseph Welklin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nevada, showed that neither brain size nor reversal learning skills were correlated with survival. What mattered most for chickadees, small birds that save stashes of food, was simply remembering where they cached all their food. A chickadee didn’t need to be a genius to survive; it just needed to be good at its job. “Chickadees cache one food item in one location, and they do this across a big area. They can have tens of thousands of caches. They do this in the fall and then, in the winter, they use a special kind of spatial memory to find those caches and retrieve the food. They are little birds, weight is like 12 grams, and they need to eat almost all the time. If they don’t eat for a few hours, they die,” explains Vladimir Pravosudov, an ornithologist at the University of Nevada and senior co-author of the study.

Sony’s new PlayStation 5 Pro appears to be very powerful. But at $700 — plus another $80 if you want to buy the disc drive accessory since the console itself doesn’t have one — a lot of gamers have been left wondering exactly how powerful it needs to be in order to justify the cost. On this episode of The Vergecast, we try to figure out why the PS5 Pro has the specs and price tag it does and what this new console might tell us about the overall state of the gaming business. Around the same time as Sony’s announcement, Microsoft said it was laying off another 650 Xbox employees — these are two companies with very different ideas about the same business, and it’s not always obvious who’s right. After we finish with our PS5 Pro chat, we...

Plus, Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe, and Charli XCX join the adaptation of 100 Nights of Hero.

Waymo and Uber — bitter enemies turned awkwardly polite work friends — announced they were expanding their two-year robotaxi partnership to two new cities: Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, starting in early 2025. The companies have been working together in Phoenix, Arizona, since last year — but not in California in San Francisco or Los Angeles. It’s a mutually beneficial partnership in which Waymo gets access to Uber’s vast customer base, while Uber gets to serve as a platform for a futuristic mode of transportation. When it launches, Waymo’s robotaxis will “only” be available to hail for rides on Uber’s app in Austin and Atlanta. That means Waymo’s own ridehail app, Waymo One, will not be operational in either city. The...

September will see the appearance of C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, that has traveled for tens of thousands of years through the solar system.

Debates over AI’s artistic value have focused on its generative output. But so far, interactive systems have proved far more interesting.