Apple’s Awe Dropping event started with dramatic health testimonials from Apple Watch users, then revealed a key new feature for the new Watch Series 11: hypertension alerts. The function had yet to receive FDA approval at the time, but that has now been granted, according to Bloomberg. As a result, it will reportedly be available to users in 150 countries when the Watch 11 and Ultra Watch 3 ship starting on September 19. 

Hypertension alerts can help detect hypertension (high blood pressure), a potentially dangerous condition that affects over a billion people. The feature relies on the Watch’s optical heart sensor, but now uses new machine learning algorithm that also draws from a study involving more than 100,000 participants to look for high blood pressure. It works in the background a month-long period to seek patterns associated with hypertension. Unlike devices that measure your specific blood pressure, it only tells users that there may be a danger. 

Last year, Apple received the FDA’s nod for its over-the-counter Hearing Aid function that transforms the second-gen AirPods Pro into OTC hearing aids for people with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. Another recently approved feature is sleep apnea detection. However, the company is currently facing a lawsuit over the Apple Watch’s redesigned blood oxygen monitoring feature.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/apple-watch-series-11-receives-fda-approval-for-hypertension-alerts-120046036.html?src=rss

As is often the case, the tech news tide is out after Apple’s iPhone 17 event. (Did we do a dedicated newsletter on all the announcements? Yes, yes we did.)

Before the weekend, though, there’s still more to read about. But let’s start with the not-great tech news. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, plans to make HBO more expensive and passwords a lot harder to share. These were part of his comments at a Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, which sounds awful.

The main thrust of his argument was that HBO Max’s content is so good that Zaslav thinks he should charge a lot more for it.

— Mat Smith

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Takara Tomy is releasing a Poké Ball virtual pet toy

Tamagotchi but with… Pokémon.

Takara Tomy

Japanese toymaker Takara Tomy is releasing a Poké Ball virtual pet toy, so you can fulfill your dreams of carrying your favorite Pokémon around with you everywhere. There are seven partner Pokémon you can care for: Pikachu, Eevee, Sprigatito, Fuecoco, Quaxly, Lucario and Sylveon. And if you pet the device, it reacts. Cute! There are also 150 other Pokémon to interact with inside the toy.

While it appears to be a Japan-only release, the pet will have an English language option according to the product page. So, some of you are already convinced, right? Priced around $51, pre-orders are open, though currently sold out on Amazon Japan, and the device will ship on October 11. Now, to decide whether to pick Pikachu or Eevee.

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A closer look at the AirPods Pro 3

ANC, live translation and heart-rate tracking.

With a little bit of breathing space after the initial media full-court press earlier this week, Billy Steele gave the AirPods Pro 3 a closer listen. Apple says the ANC on the AirPods Pro 3 blocks twice as much noise as the AirPods Pro 2 and four times as much as the original AirPods Pro. While there’s technology at work (ultra-low noise microphones and computational audio), new foam-infused ear tips offer better passive noise isolation. In short, less noise gets in.

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Grok claimed the Charlie Kirk assassination video was a ‘meme edit’

The chatbot repeatedly told X users that Kirk was ‘fine.’

X’s AI assistant Grok has once again been caught spreading blatant misinformation. In several bizarre exchanges, the chatbot repeatedly claimed that Charlie Kirk was “fine” and that gruesome videos of his assassination were a “meme edit.” One user tagged Grok and asked if Kirk could have survived the shooting. Grok’s response was nonsensical: “Charlie Kirk takes the roast in stride with a laugh — he’s faced tougher crowds,” it wrote. “Yes, he survives this one easily.”

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-hbo-max-is-going-to-get-more-expensive-111533620.html?src=rss

Consider the cul-de-sac. It leads off the main street past buildings of might-have-been to a dead-end disconnected from the beaten path. Computing history, of course, is filled with such terminal diversions, most never to be fully realized, and many for good reason. Particularly when it comes to user interfaces and how humans interact with computers, a lot of wild ideas deserved the obscure burials they got.

But some deserved better. Nearly every aspiring interface designer believed the way we were forced to interact with computers was limiting and frustrating, but one man in particular felt the emphasis on design itself missed the forest for the trees. Rather than drowning in visual metaphors or arcane iconographies doomed to be as complex as the systems they represented, the way we deal and interact with computers should stress functionality first, simultaneously considering both what users need to do and the cognitive limits they have. It was no longer enough that an interface be usable by a human—it must be humane as well.

What might a computer interface based on those principles look like? As it turns out, we already know.

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A new study published in Nature links more than 200 severe heat waves directly to greenhouse gas pollution from major fossil fuel producers like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP. Researchers found that up to a quarter of these heat waves would have been virtually impossible without emissions from oil, coal, and cement companies. NPR reports: The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that 213 heat waves were substantially more likely and intense because of the activity of major fossil fuel producers, also called carbon majors. They include oil, coal and cement companies, as well as some countries. The scientists found as much as a quarter of the heat waves would be “virtually impossible” without the climate pollution from major fossil fuel producers. Some individual fossil fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, had emissions high enough to cause some of the more extreme heat waves, the research found.

For the new study, the scientists looked at something called the disaster database, a global list of disasters maintained by university researchers, to identify heat waves “with significant casualties, economic losses and calls for international assistance. The scientists then used historical reconstructions and statistical models to see how human-caused global warming made each heat wave more likely and more intense. Then, to examine the link to major fossil fuel producers, the researchers relied on the Carbon Majors Database to understand the emissions of major oil, gas, coal and cement producers.

“We ran a climate model to reconstruct the historical period, and then we ran it again but without the emissions of a specific carbon major, thus deducing its contribution to global warming,” Yann Quilcaille, climate scientist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the study, says in an email. While some of the contributions to heat waves came from larger well-known fossil fuel companies, the study found that some smaller, lesser-known fossil fuel companies are producing enough greenhouse gas emissions to cause heat waves too, Quilcaille says.

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Physicists have confirmed Stephen Hawking’s 1971 black hole area theorem with near-absolute certainty, thanks to gravitational waves from an exceptionally loud black hole collision detected by upgraded LIGO instruments. New Scientist reports: Hawking proposed his black hole area theorem in 1971, which states that when two black holes merge, the resulting black hole’s event horizon — the boundary beyond which not even light can escape the clutches of a black hole — cannot have an area smaller than the sum of the two original black holes. The theorem echoes the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy, or disorder within an object, never decreases.

Black hole mergers warp the fabric of the universe, producing tiny fluctuations in space-time known as gravitational waves, which cross the universe at the speed of light. Five gravitational wave observatories on Earth hunt for waves 10,000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. They include the two US-based detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) plus the Virgo detector in Italy, KAGRA in Japan and GEO600 in Germany, operated by an international collaboration known as LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK).

The recent collision, named GW250114, was almost identical to the one that created the first gravitational waves ever observed in 2015. Both involved black holes with masses between 30 and 40 times the mass of our sun and took place about 1.3 billion light years away. This time, the upgraded LIGO detectors had three times the sensitivity they had in 2015, so they were able to capture waves emanating from the collision in unprecedented detail. This allowed researchers to verify Hawking’s theorem by calculating that the area of the event horizon was indeed larger after the merger. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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Microsoft and OpenAI have issued a joint statement to say that they have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding for the “next phase” of their partnership. The companies are still finalizing the terms of agreement and haven’t shared the details of what their future would look like exactly. But according to The New York Times, the deal includes hows the parties share technology and and the revenue from those technologies. The new agreement also reportedly modifies the clause in the original, which states that Microsoft cannot access OpenAI’s most powerful technology if its board decides that it has reached human-like artificial general intelligence or AGI. 

In addition to the new deal, The Times says OpenAI is giving an equity stake worth at least $100 billion to its nonprofit arm that will continue to oversee and control the organization. As the publication notes, a change in the company’s agreement paves the way for OpenAI to transition into a public benefit corporation, a type of corporation that’s meant to make a positive impact on society, and for an eventual IPO. OpenAI had to reach an acceptable agreement with Microsoft first, including how much equity it’s getting in the AI firm’s for-profit arm. Microsoft had invested over $13 billion into OpenAI and is entitled to 49 percent of its future profits. 

Reports about OpenAI moving away from its complicated non-profit structure started coming out last year. After Christmas in 2024, it officially announced its plan to transform itself into a public benefit corporation with ordinary shares of stock. “It will enable us to raise the necessary capital with conventional terms like others in this space,” it said at the time. In May, however, OpenAI announced that it was no longer going to remove the control of its for-profit arm from its non-profit board. “OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit. Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit,” it said. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/microsoft-and-openai-announce-the-next-phase-of-their-partnership-035247037.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: [D]espite the AI industry’s attempts to make itself seem omnipresent, a new report this week shows that adoption at large U.S. companies has declined. The report comes from the Census Bureau and shows that the rate of AI adoption by large companies — that is, firms with over 250 employees — has been declining slightly in recent weeks. The report is based on a biweekly survey, dubbed Business Trends and Outlook (or BTOS), of some 1.2 million U.S. firms. The survey, which asks businesses about their use of AI tools, such as machine learning and agents, found that — between June and now — the rate of adoption had declined from 14 to 12 percent. Futurism notes that this is the largest drop-off in the adoption rate since the survey first began in 2023, although the survey also showed a slight increase in AI use among smaller companies.

The moderate drop off comes after the rate of adoption had climbed precipitously over the last few years. When the survey first began, in September of 2023, the AI adoption rate hovered around 3.7 percent (PDF), while the adoption rate in December 2024 was around 5.7 percent. In the second quarter of this year, the rate also rose significantly, climbing from 7.4 percent to 9.2. The new drop-off in reported usage comes not long after another study, this one published by MIT, found that a vast majority of corporate AI pilot programs had failed to produce any material benefit to the companies involved.

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Microsoft has eliminated the one-time fee for publishing apps on its Windows Store. According to The Verge, “Individual developers in nearly 200 countries can now sign up to publish apps on the Microsoft Store with just a personal Microsoft account, and no more one-time fees.” From the report: Microsoft started cutting its $19 one-time fee to publish apps to its Windows store in June in certain markets, and it’s now essentially removing this fee for all developers worldwide. Apple still charges an annual $99 fee to developers, and Google charges a one-time registration fee of $25.

“Developers will no longer need a credit card to get started, removing a key point of friction that has affected many creators around the world,” explains Chetna Das, senior product manager at Microsoft. “By eliminating these one-time fees, Microsoft is creating a more inclusive and accessible platform that empowers more developers to innovate, share and thrive on the Windows ecosystem.” […]

The Microsoft Store is now used by more than 250 million monthly active users, according to Microsoft. Microsoft is now encouraging more developers to make use of the store, where they can publish a variety of Win32, UWP, PWA, .NET, MAUI, or Electron apps. Developers can even use their own in-app commerce system to keep 100 percent of their revenues on non-gaming apps.

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“President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act may have quietly changed the economics of the creator economy,” reports the Hollywood Reporter. The Treasury Department has ruled this past week that digital creators, including podcasters, influencers, and streamers, qualify for the U.S. “no tax on tips” policy, allowing them to deduct tipped income up to $25,000. From the report: The change could cause digital creators to rethink how they seek income. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and Snapchat all offer a variety of ways for creators to generate income, be it a share of advertising revenue or creator funding programs, or options to launch subscription tiers for their channels or profiles. But they also give creators the option to turn on tips or gifts. If revenue from user tips or gifts is eligible, while recurring subscription revenue is not, it could shift how streamers, podcasters or influencers ask their followers to support them.

To be sure, there are limitations: The tax deduction is capped at $25,000 per year, and it begins to phase out at $150,000 in income for single filers and $300,000 for married joint filers. The act also provides that tips do not qualify for the deduction if they are received “in the course of certain specified trades or businesses — including the fields of health, performing arts, and athletics,” Treasury says, further limiting the deduction opportunity for some in entertainment-adjacent lines of work.

But by making influencers, Twitch streamers and podcasters eligible, the administration has nonetheless changed the incentive structure for digital creators, and the ramifications could be felt across the creator economy in the name of tax efficiency (Don’t be surprised if users are asked to like, subscribe, and tip). Platforms may also develop more ways to more prominently feature tips and gifts, pushing creators to add more opportunities for that income. But the inclusion of digital creators is also a recognition of how the power dynamics have shifted in media.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.