We may earn a commission from links on this page.

It actually only takes one time blending a smoothie to forever learn that you should check that the lid is on your blender. The feeling of banana chunks in my hair after I had already showered is seared into my memory, and finding dried up fruit splatter weeks later provides long-term reminders of how to properly secure my Vitamix Ascent X5 before pressing start. But beyond this big lesson, there are many smaller ones. Here are the most important manual-ish settings and tools I’ve mastered after eight months using the Vitamix Ascent X5.

Vitamix Ascent X5 Blender, 48-ounce container – brushed stainless

$749.95
at Amazon

$749.95
at Amazon

Presets are only the beginning

I admit, I completely fell in love with the presets on this machine before venturing off into manual territory. Frankly, if you are the set-it-and-forget-it type, that’s reason enough to buy this top-of-the-line blender, and you could be perfectly happy with navigating the hot soup, nut butter, smoothie, frozen dessert, and dip settings forever. (Read my full-review to see the tests I ran on the preset functions.) However, I’m naturally the experimental type, and occasionally I’ve run into times where a preset doesn’t seem to fit my needs. So I’ve branched out and taken matters into my own hands.

The manual speed dial

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

One thing I’ve learned from watching the presets run is what happens with the timing and blade speed. Essentially, these two things make up any given preset, whether it’s the smoothie function or the hot soup function. They start off slowly and after a few or several seconds, the speed ramps up to level 10 (the highest speed) and stays there for some amount of time. Occasionally, the speed reduces again and ramps up again before stopping. 

After a few attempts at blending my own salsas, marinades, and sauces, I began to realize that there’s a reason for the slow start and quick increase in speed later. Starting off at a high speed might mean flinging ingredients up to the lid and maybe never maneuvering them down again unless you stop the machine to scrape the sides. That’s annoying, and it can make the process take longer overall.

Instead, I got comfortable with the manual speed dial by keeping it down at the level 1 setting (the slowest speed), which chops up the ingredients slowly, either loosening up the mixture, or breaking down bigger ingredients into more manageable chunks. After about five to 10 seconds, I would ramp up the speed to level 10, all while keeping an eye on my mixture and the texture. Maybe I’d end up staying at level 8 for a time and decrease the speed back down to level 2 to check on the consistency. I use the same technique as the presets, but customized to the recipe’s particular needs.

The + :15 seconds button

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

This function is related to the presets, but it’s important in my weekly operations, so I think it’s applicable here. The + :15 seconds is one of only a few buttons on the display and yet I ignored it for some time. It is a simple idea and makes a huge difference, though: You press this button when you think your blend needs another 15 seconds of processing—or press twice for another 30 seconds, or press “stop” somewhere in between. I make a fruit smoothie a few times a week, and this is especially useful when my fruit mixture doesn’t get off to a strong start. For example, if I added spinach or large hunks of apple and they get stuck at the top of the canister for half of the blend. I’ll just tap the all-powerful + :15 button until I’m satisfied that those items are fully incorporated. 

The tamper

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

On the topic of ingredients getting stuck at the top, I’ll come clean: I’ve been tamper resistant. The tamper is a plastic baseball bat-looking thing that comes with the Vitamix blenders, and it’s meant to help drive ingredients safely into the blades. It’s not hard to use, you just cram it into the container through the opening in the lid. However, as a lazy person who shies away from dirtying additional kitchen tools, I started my Vitamix journey by waiting and hoping for the blender to do its blending duty. Then I’d get irritated when the preset would end and pieces of fruit were stuck at the top. Meanwhile the display has a little tamper symbol telling me, “Hey, hello, use this now.”

I’ve finally come around: I now start most blends with my tamper in hand at the ready. Only I am to blame if my food takes longer than intended if I don’t use it. It’s not even hard to clean; it’s smooth plastic (but I am a work in progress).

The pulse button

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

As for the only other button left on this control panel, I’ve finally started to embrace the pulse button too. It’s funny because when I use a food processor, a cousin of the blender, I love the pulse button. I rely on pulsing far more than the on button. I started using the pulse button on the Vitamix when I wanted to keep a closer eye on the texture. 

The pulse button only blends while you hold it. It allows you to do short bursts at whichever speed you want and stops as soon as you remove your finger. It takes the commitment out of starting a preset or even starting a blend manually and the texture getting away from you before you know it. I’ve been using the pulse button for making blender cakes, which works out great but you do want to be careful not to overwork the batter. The pulse button is ideal for a one- or two-second blend, just to incorporate your ingredients. 

Things I learned the hard way

Don’t tilt the container while the machine is running. Why would anyone do this? Definitely not to avoid using the tamper and instead try to shake the stuck material down into the blades. It makes a horrifying grinding sound, and you’ll scare your cats out of their slumbers. Also, it’s not effective. The container gently sits atop the gear powered by the incredibly strong engine; it’s not locked in with a clip or anything. If you tilt the container, you’re just grinding the very expensive metal cogs, not so much affecting what’s inside the vessel. Remember, the tamper is our friend.

Do check that the lid is on. The Vitamix does not detect if the lid is on like many food processors do. If the lid isn’t on the container when you press start, she will run like it is. Of course, you want to keep your hands and any other items and body parts safe while the machine is running, but you will almost certainly end up wearing your food if you run the machine without the lid on. Just a quick glance up is all you need to blend safely and mess-free. 

The first-generation Nissan Leaf was an incredible achievement for the company and for the industry. A mass-market EV that wasn’t priced out of reach was something the industry needed at the time.

That’s important. Since then, things have stagnated. To say that the 2026 Leaf is the most important EV launch for Nissan since the original car would be an understatement. It must get it right, because the competition is too good not to.

Starting things off, the car is available with two battery options. There is a 52 kWh base pack and a 75 kWh longer-range option. Each option has an active thermal management system—a first for Leaf—to address DC fast-charging concerns. Those batteries also deliver more range, with up to 303 miles (488 km) on the S+ model.

Read full article

Comments

Oh, Gold. It’s not April 1, it’s just a weird surprise. Donald Trump is launching a phone called Trump Mobile, which comes with wireless plans (starting at $47.25) and even a phone called the T1 Phone.

During the announcement event at Trump Tower in New York City, Donald Trump Jr. said they were building something for “people who have been underserved,” and to “make sure that real Americans could get true value from their mobile carriers.”

(Trump Mobile’s only plan is roughly double that of equivalent offerings at other low-cost carriers, like Mint Mobile and Boost Mobile.)

It’s not just phone service, however: The plan will supposedly include a telemedicine service powered by Doctegrity, roadside assistance provided by Drive America and mobile device protection by Omega Mobile Care.

The T1 Phone will be a gold-accented (of course) smartphone manufactured in the United States. So expect to factor that into what it might eventually cost. (Bloomberg has reported it will be a $500 device.)

According to the Trump Mobile site, the T1 phone will have 6.8-inch AMOLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, a rear three-camera setup with a 50MP main camera and a “5000mAh long life camera,” which we’re all guessing is meant to say battery.

— Mat Smith

Get Engadget’s newsletter delivered direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here!

The news you might have missed

• The best power banks and portable chargers for every device

• A native PS3 emulator for Android is available on the Play Store

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will end with a truncated fifth season

Meta and Oakley tease a smart glasses collaboration

Something’s happening June 20.

Earlier this year, reports teased that Meta was working with Oakley on smart glasses, and it seems they’ve almost finished the project. A new Instagram account called @oakleymeta has popped up, and its first post teased an announcement for this Friday (June 20). Instagram’s own official account and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the clip on their stories. Unlike the Ray-Ban iteration, these new smart glasses are said to be for cyclists and other athletes.

Continue reading.

Android 16 is out (on all eligible Pixel phones)

Major updates include new live update notifications.

Google

Google has released Android 16 to early compatible handsets. The company says new devices will come preloaded with the OS in “the coming months.” As usual, it’s first coming to Google’s own Pixel phones. The biggest noticeable change might be live updates in notifications. This means actions like ride shares and food deliveries will get a progress bar directly in the notifications. Camera wise, Android 16 adds automatic night mode scene detection, hybrid auto exposure and more precise color temperature adjustments. UltraHDR images have been improved, with support for HEIC encoding.

Continue reading.

Teslas hit kid-sized dummies in Full Self-Driving tests

Anti-Tesla organizations repeated the test-drive trial eight times.

Tesla has reportedly pushed back the rollout of its upcoming all-electric, fully autonomous car called the Cybercab. Meanwhile, a recent demonstration in Austin, Texas, showed a Tesla Model Y running through a school bus’ flashing lights and stop signs and repeatedly hitting child-size mannequins. The Dawn Project conducted the tests by , alongside Tesla Takedown and ResistAustin, and showed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software repeating the same mistake eight times.

Tesla’s autonomous driving feature is formally known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and “requires a fully attentive driver.” Tesla even has a warning that says, “failure to follow these instructions could cause damage, serious injury or death.”

Continue reading.

Switch 2 Pro Controller review

Nintendo’s best gamepad simply costs too much.

Engadget

The Switch 2 Pro controller is the most refined gamepad Nintendo has ever made. It’s just a shame that, at $85, it’s so expensive and doesn’t have Hall effect sticks. There are also a decent number of third-party options, if you’re looking for more refined controls.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-engadget-newsletter-111632614.html?src=rss

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself. As far as scientists can tell from its genome — the only evidence of its existence so far — it’s a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum’s mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli.

The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum’s bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, “challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses,” says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. “This organism might be a fascinating living fossil — an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on.” Adamala adds that if Sukunaarchaeum really does represent a microbe on its way to becoming a virus, it could teach scientists about how viruses evolved in the first place. “Most of the greatest transitions in evolution didn’t leave a fossil record, making it very difficult to figure out what were the exact steps,” she says. “We can poke at existing biochemistry to try to reconstitute the ancestral forms — or sometimes we get a gift from nature, in the form of a surviving evolutionary intermediate.”

What’s already clear: Sukunaarchaeum is not alone. When team leader Takuro Nakayama, an evolutionary microbiologist at Tsukuba, and his colleagues sifted through publicly available DNA sequences extracted from seawater all over the world, they found many sequences similar to those of Sukunaarchaeum. “That’s when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage,” Nakayama says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Denmark has deployed four uncrewed robotic sailboats (known as “Voyagers”) for a three-month trial to boost maritime surveillance amid rising tensions in the Baltic region. The Associated Press reports: Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Two of the Voyagers launched Monday from Koge Marina, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the Danish capital, Copenhagen. Powered by wind and solar energy, these sea drones can operate autonomously for months at sea. Saildrone says the vessels carry advanced sensor suites — radar, infrared and optical cameras, sonar and acoustic monitoring. Their launch comes after two others already joined a NATO patrol on June 6.

Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins compared the vessels to a “truck” that carries sensors and uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to give a “full picture of what’s above and below the surface” to about 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) in the open ocean. He said that maritime threats like damage to undersea cables, illegal fishing and the smuggling of people, weapons and drugs are going undetected simply because “no one’s observing it.” Saildrone, he said, is “going to places … where we previously didn’t have eyes and ears.” The Danish Defense Ministry says the trial is aimed at boosting surveillance capacity in under-monitored waters, especially around critical undersea infrastructure such as fiber-optic cables and power lines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has officially announced the dates for its next annual shopping event, and there’s a twist this year. Prime Day 2025 will be four days long, running from July 8 through July 11. A departure from previous years in which Prime Day was a 48-hour affair, this year the shopping event will span nearly an entire week, bringing thousands of exclusive, Prime-only deals on everything from electronics to fashion.

In addition to spurring a large number of sales in a short period of time, Amazon Prime Day has always been a way for the online retail giant to increase the overall number of Prime subscribers. Prime Day isn’t necessarily a perk of the $139-per-year service like access to Prime Video content or free two-day shipping are, but it certainly helps that most deals you’ll find on Amazon during the event are exclusively available to Prime members.

With the event being four days long this year, we expect to see some one-day-only deals as well as sales that span the entirety of Prime Day(s) proper. We usually recommend buying things on your list as soon as you see them go on sale just to avoid the disappointment that comes with items selling out, and this time is no different. That’s especially true for deals that as listed as “limited time,” or any Lightning Deals that only last a few hours.

Prime Day in July has been the main shopping event for Amazon for a decade now, but that hasn’t stopped the company from expanding the event’s reach. “October Prime Day” has become a mainstay in the fall, and Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is a relatively new shopping event that has taken place in March over the past couple of years. No word yet on if October Prime Day 2025 will be a thing, but we believe it’s almost guaranteed at this point.

If you do plan on putting that Prime membership to use next month, you can turn to Engadget to find the tech deals worth your month during the two-day event. Unsurprisingly, Amazon Prime Day is one of the best times of the year to get Amazon devices, since most of them will likely be down to all-time-low prices. But we also expect to see worthwhile sales on headphones, robot vacuums, laptops, SSDs and much more. You can also follow Engadget Deals on X for the latest news during Prime Day.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazon-prime-day-2025-dates-officially-announced-the-shopping-event-returns-from-july-8-to-11-050449132.html?src=rss

You can grab a number of games from Amazon at no cost if you have a Prime subscription in the days leading up to Prime Day 2025, which takes place from July 8 to July 11. Starting today, June 17 at 12 PM Eastern time, you can get Dungeon of the Endless Definitive Edition without paying for it through the Amazon Games App. In the roguelike game, you take on the role of a prison spaceship survivor who has to fight off several floors of creatures after your escape pod crashes into a strange planet. Amazon will also give you free access to TOEM, a photography game by Swedish studio Something We Made, through a GOG code. You’re a photographer in this game who has to solve puzzles using the character’s camera. 

In addition to those two, you can also get Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft at no cost through GOG. It includes all the original three Tomb Raider Adventures games, all its expansions and secret levels. Saints Row 2, an open world action-adventure game that’s a direct sequel of the first, is free via GOG, as well. In it, you play the same character in the first Saints Row, except you wake up after a coma to find your gang disbanded. You can also claim Saints Row IV: Re-Elected and Star Wars: Rebellion for free via GOG. 

Mordheim: City of the Damned, The Abandoned Planet, Station to Station and Death Squared are also all free to claim. Dark Envoy and FATE: Undiscovered Realms will be available on June 19, while Thief: Deadly Shadows, Jupiter Hell and Gallery of Things: Reveries will be available on June 26. 

Prime Gaming comes bundled with all your other Amazon Prime membership perks. It gives you access to a rotating selection of free games, in-game content, along with a free monthly Twitch subscription. Prime costs $15 a month or $139 a year, but you can get a free 30-day trial when you sign up if you’re unsure about paying for it. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/amazon-is-giving-away-some-great-games-in-the-lead-up-to-prime-day-050012540.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests. More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube — overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute. “The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster — and with more impact — than in other countries,” a report found. Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week. The report’s author Nic Newman said the rise of social video and personality-driven news “represents another significant challenge for traditional publishers.” Other key findings from the report include:

– TikTok is the fastest-growing social and video platform, now used for news by 17% globally (up 4% from last year).
– AI chatbot use for news is increasing, especially among under-25s, where it’s twice as popular as in the general population.
– Most people believe AI will reduce transparency, accuracy, and trust in news.
– Across all age groups, trusted news brands with proven accuracy remain valued, even if used less frequently.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.