The shopping event of the year isn’t over just yet, and if you’re looking for a robot vacuum to keep your home clean, one of Engadget’s favorites is on sale for a stellar price this Cyber Monday. Right now, you can get the Shark AI Ultra for half off, or $300 less than its $600 MSRP. For those in the market for a robot vacuum that can clean their floors too, Shark also offers a version of the AI Ultra with mop functionality built-in. After a 43 percent discount, that variant is currently $400, down from $700. Either way, those are excellent prices for a pair of robot vacuums that offer a compelling mix of features and cleaning performance.

As mentioned above, we like the Shark AI Ultra a lot here at Engadget, with both the standard and 2-in-1 models appearing in our guide for the best robot vacuums. In fact, we consider the Shark AI Ultra to be the best midrange pick for most people. Setup is easy. All you need to do is take the vacuum out of the box, plug in the base and download Shark’s companion app on your phone. Once the AI Ultra completed its first “explore run,” we found it was a reliable cleaner, doing its best to avoid any obstacles that were left on the carpet or floor. It was also much quieter than competing models in and around the same price range. However, the best feature of AI Ultra is that it comes with an auto-empty station, and one that features a bagless design. That means you won’t need to spend extra money on the AI Ultra over time.

As for the 2-in-1 model, its water-and-solution based cleaning abilities are basic, but beat having to bring out an old-school mop and bucket. In our testing, the AI Ultra Ultra 2-in-1 left our hardwood and tile floors noticeably cleaner. As I said, both models are great options, particularly when they’re as affordable as they are right now.

Your Cyber Monday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Cyber Monday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Cyber Monday tech deals. Learn about Cyber Monday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Cyber Monday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Cyber Monday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cyber-monday-deals-include-up-to-300-off-shark-robot-vacuums-on-amazon-183038708.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Cyber Monday deals include up to 0 off Shark robot vacuums on Amazon

Smart plugs are a great way to bring even your non-IoT devices into the smart home ecosystem, and with a Cyber Monday deal on Amazon, you can pick up some of the best for super cheap. A four-pack of TP-Link’s Kasa Smart Plug Mini 15A is 30 percent off, bringing the price down to just $35 dollars from its usual cost of $50. These smart plugs work with all of the major smart home platforms, including Apple Homekit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Samsung SmartThings.

Kasa Smart Plugs are easy to set up through the app, available for both iOS and Android, and are great for anyone looking for a no-fuss experience. They top our list of the best smart plugs you can get today thanks to their versatility and ease of use. With the smart plugs, you’ll have access to voice and remote controls, device scheduling, grouping and even energy monitoring to see how much power your devices are consuming. While smart plugs won’t be able to handle complex smart home programming, they can be used to control simple functions like turning a lamp on or off.

The Smart Plug Mini is designed to take up minimal space, so it doesn’t block other outlets when it’s plugged into the wall — as can be an issue when plugging in chunky accessory blocks. It connects to your home Wi-Fi and can receive voice commands from Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant or Samsung SmartThings for hands-free use. Or, you can control the plugs and thus the connected devices through the app. While the app doesn’t have a built-in sharing mode to add multiple members of the household, you can use the same login on multiple devices, so multiple family members can have access.

Besides smart plugs, TP-Link has several smart home devices on sale for Cyber Monday. The color-changing Kasa Smart Light Bulbs, which are among the best smart light bulbs on the market, are 35 percent off. A four-pack of the light bulbs is just $26, down from its normal price of $40. The light bulbs support Google Assistant and Alexa for voice controls, as well as control via the app. There are also deals on IoT security cameras, dimmer switches and outdoor plugs.

Your Cyber Monday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Cyber Monday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Cyber Monday tech deals. Learn about Cyber Monday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Cyber Monday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Cyber Monday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-cyber-monday-deals-get-30-percent-off-our-favorite-tp-link-kasa-smart-plugs-173008455.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Amazon Cyber Monday deals: Get 30 percent off our favorite TP-Link Kasa smart plugs

Samsung’s The Frame smart TVs have hit record low prices for Cyber Monday and you can find the deals both at Amazon and Samsung directly. Discounts are available for all sizes — the 55-inch Frame TV is $520 off — a 35 percent discount — bringing it down to just $978. If you want to go big, the 85-inch Frame is a full $1,000 off, for a final price of $3,298. The big perk of the Frame is implied in its name: the TV is designed to look like artwork when not in use, complete with a matte finish, customizable frame-like bezels and Samsung’s Art Mode for displaying images and even your own photos.

The discounts apply to the most recent 4K QLED Frame TVs, all of which feature Samsung’s anti-reflection matte display. The Frame comes with a slim-fit wall mount so it can be hung flush with the wall, just like any painting or framed picture, and offers 100 percent Color Volume with Quantum Dot technology to make colors pop. When it’s not in use, you can put it in Art Mode, which will display the art of your choosing. The Frame is a game-changer for anyone who detests how TVs clash with their home decor.

Samsung offers 10 free artworks to choose from, or you can subscribe to the Samsung Art store for access to curated collections from its museum partners, like The Louvre. You can also upload your own images to display, and use it like a massive digital picture frame. When the TV is in Art Mode, it can be programmed to display artwork based on whether you’re in the room. With motion sensing, The Frame can identify when you’ve left and turn off the display so it isn’t projecting to an empty room. It’ll come back on when you return.

Like Samsung’s other smart TVs, The Frame is powered by Tizen, and it’ll have all the apps you need for your streaming purposes. You can also stream Xbox games to your TV through Samsung’s Gaming hub if you have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. The Frame comes in seven sizes: 32-inch, 43-inch, 50-inch, 55-inch, 65-inch, 75-inch and 85-inch. It might normally be a bit of a splurge, but there’s potential to save hundreds of dollars with the current Black Friday sales.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cyber-monday-tv-deals-the-samsung-frame-tv-is-on-sale-for-up-to-1000-off-162331687.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Cyber Monday TV deals: The Samsung Frame TV is on sale for up to ,000 off

For Cyber Monday, Amazon has discounted a selection of Samsung SSDs, including the company’s highly-regarded Pro Plus line of microSD cards. Through the end of tomorrow, the 128GB model is 42 percent off, making it just $11 before tax and shipping. If you need more storage, the 512GB model is also on sale, as are the 256GB variants of the Pro Ultimate and Evo Select models. After a modest 9 percent discount, the former is currently $32, down from $35.

Amazon has also discounted Samsung’s excellent T7 Shield portable drive. At the moment, the 1TB model is 6 percent off, or $5 off its typical $85 price. While this SSD is an Engadget favorite, we’ve seen it previously drop below the price Amazon is selling it for currently.

Samsung’s Pro Plus, Pro Ultimate and Evo Select lines are all featured in our guide to the best microSD cards. We like the Pro Plus models for their mix of performance and affordability. Although they’re not the fastest microSD cards Samsung sells (that distinction goes to the Pro Ultimate line), you’ll be hard pressed to find competing models in the same price range that offer better performance. In our testing, Samsung’s Pro Plus cards achieved sequential write speeds of around 130 MB/s and sequential read speeds of around 165 MB/s. Samsung also offers a 10-year warranty on its Pro Plus models.

If you’re unsure of what model to buy, your decision should be informed by what you plan to do with your new microSD card. If you intend to record a lot of 4K footage with either a camera or drone, you will need a faster card. Our guide has all the information to help you make your decision, but the short answer is to look for a model with at least a “V30” speed rating. For other cases such as storing dash cam footage and Switch games, you can save money by going for a slower model.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cyber-monday-deals-include-42-percent-off-one-of-our-favorite-samsung-microsd-cards-161524306.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Cyber Monday deals include 42 percent off one of our favorite Samsung microSD cards

Whether you’re an artist or an avid notetaker, an Apple Pencil can transform the way you work on your iPad. Normally, they don’t come cheap — but in a Cyber Monday deal on Amazon, Apple’s second-generation Apple Pencil is down to its lowest price yet at $80. You’ll be saving nearly $50 on the stylus that’s made just for the iPad. Without a discount, it costs around $130. The second-generation Apple Pencil brought a number of improvements over the previous version, including double-tap controls and magnetic attachment to the iPad for easy storage and wireless charging.

You can’t do any better than an Apple Pencil if you’re looking for a stylus to work with your iPad. It was crafted with Apple’s tablet in mind, and as such it’s one of the best iPad accessories available. The second-gen Apple Pencil offers low latency so there’s no lag as you’re writing or drawing on the touchscreen, and Apple says it achieves “pixel-perfect precision.” It also has pressure and tilt sensitivity for more natural control over things like stroke width, opacity and shading. You can double-tap the pencil to easily switch between tools.

The second-generation Apple Pencil doesn’t work with every model of iPad, though, and you’ll want to double-check compatibility before picking one up. It’s compatible with the iPad Pro 12.9-inch (third-generation and later), all generations of iPad Pro 11-inch, iPad Air (fourth- and fifth-gen), and the iPad mini (sixth-gen). The Apple Pencil can magnetically attach to the side of these iPads to charge wirelessly while it’s not in use. For those who have an iPad Pro, it also supports Apple Pencil hover, which lets you preview tools or colors before committing to them.

Apple also still offers the first-generation Apple Pencil, which is compatible with older iPad models, and it’s on sale for Cyber Monday too. It’s down to $80 from its usual price of $100, and works with iPad Pro 12.9-inch (first and second generation), iPad Pro 10.5-inch, iPad Pro 9.7-inch, the third generation iPad Air, fifth generation iPad mini, and iPad (sixth-gen and later). Apple’s more budget-friendly Apple Pencil with USB-C charging is discounted right now as well, dropping to $71 from $80. That model works with the same iPad models as the second-generation Apple Pencil, plus the 10th generation iPad.

Your Cyber Monday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Cyber Monday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Cyber Monday tech deals. Learn about Cyber Monday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Cyber Monday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Cyber Monday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-cyber-monday-deals-drop-the-price-of-the-2nd-gen-apple-pencil-to-an-all-time-low-of-80-154236215.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Amazon Cyber Monday deals drop the price of the 2nd-gen Apple Pencil to an all-time low of

Do black holes, like dying old soldiers, simply fade away? Do they pop like hyperdimensional balloons? Maybe they do, or maybe they pass through a cosmic rubicon, effectively reversing their natures and becoming inverse anomalies that cannot be entered through their event horizons but which continuously expel energy and matter back into the universe. 

In his latest book, White Holes, physicist and philosopher Carlo Rovelli focuses his attention and considerable expertise on the mysterious space phenomena, diving past the event horizon to explore their theoretical inner workings and and posit what might be at the bottom of those infinitesimally tiny, infinitely fascinating gravitational points. In this week’s Hitting the Books excerpt, Rovelli discusses a scientific schism splitting the astrophysics community as to where all of the information — which, from our current understanding of the rules of our universe, cannot be destroyed — goes once it is trapped within an inescapable black hole.   

Excerpted from by White Holes by Carlo Rovelli. Published by Riverhead Books. Copyright © 2023 by Carlo Rovelli. All rights reserved.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking made an unexpected theoretical discovery: black holes must emit heat. This, too, is a quantum tunnel effect, but a simpler one than the bounce of a Planck star: photons trapped inside the horizon escape thanks to the pass that quantum physics provides to everything. They “tunnel” beneath the horizon. 

So black holes emit heat, like a stove, and Hawking computed their temperature. Radiated heat carries away energy. As it loses energy, the black hole gradually loses mass (mass is energy), becoming ever lighter and smaller. Its horizon shrinks. In the jargon we say that the black hole “evaporates.” 

Heat emission is the most characteristic of the irreversible processes: the processes that occur in one time direction and cannot be reversed. A stove emits heat and warms a cold room. Have you ever seen the walls of a cold room emit heat and heat up a warm stove? When heat is produced, the process is irreversible. In fact, whenever the process is irreversible, heat is produced (or something analogous). Heat is the mark of irreversibility. Heat distinguishes past from future. 

There is therefore at least one clearly irreversible aspect to the life of a black hole: the gradual shrinking of its horizon.

But, careful: the shrinking of the horizon does not mean that the interior of the black hole becomes smaller. The interior largely remains what it is, and the interior volume keeps growing. It is only the horizon that shrinks. This is a subtle point that confuses many. Hawking radiation is a phenomenon that regards mainly the horizon, not the deep interior of the hole. Therefore, a very old black hole turns out to have a peculiar geometry: an enormous interior (that continues to grow) and a minuscule (because it has evaporated) horizon that encloses it. An old black hole is like a glass bottle in the hands of a skillful Murano glassblower who succeeds in making the volume of the bottle increase as its neck becomes narrower. 

At the moment of the leap from black to white, a black hole can therefore have an extremely small horizon and a vast interior. A tiny shell containing vast spaces, as in a fable.

In fables, we come across small huts that, when entered, turn out to contain hundreds of vast rooms. This seems impossible, the stuff of fairy tales. But it is not so. A vast space enclosed in a small sphere is concretely possible. 

If this seems bizarre to us, it is only because we became habituated to the idea that the geometry of space is simple: it is the one we studied at school, the geometry of Euclid. But it is not so in the real world. The geometry of space is distorted by gravity. The distortion permits a gigantic volume to be enclosed within a tiny sphere. The gravity of a Planck star generates such a huge distortion. 

An ant that has always lived on a large, flat plaza will be amazed when it discovers that through a small hole it has access to a large underground garage. Same for us with a black hole. What the amazement teaches is that we should not have blind confidence in habitual ideas: the world is stranger and more varied than we imagine. 

The existence of large volumes within small horizons has also generated confusion in the world of science. The scientific community has split and is quarreling about the topic. In the rest of this section, I tell you about this dispute. It is more technical than the rest — skip it if you like — but it is a picture of a lively, ongoing scientific debate. 

The disagreement concerns how much information you can cram into an entity with a large volume but a small surface. One part of the scientific community is convinced that a black hole with a small horizon can contain only a small amount of information. Another disagrees. 

What does it mean to “contain information”? 

More or less this: Are there more things in a box containing five large and heavy balls, or in a box that contains twenty small marbles? The answer depends on what you mean by “more things.” The five balls are bigger and weigh more, so the first box contains more matter, more substance, more energy, more stuff. In this sense there are “more things” in the box of balls. 

But the number of marbles is greater than the number of balls. In this sense, there are “more things,” more details, in the box of marbles. If we wanted to send signals, by giving a single color to each marble or each ball, we could send more signals, more colors, more information, with the marbles, because there are more of them. More precisely: it takes more information to describe the marbles than it does to describe the balls, because there are more of them. In technical terms, the box of balls contains more energy, whereas the box of marbles contains more information. 

An old black hole, considerably evaporated, has little energy, because the energy has been carried away via the Hawking radiation. Can it still contain much information, after much of its energy is gone? Here is the brawl.

Some of my colleagues convinced themselves that it is not possible to cram a lot of information beneath a small surface. That is, they became convinced that when most energy has gone and the horizon has become minuscule, only little information can remain inside. 

Another part of the scientific community (to which I belong) is convinced of the contrary. The information in a black hole—even a greatly evaporated one—can still be large. Each side is convinced that the other has gone astray. 

Disagreements of this kind are common in the history of science; one may say that they are the salt of the discipline. They can last long. Scientists split, quarrel, scream, wrangle, scuffle, jump at each other’s throats. Then, gradually, clarity emerges. Some end up being right, others end up being wrong. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, the world of physics was divided into two fierce factions. One of these followed Mach in thinking that atoms were just convenient mathematical fictions; the other followed Boltzmann in believing that atoms exist for real. The arguments were ferocious. Ernst Mach was a towering figure, but it was Boltzmann who turned out to be right. Today, we even see atoms through a microscope. 

I think that my colleagues who are convinced that a small horizon can contain only a small amount of information have made a serious mistake, even if at first sight their arguments seem convincing. Let’s look at these.

The first argument is that it is possible to compute how many elementary components (how many molecules, for example) form an object, starting from the relation between its energy and its temperature. We know the energy of a black hole (it is its mass) and its temperature (computed by Hawking), so we can do the math. The result indicates that the smaller the horizon, the fewer its elementary components. 

The second argument is that there are explicit calculations that allow us to count these elementary components directly, using both of the most studied theories of quantum gravity—string theory and loop theory. The two archrival theories completed this computation within months of each other in 1996. For both, the number of elementary components becomes small when the horizon is small.

These seem like strong arguments. On the basis of these arguments, many physicists have accepted a “dogma” (they call it so themselves): the number of elementary components contained in a small surface is necessarily small. Within a small horizon there can only be little information. If the evidence for this “dogma” is so strong, where does the error lie? 

It lies in the fact that both arguments refer only to the components of the black hole that can be detected from the outside, as long as the black hole remains what it is. And these are only the components residing on the horizon. Both arguments, in other words, ignore that there can be components in the large interior volume. These arguments are formulated from the perspective of someone who remains far from the black hole, does not see the inside, and assumes that the black hole will remain as it is forever. If the black hole stays this way forever—remember—those who are far from it will see only what is outside or what is right on the horizon. It is as if for them the interior does not exist. For them. 

But the interior does exist! And not only for those (like us) who dare to enter, but also for those who simply have the patience to wait for the black horizon to become white, allowing what was trapped inside to come out. In other words, to imagine that the calculations of the number of components of a black hole given by string theory or loop theory are complete is to have failed to take on board Finkelstein’s 1958 article. The description of a black hole from the outside is incomplete. 

The loop quantum gravity calculation is revealing: the number of components is precisely computed by counting the number of quanta of space on the horizon. But the string theory calculation, on close inspection, does the same: it assumes that the black hole is stationary, and is based on what is seen from afar. It neglects, by hypothesis, what is inside and what will be seen from afar after the hole has finished evaporating — when it is no longer stationary. 

I think that certain of my colleagues err out of impatience they want everything resolved before the end of evaporation, where quantum gravity becomes inevitable) and because they forget to take into account what is beyond that which can be immediately seen — two mistakes we all frequently make in life. 

Adherents to the dogma find themselves with a problem. They call it “the black hole information paradox.” They are convinced that inside an evaporated black hole there is no longer any information. Now, everything that falls into a black hole carries information. So a large amount of information can enter the hole. Information cannot vanish. Where does it go? 

To solve the paradox, the devotees of the dogma imagine that information escapes the hole in mysterious and baroque ways, perhaps in the folds of the Hawking radiation, like Ulysses and his companions escaping from the cave of the cyclops by hiding beneath sheep. Or they speculate that the interior of a black hole is connected to the outside by hypothetical invisible canals . . . Basically, they are clutching at straws—looking, like all dogmatists in difficulty, for abstruse ways of saving the dogma. 

But the information that enters the horizon does not escape by some arcane, magical means. It simply comes out after the horizon has been transformed from a black horizon into a white horizon.

In his final years, Stephen Hawking used to remark that there is no need to be afraid of the black holes of life: sooner or later, there will be a way out of them. There is — via the child white hole.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-white-holes-carlo-rovelli-riverhead-153058062.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Black hole behavior suggests Dr. Who’s ‘bigger on the inside’ Tardis trick is theoretically possible