Regardless of your opinion on Severance’s Season 2 finale (it was incredible!), the end of the season leaves us feeling like the puzzle-solving part of our brain was amputated. Yet our curiosity remains, like a phantom itch we can only scratch with mind-bending television. Luckily for us, Severance is just the latest…
Hollow Knight Fans have been waiting years for the metroidvania’s sequel Silksong to appear at a new gaming showcase alongside an actual release date. Last week, the game finally was briefly featured during the Nintendo Direct for Switch 2, but a 2025 launch window wasn’t all fans were blessed with. A new screenshot…
Meta and Lufthansa’s trial providing Quest 3 headsets to business class passengers won an airline industry award.
The scheme began in summer last year, and the two companies say that almost 4000 Lufthansa Allegris Business Class Suite customers have now tried it, with “overwhelmingly positive” feedback.
Lufthansa, Meta, and developer MSM.Digital won the 2025 Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) Award for Best Inflight Entertainment.
“We are thrilled with the success of this initiative and the positive feedback from our passengers”, Lufthansa says. “Immersive technology is undoubtedly an element of future in-flight entertainment.”
Given this feedback, Meta says it’s now “focused on expanding this offering to more airlines and optimizing our product suite.”
The Quest 3 headset on these flights features a streamlined launcher and comes preloaded with certain apps.
While Meta hasn’t gone into detail about what exact apps are included, the company previously said the experience lets passengers:
• Enjoy an immersive cinema experience with select movies and TV shows
• Listen to prominent travel podcasters and see their stories come to life through spatial videos and select 360-degree video content
• Discover travel destinations from a bird’s-eye view with virtual sightseeing previews before you arrive
• Play interactive games like Connect Four and Chess
• Relax with active meditation exercises or enjoy a passive, lean-back experience
UploadVRDavid Heaney
The program is possible thanks to Travel Mode, a feature Meta added last year that makes the positional tracking of Quest headsets work in moving vehicles, including airplanes. Before Travel Mode, trying to use a Quest on a flight would result in all virtual objects and interfaces flying away in the opposite direction when the aircraft changed altitude, speed, or bearing – and when there was turbulence everything would violently shake. Apple Vision Pro also has a Travel Mode, since launch.
XR headsets are an ideal way to spend time while stuck in the air, letting you escape from your cramped physical surroundings into an enormous private space to watch movies, get work done, play games, or virtually visit interesting destinations. While these advantages are seeing more people buy a headset every year, providing one for passengers who don’t own one yet is an interesting avenue, and we’ll bring you any further developments from Lufthansa and other airlines as this scheme expands.
Citing
The Tiny Races concept came to me while I was riding outdoors one day, trying to figure out a way to make workouts on Zwift more enjoyable. Like many Zwifters, I’d done a lot of structured workouts on Zwift, and I’ll readily admit that they provide very efficient and targeted training stimulus.
There’s just one problem: I find structured workouts to be lonely, painful, and boring.
So the Tiny Races were created, with the goal of pushing riders hard in 4 back-to-back events lasting 5-10 minutes each. The hope was that you’d get a lot of VO2-level work in on each race, effectively turning your hour of racing into an hour-long VO2 workout.
But Tiny Races aren’t a perfectly structured VO2 workout. Yes, you’ll get a lot of VO2-level work in. But it may vary greatly depending on your strengths as a rider, and the course chosen for the day.
So on this Saturday, I decided to try something I’d never done before. I would simply treat the first 4 minutes of each race as a VO2 interval, shooting to average 350W during that time. Then I would ease and recover as I finished the race.
Then do it again, and again. And again. Four VO2 intervals. Because on this particular day, I was more interested in getting a quality workout in than I was in finishing high in the race rankings.
Here’s how the races (workouts?) unfolded…
The first race was 6km of The Muckle Yin, ending at the Breakaway Brae Reverse banner. I chatted a bit with the other racers, even telling them what my plan was:
Soon enough, we were off! I found myself in the wind as we climbed The Cliffs section, and as a racer, this just felt wrong. I was wasting watts! But not today. Today, I needed to hold 350W for the first 4 minutes.
I stayed on or near the front for most of that climb, then the clock hit 4 minutes and I eased up.
4 minutes at 352W, HR 173bpm
We were so close to the top of the climb and the descent that followed that I put in a little extra work to hold onto the pack so I could stay in the draft until the Corkscrew Castle climb. When we hit that climb the pack flew away, and I finished the last 1.5km easy, clicking to watch the front riders finish before I crossed the line in 36th.
My racing score dropped from 549 to 529 in this single race.
The second race was on 6.2km of Loch Loop, ending at the entrance to Corkscrew Castle. This race begins with a long, slack descent down The Cliffs section that we climbed in the previous race. Again, I had to hold 350W for the first 4 minutes, so against my racing instincts I went hard out of the gate onto the descent where I would normally be recovering.
I got an aero powerup at the start, and decided to use it as I went off the front, to make the race more interesting. One rider, A. Sherman, saw my attack and followed. Let’s go!
I was using my steering to shorten the course a bit, but Sherman didn’t have steering, so eventually I gave up and let the game autosteer so we could work together. (Although “work together” really isn’t accurate, because all I was doing was holding 350W. Sherman would have to decide if he wanted to sit on my wheel or push hard and be in the wind.)
I’d say he chose poorly, sitting in the wind just ahead of me for most of my 4-minute effort instead of taking some time to recover. But maybe he was doing a VO2 interval too!
When I sat up at the 4-minute mark, I messaged, “Good luck!” and let Sherman ride away. We had a 6-second gap on the peloton.
4 minutes at 352W, HR 176bpm
I clicked to watch how Sherman got along. He ended up getting caught on Breakaway Brae with 1.2km to go. Nice try, sir!
I rolled in at 34th place out of 36. My racing score dropped from 529 to 509. Woah!
For our third race, we were taking on 2 laps of Glasgow Crit Circuit. The VO2 intervals weren’t killing me yet, so I knew I had the power to do it again. But how hard would it be to hit that 350W average on Glasgow’s undulating roads?
Only one way to find out.
Once again I was off the front early. Then we hit the Clyde Kicker, and I almost got dropped as everyone revved up the power big-time and I tried to keep it fairly steady! I used my aero powerup to chase back onto the group, finding myself off the front again before the lap was finished.
4 minutes at 350W, HR 178bpm
I finished 31 out of 39, dropping my racing score to 503. One race/interval left!
The final race was on City and the Sgurr, a route I rather despise since it quickly takes you up the gravel side of the Sgurr climb, where I always get dropped.
No pressure today, though. I just needed to hold 350W for 4 minutes, which would put me somewhere in the middle of that climb.
Again, I found myself on the front for most of the lead-in to the climb. And I stayed there for the initial bit of the climb before the pack swamped me when things got steep:
I finished my last 4-minute interval just a few meters off the back of the peloton. Job done!
4 minutes at 354W, HR 177bpm
I finished the dirt climb, descended the other side, then climbed the paved side to complete the race at the top of the Sgurr 30th out of 35., dropping my racing score to 490.
My “Tiny Racing as VO2 Workout” experience left me with two key takeaways to discuss.
I must say that doing a VO2 workout this way was much more enjoyable than doing a typical structured VO2 workout. And I’ve done a lot of structured VO2 workouts! I found it easier than anticipated to hit the target average wattage, and in fact impressed myself with how close I got.
I think it’s a combination of the rush of being off the front of a race (which pushes you to keep pushing) as well as the rush of just being in a pack of riders who are all pushing hard. It took my mind off of the suffering of the VO2 effort somewhat, and the intervals didn’t feel as long.
If structured workouts are lonely, painful, and boring, doing them in a race wasn’t lonely at all, less painful (thanks to some distraction) and much less boring, partly due to the challenge of hitting the target power without ERG mode, and partly due to being in the middle of a race.
What I’d like to do next is work to extend these intervals by increasing the target wattage (increments of 10W) or time (increments of 30s). I’d like to work up to 5 minutes at 360, then see if we can keep pushing!
I’m a fan of Zwift Racing Score, but I must say I was surprised by how precipitously it dropped in these four races.
It was particularly surprising because the three races I’d done leading up to these had been Zwift Games climbing races where I’d lost badly, but my score had only dropped a total of 6 points across those events:
I’m at a bit of a loss to explain how those three events lowered my score by only 6 points, while the four Tiny Races dropped my score by a total of 54 points. All I can figure is that placing very near the bottom of the race impacts your score a lot more than placing, say, in the bottom 1/3 of the group.
(If you’ve got any great insights into how my score dropped so significantly, please share them in the comments below! I’ve reached out to my contacts at ZHQ to see if they can provide any insight…)
Have you ever done a race as a structured workout? Explain your approach, and how it went. Got other questions or comments? Share below!
Not to be confused with the AMDXDNA accelerator driver that was mainlined just with the Linux 6.14 kernel, AMD Linux engineers are now working on “AMDPK” as a new accelerator driver for their upcoming PKI Accelerator engines…
Tom Schuster, Frederik Braun, and Christoph Kerschbaumer have
published an article
on the Firefox Security team’s Attack & Defense
blog that explains recent work to harden Firefox’s frontend code.
We have rewritten over 600 JavaScript event handlers to mitigate XSS
and other injection attacks in the main Firefox user interface. This
mitigation will ship in Firefox 138. However, blocking the execution
of scripts in the parent process is not the end – we will expand this
technique to other contexts in the near future. There is still more
work to do as the UI requires JavaScript APIs with a high level of
privileges. However: We still eliminated a whole class of attacks,
significantly raising the bar for attackers to exploit Firefox.
The Topaz Tz170 J484 Development Kit is a compact platform for evaluating and prototyping with the Efinix Tz170 FPGA. It integrates onboard memory, configurable I/O, and a preloaded reference design, providing a practical setup for testing and demonstration across a range of FPGA applications. The development kit is built around the Tz170 FPGA, which uses […]
Cisco Jabber is a communication tool that allows users to send instant messages, make phone calls, join meetings, and manage contacts. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.
Shortly after its inauguration, the Trump administration has made no secret that it isn’t especially interested in funding research. Before January’s end, major science agencies had instituted pauses on research funding, and grant funding has not been restored to previous levels since. Many individual grants have been targeted on ideological grounds, and agencies like the National Science Foundation are expected to see significant cuts. Since then, individual universities have been targeted, starting with an ongoing fight with Columbia University over $400 million in research funding.
This week, however, it appears that the targeting of university research has entered overdrive, with multiple announcements of funding freezes targeting several universities. Should these last for any considerable amount of time, they will likely cripple research at the targeted universities.
On Wednesday, Science learned that the National Institutes of Health has frozen all of its research funding to Columbia, despite the university agreeing to steps previously demanded by the administration and the resignation of its acting president. In 2024, Columbia had received nearly $700 million in grants from the NIH, with the money largely going to the university’s prestigious medical and public health schools.
Horror entertainment specialist Blumhouse is running special screenings of its movie M3GAN where audiences will be encouraged to use their smartphones. Yes, flying in the face of all the warnings and announcements to not interrupt the experience for other viewers, Blumhouse is partnering with Meta to deliver special content during screenings of M3GAN. During these one-night engagements, viewers can use Meta’s Movie Mate service to access second screen content, such as a chatbot version of the M3GAN doll, film trivia and behind-the-scenes details. Blumhouse movies Annabelle and Ma are also getting one-night engagements this spring, but those seem to be standard showings where people will get annoyed if you bust out your phone.
To take advantage of this tie-in, theater-goers start by sending a DM to the movie’s Instagram account. It will also only work for people inside participating theaters, meaning Instagram will likely require access to viewers’ location data.
“The M3GAN in-theater Movie Mate is a first-to-market moviegoer experience,” said Omar Zayat, group lead entertainment, tech, travel, gaming and auto at Meta. “We are happy to introduce filmgoers to it by way of Instagram Direct and Click-to-Messenger Ads. We are thrilled to be working with Universal Pictures and Blumhouse to deliver rich experiences designed to get audiences back into theaters.”
Buried in all that corporate jargon is an acknowledgement that movie theaters were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Possibly in an effort to encourage more business, there has been a wave of cinemas allowing or encouraging activities that would normally get you booted from the theater. AMC started hosting special sing-along showings of Wicked because some audience members apparently couldn’t stop themselves from doing their best Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande impressions. A Minecraft Movie has also seen disruptive behavior, thanks to fan reactions and the filming of fan reactions hoping to go viral.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/meta-wants-you-to-be-on-your-phone-during-special-showings-of-m3gan-220411260.html?src=rss
In the last week, the US Space Force awarded SpaceX a $5.9 billion deal to make Elon Musk’s space company the Pentagon’s leading launch provider, and then it assigned the vast majority of this year’s most lucrative launch contracts to SpaceX.
On top of these actions, the Space Force reassigned the launch of a GPS navigation satellite from United Launch Alliance’s long-delayed Vulcan rocket to fly on SpaceX’s Falcon 9. ULA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is SpaceX’s chief US rival in the market for military satellite launches.
Given the close relationship between Musk and President Donald Trump, it’s not out of bounds to ask why SpaceX is racking up so many wins. Some plans floated by the Trump administration involving SpaceX in recent months have raised concerns over conflicts of interest.
OpenSSH 10 is out now, featuring stronger cryptographic defaults, new post-quantum key exchange, and key security improvements across the board.
Apple TV+’s newest sci-fi series just released a trailer that surely was once an Elon Musk wet dream. Based on Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series of books, the show’s trailer features Succession’s Alexander Skarsgård as a humanoid robot programmed to kill before gaining free will by hacking its own system.…
Here’s something odd. Over on eBay someone seems to have spent $2,000 on a Steam Deck prototype which was being sold on the auction site for $3,000.
Health experts took to one of the country’s leading medical journals to pen searing rebukes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first weeks as the country’s top health official—and they called upon their colleagues to rise up to fight the misinformation and distrust they allege Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccine advocate, is fomenting.
From gutting federal health agencies and knee-capping critical local public health programs, to delaying a significant vaccine advisory meeting, hiring a discredited anti-vaccine advocate to conduct a vaccine study, ousting the country’s top vaccine regulator, and undermining the response to the mushrooming measles outbreak in Texas that stands to threaten the country’s measles elimination status—the researchers had no shortage of complaints.
In one article, pediatric infectious disease expert Kathryn Edwards of Vanderbilt University recounted the timeline of the measles outbreak, noting the missteps, missed opportunities, and controversial comments Kennedy made along the way. The rundown included his trivialization of the outbreak, failure to strongly advocate for vaccination, promotion of unproven treatments, like cod liver oil, and delayed responses from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which Kennedy controls.
Path Of Exile 2 had an incredible Early Access launch last December, but the honeymoon period is clearly over. Its first major update, Dawn of the Hunt, arrived last week and quickly led to review-bombing on Steam over difficulty spikes that made the game feel, according to some players at least, “like a massive…
The tech report highlights that US-based institutions produced the most significant AI model
Last year TUXEDO Computers shared that they were developing an ARM Linux notebook powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. They hoped to have the Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop shipping by Christmas 2024, but that didn’t pan out. TUXEDO Computers has now provided a status update regarding this ARM Linux notebook effort…
