Marvel Studios has dropped the first teaser for Wonder Man, an eight-episode miniseries slated for a January release, ahead of its panel at New York Comic Con this weekend.

Part of the MCU’s Phase Six, the miniseries was created by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of Five Rings) and Andrew Guest (Hawkeye), with Guest serving as showrunner. It has been in development since 2022.

The comic book version of the character is the son of a rich industrialist who inherits the family munitions factory but is being crushed by the competition: Stark Industries. Baron Zemo (Falcon and the Winter Soldier) then recruits him to infiltrate and betray the Avengers, giving him super powers (“ionic energy”) via a special serum. He eventually becomes a superhero and Avengers ally, helping them take on Doctor Doom, among other exploits. Since we know Doctor Doom is the Big Bad of the upcoming two new Avengers movies, a Wonder Man miniseries makes sense.

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The easy availability of powerful generative AI programs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and other image- and music-generation tools has given everyone the ability to instantly “create” any image, video, or song they can imagine. As the resulting flood of computer-made content washes up on shore, internet users and observers are calling it “slopcore.”

Also known as “AI slop,” slopcore’s aesthetic comes from people using AI as a collaborator instead of a tool, leaving the machines to make artistic choices. It’s marked by the strangely off, the almost-real, and the uncanny vibe of machines imitating humanity. Slopcore often depicts deeply emotional subjects, but the lack of depth and insight make it uniquely disquieting.

At first glance, slopcore photos and videos appear realistic, but a closer look reveals misplaced anatomy, impossible geometry, and a weird “sheen” that comes from surfaces being too smooth and lighting being too perfect. Slopcore music has the same vibe, in audible form. Instruments sound bland and mid and vocals sound eerie due to attempts to sound “emotional” but being disconnected from actual emotions.

Here are some examples of slopcore videos:

And here is “No More Slop,” an example of slopcore music I generated in 45 seconds with Suno, and here are some slopcore images of protest singers generated by ChatGPT and Meta AI:

Credit: ChatGPT, MetaAI

Note the details that don’t quite fit together—the guitar strap not attached to the guitar, the sign intersecting with the singer’s head, the generic “AI font” used on the sign, the extra foot on the guitarist to the left—these are all signs of slopcore.

While generative AI programmers are working hard to create models that don’t add fingers and limbs, some appreciate Slopcore because of its flaws and the uniquely disquieting, uncanny valley feeling they evoke. If you look past the mawkishness and hallucinations, AI slop shows a vision of a likely future where nearly everything is made by machines, and hardly anyone can tell the difference.

Google is introducing a new Chrome browser feature for Android and desktop users that automatically turns off notifications for websites that you’re already ignoring. From a report: Chrome’s Safety Check feature already provides similar functionality for camera access and location tracking permissions.

This new auto-revocation feature builds on a similar Android feature that already makes it easier for Chrome users to unsubscribe from website notifications they don’t care about with a single tap. The feature doesn’t revoke notifications for any web apps installed on the device, and permissions will only be disabled for sites that send a lot of notifications that users rarely engage with. Less than one percent of all web notifications in Chrome currently receive any interaction from users, according to Google, often making them more distracting than helpful.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump threatened China with a “massive increase” on tariffs and may cancel his upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping after China spent the past two days making “very hostile” trade moves—including aggressive rare-earths export restrictions and an attack on a key US semiconductor company.

In a Truth Social post, Trump accused China of trying to “clog” markets by restricting not just access to rare earths but also by placing export controls on “foreign companies that use Chinese rare earth equipment or material.”

These rules are intended to take effect December 1, with many outlets reporting the rules will give China more leverage ahead of the Trump-Xi trade talks that are supposed to take place in South Korea in two weeks.

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Apple is partnering with Spectrum SportsNet to stream select Los Angeles Lakers games directly to the Apple Vision Pro during the 2025-2026 basketball season. The games will be filmed in the Apple Immersive video format, the same VR-friendly filming style the company used to capture the Metallica concert film it released earlier this year.

Beyond giving you a reason to blow the dust off your $3,500 Apple Vision Pro, watching the games in-headset will showcase “perspectives impossible to capture in traditional broadcasts,” Apple claims. Live games will be limited to headset owners living in the Lakers’ regional broadcast territory (Southern California, Hawaii and parts of southern Nevada) and will likely require a subscription to view, but Apple says the full replays and highlights will also be accessible in “select countries and regions from both the SportsNet and NBA apps.” There’s no schedule of games available yet, but Apple and Spectrum say they’ll announce their final plans this fall, with the first games streaming early 2026.

While the general consensus on the Vision Pro is that it makes for a great media consumption device, sports programming that takes advantage of its unique features has been largely missing. Apple makes it easy to watch things like Friday Night Baseball and Major League Soccer, but the NBA is the only mainstream sports league trying to offer an experience that’s specific to the Vision Pro. Beyond playing live games, the NBA visionOS app can display real-time player stats, stream multiple games at once in multiview and show you a tabletop view of games, complete with a 3D court and tiny players.

Now that Apple is reportedly prioritizing smart glasses over a lighter and cheaper version of the Vision Pro, the best thing the company can do is supply existing owners with new things to watch. Not everyone loves the Lakers, but if it opens the door to more live sports in the future, that’s only a good thing.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/apple-is-bringing-live-nba-games-to-the-vision-pro-in-2026-184941594.html?src=rss

Bose will brick key features of its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars soon. On Thursday, Bose informed customers that as of February 18, 2026, it will stop supporting the devices, and the devices’ cloud-based features, including the companion app, will stop working.

The SoundTouch app enabled numerous capabilities, including integrating music services, like Spotify and TuneIn, and the ability to program multiple speakers in different rooms to play the same audio simultaneously.

Bose has also said that some saved presets won’t work and that users won’t be able to change saved presets once the app is gone.

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US datacenters are experiencing a significant shift toward coal-powered energy due to elevated natural gas prices and rapidly growing electricity demand. From a report: According to a research note from financial services firm Jefferies, datacenter operators are racing to connect new capacity to the electrical grid, with accelerated load growth expected during the 2026-2028 period. This spike in demand is driving an unexpected resurgence in coal generation, which has increased nearly 20 percent year-to-date.

The research note, seen by The Register, states: “We raise our estimate for coal generation by ~11 percent (driven by higher capacity factors), and staying elevated through 2027 on favorable fuel pricing vs gas (particularly for existing fleet).” Warnings emerged last year that rising energy demand from the proliferation of data centers in the US risked outstripping available generation capacity, potentially extending the operational life of coal-fired power plants. Further reading: India Needs Coal For the Next Decade and Nobody Wants To Say It.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is warning of an active scam that diverts employees’ paycheck payments to attacker-controlled accounts after first taking over their profiles on Workday or other cloud-based HR services.

Payroll Pirate, as Microsoft says the campaign has been dubbed, gains access to victims’ HR portals by sending them phishing emails that trick the recipients into providing their credentials for logging in to the cloud account. The scammers are able to recover multi-factor authentication codes by using adversary-in-the-middle tactics, which work by sitting between the victims and the site they think they’re logging in to, which is, in fact, a fake site operated by the attackers.

Not all MFA is created equal

The attackers then enter the intercepted credentials, including the MFA code, into the real site. This tactic, which has grown increasingly common in recent years, underscores the importance of adopting FIDO-compliant forms of MFA, which are immune to such attacks.

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Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news.

This week, neurotech startup Neurable launched its MW75 Neuro headphones with a pretty seductive pitch—one that I’m not quite buying.

Just slip on this pair of headphones, and you’ll gain unprecedented access to your brain’s inner workings. Track your focus. Measure your mental fatigue. Quantify your cognitive performance. It’s supposed to be the quantified-self movement’s next frontier—moving from steps and heart rates to the most intimate data source of all: your brainwaves.

If you ask me, a pair of headphones that can read your mind sounds either too good to be true, or too creepy to be good. Neurable doesn’t plan to stop at headphones, and they aren’t the only company making a name in the space. Glasses, helmets, what have you—the next wave of wearable devices are targeting the brain. Whether you find it tempting or find it terrifying, the real question: Is this technology even real? Can “brain tracking” headphones actually measure anything meaningful, or are people paying $499 for an elaborate placebo wrapped in EEG sensors? 

Unsurprisingly, the answers are a little wrinkly. 

What are brain wearables in theory?

The concept behind brain wearables is this: Using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors embedded in headphone ear cups, devices like Neurable’s MW75 Neuro claim to track electrical signals from your brain, translating them into actionable insights about your mental state. The headphones promise to tell you when you’re losing focus, when you need a break, and even provide a “cognitive snapshot” of your brain health over time.

For the wellness-obsessed, it’s pretty much catnip. Where fitness trackers gave us visibility into our physical states, brain wearables promise to illuminate the black box of our mental performance. In theory, you could optimize not just your workout routine, but your work-work routine, catching burnout before it catches you.

The problem, according to experts across technology law and neuroscience, is that we’re nowhere near ready for this technology to become mainstream—neither from a regulatory standpoint nor a scientific one. Let’s start with the science.

How does the science of brain wearables hold up?

Before getting into the fairly obvious privacy nightmare, there’s a fundamental question about whether these devices can actually deliver on their promises.

José M. Muñoz, an associate at The Centre for Neurotechnology and Law in the United Kingdom and the International Center for Neuroscience and Ethics in Spain, is blunt in his assessment: “For years, there has been an ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness, accuracy, and challenges of direct-to-consumer neurotechnologies such as this new device from Neurable,” he explains. “Although it is true that the algorithms analyzing brain data collected via EEG are steadily improving, this remains a neurotechnology that is still insufficiently accurate outside of a medical or clinical setting.”

The problems are both technical and practical. EEG data quality is extremely sensitive to electrode placement—sometimes within a range of millimeters. When users place these sensors themselves, without medical supervision, their reliability plummets. Moreover, the most accurate EEG studies use far more electrodes than the handful embedded in a pair of headphones.

“In sum, you may be wearing these headphones and believing they are helping to improve your mental health, physical performance, or attention,” Muñoz says. “But what you are really improving are the manufacturer’s algorithms, while handing over your brain data in exchange for very little.”

In other words, it’s the tech tale old as time: You’re not the customer being served by this technology. You’re the data source training it.

Dr. Annu Navani offers a more measured perspective. She acknowledges that brain wearables have “significant limitations, including being currently expensive, less clinically validated, and less convenient or comfortable than wrist-worn trackers.” The metrics they provide are also harder to translate into practical guidance—most people intuitively understand what to do with their step count, but what action should you take when your “cognitive load score” hits 73?

Rather than replacing traditional fitness trackers, Navani believes brain wearables will likely “complement rather than replace conventional devices, targeting a niche of users interested in cognitive and neuro-performance insights.” Traditional wearables, she points out, still provide reliable, validated data for basic health metrics that users can easily understand and apply.

Who is really reading your mind here?

Think about it (and hey, maybe relish in the fact that no headphones are successfully reading those thoughts): Your brainwave data is arguably the most intimate biometric information you possess. We’re talking about a window into your mental and emotional states. So what happens when you willingly give up this data with no meaningful oversight?

“I hope brain wearables are not the future of fitness tracking, or any industry, at least certainly not yet and not any time soon,” says Star Kashman, a technology attorney and founding partner of a cyber law firm. “We are still somehow facing a complete lack of federal regulation in the U.S. when it comes to biometric data, data privacy law, and minimal to no cybersecurity standards for these devices, and no protective regulations for users.”

The implications are stark: “What happens when a ‘brain wearable’ is hacked?” Kashman asks. The lack of regulation means users have little recourse and limited knowledge about how their neural data is being stored, used, or potentially sold.

Regulation aside, individual consumers do still have their own privacy concerns. The sort of consumer ready to spend hundreds of dollars on headphones might just be the same type of person who is uncomfortable with constant surveillance. “Unless someone is so obsessed with optimizing their fitness journey that they ignore the serious risks present, I just do not see this becoming the norm anytime soon,” Kashman notes. Just look at Meta’s push for smart glasses. The tech has got to be good and ready before consumers are going to drop hundreds of dollars and risk their most private bodily information.

The bottom line

So, simply put, at the time of this publication, asked with my own private brain waves: Are brain wearables the future of fitness tracking? Almost certainly not in the way their manufacturers hope. The technology is too immature, the regulatory landscape too barren, and consumer wariness too high for these devices to start popping up like Fitbits tomorrow.

I’d say what we’re witnessing instead is the familiar pattern of the wellness industry: a genuine technological development (EEG monitoring does work in controlled settings!) being prematurely commercialized and marketed with promises that totally outstrip the reality. The result is an expensive product that may provide some users with interesting data, but likely offers more placebo than breakthrough.

For now, brain wearables occupy an awkward position: too invasive for casual users, too unproven for serious applications, and too unregulated to trust. They may have a future, but it’s not this one—not until the science catches up to the marketing, and the law catches up to both.

Until then, your regular fitness tracker measuring your heart rate and steps? That’s probably telling you more useful information about your health than any headphones reading your brainwaves ever could.