Two Amazon Prime Air drones collided with a crane in Tolleson, Arizona near 96th Avenue and Roosevelt Street. Amazon confirmed the incident and is working with authorities to determine what happened, though no injuries have been reported. CNBC reports: The incident occurred on Wednesday around 1 p.m. EST in Tolleson, Arizona, a city west of Phoenix. Two MK30 drones crashed into the boom of a stationary construction crane that was in a commercial area just a few miles away from an Amazon warehouse. One person was evaluated on the scene for possible smoke inhalation, said Sergeant Erik Mendez of the Tolleson Police Department.

Both drones sustained “substantial” damage from the collision on Wednesday, which occurred when the aircraft were mid-route, according to preliminary FAA crash reports. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident. The drones were believed to be flying northeast back-to-back when they collided with the crane that was being used for roof work on a distribution facility, Tolleson police said in a release. The drones landed in the backyard of a nearby building, according to the release.

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Microsoft may have made the unfortunate decision to raise the price of a Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to $30 a month, but you don’t have to live by the company’s rules — at least not yet. Most online retailers are still selling codes for prepaid Game Pass subscriptions at the original $20 a month price. That means you can pay $60 for three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, stack your codes and keep your subscription without having to downgrade or cancel.

As the highest tier in Game Pass, an Ultimate subscription gives you the ability to download and play a library of over 200 games on your PC or Xbox. With Xbox Cloud Gaming, you can also stream the majority of those games to other devices, too, whether it’s a smartphone, LG TV or in-car display. It’s worth noting, though, the benefits of Ultimate did change with the introduction of the higher price. Microsoft shared that Ultimate subscribers will now also receive the benefits of an Ubisoft+ subscription at no additional cost, a $16 a month value that unlocks access to a back catalog of Ubisoft games from franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry. Starting in November, the new Ultimate subscription also includes access to Fortnite Crew, Epic’s $12 a month plan that gives you V-Bucks, battle passes and more in Fortnite.

While those new benefits might justify a higher price monetarily, whether that’s a convincing reason to stay subscribed is a separate question. This likely won’t be the last time Microsoft will raise the price of its subscription service. Avoiding those fees by buying pre-paid Game Pass codes seems like an excellent way to try out the new Ultimate before committing to cancelling your subscription, downgrading your plan or sticking with Microsoft’s new price. You can purchase three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $60 a month. Stacking four three-month codes should come out to around $240.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/game-pass-ultimate-is-still-20-a-month-if-you-buy-pre-paid-codes-222333258.html?src=rss

There’s a good bit riding on the second launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

Most directly, the fate of a NASA science mission to study Mars’s upper atmosphere hinges on a successful launch. The second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifter will send two NASA-funded satellites toward the red planet to study the processes that drove Mars’s evolution from a warmer, wetter world to the cold, dry planet of today.

A successful launch would also nudge Blue Origin closer to winning certification from the Space Force to begin launching national security satellites.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The operator of a popular pirate sports streaming site in Argentina has gone from spending time in jail with murderers to landing a new high-profile job a month later. Alejo “Shishi” Warles, the 25-year-old operator of Al Angulo TV, was arrested on August 20 in a LaLiga-backed crackdown. After his release on bail, he was hired by professional esports team 9z Globant, a partnership involving Argentine tech unicorn Globant. […] The team is the result of a partnership between 9z Team and Argentinian tech unicorn Globant. Somewhat ironically, Globant previously worked with LaLiga to monitor the live-streaming user experience. Warles welcomed himself to 9z Globant via the team’s social media account, referring to himself as an idol, genius, and GOAT.

Lucia Quinteros, the main social media manager at the esports team, informed Entre Rios that after considering their new hire’s history, they believe that he can add value to the team. “We hired Alejo, not the person who set up that project (Al Angulo TV). Of course, we evaluated what happened, but we believe that, from now on, Alejo can pursue a different career path,” Quinteros said. According to Warles himself, he was hired because he’s the best. Like many of his comments, this bravado should not be taken too seriously, but nevertheless sits in stark contrast to the typical pirate site operator facing criminal charges.

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Note: Photo above is a lie, does not use finger lightning.

This is a video of Nate From The Internet (I thought I recognized him from somewhere!) attempting to bake edgeless brownies (plus bread and angel food cake) using electricity. The concept is simple: place the batter between two conductive steel sheets and run electricity to them, allowing the batter’s electrical resistance heat and cook the brownies. His first attempt leaves something to be desired, but he produces a decent brownie the second time. Me? I would have just eaten the batter raw. My girlfriend was making cookies the other night but stepped away to take a phone call before they went in the oven. BIG MISAKE. Long story short she was still able to make a cookie, and I got to sleep on the couch.

Fitness tech appears to be having a strange spat. Earlier this week, Strava filed a lawsuit alleging that Garmin infringed on its patents for two features related to tracking exercise routes: segments and heatmaps. It’s also claiming that Garmin violated a Master Cooperation Agreement by developing its own heat map feature. The complaint (via The Verge) is seeking a permanent injunction to stop Garmin from selling any items with segments or a heat map features, which would amount to a majority of Garmin’s hardware products as well as its Connect tracking program.

The lawsuit on its own is a surprise. Strava and Garmin are two major players in fitness tech that have worked together for about a decade, the pair have a number of integrations between their platforms. It also seems unlikely that Strava will make much headway with the case. DC Rainmaker, which first picked up on the lawsuit, has a thorough timeline of the companies’ patent filings that strongly suggests the arguments won’t hold water in court. It’s also strange that these alleged infringements, by Strava’s own assertions, began a long time ago and yet the company is only taking issue with them now.

But the situation got even stranger when Strava Chief Product Officer Matt Salazar took to Reddit today to give some insight into why the company is taking such aggressive action against a frequent partner. According to Salazar’s post, Strava is invoking the lawyers because Garmin is adopting new developer guidelines for API partners “that required the Garmin logo to be present on every single activity post, screen, graph, image, sharing card etc.” Although he frames it as a move to protect users’ data, the argument sounds more like a petty complaint that Garmin is putting its brand on the data its products are used to collect.

It’s a weird lawsuit, and hopefully one that won’t cause any disruptions for either company’s customers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/strava-sues-garmin-in-bizarre-patent-infringement-lawsuit-213300227.html?src=rss

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on January 15, 2022. The pyroclastic flow severed both of Tonga’s underwater internet cables. The eruption cut sixty-five miles from the domestic cable and fifty-five miles from the international link to Fiji. Tonga lost all internet access. The cables sit on the ocean floor and carry 95% of the world’s international internet traffic.

The Guardian has a long read on what happened in the aftermath. A.T.M.s (cash machines) stopped working because banks could not verify account balances. Businesses could not file export paperwork. Foreign remittances made up 44% of the country’s G.D.P. The government found old satellite phones. Three or four days later, officials restored a hundred and twenty megabytes per second of bandwidth for essential work. A month after the eruption, SpaceX donated fifty Starlink terminals. SubCom’s repair ship Reliance took five weeks to restore the international cable. Vava’u did not get broadband back until August, 2023. Another earthquake in the summer of 2024 severed the domestic cable again.

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When a robotics pioneer who has spent decades building humanoid machines recommends that you stand at least nine feet away from any full-sized walking robot, you should probably listen.

“My advice to people is to not come closer than 3 meters to a full-size walking robot,” Rodney Brooks writes in a technical essay titled “Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity” published on his blog last week. “Until someone comes up with a better version of a two-legged walking robot that is much safer to be near, and even in contact with, we will not see humanoid robots get certified to be deployed in zones that also have people in them.”

Brooks, the MIT professor emeritus who co-founded iRobot (of Roomba fame) and Rethink Robotics, believes companies pouring billions into humanoid development are chasing an expensive fantasy. Among other problems yet to be addressed, he warns that today’s bipedal humanoids are fundamentally unsafe for humans to be near when they walk due to the massive kinetic energy they generate while maintaining balance. That stored-up energy can cause severe injury if the robot falls or its limbs strike someone.

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This is a video of climber Domen Škofic attempting a climbing route underneath the wings of a flying plane, using handholds made by his father. He falls on his first two attempts (he has a parachute or there only would have been one attempt), but manages to complete the route on his third. And you know what my old mentor used to say about the third time. “It’s the charm?” What? No — why even bother trying again? You failed twice, just give up already. He was a real inspiration.

AI has run out of training data, according to Neema Raphael, Goldman Sachs’ chief data officer and head of data engineering. “We’ve already run out of data,” Raphael said on the bank’s podcast. He said this shortage is already shaping how developers build new AI systems. China’s DeepSeek may have kept costs down by training on outputs from existing models instead of fresh data. The web has been tapped out.

Developers have been using synthetic data — machine-generated material that offers unlimited supply but carries quality risks. Raphael said he doesn’t think the lack of fresh data will be a massive constraint. “From an enterprise perspective, I think there’s still a lot of juice I’d say to be squeezed in that,” he said. Proprietary datasets held by corporations could make AI tools far more valuable. The challenge is “understanding the data, understanding the business context of the data, and then being able to normalize it.”

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As respiratory virus season draws near, no federal health official has signed off on recommendations for this year’s updated COVID-19 vaccines, leaving the federal vaccination schedule without an update and access to the shots in limbo for some low-income children.

According to reporting by Stat news earlier this week, two immunization program experts—who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal from the Trump administration—said that because there is no sign-off, states are not yet able to order COVID-19 shots for children who receive vaccines through the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program. The federal program provides vaccines to children who are Medicaid-eligible and under- or uninsured, which includes around half of all children in the US.

Typically, federal vaccination recommendations come about after a panel of expert advisors for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—publicly reviews vaccine data and votes on recommendations for use. Then, the CDC director decides whether to adopt those recommendations. While directors don’t always adopt ACIP’s recommendations, they usually do—and often on the same day as the ACIP vote. After that, the recommendation becomes part of federal vaccine guidance, and insurance companies and federal programs are required to cover the recommended shots.

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