One of the most annoying restrictions in Gmail is that, once you’ve picked an email address, you’re stuck with it. There are exceptions for third-party addresses, like work emails tied to a company’s domain, but for the typical @gmail.com account, no dice. Personally, I’ve had a number of loyalty programs and store accounts tied to an embarrassingly edgy email from high school for decades now, but finally, it seems like I’ll be able to change it.

A recently updated Google support page says the company is now “gradually rolling out” the ability to change your Gmail address, with some limitations. Oddly, the page is only available in Hindi for the moment, so I’ve reached out to Google for clarification about where and when the feature will be available and will update when I hear back. Still, the support page does say (through a machine translation) that the feature’s coming “to all users,” which implies it’ll see a global release at some point.

For good measure, I checked if I could change any of my personal gmail addresses, but no luck. But once the feature rolls out to you, here’s how you’ll be able to do it.

1. On a computer or mobile device, navigate to myaccount.google.com/google-account-email.

2. At the top of the page, click or tap “Personal Information.” On mobile, this may show up as “Personal Info.”

3. Click or Tap on “Google Account Email.”

4. From there, click or tap on “Change Your Google Account Email Address” and enter your updated email address.

Note that these instructions were filtered through a machine translation, so exact wording may differ depending on region. I’ll update with official English instructions when available, but the process does seem simple enough.

There are a couple of wrinkles, however. The big one is that emails sent to your old address will still be sent to your new one, and that your old email may still show up instead of your new one in some cases, like on Calendar events created before you changed your address. That’s because your former name will be listed as an alias for the account, rather than deleted. That could be a pain if you’re trying to leave old contacts behind, but it’ll also ensure important contacts don’t get lost in the shuffle, and it’ll keep anyone else from registering a new account with that email address. You’ll also still be able to use your old gmail address to sign into any accounts associated with it, and regardless of which name you sign in with, you’ll still have access to all of your messages, photos, and other files.

You can also revert to your old address at any time, but as for changing it to a new address, you can only do it once a year, and only three times total. So no changing it to a wacky new address every Halloween and then back to normal come November.

Still, it should be a major quality-of-life upgrade, and should help Google’s email service better catch up to more permissive email providers like Proton. No more sounding like an edgelord every time I talk to the checkout clerk at Sephora.

A group of researchers is calling on universities to treat consulting work as a strategic priority, arguing that bureaucratic obstacles and inconsistent policies have left a massive revenue stream largely untapped even as higher education institutions face mounting financial pressures. (Consulting work refers to academics offering their advice and expertise to outside organizations — industry, government, civil society — for a fee. It’s one of the most direct and scalable ways academics can shape the world beyond campus, and the projects are typically shorter in duration and easier to set up than alternatives like spin-out companies.)

Writing in Nature, the authors found that fewer than 10% of academic staff at nine UK universities engaged in consulting work, and the number of academic consulting contracts across the country fell 38% over the past decade — from around 99,000 in 2014-15 to fewer than 62,000 in 2023-24.

Academic consulting in the UK is currently worth roughly $675-810 million annually, a figure that represents just 0.6% of the country’s $124 billion management consulting market. The authors examined policies at 30 universities and surveyed 76 fellows from a UK Research and Innovation programme. Two-thirds of the surveyed institutions had publicly available consulting policies, and two outright prohibit private consulting. Permitted consulting time ranged from unlimited to 30 days or fewer per year, institutional charges varied from 10-40% of fees, and contract approval timelines stretched from 24 hours to several months.

Private consultancy firms are moving into this space, capturing opportunities that universities neglect. Small-scale projects under $6,750 are commonly sidelined by university contract offices because they represent too small an income for strained institutional resources. The authors propose standardized policies across institutions, shared consulting income with departments, and faster approval processes — reforms similar to those already implemented for university spin-out companies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Most outdoor speakers claim they can handle water. The Soundcore Boom 3i goes further: it’s fully waterproof and dustproof with an IP68 rating, but it also resists saltwater, which is still rare at this size and price. That matters if your weekends involve beaches, boats, or the ocean rather than a backyard patio. Also, it floats, and more importantly, it does so facing upward, which keeps the drivers out of the water and the sound clear. That one detail makes a real difference when waves or movement would normally flip a speaker onto its side. The Boom 3i usually sells for $129.99, but it’s currently down to $79.99, its lowest price so far, according to price trackers.

Soundcore Boom 3i by Anker, Compact Outdoor Speaker, IP68 Waterproof, Floating Playback, Saltwater-Resistant, BassUp 2.0, 50W Portable Speaker, Bluetooth 5.3, 16H, TWS, Kayak/Fishing/Camping-Blue

$79.99
at Amazon

$129.99
Save $50.00

$79.99
at Amazon

$129.99
Save $50.00

It weighs a little over three pounds and comes with a shoulder strap, so carrying it to a beach or campsite doesn’t feel like a chore. And pushing up to 50 watts, the Boom 3i is loud enough to cover a small gathering of about eight people without sounding strained.

The sound quality is solid but not dramatic. You get punchy mid-bass and a warm tone, but very little deep bass, which is expected from a compact, front-facing speaker. There’s a BassUp button on top if you want more low-end emphasis, and the Soundcore app includes a nine-band equalizer for finer tuning. Battery life sits around 15 to 16 hours at moderate volume, and you can keep listening while charging over USB-C.

The Boom 3i’s interesting extras include a Buzz Clean mode, which plays a low-frequency tone to shake sand and grit out of the speaker after a beach day. It works surprisingly well, though you may still need to rinse or shake it afterward. Plus, there’s an emergency alarm and voice amplifier built in, which could be useful for kayaking or group outings, even if they’re not things you’ll use often. On the downside, the speaker reportedly down-mixes stereo audio to mono unless you pair it with a second unit, and the app doesn’t show an exact battery percentage.

All said, this isn’t the speaker for indoor listening or detailed sound. It’s for water-heavy trips where durability matters more than finesse. At this price, it’s a strong option for that specific use case.

China drafted landmark rules to stop AI chatbots from emotionally manipulating users, including what could become the strictest policy worldwide intended to prevent AI-supported suicides, self-harm, and violence.

China’s Cyberspace Administration proposed the rules on Saturday. If finalized, they would apply to any AI products or services publicly available in China that use text, images, audio, video, or “other means” to simulate engaging human conversation. Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, told CNBC that the “planned rules would mark the world’s first attempt to regulate AI with human or anthropomorphic characteristics” at a time when companion bot usage is rising globally.

Growing awareness of problems

In 2025, researchers flagged major harms of AI companions, including promotion of self-harm, violence, and terrorism. Beyond that, chatbots shared harmful misinformation, made unwanted sexual advances, encouraged substance abuse, and verbally abused users. Some psychiatrists are increasingly ready to link psychosis to chatbot use, the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend, while the most popular chatbot in the world, ChatGPT, has triggered lawsuits over outputs linked to child suicide and murder-suicide.

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You can customize more on your Mac than you might have realized, and that extends to the file management software you use to browse around your system. Take, for example, Finder: There are a good number of alternatives around that bring with them extra features and different layouts.

I’ve been testing out three of the most well-known and highly rated alternatives to Finder to see what I might be missing. Each one has its own appeal, but the third in the list here is so good that I might switch to it permanently for all my file and folder needs on macOS.

Commander One

Credit: Lifehacker

As soon as you load up Commander One, you’ll notice it has a busier interface than Finder, which may or may not suit you, depending on your attitude toward minimalism. Its layout is based around a dual-pane interface, and you can customize it in a variety of ways—even down to the fonts and colors used, if you want something bespoke.

The software starts to show its potential when you move from just looking at your files and folders to actually doing something with them. You’re able to rename files when copying and moving them; you get a dedicated file operations queue; and you can run complex searches through your system using regular expressions, too.

I like the quick toggle switches for seeing hidden files and for previewing files without any additional apps, and connecting up to network locations and cloud storage is straightforward. There’s even an integrated Terminal for you to make use of. It’s handy having shortcut keys on show in the interface as well, and you can customize these as needed if you don’t like the defaults.

There’s certainly a lot going on, and while the interface takes a little bit of getting used to, that’s to be expected—and it doesn’t take long to learn what’s what. The Pro version of the software comes with extra features, including layout themes, and integrations for FTP, Google Drive, and Dropbox: That’s yours for a one-off fee of $29.99.

QSpace Pro

Credit: Lifehacker

QSpace Pro is the best Finder alternative I tested in terms of the interface customizations you get access to: You can tailor to a fine level of detail, though the default look isn’t all that different from Finder. You can have up to four different system locations on view at once, with the panels arranged in a variety of different ways, and jumping between these layouts is easily done.

After a short while using QSpace Pro I definitely felt I was better able to get around my Mac more efficiently, and when you’ve got a lot to do on your system, that really helps. Copying, moving, searching, deleting, tagging, and previewing is all intuitively and simply done, and you can easily hide parts of the interface if you know you won’t need them.

The wealth of settings available in QSpace Pro is a testament to how much you can do with this: Keyboard shortcuts, the context menu, new file creation, batch operations, folder syncing, iCloud links, and app launching can all be customized, and those are just some of the options available. It’s like Finder, but with a lot more going on.

QSpace Pro isn’t free, however: Its features cost a one-off fee of $27.99 via the Mac App Store (or $29.99 via a direct download), though at the time of writing, those prices are down to $12.99 and $13.99, respectively. If you go through the QSpace Pro website, you can test the software out for 30 days for free before buying.

Path Finder

Credit: Lifehacker

Path Finder is one of the Finder alternatives that’s been around the longest, and I think it’s the one I’m actually going to switch to permanently. It’s absolutely packed with features and options to play around with, and if you spend a little time getting it set up the way you want it, it should seriously speed up all your file operations.

There are a choice of different layouts to pick from, including a dual-pane layout that makes moving and copying more straightforward, and I very much appreciate the “stacking” approach that lets you pile up several files and folders in a temporary holding pane first, before you do anything with them.

Batch file operations are supported, as are synced folders, so you can merge and compare two folders on your system as required. There’s also extensive use of bookmarks and tab presets, so that you can quickly jump to the places on your Mac system that you need to visit the most—something that isn’t always simple to do in Finder.

The visual representations of how much space files and folders are taking up on disk is very handy, and so is the Dropbox integration (with Dropbox being my go-to cloud storage option). Admittedly it’s not the most visually appealing of the software packages listed here, but that’s not necessarily the most important thing in a file manager, and it adds all the features I didn’t know I’d been missing from Finder.

Path Finder is $29.99 for the year, but there’s a 30-day trial available.

Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends. There is a growing body of research that strives to connect those ancient stories with the real natural events that inspired them. Folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor has put together a fascinating short compendium of such insights with Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, from dry quicksand and rains of frogs to burning lakes, paleoburrows, and Scandinavian “endless winters.”

Mayor’s work has long straddled multiple disciplines, but one of her specialities is best described as geomythology, a term coined in 1968 by Indiana University geologist Dorothy Vitaliano, who was interested in classical legends about Atlantis and other civilizations that were lost due to natural disasters. Her interest resulted in Vitaliano’s 1973 book Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins.

Mayor herself became interested in the field when she came across Greek and Roman descriptions of fossils, and that interest expanded over the years to incorporate other examples of “folk science” in cultures around the world. Her books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (2009), as well as Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & the Scorpion Bombs (2022), exploring the origins of biological and chemical warfare. Her 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, explored ancient myths and folklore about creating automation, artificial life, and AI, connecting them to the robots and other ingenious mechanical devices actually designed and built during that era.

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