A small section of the International Space Station that has experienced persistent leaks for years appears to have stopped venting atmosphere into space.

The leaks were caused by microscopic structural cracks are inside the small PrK module on the Russian segment of the space station, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module. The problem has been a long-running worry for Russian and US operators of the station, especially after the rate of leakage doubled in 2024. This prompted NASA officials to label the leak as a “high likelihood” and “high consequence” risk.

However, recently two sources indicated that the leaks have stopped. And NASA has now confirmed this.

Read full article

Comments

Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country’s defence and environment ministers along with six others.

After the accident, TikTok clips circulated showing pastors who claimed to have foreseen the disaster before it happened. Elvis Ankrah, the presidential envoy for inter-faith and ecumenical relations, now asks prophets to submit their predictions for review.

Charismatic preacher-prophets have been a fixture of Ghanaian public life since Pentecostalism arrived in the 1980s, but social media has amplified their reach and made their claims increasingly outlandish. Police have threatened to arrest prophets who cannot prove their predictions eventually came true. Some two-thirds of Ghanaians favor giving divine intervention a role in politics. Ankrah recently declared that most prophecies submitted to him are “total bunk.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Pebble, the early smartwatch pioneer, has added a new model to its relaunched lineup, and it’s the thin, round model Pebble fans have been waiting for. What’s even more intriguing to me is the fact that the Pebble Round 2 doesn’t have a heart rate sensor, signaling that a smartwatch doesn’t have to be a fitness watch, too. The Pebble Round 2 starts shipping in May, and is available for pre-order now at $199.

The new watch is meant to be a modern remake of 2015’s Pebble Time Round. Pebble fans loved the round watch, and every thread about new products on the Pebble subreddit has at least a few comments begging for a new version of it. That wish has been granted. (I did notice that Pebble’s website had a teaser telling people who visited the website to “check back around” to see what’s in today’s announcement. Cute.)

What’s in the Pebble Round 2

The Pebble Round 2 is a round smartwatch in a stainless steel frame. It’s about the same size and shape as the old Pebble Time Round, but has a much larger display area with nearly double the resolution, better visibility at an angle, a dramatically increased battery life, and—unusually for smartwatches these days—no heart rate sensor. The specs include: 

• 10 to 14 day battery life

• 42 millimeter size, 8 millimeters thick (that’s thinner than every Apple Watch)

• Color e-paper screen (the same technology Garmin calls MIP)

• 1.3-inch screen with 260×260 resolution

• Dual microphones for voice input

• Accelerometer

• Magnetometer

• Touchscreen

• Takes a 20 mm watch band (black and brushed silver models), or a 14 mm watch band (brushed silver and rose gold models)

• Works with iOS and Android

• Tracks steps and sleep

Eric Migicovsky, founder of both the original Pebble company and its modern incarnation Core Devices, told me the e-paper screen is the same one Garmin used in its old Forerunners. You may recall that I think the Forerunner 255 is one of the best-kept secrets in the smartwatch world, and that MIP screens have some advantages over the AMOLED displays that are more common these days. 

I’ll say more about this below, but the lack of a heart rate sensor is an interesting choice. The Pebble Round 2 can still track steps and sleep by sensing motion, so it’s not like health tracking features are totally missing. But it’s not going to measure your heart rate during workouts, nor try to capture heart rate and HRV while you sleep.

How the Pebble Round 2 bucks the smartwatch trend (and why that’s probably a good thing)

This is a really interesting list of specs, to me. Microphones for voice input are a new trend that’s been rolling out to more and more watches (both Garmin and Coros added them to more models this year). The battery life is a nice improvement, since the old Pebble Time Round only had about three days of battery life, and even today’s smartwatches often struggle to get more than a few days. The thin build is impressive—I believe it’s the thinnest on the market right now. 

But some aspects feel retro. The display technology is an older one that has seemd like it was on its way out. And the thing that I can barely wrap my head around as a fitness-focused writer is how do you release a smartwatch in 2026 that doesn’t have a heart rate sensor? This is madness! Or…is it?  

Over the past few years, maybe the past decade, smartwatches and fitness watches have been converging on each other. It seems like each device wants to be able to say “we have that feature too!” so Oura now tracks activities instead of just sleep, Whoop tracks steps instead of just heart rate and HRV, and Apple—always willing to be seen as a fitness company, but always lagging behind on fitness features—finally, in 2025, gave us a real fitness app. Every watch these days has a heart rate sensor, every brand is ditching MIP style screens for AMOLED ones, and there’s no longer any categorical difference between smartwatches and fitness watches. Everything tries to do everything.

This trend isn’t necessarily good for users. For example: Garmin needed to add more features to the Forerunner 265 to justify a new model, but it already had pretty much everything a runner could ask for, at an already-premium price. So Garmin added a speaker and microphone to create the 570, and raised the price by $100. Should a middle-of-the-road running watch really cost $550? 

By contrast, the Pebble Round 2 leans into the things it’s good at (thin build, e-paper screen, microphone for input) and leaves off the things that, in theory, Pebble Round 2 users don’t care about. It’s missing both a heart rate sensor and a speaker, but its rectangular sibling the Pebble Time 2 has both. These two models sell for $199 and $225, respectively.

I’m cautiously optimistic that Pebble’s approach might signal a change in the trend. Migicovsky wrote in a postmortem on the original Pebble company’s failure that Pebble could have kept its niche as “the smartwatch for hackers” but tried to be too many things to too many people. (In that same blog post, written in 2017 and updated in 2022, Migicovsky notes that the smartwatch market of 2015 was moving toward fitness, but Pebble wasn’t a fitness company and arguably shouldn’t have tried to be one.)

“People want different things,” Migicovsky told me in a call earlier this week. He’s focusing Pebble’s new products on things he would want to use, not on what he thinks everybody else wants. That could be a risky move, since I’m not convinced that there’s a huge market for a heart-rate-less smartwatch. But I think he might be right that the smartwatch market is ready to stop being everything to everybody. 

You’ve probably heard people say it’s impossible to go back and correct some error from the past. To those people, you should raise a middle finger in defiance (they are miserable, after all), and then point them to the tale of Pebble’s unlikely revival. The smartwatch pioneer’s return was a surprise of 2025, and now the company has resurrected one of its last great triumphs. It’s announcing the Pebble Round 2, and company founder Eric Migicovsky is looking to put right what once went wrong.

The Pebble Round 2 is the successor to the Pebble Time Round, which debuted in 2015 to what can only be described as frustrated reviews. It was a truly thin smartwatch, with a glorious round display, but that came at the cost of battery life and durability. The fancier components also added to the cost which pushed it to an unreasonable-for-the-time $249. It’s these flaws which the company has sought to address with the Round 2, as well as some of the issues that weren’t deal breakers at the time, but certainly weren’t ideal. 

For instance, the massive bezel around the display is now a thing of the past, with the Round 2’s 1.3-inch color e-paper touchscreen now stretching to the edge of its case. The viewing angles have also been dramatically improved, enabling you to check the time without having to move your wrist. The display has also been bonded to the glass crystal, reducing reflectivity and glare which was another downside for the original model. 

Better still, the battery life is now more than two weeks on a single charge, giving it the sort of Pebble-esque longevity its users demand. And it’s retained that thinness — measuring in at just 8.1mm — which is far more elegant than the chunkier smartwatches from other manufacturers. Plus, there’s dual microphones for interacting with AI agents and dictating messages, as well as step and sleep tracking.

Migicovsky explained that the focus here isn’t just to correct some of the more glaring issues from the first model. As he wrote back in 2022, Pebble’s failure was down to its attempt to broaden its appeal beyond the users who had so warmly adopted it in the first place. Consequently, rather than include bulky features like a a built-in optical heart-rate sensor, the focus is on utility. Not to mention a desire to reintroduce some much-needed whimsy into hardware, and empowering users to tinker with their devices, enabling them to craft their own watch faces.

Hopefully, we’ll get some time in person with the Pebble Round 2 in the next few days, but in the meantime, it’s up for pre-order from today. It’ll set you back $199, and will begin shipping in May. And if you’ve already put down cash for a Pebble Time 2, and want to change your mind, you can switch your order over, no questions asked.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/pebble-brings-its-round-faced-smartwatch-back-from-the-dead-150000172.html?src=rss

We’re gearing up for CES 2026! Engadget will be on the ground, once again, to dive into the latest TVs, wearables and other wild tech from the world’s biggest consumer electronics show. In this episode, we chat about some new products we expect to see, like Micro RGB LED TVs and AI devices, and peer into what’s ahead for the rest of 2026.

Subscribe!

• iTunes

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• Stitcher

• Google Podcasts

Credits

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/engadget-podcast-everything-we-expect-at-ces-2026-144657955.html?src=rss

Elon Musk’s Grok AI has been allowing users to transform photographs of woman and children into sexualized and compromising images, Bloomberg reported. The issue has created an uproar among users on X and prompted an “apology” from the bot itself. “I deeply regret an incident on Dec. 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user’s prompt,” Grok said in a post. An X representative has yet to comment on the matter.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, CSAM includes “AI-generated content that makes it look like a child is being abused,” as well as “any content that sexualizes or exploits a child for the viewer’s benefit.”

Several days ago, users noticed others on the site asking Grok to digitally manipulate photos of women and children into sexualized and abusive content, according to CNBC. The images were then distributed on X and other sites without consent, in possible violation of law. “We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them,” a response from Grok reads. It added that CSAM is “illegal and prohibited.” Grok is supposed to have features to prevent such abuse, but AI guardrails can often be manipulated by users.

It appears X has yet to reinforced whatever guardrails Grok has to prevent this sort of image generation. However, the company has hidden Grok’s media feature which makes it harder to either find images or document potential abuse. Grok itself acknowledged that “a company could face criminal or civil penalties if it knowingly facilitates or fails to prevent AI-generated CSAM after being alerted.” 

The Internet Watch Foundation recently revealed that AI-generated CSAM has increased by an increase orders of magnitude in 2025 compared to the year before. This is in part because the language models behind AI generation are accidentally trained on real photos of children scraped from school websites and social media or even prior CSAM content.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/elon-musks-grok-ai-posted-csam-image-following-safeguard-lapses-140521454.html?src=rss

CBS News: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has printed its final newspaper, marking the end of a 157-year chapter in Georgia history and officially transitioning the longtime publication into a fully digital news outlet.

The front-page story of the final print edition asks a fitting question: “What is the future of local media in Atlanta?” The historic last issue is also being sold for $8, a significant increase from the typical $2.00 price.

Wednesday, Dec. 31, marks the last day The AJC will be delivered to driveways across metro Atlanta. Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the newspaper will exist exclusively online, a move its leadership says reflects how readers now consume news and ensures the organization’s future.

AJC President and Publisher Andrew Morse said the decision was not made lightly, especially given how deeply the paper is woven into daily life for generations of readers. The move makes Atlanta the only major U.S. city without a daily printed newspaper.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fender Audio, the consumer electronics arm of the instrument maker, will introduce two flagship audio products at this year’s CES in Las Vegas. These products were made under a licensing agreement with Singapore-based company RiffSound.

First up is a line of Bluetooth speakers dubbed the ELIE (Extremely Loud Infinitely Expressive). The lineup includes two models, the E6 and E12. The speakers leverage a combination of DSP and system-on-a-chip processing, which Fender says can deliver more volume while maintaining greater power efficiency.

Each speaker can handle up to four audio channels at once, including a Bluetooth source, a wired XLR or 1/4-inch input and two additional wireless channels with compatible Fender Audio accessories. Users can also sync up two ELIE speakers in a stereo set-up. The announcement was light on specific differences between the E6 and E12, but in images shared with Engadget, the E12 appears larger. We’ll be seeing these in person at CES for a more thorough evaluation.

Fender will also introduce the MIX headphones, a set of modular cans that the company says are designed to adapt to a user’s sound and style preferences. The headphones include a USB-C transmitter that offers lossless, low-latency and Auracast transmission modes.

The headphones are powered by 40mm graphene drivers and feature active noise cancellation. They work in wired or wireless mode, with up to 100 hours of battery life, according to Fender. The company hasn’t shared much about the modular aspect of these headphones, but we’ll get a closer look at CES. Details on pricing and availability have not been shared.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/speakers/fender-audio-will-introduce-a-new-line-of-bluetooth-speakers-and-headphones-at-ces-130041696.html?src=rss