We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

Spending less than $100 on noise-canceling earbuds used to mean accepting weak ANC, short battery life, or stripped-down features. The Anker Soundcore Liberty 5 makes fewer of those compromises. They’re currently $99.99 on Amazon, down from $129.99—a $30 drop, or about 23% off—and price trackers show this is the lowest they’ve been.

Anker Soundcore Liberty 5

$99.99
at Amazon

$129.99
Save $30.00

$99.99
at Amazon

$129.99
Save $30.00

PCMag gave them an “excellent” rating and named them the “Best Budget Earphones” of 2025, mainly because they offer features that are usually reserved for pricier models. The Liberty 5 earbuds have a glossy finish, while its charging case has a matte texture and slide-open top. The fit is secure enough for long listening sessions without feeling tight. They connect over Bluetooth and support AAC, SBC, and LDAC codecs (LDAC can deliver higher-quality audio on supported Android devices), which is notable at this price.

You also get Bluetooth multipoint (which lets you connect to two devices at once), so you can switch between a laptop and a phone without re-pairing. Controls are handled by squeezing the stem. A single squeeze plays or pauses audio. A long squeeze switches between noise cancellation and transparency mode. You can customize most gestures in the Soundcore app, including EQ adjustments to fine-tune the sound.

Noise cancellation is where these earbuds stand out for the price. They block low-frequency rumble from planes and engines effectively, and they reduce much of the chatter in a café. They are not on the same level as top-tier models from Apple or Bose, but they perform better than many earbuds in this range, notes this PCMag review.

Battery life is strong. With ANC on, you get up to eight hours per charge and up to 32 hours with the case. Turn ANC off and that jumps to 12 hours and 48 hours total. A 10-minute charge gives you about five hours of playback, and the case supports wireless charging. With IP55 water resistance for sweat and rain, the Liberty 5 is a practical pick for workouts, commuting, or travel at a record-low price.

OpenAI has closed what is now the largest private financing in history — a $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation that more than doubles the $40 billion raise it completed just a year ago, itself a record for a private tech company at the time.

Amazon invested $50 billion, SoftBank put in $30 billion, and Nvidia committed $30 billion, and additional investors are expected to join as the round progresses. The valuation is a sharp jump from the $500 billion OpenAI commanded in a secondary financing in October, and the round dwarfs recent raises by rivals Anthropic ($30 billion) and xAI ($20 billion).

The company has been telling investors it is now targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, a more measured figure than the $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments CEO Sam Altman had touted months earlier. OpenAI is projecting more than $280 billion in total revenue by 2030, split roughly equally between consumer and enterprise. ChatGPT now has over 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million paying subscribers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excepting the AirTag 2, so far it’s been a quiet year for Apple hardware. But that’s poised to change next week, as the company is hosting a “special experience” on March 4.

The use of the word experience, rather than event or presentation, implies that Apple’s typical presentation format won’t apply here. And CEO Tim Cook more or less confirmed this when he posted that the company had “a big week ahead,” starting on Monday. Apple is most likely planning multiple days of product launches announced via press release on its Newsroom site, with the “experience” on Wednesday serving as a capper and a hands-on session for the media.

Apple has used a similar strategy before, spacing out relatively low-key refreshes over several days to generate sustained interest rather than dropping everything in a single 30- to 60-minute string of pre-recorded videos.

Read full article

Comments

You’ve probably heard that you should feel a certain muscle working when you do an exercise. Your biceps should burn a little when you’re doing bicep curls, your quads when you’re doing squats, and so on. But this isn’t an ironclad rule. Sometimes you can get a totally effective workout without feeling any specific muscle at all.

So why do so many people tell you to pay attention to feeling the muscle working? Partly because it can be a useful teaching tool to make sure you’re doing the exercise right—but that’s only true for some exercises. And honestly, another big reason is the influence of bodybuilding lingo and techniques on gym culture in general. Bodybuilders who train for the stage operate with a piece-by-piece mindset: Make sure you’re working this muscle and not that one. That’s OK if you’re trying to fine-tune your physique after years of training, but that approach isn’t needed to build muscle in the first place. So here’s what you need to know.

You may not always feel a muscle, even if it’s working

Here’s the most important thing to know: you don’t have to feel a muscle for it to be working. Say you’re doing a barbell squat. A squat works your quads, your glutes, and a lot of other muscles besides. You may not feel every one of those because when you’re doing a heavy squat, your brain is processing a lot of information. It’s feeling the weight of the bar on your back. It’s remembering the technique cues that you’re trying to focus on. It’s paying attention to your balance as you descend to make sure you don’t tip over one way or another. It’s counting the number of the rep in your head. Maybe sometimes a muscle manages to pipe up with “hey, I’m your quads and I’m kind of hurting right now.” But your brain does not have time to listen to every muscle’s nonsense, any more than a mom making dinner has time to listen to her toddler’s every whine. Your brain is focused on the task at hand: making sure you complete the rep.

I like to think of some muscles as being “louder” than others. If I’m doing kettlebell swings, I might be more focused on the fact that my forearms are burning (from holding onto the kettlebell) and not feel my glutes working at all. But after 100 swings, hoo boy, you can bet my butt will be feeling like jelly afterward. It just didn’t give me that burning sensation in the moment.

When it matters whether you feel the burn, and when it doesn’t

So what should you do if you don’t feel the muscle working? You look for another way to be sure the muscle is working. In the case of the compound exercises mentioned above, the fact that you completed the exercise is all the information you need. Your pullups used your lats. Your kettlebell swings and your squats used your glutes. There’s simply no way around that.

Does it ever matter whether you’re feeling the muscle? Yes, it can help if you’re doing isolation exercises. In these exercises, like a bicep curl or a leg extension, you’re trying to focus a movement on one muscle or a small muscle group. You’re “isolating” that muscle. Your brain is a little more able to focus on the feeling from that one muscle, and isolations are the type of exercise where it may be possible to do a similar movement without working the target muscle.

For example, let’s say you’re doing side-lying leg raises to work your hip adductors, particularly the gluteus medius. If you have your hips tilted or your legs angled slightly forward, you may feel the muscles toward the front of your hips working. But if you do the same exercise with your back to a wall, sliding your heel along the wall as your lift your leg, you’ll feel it a lot more in that glute you’re trying to isolate.

As a general rule, for compound exercises (where many muscles are working at once), it doesn’t matter whether you feel the muscle. But if you are doing an isolation exercise, feeling the muscle is helpful feedback to make sure that you are isolating the right muscle.

Don’t reduce the amount of weight just to feel the muscle work

There’s a lot of bad advice out there, and I’d like to call out one thing specifically: the advice to reduce the amount of weight you’re lifting so that you can feel the muscles better. Sometimes people will say it’s important to build a “mind-muscle connection.”

But you don’t have to forgo weight on the bar to build that connection. If you’d like to spend more time feeling the muscle, do some isolation work in your warmups. (These are sometimes called “activation” exercises.) You can also do extra isolation work at the end of your workout just to give those specific muscles a little more volume.

It’s important to remember that different parts of your workout have different purposes. If you’re squatting heavy, you need to put some fucking weight on the bar to keep building your strength and your skill at squatting. Often the lifts that make it hardest to feel a muscle are the lifts where that muscle is working the most! So don’t give up on heavy, effective lifts just because you don’t “feel” them as well as isolations or warmups.

The MacBook is coming back — or at least, that’s what the rumors claim. Next week, Apple is expected to announce a colorful, low-cost, non-Air, non-Pro MacBook powered by one of its mobile processors. By avoiding its pricier M-series chips, Apple may reportedly be able to reach a low $699 or $799 price for the MacBook. The $999 MacBook Air is the cheapest laptop on the company’s website right now, but Apple also sold the older M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for $700 in 2024, which later went down to $650 last year.

That Walmart deal was a smart way for Apple to test out the viability of cheaper MacBooks without building an entirely new product. But now the M1 Air’s design looks seriously dated, and the company also needs to move beyond the six-year-old M1 chip. It’s time to get serious about delivering a true low-cost Apple laptop.

There’s another compelling reason to bring back a cheaper MacBook: It’s the perfect way  to court disgruntled Windows users, something Apple hasn’t really done since its “Get A Mac” ads from the mid-2000s. I figure the unbridled success of the iPhone and iPad made Apple focus less on directly competing with Windows. The sleek designs of the 2011-2015 era MacBook Air and Pros were their main selling points, but Apple’s push towards USB-C-only machines and unreliable butterfly keyboards later made it clear it wasn’t totally focused on Macs.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

But now Microsoft is distracted by AI — it’s been pushing Copilot and AI features for years, instead of improving the Windows experience with more useful upgrades. Recent talk of agentic AI capabilities, which would let Copilot handle tasks for you automatically, also sparked plenty of criticism from Windows users. And with all of the focus on AI, Microsoft has also released some disastrous Windows updates over the last year, which have bricked OS installations. So, Apple, why not make a direct play for Windows users? 

Last year, I covered why it’s a great time to jump ship from Windows to Mac, and I haven’t been able to let go of that idea since. Apple’s M-series chips are shockingly fast and efficient, and its hardware tends to be more durable than typical PC fare. Rumors point to Apple developing a new aluminum case for the low-cost MacBook, so it will likely feel more polished than a typical sub-$1,000 Windows laptop. macOS has also avoided the bloat that’s plagued Windows for years — you can turn off Apple Intelligence with two clicks if you want to, and there aren’t any annoying ads to deal with. 

And while it used to be a pain to transition from Windows to Mac, it’s far easier these days, especially if you mainly rely on web apps. It also wouldn’t be tough for Apple to make short tutorials to help Windows users get their bearings with the macOS basics, like installing apps and juggling app windows. Apple could also make a play for iPhone owners using Windows, who may not be aware of the many ways iOS and macOS are integrated. iPhone mirroring may be a huge draw on its own.

Rumors also suggest the upcoming MacBook might use the A18 Pro from the iPhone 16 Pro, a chip that benchmarks faster than the M1. Even if it only has six cores, making it slower for heavy workloads than the M2, an A18 Pro-powered MacBook would still be more than enough power for basic productivity work. Not everyone needs the surprising amount of GPU power in the MacBook Air — especially if downgrading means they can save $200 to $300.

I’m not saying any of this through any sort of Apple-loving bias. I typically use a MacBook Pro for work, but I’m a Windows user at heart. Windows was my gateway to computing in the ’90s, back when Macs were far more expensive than PCs. These days, I spend more time on my Windows desktop making podcasts, playing PC games and bumming around the internet than I do working on Macs. 

And yet, it’s hard to deny everything Apple is doing right today — the only thing it’s missing is an inexpensive laptop entry. A $699 or $799 MacBook simply makes sense. And for many Windows users, it’ll be just the escape from Microsoft they need.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/a-cheap-macbook-is-the-perfect-way-for-apple-to-win-over-windows-users-130000045.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year — and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones. Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage. Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.

The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won’t be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal. “Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs — those below about $500,” he told The Register. PC makers could just raise the price of their cheap and cheerful boxes to above that level to compensate for the memory hike, however, price-sensitive buyers simply won’t bite, he added.

Another factor expected to add to declining fortunes of the PC industry this year is AI devices — systems equipped with special hardware for accelerating AI tasks, typically via a neural processing unit (NPU) embedded in the CPU. These systems were predicted to take the market by storm, but they require more memory to support AI processing and vendors like to mark them up to a premium price. “Historically, downgrading specifications was the way to go when prices were being squeezed, but that’s difficult here,” Atwal said. “The thinking was that the average price [of AI PCs] would fall this year, and lead to more adoption,” said Atwal, “but that’s not happening.” The lack of killer applications isn’t helping either.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If there’s one thing that stops people using their smart rings over the long term, it’s the battery life. After all, they’re so unobtrusive, it’s easy to forget to drop it on the charging plate every few days. It doesn’t take long for your pricey gadget to become little more than a very expensive piece of jewelry. It’s one of many maladies Ultrahuman is looking to address with the advent of its new Pro, a smart ring boasting up to 15 days of battery life. It even ships with a fancy battery case, which itself includes enough power to last it 45 days, making it easier to keep re-charged on the go.

Ultrahuman Ring Pro hasn’t just got a far bigger battery, it’s been re-engineered from the ground up. The company’s Bhuvan Srinivasan explained the older hardware had been pushed to its limit, especially in terms of the data it could process. Consequently, the Pro is equipped with a dual core processor with on-device machine learning to better crunch the numbers your body is throwing out. Its memory has also been increased, holding up to 250 days of data before it needs to sync with your smartphone. As well as improvements to durability, the new ring is also easier to cut apart in the hopefully rare event your finger, or its battery, begins to swell.

Ultrahuman

I’ll admit, having seen a prototype Pro Charger in person back in January, that it’s the prettiest way to re-juice a smart ring I’ve ever seen. Whereas Samsung and Oura have both opted for discreet, ring box-style hardware, Ultrahuman made something designed to sit on your nightstand. It’s not taking up space just for show, either, since it includes the aforementioned battery, LED charge indicator, speaker and haptics. It’s also got the ability to diagnose and address firmware issues to eliminate worries around firmware issues bricking devices.

Ultrahuman

At the same time, Ultrahuman is pulling the covers off Jade, its new “real time biointelligence AI.” The company promises Jade will be able to “pull real-time actionable insights, and even start breathwork or trigger Afib detection.” Jade is expected to get new features over time, with some examples being ordering good, changing your room temperature or flagging potential health issues. The idea is that Jade will keep a constant eye on your health, pulling in data from the ring, M1 continuous glucose monitor and environmental stats from your Ultrahuman Home.

Naturally, we’ll be getting in the Pro to test and will give our opinions on how effective all of this is when we’ve spent a month or two actually using it. But if you’d rather not wait and you’re based outside the US, you can pre-order the Ultrahuman Ring Pro right now, for $479, with shipments beginning in March. If you already have an Ultrahuman Ring, you can also get a trade-in deal to help cut the cost of the new model.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/ultrahumans-new-pro-ring-comes-with-15-days-battery-life-120038820.html?src=rss

Welcome to Edition 8.31 of the Rocket Report! We have some late-breaking news this week with an update Thursday afternoon from Rocket Lab on the timing of its much-anticipated Neutron rocket. Following the failure of a first stage tank during testing, the company is pushing the medium-lift rocket’s debut into the fourth quarter of this year. Effectively that probably means 2027 for the booster, which is disappointing because we all very much want to see another reusable rocket take flight.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

The ghost of Vector lives on. Tucson, Arizona-based satellite and rocket developer Phantom Space, co-founded by Jim Cantrell in 2019, has acquired the remnants of Vector Launch, Space News reports. The announcement is notable because Cantrell left Vector as its finances deteriorated in 2019. Cantrell said some of the assets, comprising flight-proven design elements, engineering data, and other technology originally developed for Vector, will be immediately integrated into Phantom’s Daytona vehicle architecture to reduce development risk.

Read full article

Comments

OpenAI has vowed to strengthen its safety protocols and to notify law enforcement of credible threats sooner in a letter addressed to Canadian authorities, according to Politico and The Washington Post. If you’ll recall, Canadian politicians summoned the company’s leaders after reports came out that it didn’t notify authorities when it banned the account owned by the Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia mass shooting suspect back in 2025. Some of OpenAI’s leaders have already met with Candian officials, and British Columbia Premier David Eby said Sam Altman had also agreed to meet with him.

While OpenAI has yet to announce changes to its rules, Ann O’Leary, its vice president of global policy, reportedly wrote in the letter that the company will tweak its detection systems so that they can better prevent banned users from coming back to the platform. Apparently, after OpenAI banned the shooter’s original account due to “potential warnings of committing real-world violence,” the perpetrator was able to create another account. The company only discovered the second account after the shooter’s name was released, and it has since notified authorities.

Further, OpenAI will now notify authorities if it detects “imminent and credible” threats in ChatGPT conversations, even if the user doesn’t reveal “a target, means, and timing of planned violence.” O’Leary explained that if the new rules had been in effect when the shooter’s account was banned in 2025, the company would have notified the police. OpenAI will also establish a point of contact for Canadian law enforcement so it can quickly share information with authorities when needed.

The Canadian government sees OpenAI’s decision not to report the shooter’s original account as a failure. It threatened to regulate AI chatbots in the country if their creators cannot show that they have proper safeguards to protect its users. It’s unclear at the moment if OpenAI also plans to roll out the same changes in the US and elsewhere in the world.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-will-notify-authorities-of-credible-threats-after-canada-mass-shooters-second-account-was-discovered-112706548.html?src=rss

Google will finally be able to provide real-time driving and walking directions in South Korea, The New York Times reported. The company has received permission from the nation’s Transport Ministry to export geographic data out of the country, which will allow it to provide GPS services as well as detailed listings for restaurants and other businesses. 

“We welcome today’s decision and look forward to our ongoing collaboration with local officials to bring a fully functioning Google Maps to Korea,” Google’s senior executive Cris Turner told the NYT in a statement. However, the approval is contingent “on the condition that strict security requirements are met,” a spokesperson from the Transport Ministry said. Those conditions reportedly restrict Google from displaying sensitive military sites and longitude and latitude coordinates. 

South Korea has generally restricted the export of 1/5000 scale map data over national security concerns, as it’s still technically at war with its neighbor North Korea. Google hasn’t been able to provide mapping directions or business details since it arrived in the nation, though it has applied twice in 2007 and 2016.

This lack of data sharing has reportedly been a bone of contention in trade talks with the US. Google argued that it was unfairly handicapped by the restrictions that allowed local apps like Naver to thrive. 

However, critics in the nation have expressed concern that Google could now come in and monopolize the market. “If Naver and Kakao are weakened or pushed out and Google later raises prices, that becomes a monopoly. Then, even companies that rely on map services — logistics firms, for example — become dependent [on Google],” geography professor Choi Jin-mu told Reuters. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/google-maps-will-finally-be-usable-in-south-korea-104301396.html?src=rss

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: For decades, planetary scientists have pored over a mystery hidden within the Moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and ’70s. Minerals in the rocks record the imprint of a magnetic field, nearly as powerful as Earth’s, that existed more than 3.5 billion years ago and seemed to persist for millions of years. But generating a magnetic field requires a dynamo — a churning, molten core — and most researchers believed the Moon’s tiny core would have long since cooled off, 1 billion years after it formed. Corroborating that picture are other ancient Moon rocks of about the same age that suggest the field was weak — leaving planetary scientists baffled.

Now, researchers are proposing a new way to solve the puzzle. A paper published today in Nature Geoscience theorizes that between 3.5 billion and 4 billion years ago, blobs of titanium-rich magma melted episodically just above the core, rising in plumes that drove volcanic eruptions on the surface. By intermittently stirring up the Moon’s core, these bouts of melting would have caused the Moon’s magnetic field to flicker on in short, powerful bursts. The paper “links a few different concepts that people were thinking about separately, but hadn’t actually brought together,” says Sonia Tikoo, a planetary geophysicist at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite an ultimatum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Anthropic said that it can’t “in good conscience” comply with a Pentagon edict to remove guardrails on its AI, CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post. The Department of Defense had threatened to cancel a $200 million contract and label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” if it didn’t agree to remove safeguards over mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.

“Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters — with our two requested safeguards in place,” Amodei said. “We remain ready to continue our work to support the national security of the United States.”

In response, US Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael accused Amodei in a post on X of wanting “nothing more than to try to personally control the US military and is OK putting our nation’s safety at risk.”

The standoff began when the Pentagon demanded that Anthropic its Claude AI product available for “all lawful purposes” — including mass surveillance and the development of fully autonomous weapons that can kill without human supervision. Anthropic refused to offer its tech for those things, even with a “safety stack” built into that model.

Yesterday, Axios reported that Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline of 5:01 PM on Friday to agree to the Pentagon’s terms. At the same time, the DoD requested an assessment of its reliance on Claude, an initial step toward potentially labelling Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” — a designation usually reserved for firms from adversaries like China and “never before applied to an American company,” Anthropic wrote. 

Amodei declined to change his stance and stated that if the Pentagon chose to offboard Anthropic, “we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations or other critical missions.” Grok is one of the other providers the DoD is reportedly considering, along with Google’s Gemini and OpenAI. 

It may not be that simple for the military to disentangle itself from Claude, however. Up until now, Anthropic’s model has been the only one allowed for the military’s most sensitive tasks in intelligence, weapons development and battlefield operations. Claude was reportedly used in the Venezuelan raid in which the US military exfiltrated the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

AI companies have been widely criticized for potential harm to users, but mass surveillance and weapons development would clearly take that to a new level. Anthropic’s potential reply to the Pentagon was seen as a test of its claim to be the most safety-forward AI company, particularly after dropping its flagship safety pledge a few days ago. Now that Amodei has responded, the focus will shift to the Pentagon to see if it follows through on its threats, which could seriously harm Anthropic. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/anthropic-refuses-to-bow-to-pentagon-despite-hegseths-threats-085553126.html?src=rss