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Sony’s WH-1000XM5 headphones are no longer the newest model in the company’s lineup, but they remain one of the easiest recommendations if you want strong noise canceling without paying flagship prices. Right now, a refurbished pair is $209.99 on Amazon, compared with $278 for a new set (and the $399.99 launch price in 2022). These are sold as Amazon Certified Refurbished units, meaning they’ve been tested and certified by the manufacturer to work like new. They also come with the original accessories and a 90-day limited hardware warranty.

Sony WH-1000XM5 Headphones

$209.00
at Amazon

$278.00
Save $69.00

$209.00
at Amazon

$278.00
Save $69.00

PCMag named them the best headphones of 2022 and gave them an “outstanding” review, largely for how well Sony balanced sound quality with noise cancellation. The XM5 uses 30mm carbon-fiber drivers paired with Sony’s Integrated Processor V1, and the combination still holds up in 2025. Music sounds full without becoming muddy. Bass-heavy tracks have weight, but vocals remain clear, and instruments don’t disappear into the background. The active noise cancellation is also effective at blocking out low-frequency sounds like airplane engines, traffic, or the general rumble of public spaces. Audio quality remains consistent with ANC enabled, unlike many cheaper headphones. For wireless listening, Bluetooth 5.2 supports AAC, SBC, and LDAC codecs, and multipoint pairing makes it easy to switch between devices, such as a laptop and a phone, without reconnecting each time.

The XM5 has a lightweight frame and soft synthetic-leather earcups that stay comfortable during long listening sessions. That makes them practical for commuting, long flights, or simply wearing through a full workday. Controls are handled through touch gestures on the earcups—swipe up or down for volume and tap to pause or play. It takes a little time to get used to the gestures, but they work reliably once you learn them. Sony’s Sound Connect app adds more control, letting you tweak the EQ, adjust noise-canceling levels, and change a few listening settings depending on your environment. Battery life is rated at about 30 hours with noise canceling enabled, which is enough for several days of regular use before needing to recharge.

Scientists have discovered that male fireflies in a South Carolina swamp follow local interaction rules to synchronize their flashing mating displays. The research is being presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. (A preprint is also available on the biorxiv.) Such work could one day lead to insights into how the body’s cells sync to its internal circadian rhythm, or how neurons fire together in the brain, as well as the design of drone swarms communicating through synchronized flashes.

As previously reported, research into swarming and flocking was largely relegated to observational biologists for decades. But in the 1980s, a computer graphics specialist named Craig Reynolds developed the so-called “boids” program, an agent-based computational model that has dominated collective behavior studies ever since. In such a model, each individual unit in a swarm is a dot moving in a straight line at a constant speed. By introducing a few simple rules regarding interactions between dots, a flocking pattern will emerge once the dots get dense enough. Another set of rules will produce a swarming pattern, and so forth.

Fire ants provide a textbook example of this kind of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour them from a teapot like ants, or they can link together to build towers or floating rafts—a handy survival skill when, say, a hurricane floods Houston. They also excel at regulating their own traffic flow. You almost never see an ant traffic jam.

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Firefly aired for just one season in 2002 before Fox canceled it. In the 24 years since, the sci-fi show has skyrocketed in popularity and now fans are finally getting more. Nathan Fillion has announced that an animated Firefly series is currently in advanced development, Deadline first reported. 

Fillion shared the news at AwesomeCon during a live taping of his podcast Once We Were Spacemen with his Firefly co-stars Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, Summer Glau, Sean Maher, Jewel Staite and Alan Tudyk. Tudyk co-hosts the podcast, in which the duo look back at their careers and interview past coworkers. Each of the actors present at AwesomeCon are expected to voice the animated versions of their characters.

This isn’t one of those maybe one day it will happen announcements, with many steps already being taken. The animated reboot is under the direction of showrunners Tara Butters (Agent Carter, Reaper) and Marc Guggenheim (DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Arrow) — original creator Joss Whedon is not involved, but has given his blessing. It has early concept art from ShadowMachine, an Oscar- and Emmy-winning animation studio. Fillion is producing the show through Collision33, his production company, and with 20th Television Animation. There’s even already a script in place. 

According to Fillion, the one thing left is a home for the series. He and his co-stars took to Once We Were Spacemen‘s Instagram to provide more details and implore FireFly fans to show demand for the reboot.

Firefly took place in 2517, centuries after a universal civil war. It followed a group of people living aboard a transport ship, Serenity, flying through the galaxy. In 2005, the show got a sequel in the form of a movie, Serenity. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/firefly-is-getting-rebooted-as-an-animated-series-120604649.html?src=rss

We’ve loved Apple’s 2021-era MacBook Pro design from the start, and the M5 Max edition is once again the professional notebook to beat. But it’s hard to deny that the star of Apple’s recent laptop rollout wasn’t its most powerful Pro systems — all eyes were on the $599 MacBook Neo. The MacBook Pro’s next time to shine is likely this fall, when Apple is expected to finally deliver OLED models and a dynamic touchscreen interface.  (I’ve argued before that, at this point, Apple has no excuse not to give us touchscreen Macs.)

This generation of MacBook Pro might just be the last gasp of the 2021 remodel. It’s still an incredibly powerful machine that’s been honed to near-perfection, but if you’re looking for something that feels truly new, it may be worth waiting several months. 

It’s not too surprising to see the M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros be relatively low-key efforts. Apple launched the M5 14-inch MacBook last fall with a mere press release. But at least that model delivered a noticeable leap in graphics performance. The new M5 Pro and Max chips are a bit faster than before, but they don’t really have any major features to call out. (Unless you’re super excited about Neural Accelerators for AI work.)

I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining too much, though. The 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro I’m reviewing is still a gorgeous laptop, with an overall design that most premium Windows PC makers are still trying to copy. Apple’s unibody metal frame design still feels rock solid. There’s a generous amount of ports, including three Thunderbolt 5 USB-C connections, HDMI, a headphone jack and a SD card reader. Its 16-inch Liquid RetinaXDR screen also looks incredible, thanks to its bright Mini LED backlighting, and there’s once again a nano-texture option to reduce glare. 

What else could you want in a laptop? I suppose there’s the lingering feeling that an OLED screen would look better, with sharper contrast and pure black levels. But you’d be hard pressed to find much else to complain about with the MacBook Pro’s screen. I’m also intrigued to see how Apple implements a touchscreen interface alongside macOS in upcoming MacBook Pros, but I’ll admit, I haven’t really been compelled to touch this laptop’s display much. 

Touchscreens always seemed like a quixotic effort for laptops — they’re nice to have, but Microsoft has been trying to shove them into PCs for 15 years now. The addition of touchscreens really didn’t improve the overall Windows experience much. So I wasn’t surprised to see Apple take its time bringing the technology to macOS — if you really want to swipe around screens, just get an iPad.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

But back to this MacBook Pro: I still love everything about Apple’s current design. Sure, the keyboard could have a bit more depth, but it withstood my furious typing like a champ. (Unlike Dell’s XPS 14, which tried so hard to be a MacBook Pro-killer.) And the MacBook Pro’s glass touchpad is still one of the best I’ve ever seen in a laptop.

Our review unit was also equipped with 32GB of RAM, a 4TB SSD, a 40-core GPU and Apple’s $150 nano-texture display upgrade, bringing the total for this M5 Max system to a whopping $6,149. That may seem excessive to most consumers, but for creative professionals who actually need the power of the M5 Max chip, it’s not that unusual. You can also save over $1,000 by opting for the M5 Pro chip instead. 

So what does the M5 Max bring to the party? Obviously, it’s speedier than the M4 Max. Our review unit was 30 percent faster than the M4 Max-equipped MacBook Studio in the Geekbench 6 multi-threaded CPU benchmark. It’s only 10 percent faster in Geekbench’s single-threaded test, but that still gives Apple room to claim that it has the fastest chip core around. If you’ve got an M4 Max machine, you certainly don’t need to dump it for this lineup. But if you’ve been hammering on an M1 Max or M2 Max system for years, you’ll see some meaningful benefits from upgrading now.

Apple says this new line of MacBook Pros also feature its latest SSD technology, which is up to twice as fast as before. Our review unit reached 13.8 GB/s write speeds and 13 GB/s read speeds in the ATTO disk speed test, whereas previous MacBook Pros hovered around 6 GB/s for read/write speeds. If you’re working with huge data files every day, you’ll likely notice the difference. Another benefit to the new hardware? Apple is now equipping every MacBook Pro with 1TB of storage by default. 

All of the M5 chips feature faster GPUs than before, but that’s less noticeable on the M5 Max. I’ve never had trouble running a high-end game like Lies of P on the M2, M3 or M4 Max hardware, and once again it still runs incredibly well with the M5 Max in its native resolution, and with all of the graphics settings cranked up. All I’m looking for is a smooth 60 fps frame rate, and the MacBook Pros have delivered on that for years. macOS isn’t the sort of platform where you’ll be playing many high fps games, but the MacBook Pro’s 120Hz refresh rate is equipped to handle them.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

Beyond raw performance, the MacBook Pro continues to be a joy to use. Its screen is gloriously bright, and its smooth refresh rate makes scrolling through documents and websites easy on the eyes. Its six-speaker setup remains the best audio experience I’ve ever heard on a laptop, allowing for crisp, detailed and surprisingly dynamic bass. When I’m too lazy to cast music to my Sonos speakers, I can still have a decent jam session on the MacBook Pro’s built-in setup.

It’s hard to improve much on the 30 hours and 16 minutes of battery life we saw on last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro, but the M5 Max model managed to beat that by 30 minutes. Realistically, it means you can likely use the MacBook Pro for a few days without needing to recharge, assuming you’re not doing heavy-duty work the entire time.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

You don’t need me to sell you on the MacBook Pro; all you need to know is that the M5 Max actually delivers. Given how well the standard M5 14-inch MacBook Pro performed, I’d also expect a decent speed bump from the M5 Pro model. The only downside to the M5 systems is that they’ll feel out of date quickly if the rumored OLED and touchscreen models arrive later this year. But if you need the best performance now, it’s hard to go wrong with any MacBook Pro.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/macbook-pro-m5-max-16-inch-review-still-the-pinnacle-120000325.html?src=rss

“A new type of battery storage is about to be deployed on the Midwestern grid for the first time,” reports Electrek:

Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer Peak Energy and global energy company RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the first sodium-ion deployment on that grid. Peak Energy says its technology is specifically designed for grid-scale storage and leverages sodium-ion chemistry’s inherent stability. Unlike many lithium-ion systems, sodium-ion batteries don’t require active cooling and can operate over a wide temperature range without losing performance.

That simpler design could make a meaningful dent in the cost of storing electricity. According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour. That’s roughly half the total cost of a typical battery system today. The company says it achieves those savings by removing energy-hungry cooling systems, eliminating routine maintenance requirements, and reducing the need to overbuild storage capacity to account for battery degradation over time…

If the Wisconsin pilot proves successful, it could open the door to wider adoption of sodium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage across the US.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robert Goddard, a Massachusetts-born physicist, launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket on this date 100 years ago.

It was not an overly impressive flight. The rocket, fueled by gasoline and liquid oxygen, rose just 41 feet into the air, and the flight lasted 2.5 seconds before it struck ice and snow.

Nevertheless, this rocket, named “Nell,” represented a historic achievement that would help launch the modern age of spaceflight. Three decades later, the first objects would begin to ride liquid-fueled rockets into space, followed shortly by humans. A little more than 40 years would pass before humans walked on the Moon.

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Ahead of its acquisition by Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros. dominated the 2026 Oscars with 11 wins primarily for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Netflix also put in a strong showing with seven Academy Awards, including two for KPop Demon Hunters and three for Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. 

All told, dedicated streaming services chalked up eight awards, but were shut out of the major prizes. Frankenstein took the trophies for for Best Production Design, Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling, while KPop Demon Hunters took Best Animated Feature and Best original Song. Netflix also took prizes for All The Empty Rooms (Best Documentary Short Film) and The Singers (Best Live Action Short Film). Apple TV garnered the other streaming service Oscar for F1 (Best Sound). 

Warner Bros. dominated the more prestigious awards. The studio took its first Oscar for Best Picture (One Battle After Another) since Argo won in 2012, while also winning Anderson the prizes for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and giving Sean Penn the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Sinners, meanwhile, won for Best Cinematography, giving Autumn Durald Arkapaw the first ever win for a woman and woman of color in that category. Michael B. Jordan took the Best Actor prize for that film, while Director Ryan Coogler won for Best Original Screenplay.  

Other notable acting prizes were won by Jessie Buckley (Best Actress, Hamnet) and Amy Madigan (Best Support Actress, Weapons). 

Host Conan O’Brien joked that it was the “first time in a theater” for Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. It remains to be seen, however, whether Netflix losing out to Paramount Skydance on the Warner Bros. acquisition will be to the film industry’s benefit or detriment. One clear loser of late is broadcast television as the 2026 Oscars will be the third-to-last aired by Walt Disney’s ABC, with YouTube set to stream the ceremony exclusively starting in 2029. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/warner-bros-dominates-oscars-with-11-wins-ahead-of-its-acquisition-by-paramount-093916527.html?src=rss

Starting in September, even Android developers not in Google’s Play Store will still be required to register with Google to distribute their apps in Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, with Google continuing “to roll out these requirements globally” four months later. Even developers distributing Android apps on the web for sideloading will be required to register, pay Google a $25 fee, and provide a government ID.
But there’s a new theory on what’s secretly been motivating Google from an unnamed source in the “Keep Android Open” movement, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland:

“You can’t separate this really from their ongoing interactions with Epic and the settlement that they came to,” they argue. Twelve days ago Epic Games and Google announced a new proposal for settling their long-running dispute over the legality of alternative app stores on Android phones. (Rather than agreeing to let third-party app stores into their Play Store, Google wants them to continue being sideloaded, promising in a blog post last week that they’ll even offer a “more streamlined” and “simplified” sideloading alternative for rival app stores. “This Registered App Store program will begin outside of the US first, and we intend to bring it to the US as well, subject to court approval.”)

So “developer verification” could be Google’s fallback plan if U.S. courts fail to approve this. “If the Google Play Store has to allow any third-party repository app store, Google essentially has given up all control of the apps. But if they’re able to claw back that control by requiring that all developers, no matter how they distribute their apps, have to register with Google — have to agree to their Terms & Conditions, pay them money, provide identification — then they have a large degree of indirect control over any app that can be developed for the entire platform.”
But that plan threatens millions of people using the alternative F/OSS app distributor F-Droid, since Google also wants to have only one signature attached to Android apps. Marc Prud’hommeaux, a member of F-Droid’s board of directors, says that “all of a sudden breaks all those versions of the application distributed through F-Droid or any other app store!”

Prud’hommeaux says they’ve told Google’s Android team “You know perfectly well that you’re killing F-Droid!” creating an “existential” threat to an app distributor “that has existed happily for over 10 years.” But good things started happening when he created the website Keep Android Open:

There’s now a “huge backlog” of signers for an Open Letter that already includes EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Free Software Foundation. He believes Android’s existing Play Protect security “is completely sufficient to handle the particular scenarios they claim that developer verification is meant to address”…

The Keep Android Open site urges developers not to sign up for Android’s early access program when it launches next week. (Instead, they’re asking developers to respond to invites with an email about their concerns — and to spread the word to other developers and organizations in forums and social media posts.) There’s also a petition at Change.org currently signed by 64,000 developers — adding 20,000 new signatures in the last 10 days. And “If you have an Android device, try installing F-Droid!” he adds. Google tracks how many people install these alternative app repositories, and a larger user base means greater consequences from any Android policy changes.

Plus, installing F-Droid “might be refreshing!” Prud’hommeaux says. “You don’t see all the advertisements and promotions and scam and crapware stuff that you see in the commercial app stores!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2024 Anthropic was sued over claims it infringed copyrights when training LLMs.
But as they try to settle, they may have a problem. The Free Software Foundation announced Friday that Anthropic’s training data apparently even included the book “Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software” — for which the Free Software Foundation holds a copyright.

It was published by O’Reilly and by the FSF under the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). This is a free license allowing use of the work for any purpose without payment.

Obviously, the right thing to do is protect computing freedom: share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM, together with the complete model, training configuration settings, and the accompanying software source code. Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom.

We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation.

“The FSF doesn’t usually sue for copyright infringement,” reads the headline on the FSF’s announcement, “but when we do, we settle for freedom.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.