With the launch of its all-new, all-electric EX60, Volvo has put lessons learned from the EX30 and EX90 to use. The EX60 is built on Volvo’s new SPA3 platform, made only for battery-electric vehicles. It boasts up to 400 miles (643 km) of range, with fast-charging capabilities Volvo says add 173 miles (278 km) in 10 minutes. Mega casting reduces the number of parts of the rear floor from 100-plus to one piece crafted of aluminum alloy, reducing complexities and weld points.

Inside the cabin, however, the real achievement is Volvo’s new multi-adaptive safety belt. Volvo has a history with the modern three-point safety belt, which was perfected by in-house engineer Nils Bohlin in 1959 before the patent was shared with the world. Today at the Volvo Cars Safety Center lab, at least one brand-new Volvo is crashed every day in the name of science. The goal: to test not just how well its vehicles are protecting passengers but what the next frontier is in safety technology.

Senior Safety Technical Leader Mikael Ljung Aust is a driving behavior specialist with 20 years under his belt at Volvo. He says it’s easy to optimize testing toward one person or one test point and come up with a good result. However, both from the behavioral perspective and from physics, people are different. What’s not different, he points out, is how people drive.

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OpenAI launched a dedicated team in October called OpenAI for Science, led by vice president Kevin Weil, that aims to make scientists more productive — but Weil admitted in an interview with MIT Technology Review that the LLM cannot yet produce novel discoveries and says that’s not currently the mission.

UC Berkeley statistician Nikita Zhivotovskiy, who has used LLMs since the first ChatGPT, told the publication: “So far, they seem to mainly combine existing results, sometimes incorrectly, rather than produce genuinely new approaches.”

“I don’t think models are there yet,” Weil admitted. “Maybe they’ll get there. I’m optimistic that they will.” The models excel at surfacing forgotten solutions and finding connections across fields, but Weil says the bar for accelerating science doesn’t require “Einstein-level reimagining of an entire field.”

GPT-5 has read substantially every paper written in the last 30 years, he says, and can bring together analogies from unrelated disciplines. That accumulation of existing knowledge — helping scientists avoid struggling on problems already solved — is itself an acceleration.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Apple stops supporting older iPhones and iPads with the latest version of iOS or iPadOS, it usually isn’t the end of the line—Apple keeps releasing new security-only patches for those devices for another year or two, keeping them usable while their hardware is still reasonably capable.

Once those updates dry up, it’s rare for Apple to revisit those older operating systems, but the company does sometimes make exceptions. That was the case yesterday, when the company released a batch of updates for long-retired iOS and iPadOS versions that otherwise hadn’t seen a new patch in months or years. Those updates include iOS 12.5.8, available for devices as old as 2013’s iPhone 5S and 2014’s iPhone 6; iOS 15.8.6, available for devices like the iPhone 6S, iPhone 7, and iPad Air 2; and iOS 16.7.13, available for devices like the iPhone 8 and iPhone X.

Both iOS 15 and iOS 16 were last patched in mid-2025, but iOS 12’s last patch was released in January of 2023.

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Gen. Michael Guetlein, the senior officer in charge of the US military’s planned Golden Dome missile defense shield, has laid out an audacious schedule for deploying a network of space-based sensors and interceptors by the end of President Donald Trump’s term in the White House.

The three-year timeline is aggressive, with little margin for error in the event of budget or technological setbacks. The shield is designed to defend the US homeland against a range of long-range weapons, including Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), cruise missiles, and newer threats like hypersonic weapons and drones.

“By the summer of ’28, we will be able to defend the entire nation against ballistic missiles, as well as other generation aerial threats, and we will continue to grow that architecture through 2035,” Guetlein said Friday in a presentation to representatives from the US defense industry.

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The European Commission has started proceedings to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in certain ways. Specifically, the European Union’s executive arm has told Google to grant third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that Gemini has. “The aim is to ensure that third-party providers have an equal opportunity to innovate and compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape on smart mobile devices,” the Commission said in a statement. 

The company will also have to hand over “anonymized ranking, query, click and view data held by Google Search” to rival search engines. The Commission says this will help competing companies to optimize their services and offer more viable alternatives to Google Search. 

“Today’s proceedings under the Digital Markets Act will provide guidance to Google to ensure that third-party online search engines and AI providers enjoy the same access to search data and Android operating system as Google’s own services, like Google Search or Gemini,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy. “Our goal is to keep the AI market open, unlock competition on the merits and promote innovation, to the benefit of consumers and businesses.”

The Commission plans to wrap up these proceedings in the next six months, effectively handing Google a deadline to make all of this happen. If the company doesn’t do so to the Commission’s satisfaction, it may face a formal investigation and penalties down the line. The Commission can impose fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s global annual revenue for a DMA violation.

Google was already in hot water with the EU for allegedly favoring its own services — such as travel, finance and shopping — over those from rivals and stopping Google Play app developers from easily directing consumers to alternative, cheaper ways to pay for digital goods and services. The bloc charged Google with DMA violations related to those issues last March. 

In November, the EU opened an investigation into Google’s alleged demotion of commercial content on news websites in search results. The following month, it commenced a probe into Google’s AI practices, including whether the company used online publishers’ material for AI Overviews and AI Mode without “appropriate compensation” or offering the ability to opt out.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-eu-tells-google-to-give-external-ai-assistants-the-same-access-to-android-as-gemini-has-154157081.html?src=rss

Every time Apple’s AirPods 4 with active noise cancelation go on sale I have the same thought: maybe I made a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I love my regular AirPods 4, but the noise canceling aspect makes their sister pair very enticing.

Take now, for instance, when the AirPods 4 with ANC are on sale for $119, down from $179. The 34 percent discount brings them to only $4 more than the standard AirPods 4 current sale price and below their usual $129. While we’ve seen the ANC model as low as $99, the $119 price tag is the best deal we’ve seen so far this year. 

Apple released its fourth-generation AirPods in late 2024 and they’re still our pick for best budget AirPods on the market. We gave the ANC model an 86 in our review thanks to their effective noise canceling, better sound quality and features like adaptive audio. Overall, at $60 off, they’re a great option to pick up. 

Check out our coverage of the best Apple deals for more discounts, and follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/airpods-4-with-anc-drop-to-119-153239093.html?src=rss

With the monumental winter storm recently covering most of the nation, now seems a good time to look at some cold and winter weather myths and misinformation. You might be freezing, but there’s no excuse for being freezing and ignorant.

Myth: A blizzard is a heavy snowstorm

Technically, for a storm to be a blizzard, it must have these things: wind speeds of over 35 mph and low visibility (under 1/4 mile) for at least three hours. So you could have blizzard from blowing snow, even if no snow is falling, and you could get a ton of accumulation without it technically ever being a blizzard. (Whether it’s a snowstorm or a blizzard likely won’t matter to you if you’re trapped in it, however.)

Myth: It can be too cold to snow

There’s some nuance to this one. Extremely cold air contains very little moisture, but it has to be very cold. According to Matt Peroutka, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, “Once the air temperature at ground level drops below about -10 degrees Fahrenheit, (-20 degrees Celsius), snowfall becomes unlikely in most places.”

But there could still be something like snow. “There actually is no such thing as too low a temperature for some sort of ice crystal to form and for such crystals to settle out and land on the surface,” explains Fred W. Decker of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University, in an interview with Scientific American. “Such a deposit of ice needles is not usually considered ‘snow,’ however; in the Arctic, for instance, we might refer instead to an ice fog.”

Myth: You lose most of your body heat through your head

I dug deeply into this myth here, but the bottom line is, not wearing a hat accounts for around seven to 10 percent of bodily heat loss because your head accounts for about seven to 10 percent of your body. On the other hand, how cold you feel is subjective, and not wearing a hat in cold weather will probably make you feel colder, even if you’re not actually losing most of your body heat. Bottom line: Wear a hat to feel warm in cold weather, or don’t wear a hat to prove you’re not losing too much heat.

Myth: Alcohol keeps you warm in cold weather

In an emergency situation, drinking brandy from the cask around a rescue St. Bernard’s neck is a bad idea. Alcohol makes you feel warm by dilating blood vessels, but it actually lowers your body temperature by drawing heat away from your core, which increases your risk of hypothermia. But, much like “losing heat through your head” myth, drinking alcohol often makes people feel warmer, so if you’re safe on your porch and you want a hot toddy, it will seem to “warm you up.” Speaking of…

Myth: Drinking hot liquids warms you faster than drinking cold liquids

It’s probably impossible to drink enough of a hot liquid to raise the temperature of your body’s core. On the other hand (and for the third entry in a row) it might make you feel warmer to drink something warm, and often that’s what you really want, even if it isn’t literally making you warmer. So if you’re safe on your porch and you want a hot tea to feel cozy, go for it.

Traditional winter signs that don’t actually predict anything

There might be a lot we can learn from folk traditions, but man, they get a lot of things wrong too. The following are some folklore sayings about winter that seem dubious:

• Thick corn husks, onion skins, and apple skins means a cold winter: The thickness of the outside of vegetables reflect the condition under which they were grown; they don’t predict the future.

• Squirrels with very bushy tails means a cold winter: Like the vegetables, the thickness of a squirrel’s tail is generally determined by how healthy and fed it was leading up to winter. More nuts in summer means beefier squirrels.

• You can predict winter severity by looking at a caterpillar tail: They say the wider the rusty brown sections on a wooly caterpillar, the milder the coming winter will be. The more black there is, the more severe the winter. The problem is, you’d have to look at a lot of caterpillars to even check if this is true, because some would have wider brown stripes and some wouldn’t. According to University of Massachusetts entomology Mike Peters in the Farmer’s Almanac, “There’s evidence that the number of brown hairs has to do with the age of the caterpillar—in other words, how late it got going in the spring. The [band] does say something about a heavy winter or an early spring. The only thing is … it’s telling you about the previous year.”

Weird myth: This winter storm was manmade and designed to freeze a gigantic sea serpent

The weirder corners of the internet are spreading the theory that the Biblical beast Leviathan has awakened, and the winter storm was created by us to freeze it in its tracks. Their evidence is satellite photos which seem to show a gigantic serpent shape in the Atlantic Ocean. As much as I’d welcome a Biblical sea monster rising from the ocean to seek retribution—all hail Leviathan!—it’s unlikely to exist. I’m 99.9% certain (still have some hope) these were natural geological formations seen on Google Earth being mistaken for a sea monster as a result of pareidolia, the human tendency to see patterns in random data. Also: We can’t control winter storms any more than we can control hurricanes, even if we were about to be eaten by a sea monster.

Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to draw marketers with their extensive user base.

Pinterest had 5,205 full-time employees as of September 2025. The latest job cut would translate to less than 780 positions. Top executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies which were planning layoffs anyway. Last week, design software maker Autodesk also announced a 7% job cut to redirect investments to its cloud platform and AI efforts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—The annual 24 hour race that kicks off the American racing season took place this past weekend at Daytona International Speedway. Each year, the crowd gets bigger and bigger, drawn in large part by the hybrid prototypes that contest the GTP class for overall victory. After Formula 1, these are some of the most complex, sophisticated race cars ever to turn a wheel—and it doesn’t hurt that they look extremely cool too. But yet again, endurance racing wants to offer more than just entertainment.

A large number of automotive technologies or safety features that we mostly take for granted today made their way into road cars from the race track. Seatbelts, rear view mirrors, turbocharged engines, aerodynamics, direct-injection engines, dual-clutch gearboxes, and more owe their existence to competition. Although, truth be told, direct examples of racing technology transfer in the mid-21st century seem less common than the intangible benefits gained when a bunch of motorsports-trained engineers have lunch every day with their road car colleagues.

That is starting to change, though, but now the domain is in simulation. Vast amounts of data are generated during the course of a race—each of the 11 GTP cars that raced at Daytona collects 1,600 different channels of data from onboard sensors, with nearly as many on the GTD machines that are based on road-going cars like Porsche’s 911 or Chevrolet’s Corvette. With 60 cars running for 24 hours—and that’s just the first race of the year—that’s a heck of a lot of high-quality data being generated, and now IMSA wants to leverage that to help automotive and technology companies develop better simulation tools, with the creation of IMSA Labs.

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