Tech

Google says the Gemini app has passed 1 billion monthly active users, a milestone chief executive Sundar Pichai announced on August 11. Pichai described Gemini as the fastest-growing product in the company’s history. It is the fourteenth Google product to reach the billion-user mark, joining Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, Chrome, Play, and YouTube. The figure […]

Release candidates exist so a kernel can settle down before it ships. The final stretch of the Linux 7.2 cycle has done the opposite: the seventh candidate, posted on August 9, carried more than 400 fixes signed off by more than 230 developers, a volume that looks more like the opening of a development cycle […]

The Google Play Store now distributes a competing app store. Aptoide Games, a game-focused marketplace operated by the Lisbon-based company Aptoide, became the first third-party store available directly through Google Play in the United States this week, reachable by searching the storefront or opening a dedicated landing page. The change looks like a routine product […]

When dictionary bodies in the United States and Australia named slop the word of the year in December 2025, the choice captured a mood: the web had filled with low-effort AI-generated content, and people were tired of it. What has changed in the eight months since is that the backlash has stopped being a sentiment […]

Most quantum computers are built around extreme cold. Superconducting qubits need dilution refrigerators that hold them near absolute zero, which is why quantum hardware usually lives in specialized labs with dedicated cooling. The machine unveiled by German startup Saxon Q takes the opposite approach: it runs at room temperature, fits in a standard server rack, […]

For two decades the semiconductor supply chain arranged itself around Apple. Foundries courted its orders, memory makers tuned production to its launch cycles, and the industry’s biggest capacity decisions were made with Cupertino in mind. The first half of 2026 produced the clearest evidence yet that this era is over: the four largest cloud companies […]

The same laser-based sensing that keeps a consumer drone from flying into a tree is, in the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed vocabulary, a marker of military hardware. The FCC is seeking comment on a plan to prohibit the import and marketing of previously authorized foreign-made drones it classifies as “military-grade,” and its draft definition reaches […]

MIT physicists watch a quantum material’s electrons take two different paths back to order Inside a sliver of a rare-earth material chilled to roughly minus 230 degrees Celsius (minus 382 degrees Fahrenheit), two rival patterns of electrons were smashed apart by a laser pulse, and then filmed rebuilding themselves. The surprise: the two patterns came […]

Why ransomware crews now target the 46-year-old manager instead of the CEO Getting a company to pay a ransom, new research suggests, no longer starts with the CEO’s inbox. It starts with the 46-year-old manager who can actually approve the payment. That is the conclusion of work from Zscaler’s ThreatLabz unit, which dissected a single […]

The AI barons who say they’ll give it all away: a wave of pledges built on paper fortunes David Silver is a billionaire, sort of. The stake he holds in Ineffable Intelligence, the London AI lab he founded after leaving DeepMind, is worth a fortune on paper. But he will not collect any of it […]