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At The Check Up 2025, we shared more about the potential of AI in health and our latest health AI research, partnership and product updates.

At The Check Up 2025, we shared more about the potential of AI in health and our latest health AI research, partnership and product updates.

At The Check Up 2025, we shared more about our latest health AI research, partnership and product updates.At The Check Up 2025, we shared more about our latest health AI research, partnership and product updates.

Ubie, a health tech startup in Japan, is using Google AI to change patient — and healthcare worker — experiences for the better.Ubie, a health tech startup in Japan, is using Google AI to change patient — and healthcare worker — experiences for the better.

Balmuda’s new MoonKettle splits the crosshairs between traditional style and modern whistles and bells.

Google signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wiz. This deal will make it easier for companies to protect themselves across major clouds.Google signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wiz. This deal will make it easier for companies to protect themselves across major clouds.

Womanizer stuffs its famous Pleasure Air technology into a vibrator, delivering a winning combo.

About 252 million years ago, volcanic eruptions triggered the End-Permian Mass Extinction, also known as the Great Dying. About 96 percent of marine species were wiped out—but were things just as grim on land?

Scientists have debated whether this event caused nearly as much terrestrial destruction. Now, researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology (NIGPAS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences suggest that terrestrial ecosystems did not suffer nearly as much as the oceans.

Led by paleontologist Feng Liu, the NIGPAS team found evidence for refugiums, oases where life thrived despite the devastation. Not only did these refugiums give life a chance to survive the mass extinction event, which lasted 200,000 years, but they are now thought to have been crucial to rebuilding ecosystems in much less time than was previously assumed.

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Nothing ruins a great night of sleep faster than getting too hot. We slept on a myriad of cooling mattresses to find which ones drew the heat away best.

Optical illusions are great fun, and they fool virtually everyone. But have you ever wondered if you could train yourself to unsee these illusions? Our latest research suggests that you can.

Optical illusions tell a lot about how people see things. For example, look at the picture below.

The Ebbinghaus illusion. Credit: Hermann Ebbinghaus

The two orange circles are identical, but the one on the right looks bigger. Why? We use context to figure out what we are seeing. Something surrounded by smaller things is often quite big. Our visual system takes context into account, so it judges the orange circle on the right as bigger than the one on the left.

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There's a new Google AI model in town, and it can generate or edit images as easily as it can create text—as part of its chatbot conversation. The results aren't perfect, but it's quite possible everyone in the near future will be able to manipulate images this way.

Last Wednesday, Google expanded access to Gemini 2.0 Flash's native image-generation capabilities, making the experimental feature available to anyone using Google AI Studio. Previously limited to testers since December, the multimodal technology integrates both native text and image processing capabilities into one AI model.

The new model, titled "Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental," flew somewhat under the radar last week, but it has been garnering more attention over the past few days due to its ability to remove watermarks from images, albeit with artifacts and a reduction in image quality.

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Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost science station accomplished a lot on the Moon in the last two weeks. Among other things, its instruments drilled into the Moon's surface, tested an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner, and showed that future missions could use GPS navigation signals to navigate on the lunar surface.

These are all important achievements, gathering data that could shed light on the Moon's formation and evolution, demonstrating new ways of collecting samples on other planets, and revealing the remarkable reach of the US military's GPS satellite network.

But the pièce de résistance for Firefly's first Moon mission might be the daily dose of imagery that streamed down from the Blue Ghost spacecraft. A suite of cameras recorded the cloud of dust created as the lander's engine plume blew away the uppermost layer of lunar soil as it touched down March 2 in Mare Crisium, or the Sea of Crises. This location is in a flat basin situated on the upper right quadrant of the side of the Moon always facing the Earth.

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Don’t succumb to the chaos. Fire up Chrome’s bookmarks sidebar and bring some order to the noisy online world.

This delusional airport trend only appeals to those who have no concept of how time or space work. Here’s how to actually travel like a pro.

Save 20% with an LG promo code and explore today’s latest coupons for appliances and electronics.

Enjoy at least 10% off headphones, speakers, soundbars, and other audio products from Bose.

Unlike the previous fundraiser, this event did not appear on President Donald Trump’s official schedule.

Federal support for mRNA vaccine research appears in jeopardy after KFF Health News reported Sunday that officials at the National Institutes of Health have directed scientists to remove all references to the lifesaving technology from their grant applications. All such research is now under direct scrutiny from health secretary and long-time anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A senior official at the NIH's National Cancer Institute confirmed to KFF that NIH acting Director Matthew Memoli "sent an email across the NIH instructing that any grants, contracts, or collaborations involving mRNA vaccines be reported up the chain to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s office and the White House."

Further, two independent scientists told the outlet that they were informed by NIH officials that any mention of mRNA vaccines needed to be removed from their grant applications. One, a biomedical researcher in Philadelphia, said that the NIH had "flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component." The other, a researcher in New York who works on vaccines but not mRNA vaccines, was told that background mentions of mRNA vaccine efficacy in their previous grant applications needed to be removed from future applications.

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Plastics are great, except when it comes to making or disposing of them. Production generally requires the use of chemicals derived from fossil fuels, and so helps to continue our reliance on them. And the final products are generally not biodegradable, so they tend to stick around despite breaking down into ever smaller fragments.

Biology might ultimately provide a solution, however. Researchers have identified bacteria that evolved the ability to digest some plastics. And improvements in our ability to design proteins have allowed us to make new enzymes that can chew up plastics.

This week brings some progress on the other side of the equation, with a team of Korean researchers describing how they've engineered a bacterial strain that can make a useful polymer starting with nothing but glucose as fuel. The system they developed is based on an enzyme that the bacteria use when they're facing unusual nutritional conditions, and it can be tweaked to make a wide range of polymers.

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Owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks running Roku OS are already subject to video advertisements on the home screen. Now, Roku is testing what it might look like if it took things a step further and forced people to watch a video ad play before getting to the Roku OS home screen.

Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an ... ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen.” Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. The ads have a close option, but some users appear to have not seen it.

When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out.

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A federal broadband official departed the US government with a warning that a Trump administration plan will strand rural Americans with worse Internet access in order to help Elon Musk secure public money for Starlink.

"Stranding all or part of rural America with worse Internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington," wrote Evan Feinman, who had been a Commerce Department official and director of the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program since 2022.

As Politico reported, Feinman made the statement in "a blistering email to his former colleagues on his way out the door Sunday warning that the Trump administration is poised to unduly enrich Elon Musk's satellite Internet company with money for rural broadband."

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