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Check out the Gemini app’s latest features, like Canvas and Audio Overview.Check out the Gemini app’s latest features, like Canvas and Audio Overview.

Pebble's founder is back with a company called Core Devices and two familiar smartwatches—Core 2 Duo and Core Time 2—but this time he's only making 10,000 units of each.

Before he was abruptly fired last month, Derek Copeland worked as a trainer at the US Department of Agriculture’s National Dog Detection Training Center, preparing beagles and Labrador retrievers to sniff out plants and animals that are invasive or vectors for zoonotic diseases, like swine fever. Copeland estimates the NDDTC lost about a fifth of its trainers and a number of other support staff when 6,000 employees were let go at the USDA in February as part of a government-wide purge orchestrated by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Before he received his termination notice, he says, Copeland had just spent several months training the only dog stationed in Florida capable of detecting the Giant African land snail, an invasive mollusk that poses a significant threat to Florida agriculture. “We have dogs for spotted and lantern flies, Asian longhorn beetles,” he says, referring to two other non-native species. “I don’t think the American people realize how much crap that people bring into the United States.”

Dog trainers are just one example of the kind of highly specialized USDA staff that have been removed from their stations in recent weeks. Teams devoted to inspecting plant and food imports have been hit especially hard by the recent cuts, including the Plant Protection and Quarantine program, which has lost hundreds of staffers alone.

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Time and again, studies and surveys identify the time it takes to charge an electric vehicle as one of the most significant hurdles affecting EV adoption. For generations, drivers have gotten used to being able to refuel their cars in five minutes using energy-dense liquid hydrocarbons, and plenty of them balk at the idea of having to drive a car where recharging a battery takes half an hour or more. Now it seems that may not be an excuse for much longer—in China, at least.

New tech has been developed by BYD, the Chinese automaker that recently eclipsed Tesla as the leading EV maker by volume. Called the "super e-platform," the new batteries are able to charge at 10C, and the new DC chargers peak at 1,000 kW. BYD says this will add 249 miles (400 km) of range in just five minutes. By contrast, most current Tesla Superchargers peak at 250 kW, with Electrify America's chargers maxing out at 350 kW, and even the powerful new chargers used by Formula E can only reach 600 kW.

"Our goal is to make EV charging as fast as refueling a gasoline car," said BYD chairperson Wang Chuanfu.

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This slate gray mouse feels buttery smooth but is outshined by its cheaper non-pro sibling.

When Emma Kidwell got tapped to work on a new piece of content for Marvel’s Midnight Suns, she went back to her fanfic roots. She won’t be the only one following the rules of fan-written stories to develop fresh ideas.

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.

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