Astronomers watch Betelgeuse recover after colossal blast

Just like the mischievous Tim Burton character of the same name, the red supergiant star Betelgeuse's head shrank. Scientists watched the star blast its outer surface into space in 2019, an unexpected cosmic event they had never seen before in a normal star. The eruption was so catastrophic, it blew off 400 billion times as much material as the sun does routinely in ejections linked to solar flares, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. What's more, the star got so dim

Image: Sonos Today, Sonos is officially introducing the redesigned mobile app that I showed you earlier this month. It’ll roll out for both Android and iOS on May 7th, but the company’s desktop apps aren’t coming along for the ride: Sonos will discontinue its controller apps for Windows and macOS in the near future. Taking their place is a new web app that will allow you to control and access your Sonos speakers from anywhere — not just when you’re home on Wi-Fi.But

Image: Epic Games If you still have your old Rock Band guitars lying around, it’s now possible to use them in Fortnite’s Rock Band-like music mode. As promised at launch, Fortnite Festival now supports a handful of guitar controllers across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. The announcement comes as part of a fresh update headlined by Billie Eilish.
The supported controllers include the Riffmaster Wireless Guitar Controller, Rock Band 4 Rivals Wireless Fender Jaguar Guitar, and Rock Band 4

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Image: Getty Images Elon Musk is currently embroiled in a battle with Australian authorities over demands for X to remove violent content of a stabbing that took place during a livestreamed service at a church in Sydney last week. Musk is arguing that such decisions could give countries the power to control “the entire internet,” while the Australian government is arguing that geoblocking content isn’t enough in its plea for decency a

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Grzegorz Wajda, Getty Images When Tesla releases its first quarter earnings this afternoon, the company’s CEO Elon Musk will field the usual questions about new products, new factories, and progress toward its futuristic vision of self-driving cars and robot workers. But Musk will also face increasingly urgent questions about its current state of affairs — and why everything seems to be going to shit.Earlier this month, the company reported its fi

SimpliSafe’s new live guard outdoor protection service allows its agents to monitor your outdoor security cameras for potential intruders. | Image: SimpliSafe SimpliSafe is bringing live monitoring to its outdoor cameras, adding to the indoor live monitoring service it launched last year. The new live guard outdoor protection service lets SimpliSafe’s human agents view a live feed from its outdoor camera when the system is armed, the camera detects a person, and its AI and facial rec

Unlike other Firefly-powered tools that generate sections of an image, Photoshop’s new Generate Image tool will fill the entire canvas. | Image: Adobe Adobe is adding some new generative AI tools to its Photoshop creative software that aim to give users additional ways to control the designs they generate. Powered by Adobe’s new Firefly Image 3 foundation model, these new tools are available today via the Photoshop beta desktop app, and will be generally available “later this y

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft launched the next version of its lightweight AI model Phi-3 Mini, the first of three small models the company plans to release.Phi-3 Mini measures 3.8 billion parameters and is trained on a data set that is smaller relative to large language models like GPT-4. It is now available on Azure, Hugging Face, and Ollama. Microsoft plans to release Phi-3 Small (7B parameters) and Phi-3 Medium (14B parameters). Parameters refer to how many complex instructions a model c

YouTube Fortnite is rolling out an update on Tuesday that includes a new setting that filters out “confrontational” emotes. The v29.30 update will let players “choose not to see” the following emotes: “Laugh It Up”, “Take the L”, “Whipcrack”, and “Make it Plantain.”The four emotes won’t exactly be hidden per se, they’ll appear as still images in the game — but players performing them won’t dance and t

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge DolphiniOS, a fork of the popular Dolphin emulator for Nintendo Wii and GameCube games, has confirmed that it’s not coming to the Apple App Store even though emulators are now supported. In a post on Friday, the developer behind the emulator says it’s because Apple doesn’t allow DolphiniOS to use its underlying performance-boosting tech.
As explained by developer OatmealDome, DolphiniOS — along with other Wii and GameCube emulators &mdash

This drone might migrate south to a new location in Arizona. | Image: Amazon Amazon is winding down its Prime Air drone delivery program in Lockeford, California — an early testing zone for a service that allowed local residents to order products weighing up to five pounds and get them delivered to their location via drone in 30 minutes.
In the same press release, Amazon also announced that the company is launching a new Prime Air location in Tolleson, Arizona. The new location is expected

Anker’s versatile charging orb functions as both a power strip and a StandBy-ready phone stand. | Image: Nathan Edwards / The Verge A cluttered desk can easily hijack your focus, which is why Anker’s Qi2-certified MagGo Magnetic Charging Station (8-in-1) can prove helpful. It’s small, but it can quickly clear up space by replacing a good chunk of your chargers while doubling as a sturdy phone stand. It normally runs $99.99, but now until 4:45PM PT / 7:45PM ET on April 28th, you

Illustration: The Verge Former Meta executive Jason Taylor is joining Microsoft’s AI supercomputing team. In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott says Taylor will take on the role of corporate vice president and deputy CTO to help “build the next set of systems that will push the frontier of AI forward.”
Taylor worked at Meta from 2009 to 2022, where he most recently served as the company’s vice president of infrastructure. He handled AI, data, and privacy

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge Europe is warming up at twice the global average, leading to deadly heatwaves and severe flooding, according to the European State of the Climate (ESOTC) report for the year 2023, released Monday.
According to the report, temperatures in Europe are rising 2.3 degrees Celsius (or 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, according to a five-year average, compared to 1.3 degrees Celsius (roughly 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) globally. The report, jointly issued

Mark Zuckerberg onstage at Meta Connect 2023. | Getty Images Meta has started licensing the operating system for its Quest headset to other hardware makers, starting with Lenovo and Asus. It’s also making a limited-run, gaming-focused Quest with Xbox.On the theme of opening up, Meta is also pushing for more ways to discover alternative app stores. It’s making its experimental App Lab store more prominent and even inviting Google to bring the Play Store to its operating system, which

Maybe your home should be dumb! | Illustration by Adrián Astorgano It turns out your TV can actually mess up your computer — at least if you’re using a Hisense TV and Windows.Kevin Snow, a video game narrative designer, wrote on Cohost that they’d been having trouble with their PC. The “Display Settings” menu didn’t open. The “Task Manager” started hanging. Then things necessary to making the computer work started to fail. Spelunking in hidd

How Meta envisions an Xbox-branded VR headset. | Image: Meta Microsoft is teaming up with Meta to create a limited edition Meta Quest VR headset that’s “inspired by Xbox.” While both Microsoft and Meta aren’t sharing full details on this VR headset, it sounds like it’s simply going to be a skinned Meta Quest 3 (or future unannounced version) that comes bundled with an Xbox controller.
“We’re working together again [with Microsoft] to create a limited-edi

Image: Epic Games Finally, you can bury a friend as Billie Eilish. Fortnite has revealed its next major musical collaboration, and it will see Eilish become a playable character starting on April 23rd. You should see her in a Victory Crown.
There aren’t many details just yet, but the singer will be the featured artist for the next season of Fortnite Festival, the Rock Band-like in-game experience that launched last year. That means you can expect her songs to be playable in that mode and h

Image: Cath Virginia | The Verge Open platforms keep gaining support out there — newsletter platform Ghost just published what amounts to a manifesto in support of the ActivityPub protocol with plans to ship ActivityPub integration “in 2024.”
That’s a big shot of support for the fediverse — the network of open and interoperable social services that have all been gaining momentum over the past year. Ghost founder John O’Nolan recently said that federation over

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images A new report from Stanford’s Internet Observatory said the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline needs to improve its technology if it wants to meet the influx of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The report said CyberTipline, the first defense against CSAM on the internet, already struggles to handle the high volume of calls it receives. According to the center, the tip li

Photo by Ulrik Pedersen / DeFodi Images via Getty Images It looks like Apple’s foray into streaming soccer could be getting even more ambitious. According to a report from The New York Times, Apple is close to a deal with FIFA — the sport’s global governing body — for worldwide rights for an expanded version of the Club World Cup that will take place in the US in 2025. The Times says that the deal could be worth upward of $1 billion and that an official announcement could

Image: Weta Workshop / Private Division One of the most famous pieces of literature in the world starts with, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” and now, technology has advanced to the point where we can be that hobbit with our own holes in the ground. Private Division and Weta Workshop have released the first official trailer for Tales of the Shire, a cozy, hobbit life sim where players can live out the fantasy of being one of Bilbo’s halfling neighbors.
The premi