Best Binoculars (2024): Nikon, Celestron, Swarovski, Zeiss

Barrels stored at the Energy Fuels White Mesa Mill uranium production facility in Blanding, Utah, US, on Monday, June 12, 2023.  | Photo: Getty Images President Joe Biden signed a new law that bars the US from importing uranium from Russia, in the hopes of jumpstarting domestic mining to fuel nuclear reactors. The law also unlocks $2.7 billion in federal funding to shore up that domestic supply chain, which Congress previously approved pending limits on imports from Russia.
Russia has histo

Image: Google Google I/O just ended — and it was packed with AI announcements. As expected, the event focused heavily on Google’s Gemini AI models, along with the ways they’re being integrated into apps like Workspace and Chrome.
If you didn’t get to tune in to the event live, you can catch up with all the latest from Google in the roundup below.
Google Lens now lets you search by recording a video
Google Lens already lets you search for something based on images, but now

The new Blink Mini 2 adds weather resistance so you can use it indoors and outdoors. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge If you’ve got vacation plans for Memorial Day weekend, a security camera can help you keep an eye on valuables back home so you can really relax during your time off. And right now, one of the least expensive options on the market is even more affordable, with the new Blink Mini 2 selling for just $29.99 ($10 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and The Home Depot. If yo

Illustration by Haein Jeong / The Verge Among Google’s swath of new AI models and tools announced today, the company is also expanding its AI content watermarking and detection technology to work across two new mediums.
Google’s DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, took the stage for the first time at the Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday to talk not only about the team’s new AI tools, like the Veo video generator, but also about the new upgraded SynthID watermark imprinting

Image: The Verge Google is adding a bunch of new features to its Gemini AI, and one of the most powerful is a personalization option called “Gems” that allows users to create custom versions of the Gemini assistant with varying personalties.
Gems lets you create iterations of chatbots that can help you with certain tasks and retain specific characteristics, kind of like making your own bot in Character.AI, the service that lets you talk to virtualized versions of popular characters a

The dream of contextual search is alive. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google is updating Gemini on Android to let its AI better tap into what’s on your screen. The update should allow Gemini to lean into one of its best use cases, helping you make sense of a limited set of data as you go about your day.
If you set Gemini as the default assist on your Android phone, it can already summarize or answer questions about a webpage or a screenshot. Soon, it’ll also be able

Google might tell you f = ma, or something. I haven’t been to school for a long time. | Image: Google Google is enhancing Android’s Circle to Search — the feature that lets you literally circle something on your Android phone’s screen to search it on Google — with a new ability to generate instructions on how to solve school math and physics problems.
Using an Android phone or tablet, students can now use Circle to Search to get AI assistance on mathematical word pr

Image: The Verge Google is building its Gemini AI into Chrome on desktop. During its I/O event on Tuesday, Google announced that Chrome 126 will use Gemini Nano to power on-device AI features, such as text generation.
Gemini Nano is the lightweight large language model Google introduced to the Pixel 8 Pro last year — and, later, the Pixel 8. To get Gemini Nano on Chrome, Google says it tweaked the model and optimized the browser to “load the model quickly.”
The integration will

Illustration: The Verge Gemini, Google’s ChatGPT competitor, is getting new trip planning capabilities, the company announced today at its I/O developer conference.Based on the user’s prompt, the AI model will now research publicly available information as well as tap into specific details like flight times and hotel bookings to work up a custom, multiday vacation itinerary “in a matter of seconds.”
In a briefing with reporters, Google VP and general manager of Gemini, Si

Veo demos show that Google’s AI-generated video capabilities have come a long way. | Image: Google It’s been three months since OpenAI demoed its captivating text-to-video AI, Sora, and now Google is trying to steal some of that spotlight. Announced during its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google says Veo — its latest generative AI video model — can generate “high-quality” 1080p resolution videos over a minute in length in a wide variety of visual and c

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is working on new protections to help prevent Android users from falling victim to phone scams. During its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced that it’s testing a new call monitoring feature that will warn users if the person they’re talking to is likely attempting to scam them and encourage them to end such calls.
Google says the feature utilizes Gemini Nano — a reduced version of the company’s Gemini large

Searching with Lens is now as simple as pointing and shooting. | Image: Google Google’s adding a nifty new feature to Lens, its visual search tool: you can now search by shooting a video. Previously, Lens only captured still images, but now you can use both video and audio to ask your question. Google imagines you might use it to ask about a problem you’re having with your car or to get more information about a product you see. It’s also yet another way AI is making its way int

Astra is meant to be a real-time, multimodal AI assistant. | Image: Google “I’ve had this vision in my mind for quite a while,” says Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind and the leader of Google’s AI efforts. Hassabis has been thinking about and working on AI for decades, but four or five years ago, something really crystallized. One day soon, he realized, “we would have this universal assistant. It’s multimodal, it’s with you all the time.”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Part of Google’s vision at its I/O developer conference this year has involved transforming its Gemini AI chatbot into more of a digital assistant that specializes in dealing with our day-to-day tedium. One of the new ways it’s doing that is by integrating Gemini with Google Calendar, Tasks, and Keep.
The new integrations, which Google says are coming “soon” come by way of the extensions the company added to Bard last year and have

Image: Google Google Photos already has impressive search capabilities, but Google is using Gemini to dial those powers up to the next level. During today’s I/O keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai announced “Ask Photos,” a new feature coming this summer that should make the service much smarter when it comes to understanding what it is you’re looking for, using artificial intelligence to connect the dots for more sophisticated requests.Pichai asked the app, “What’s my

Image: Crystal Dynamics In addition to announcing a second season of Mr. And Mrs. Smith and a fifth season of The Boys, Amazon is adding another new series to its television lineup: a live-action Tomb Raider series. The series will be produced in collaboration between Crystal Dynamics and Amazon MGM Studios, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge serving as the show’s writer and executive producer, confirming rumors reported earlier last year.
The Tomb Raider series is no stranger to live-action adapta

Image: Sony Pictures The classic competitive game show Jeopardy! is getting a spinoff series on Prime Video. Sony Pictures Television is producing Pop Culture Jeopardy!, which turns the classic academic quiz show with three challengers into a team-based trivia game that touches on music, movies, culture, sports, celebrities, entertainment, and more.
The new series marks the first time the company’s game show division is expanding the Jeopardy! brand to a streaming platform with a new show.

Starting today, users in Europe can access Claude, Amazon-backed AI startup Anthropic’s proper ChatGPT contender.  There are a few company names that have become synonymous with the advent of generative AI. OpenAI may have had the early-mover advantage, with ChatGPT becoming close to a household name. However, others have also been busy honing their craft and algorithms.  When Anthropic first released its latest large language model (LLM) family Claude 3 to the public in March 2

The annual rings on the trunk of a conifer tree. | Photo: Getty Images A summer marked by deadly heatwaves across Asia, Europe, and North America last year turns out to have been the hottest in the Northern Hemisphere in at least 2,000 years, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.
Officially, 2023 went down in history books as the hottest on record for the planet — but those records only started in 1850. To see how drastically the climate has changed over millennia, the

Workers are producing structural components of EV batteries at a production workshop in Qingkou Automobile Industrial Park in Fuzhou, Fujian province, China, on February 23rd, 2024. | Photo by Costfoto / NurPhoto via Getty Images The Biden administration announced much higher tariffs today on key goods from China that the US will need to meet its climate goals. The move targets transportation, clean energy technologies, raw materials, and more.“To encourage China to eliminate its unfair tr

Alexey Pertsev, the developer behind crypto mixer Tornado Cash, has been found guilty of money laundering by a Dutch court in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Pertsev, was first imprisoned in the Netherlands, where he had been residing, in August 2022 on charges of money laundering worth of $1.2bn in cryptocurrency. He was released in April 2023 and remained under house arrest pending his trial in March this year — the verdict of which was announced today. Pertsev’s arrest in the Netherlands

The Arctis Nova 5 headset’s mic can retract into the earcup when not in use. | Image: SteelSeries If you hate (or simply can’t be bothered) to adjust your audio profiles when setting up a new gaming headset, then you might be the target demographic for SteelSeries’ latest offering. Introduced on Tuesday, the new Arctis Nova 5 headset is supported by a dedicated companion app that features over 100 game-specific audio presets for Xbox and PlayStation 5 titles like Fortnite, Apex