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Where are Engadget's CES 2025 winners now?

Engadget

Where are Engadget's CES 2025 winners now? Most are available to purchase, though some will arrive this year. A man takes a photo of a CES sign as setup continues for CES 2025, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. January 5, 2025. With CES 2026 slated to officially start next week, the focus is understandably on all the new products that will be announced at this year's event. But before diving into what's new, we thought it was a good idea to revisit our best of show winners from last year to see where they're at.


Wyze Solar Cam Pan review: Pan/tilt security powered by the sun

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. A built-in solar panel and full pan-tilt coverage make this a low-maintenance way to keep an eye on your entire yard. AI person tracking doesn't require a subscription Wyze's first solar-powered pan-tilt camera delivers broad coverage and low-maintenance operation for far less than most competitors. Wyze has been cranking out budget security cameras cameras at a steady pace, filling every niche from doorbells to floodlights. The Solar Cam Pan is the company's first real swing at solar power, though, and it connects solidly.


The Great Big Power Play

WIRED

US support for nuclear energy is soaring. Meanwhile, coal plants are on their way out and electricity-sucking data centers are meeting huge pushback. Welcome to the next front in the energy battle. Take yourself back to 2017. Get Out and The Shape of Water were playing in theaters, Zohran Mamdani was still known as rapper Young Cardamom, and the Trump administration, freshly in power, was eager to prop up its favored energy sources. That year, the administration introduced a series of subsidies for struggling coal-fired power plants and nuclear power plants, which were facing increasing price pressures from gas and cheap renewables.


Octopus Energy to spin off 8.65bn tech arm Kraken

BBC News

Octopus Energy to spin off $8.65bn tech arm Kraken Octopus Energy is set to spin off its Kraken Technologies arm as a standalone company after a deal to sell a stake in the platform valued it at $8.65bn (£6.4bn). The energy giant, Britain's biggest gas and electricity supplier, has sold a $1bn stake in the AI-based division to a group of investors led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. The move paves the way for Kraken to be demerged from Octopus, and for a potential stock market flotation for the business in the future. Octopus founder and chief executive Greg Jackson told the BBC there was every chance Kraken would list its shares in the medium term, with the location of the flotation between London and the US. Kraken uses AI to automate customer service and billing for energy companies and can manage when customers use energy, rewarding them for reducing consumption at peak times. It was initially built for use by Octopus but has since picked up a raft of other utilities clients, including EDF, E.On Next, TalkTalk and National Grid US.


Calibrated Multi-Level Quantile Forecasting

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We present an online method for guaranteeing calibration of quantile forecasts at multiple quantile levels simultaneously. A sequence of $α$-level quantile forecasts is calibrated if the forecasts are larger than the target value at an $α$-fraction of time steps. We introduce a lightweight method called Multi-Level Quantile Tracker (MultiQT) that wraps around any existing point or quantile forecaster to produce corrected forecasts guaranteed to achieve calibration, even against adversarial distribution shifts, while ensuring that the forecasts are ordered -- e.g., the 0.5-level quantile forecast is never larger than the 0.6-level forecast. Furthermore, the method comes with a no-regret guarantee that implies it will not worsen the performance of an existing forecaster, asymptotically, with respect to the quantile loss. In experiments, we find that MultiQT significantly improves the calibration of real forecasters in epidemic and energy forecasting problems.


5 home innovations that improved our lives in 2025

Popular Science

Technology Best of What's New 5 home innovations that improved our lives in 2025 We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. When you live with small annoyances, frustration can build over time. You can only catch your belt loop on a drawer handle so many times before you hit your limit. Several of this year's home innovations address those seemingly small hurdles that can make a big difference in your home life. The monthly chore of replacing an air filter and the seemingly simple task of finding a place to store the lawn mower when not in use get clever solutions.


The Earth Is Nearing an Environmental Tipping Point

WIRED

Today’s global coral bleaching events are the worst kind of climate warning.


Optimizing Energy Production Using Policy Search and Predictive State Representations

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the challenging practical problem of optimizing the power production of a complex of hydroelectric power plants, which involves control over three continuous action variables, uncertainty in the amount of water inflows and a variety of constraints that need to be satisfied. We propose a policy-search-based approach coupled with predictive modelling to address this problem. This approach has some key advantages compared to other alternatives, such as dynamic programming: the policy representation and search algorithm can conveniently incorporate domain knowledge; the resulting policies are easy to interpret, and the algorithm is naturally parallelizable. Our algorithm obtains a policy which outperforms the solution found by dynamic programming both quantitatively and qualitatively.


The Environmental and Human Rights Costs of China's Clean Energy Investments Abroad

WIRED

If a major disaster like Fukushima or Chornobyl ever happens again, the world would know almost straight away, thanks to an array of government and DIY radiation-monitoring programs running globally. Why Don't Norwegians Hate Tesla Like the Rest of Europe Does? November's Tesla registrations were down in France, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Norway, however, is bucking the trend--thanks to a tax incentive system that will soon be rolled back.


London Eye architect proposes 14-mile tidal power station off Somerset coast

The Guardian > Energy

West Somerset Lagoon would harness renewable energy for UK's AI boom - and create'iconic' arc around Bristol Channel The architect of the London Eye wants to build a vast tidal power station in a 14-mile arc off the coast of Somerset that could help Britain meet surging electricity demand to power artificial intelligence - and create a new race track to let cyclists skim over the Bristol Channel. Julia Barfield, who designed the Eye and the i360 observation tower in Brighton, is part of a team that has drawn up the £11bn proposal. The proposal comes amid growing concern that rapidly rising use of AI in Britain will drive up carbon emissions unless more renewable energy sources are found. The AI boom is expected to add to sharp increases in demand for electricity across the UK, which the government estimated this month could more than double by 2050. "If the decision is to go ahead with adopting more and more AI - which I am surprised is not being questioned more at a time of climate emergency - then it is going to be better with a renewable energy source," said Barfield.