Phone battery draining too fast? Simple iPhone and Android settings adjustments like disabling background app refresh and always-on display can extend battery life significantly.

At a time when nuclear threats feel more alarming than ever, Netflix's doomsday film falls frustratingly flat. A 1964 masterpiece tells a much better cautionary tale. Somewhere over the Arctic reaches of North America, a nuclear bomber flies in a squadron, awaiting its orders. When a secret code appears on a machine in the cockpit, the crew looks at each other, stunned. The code is instructing them to attack.

Everything is a conspiracy theory now. Conspiracists are all over the White House, turning fringe ideas into dangerous policy. America's institutions are crumbling under the weight of deep suspicion and the lasting effects of covid isolation. Online echo chambers are getting harder to escape, and generative AI is altering the fabric of truth. A mix of technology and politics has given an unprecedented boost to once-fringe ideas--but they are pretty much the same fantasies that have been spreading for hundreds of years. MIT Technology Review helps break down how this moment is changing science and technology--and how we can make it through.

Trump-Xi meeting: Who has the upper hand? Could Trump go for a third term? Is the US eyeing its next Latin American target? Why is Trump tearing down parts of the White House? United States President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have agreed to a trade truce under which the US will ease tariffs and Beijing will restart imports of US soya beans, delay the introduction of export restrictions on some of its rare earth metals and intensify efforts to curb illegal fentanyl trafficking.

The US government shut down 30 days ago. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen federal workers who have struggled to pay bills, worked side gigs, and relied on free food programs to get by. In late September, a federal worker based abroad learned that her husband, who is also a federal worker and a military veteran, had "high risk, very aggressive cancer." Doctors told the couple that the cancer needed to be removed immediately or it would no longer be treatable. Her husband is covered by TRICARE, the health care program offered to members of the military and veterans.

What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) Mike Rothschild has spent years studying the rise of QAnon and antivaccine conspiracism. After his house in Altadena, California, burned down, he found himself mired in similarly sticky webs of misinformation. On a gloomy Saturday morning this past May, a few months after entire blocks of Altadena, California, were destroyed by wildfires, several dozen survivors met at a local church to vent their built-up frustration, anger, blame, and anguish. As I sat there listening to one horror story after another, I almost felt sorry for the very polite consultants who were being paid to sit there, and who couldn't do a thing about what they were hearing. Hosted by a third-party arbiter at the behest of Los Angeles County, the gathering was a listening session in which survivors could "share their experiences with emergency alerts and evacuations" for a report on how the response to the Eaton Fire months earlier had succeeded and failed. It didn't take long to see just how much failure there had been. After a small fire started in the bone-dry brush of Pasadena's Eaton Canyon early in the evening of Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the raging Santa Ana winds blew its embers into nearby Altadena, the historically Black and middle-class town just to the north. By Wednesday morning, much of it was burning.

Turns out many believers do respond positively when presented with the right evidence and arguments. It's become a truism that facts alone don't change people's minds. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to conspiracy theories: Many people believe that you can't talk conspiracists out of their beliefs. It turns out that many conspiracy believers respond to evidence and arguments--information that is now easy to deliver in the form of a tailored conversation with an AI chatbot. In research we published in the journal this year, we had over 2,000 conspiracy believers engage in a roughly eight-minute conversation with DebunkBot, a model we built on top of OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo (the most up-to-date GPT model at that time). Participants began by writing out, in their own words, a conspiracy theory that they believed and the evidence that made the theory compelling to them.

Virgin Media O2 is set to become the first mobile operator to offer UK customers automatic connectivity via satellite in places without mobile signal. O2 Satellite will be an optional service due to launch in the first half of 2026. The firm has not yet revealed how much it will cost, but it will be an additional fee to pay each month. O2 has partnered with Elon Musk's satellite business Starlink to offer the service. Enabled smartphones will automatically switch to satellite coverage in parts of the UK where there is no terrestrial signal available - for example in rural areas.

Google sets a new standard with a full IP68 rating for foldable phones. Google sets a new standard with a full IP68 rating for foldable phones. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. G oogle's third-generation folding phone promises to be more durable than all others as the first with full water and dust resistance while also packing lots of advanced AI and an adaptable set of cameras.

Japan's HTV-X resupply vehicle arrives at the International Space Station where a robot arm operated by astronaut Kimiya Yui awaits early Thursday. Japan's newly developed HTV-X resupply vehicle arrived at the International Space Station in the small hours of Thursday Japan time. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, 55, successfully caught the craft with a robotic arm around 12:58 a.m. and attached it to the ISS. "Thank you for entrusting me with this important task today," Yui said in communication with ground control soon after that. "Congratulations on the capture," fellow Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, 56, responded from the control room at NASA in the United States.