Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Creator Hub Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Versus Switch Off Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series I give robot vacuum advice to friends and family all the time. Leah Stodart is a Philadelphia-based Senior Shopping Reporter at Mashable where she covers and tests essential home tech like vacuums, TVs, beauty devices, and eco-friendly hacks. Her ever-evolving experience in these categories helps her make thoughtful recommendations for how to spend your money during shopping holidays like Black Friday, which Leah has been covering for Mashable since 2017. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission. Recommendations for the best robot vacuums to buy in 2026 are at the bottom of this guide. Use the table of contents to skip down to that, or to skip to the deep dive on a specific robot vacuum feature.

Is the war entering a new phase? 'New level of danger': Drone incidents scare Europe amid Russia-Ukraine war A quadcopter drone with plastic explosives attached to it flew unnoticed past air defence installations at Germany's Leipzig/Halle Airport, a key NATO airlift hub, on August 4. The drone hit a Ukrainian cargo plane but failed to detonate. It fell onto the tarmac and was found four hours later by a bus driver who stepped on it and called security, German media reported. DNA traces linked the drone to a firebomb that was mailed to the same airport and set a freight container on fire in July 2024, the Bild tabloid reported.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. I'm starting to think I got the last good GPU deal My $500 RTX 5070 Ti is now a $1,300 problem. In November, around the U.S. Black Friday deal rush, I bought a new graphics card. That was nine months ago, and I think it might be the last time -- at least for the foreseeable future -- that I'll get a decent price on any computer hardware. In this week's issue of Boost Mode, I'll brag a little about my find, and explain why something that good is unlikely to come again any time soon.

A New Trick Reveals AI Models' Inner Thoughts Researchers devised a way to extract "reasoning traces" from Claude, GPT, and Gemini. What they found, they say, indicates that some Chinese AI may be trained on leading US models. Computer scientists recently discovered a way to extract the hidden "thinking" that frontier AI models perform as they work through complex problems. The findings provide some evidence--although not conclusive proof--that certain Chinese models may have been trained by " distilling " reasoning information from US models that was supposedly hidden because of how closely some of their thinking or reasoning patterns seem to match. The researchers have also demonstrated that the method could be used to recover personal information, like passwords and API keys, from a model's inner reasoning, although this vulnerability has been fixed.

Beyond Elon Musk's interpretation of, Silicon Valley leaders have often misunderstood classic books like and . Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer's, or Christopher Nolan's? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a "historically accurate" version of the --turning epic poetry into atrocious slop--even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Slick, super capable, and easy to use, Todo Backup 2026 remains one of our favorite backup suites despite minimal changes or fixes. Super capable, and super easy to use, Todo Backup 2026 is still one of our favorite backup suites -- despite some non-fatal bugs in the sync module and the occasional interface oddity. Though it's been a long, slow road with enhancements, Easeus Todo Backup has gradually developed into one of the most capable backup suites on the market. It also features the most efficient workflow I've seen and is supremely fast.

If A.I. Takes the Jobs of Young People, How Will They React? The Democratic electorate is already moving left, but that may be nothing compared with what happens when unemployment really starts to rise. In the first column in this series, I wrote about how the economic reality for young people in this country doesn't exactly match the bleak picture that is sometimes painted of it. In the second, I offered a theory about the discontent that is nonetheless fuelling a new populist economic politics among college-educated Gen Z-ers and millennials. In short, these voters believe, not without reason, that the old-fashioned trappings of middle-class life--homeownership, stability, a sense of purpose--are out of reach.

Mini human brains are being grown in labs all over the world. I'm going to let you in on a secret. Every cell in your body has the potential to get smarter. I don't mean this metaphorically, or in a "body keeps the score" kind of way. I mean that if lab-coated biologists took a sample of your skin and very carefully manipulated the cells inside it, they could actually make a brain. They do it all the time. Not a brain as complex as the one behind your eyes, of course, but a glob of gray matter nonetheless, with a few-million-odd neurons that can send and receive electrical signals. Kept at a womblike 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for eight months, they'll produce repetitive oscillations-- --nearly indistinguishable from those made by a premature baby. In cell culture labs around the world, human brain organoids live out their short lives as neural guinea pigs, testing the effects of diseases, toxins, and new pharmaceuticals. But they may soon be on to more glamorous pursuits. At the University of San Diego, organoids are guiding spidery robots through mazes and taking hero doses of psychedelics.

Startups and Big Ag are using Crispr gene editing to create crops that taste better and grow on a hotter planet. But will they find a market? If you wanted to create better blackberries, you could try to breed a variety without the seeds that get stuck in your teeth. Or one without the thorns that make the berries hard to pick. Or you could aim for more environmentally efficient plants that produce more berries per acre with less water and fewer chemicals.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Sen. Scott Wiener, shown in 2023, caught heat for launching an AI chatbot parodying his rival in his race for congress. Scott Wiener's congressional campaign launched a chatbot parodying rival Connie Chan, sparking a rebuke from Pelosi and illustrating the minefield politicians navigate when using AI. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .