Prior to the Baltimore Ravens' win over the Chicago Bears, Lamar Jackson ordered the locker room stripped of video games, ping pong tables and cornhole boards.

This drone's wingspan rivals a 737--but it's lighter than a NFL linebacker It could deliver internet to remote areas...or quietly watch us from the stratosphere. Radical's Evenstar solar-powered drone has a 120-foot wing span and weighs just 240 pounds. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Back in the mid-2010s, some of the world's biggest tech companies were racing to launch lightweight, solar-powered drones to hover above remote areas and beam down internet connectivity. Meta (then called Facebook) and Google, the two companies most heavily investing in the technology at the time, abruptly exited the space following a series of mishaps.

The second major cloud outage in less than two weeks, Azure's downtime highlights the "brittleness" of a digital ecosystem that depends on a few companies never making mistakes. Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, its widely used 365 services, Xbox, and Minecraft started suffering outages at roughly noon Eastern time on Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft said was "an inadvertent configuration change." The incident--which marks the second major cloud provider outage in less than two weeks--highlights the instability of an internet built largely on infrastructure run by a few tech giants. Microsoft's problems specifically originated from Azure's Front Door content delivery network and emerged just hours before Microsoft's scheduled earnings announcement. The company website, including its investor relations page, was still down on Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft provides updates was having intermittent issues as well.

One of the Milky Way's smallest galactic neighbours seems to have a supermassive black hole at its centre, upending assumptions that it was dominated by dark matter A nearby galaxy once thought to be dominated by dark matter seems to have a surprise supermassive black hole at its centre. Segue 1 is barely a galaxy, with only about 1000 stars compared to the Milky Way's hundreds of billions, and yet it appears to be home to a black hole about 10 times as massive as all its stars combined. Segue 1 and other similar dwarf galaxies do not have enough stars to provide the gravity needed to hold them all together. To solve that problem, physicists have long assumed they were chock-full of the mysterious substance called dark matter, which we can't see but that could generate the extra gravity. So when Nathaniel Lujan at the University of Texas at San Antonio and his colleagues began testing computer models of Segue 1, they expected the best-fitting model would be one dominated by dark matter.

Life is too short to use bad nonstick cookware. These All-Clad pans are the gold standard, and they're less expensive than usual. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. It can be hard to build an Adulting Arsenal.

One Hand Clapping covers a lot of ground, which can make it seem like an entertaining lecture series, with amusing sketches. Some may find Kukushkin's playfulness a bit much.

Feedback comes across a YouTuber's efforts to build a large language model in Minecraft and is impressed at the scale of it - even if it doesn't quite live up to its promise to blow your mind in spectacular fashion There are few things Feedback appreciates more than a truly committed hobbyist: someone who happily spends months or even years building something that is of no practical use whatsoever, just to be able to look at it or play with it. For those who might be unfamiliar, Minecraft is an open-world game in which everything is made up of cubical blocks. Players dig into the ground to collect cubes of useful minerals, which they can use to build things. For instance, they might build a house so that the monsters that come out at night can't get them. Or they might go big.

Environment Animals Wildlife Spiders Spiders'decorate' their webs to help trap dinner Stabilimenta may help spiders find a buggy snack. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. One of nature's most beautiful natural wonders, spider webs sometimes feature little extra bits of flair called stabilimenta . Stabilimenta are highly-reflective UV structures. Basically, think of them like spidey bike reflectors scattered throughout a web.

Human-level AI is still some ways off. Even the best artificial intelligence agents are fairly hopeless at online freelance work, according to an experiment that challenges the idea of AI replacing office workers en masse. The Remote Labor Index, a new benchmark developed by researchers at data annotation company Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), a nonprofit, measures the ability of frontier AI models to automate economically valuable work. The researchers gave several leading AI agents a range of simulated freelance work and found that even the best could perform less than 3 percent of the work, earning $1,810 out of a possible $143,991. The researchers looked at several tools and found the most capable to be Manus from a Chinese startup of the same name, followed by Grok from xAI, Claude from Anthropic, ChatGPT from OpenAI, and Gemini from Google.

Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft are among some of the sites and services experiencing problems amid a global Microsoft outage. Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of issues with a number of websites globally on Wednesday. Microsoft said some users of Microsoft 365, which includes Outlook and Teams, might see delays. The company's Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the internet, reported a degradation of some services at 1600 GMT. It said this was due to DNS issues - the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.