My job is one in which companies make big promises and rarely follow through. In that respect, it's remarkable that Roborock launched the Saros Z70 with OmniGrip at all. A robot vacuum with a retractable arm that can identify, pick up socks, and put them away seemed like such a big leap forward that I have to applaud Roborock for releasing it for consumer purchase at all. That said, the robot arm … doesn't really work. At least, it doesn't in my home, which is exactly the type of home that would call for a helpful robot arm. I've been testing it for two months now, and Roborock's machine learning hasn't helped it out yet.

Mizuho Financial Group said Friday that it has signed a strategic partnership agreement with SoftBank to introduce cutting-edge artificial intelligence to streamline operations and improve customer service. Mizuho will be the first in the financial sector to introduce "Cristal intelligence," which is being developed jointly by SoftBank and OpenAI, the U.S. developer of the ChatGPT generative AI tool. Mizuho expects the latest AI technology, which optimizes corporate tasks, to help the company increase revenue and cut costs, resulting in positive effects totaling 300 billion by fiscal 2030. Using the technology, Mizuho plans to analyze transaction data and market trends to quickly provide corporate customers with management advice. The financial group also expects the technology to help boost productivity in its sales activities more than twofold and reduce low-value operations by up to 50%.

RoboCup2025 is currently taking place in Salvador, Brazil. With day one of the main competition complete, things are hotting up across the many different leagues. From soccer to rescue, from industrial to home scenarios, teams are putting their robots through their paces across a variety of tasks and matches. If you would like to catch up on the action from the first day, you can watch the recording of the livestream below. This includes coverage of the teams competing, interviews with participants and organisers, and insights into RoboCup and the various leagues.

AI humanoid robots are stepping into showrooms to greet customers, explain features and pour coffee. Why settle for a regular robot when you can have a robot coyote? That's the innovative question the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) is answering as it rolls out robot coyotes for airfield wildlife control. These cybernetic prairie predators are a creative solution to a very real problem. Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy Report Get my best tech tips, urgent security alerts and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox.

"Eddington" is a slog, but a slog with ambitions--and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are. His earlier chillers, "Hereditary" (2018) and "Midsommar" (2019), had their labyrinthine ambiguities, too, but they also had propulsive craft and cunning, plus a resolute commitment to scaring us stupid. Then came the ungainly "Beau Is Afraid" (2023), a cavalcade of Oedipal neuroses both showy and coy, in which Aster didn't seem to lose focus so much as sacrifice it on the altar of auteurism. With "Eddington," his high-minded unravelling continues. No longer a horror wunderkind, Aster, at thirty-nine, yearns to be an impish anatomist of the body politic.

President Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House on July 15, 2025, in Washington, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt watches in reverence.. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. AI is "not my thing," President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI. "You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that," Trump said, recalling a conversation with "David"--most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. "I said, what, are you kidding? That's double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it."

I've long believed that the first hugely popular music you realize you hate is in many ways as important a discovery as the first music you realize you love. There's something crucial and formative about the recognition that an artist whose music is beloved by millions makes your skin crawl, not simply in the realization that said music "isn't for you," but in the fierce and irrational conviction that those millions of people are wrong, that sometimes art that's enormously successful is not, in fact, correspondingly good. As misanthropic as that sounds, it's a significant milestone in coming to learn that everyone's taste is (or at least should be) individuated and distinct, and that those distinct tastes are a large part of what makes people attractive, maddening, and above all else interesting to one another. I don't remember exactly when I discovered I hated Billy Joel's music, but it was sometime in middle school, when as a relatively proficient young piano player, I was asked, for the 10th or 100th time, to play "Piano Man." At that age I only vaguely knew the song and hadn't learned how to play it, and for reasons I probably couldn't have articulated, I promptly resolved that I never would.

If you're holding off on getting a Nintendo Switch 2 because you think that Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza are the only two games you can play right now, you're mistaken (although, you definitely need to play both of those games). In fact, there are a lot of games you can play on the new handheld, including the best titles from the original Nintendo Switch generation -- and with better visuals than ever before. That's because Nintendo has released Nintendo Switch 2 upgrades for a slate of its most popular Switch games. Can you upgrade your Switch 1 game for the Switch 2 for free? While you can upgrade some Switch games for free, others require you to purchase a Switch 2 upgrade pack, though these upgrades are much cheaper than a typical video game.

At least 30 Palestinians have been killed since dawn across Gaza in Israeli attacks, medical sources have told Al Jazeera, as the besieged and bombarded enclave's decimated health system, overwhelmed by a daily flow of wounded, is forcing doctors to make decisions on who to treat first. In the latest killings on Friday, three people died in an Israeli attack on the Tuffah neighbourhood of eastern Gaza City. Five people were also killed in an Israeli air attack in Jabalia an-Nazla, in northern Gaza. Earlier, an Israeli attack hit tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza – previously designated a so-called "safe zone" – igniting a major fire and killing at least five people, including infants. Al-Mawasi has come under repeated, deadly Israeli fire.

Netflix has used artificial intelligence in one of its TV shows for the first time, in a move the streaming company's boss said would make films and programmes cheaper and of better quality. Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said the Argentinian science fiction series El Eternauta (The Eternaut) was the first it had made that involved using generative AI footage. "We remain convinced that AI represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper," he told analysts on Thursday after Netflix reported its second-quarter results. He said the series, which follows survivors of a rapid and devastating toxic snowfall, involved Netflix and visual effects (VFX) artists using AI to show a building collapsing in Buenos Aires. "Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and, in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and workflows," he said.