The IDF said it had killed Izadi in a strike on an apartment in Qom, south of Tehran, in the early hours of Saturday. He had been in charge of the Palestine Corps of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps's (IRGC) Quds Force, responsible for handling ties with the Palestinian armed groups. He was reportedly instrumental in arming and financing Hamas, and had been responsible for military co-ordination between senior IRGC commanders and Hamas leaders, the IDF said. In April 2024, Izadi narrowly survived an Israeli air strike targeting the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria - an attack that killed several high-ranking Quds Force commanders. Israel later on Saturday also claimed to have killed another Quds Force commander, Behnam Shahriyari in a drone strike as he was travelling in a car through western Iran.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, Feb. 26, 2025. TECH TAKEOVER: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says artificial intelligence will "change the way" work is done and expects the company's total corporate workforce to be reduced as a result. 'GIANT OFFERS': Meta has allegedly tried to recruit employees from competitor OpenAI by offering bonuses as high as 100 million, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed on a podcast that aired Tuesday. ENERGY OUTLOOK: The rise of artificial intelligence and the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency will continue to push electricity consumption to record highs in 2025 and 2026. POWER DRAIN CRISIS: Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, to generate an image or let artificial intelligence summarize your email, something big is happening behind the scenes.

OpenAI announced in an X post on Thursday that users of ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Edu can now record audio by simply pressing a button. Record mode is rolling out today in ChatGPT to Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users. The feature allows you to record meetings and voice notes, just as you would through the iPhone Voice Memos recorder or third-party tools such as Otter.ai. ChatGPT will then convert the audio into a summarized transcript, which is saved as a canvas in your chat history. You can also prompt the chatbot to convert the transcripts into different kinds of outputs, including personalized emails and computer code.

For the past 40 years, Henry and Margaret Tanner have been crafting leather shoes by hand from their small workshop in Boca Raton, Florida. "No shortcuts, no cheap materials, just honest, top notch craftsmanship," Henry says in a YouTube advertisement for his business Tanner Shoes. Henry has been able to do all this despite his mangled, twisted hand. And poor Margaret only has three fingers, as you can see in this photo of the couple from their website. I discovered Tanner Shoes through a series of YouTube video ads. Having written about men's fashion for years, I was curious about these bespoke leather shoemakers.

It's hard to believe, but this year is already halfway over. Since January, a lot has happened in the tech world. It's a fickle, fast-paced industry, and some major products and services haven't survived past the mid-year mark. Some of the entries on our list lived long, fruitful lives and contributed lasting legacies to the ever-evolving space. Others were flash-in-the-pan features or straight-up flops (we're looking at you, Humane AI Pin), destined to meet their inevitable demise.

Paradromics is shifting from research to clinical trials. Recently, a neurotech company called Paradromics made headlines by successfully implanting its brain-computer interface (BCI) in a human for the first time. The procedure happened at the University of Michigan during a patient's routine epilepsy surgery. The device was both placed and removed in just about 20 minutes, a quick turnaround for such a complex technology. This achievement is a big deal for Paradromics, which has been working on this brain implant technology for nearly 10 years.

Relying on ChatGPT significantly affects critical thinking abilities, according to a new study. Researchers from MIT Media Lab, Wellesley College, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design conducted a four-month study titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT" and found users of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's chatbot "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels." This included the participants' decreased brain activity, a weaker sense of authorship, and inability to remember what they wrote -- which even continued when they weren't allowed to use an LLM. Anyone who uses ChatGPT for writing may have drawn similar conclusions; the point of using LLMs, after all, is to automate the work and outsource the critical thinking effort. But with this MIT study, there's now scientific evidence showing that relying on ChatGPT and other LLMs can impair memory and learning.

When I need to research a topic these days, I often turn to AI, at least as a starting point. But depending on my questions and which chatbot I use, the response may not always be satisfying -- it can be too brief or canned. In that case, I find myself wanting more. As the name implies, Learn About is more than just a way to get a quick answer to a question. Instead, it's a teaching tool that invites you to dive more deeply into your chosen topic.

AI agents are one of the buzziest trends in Silicon Valley, with tech companies promising big productivity gains for businesses. But do individual workers actually want to use them? A new study from Stanford University shows the answer may be yes -- as long as they automate mundane tasks and don't encroach too far on human agency. Also: Don't be fooled into thinking AI is coming for your job - here's the truth Titled "Future of Work with AI Agents," the study set out to move beyond hype around AI agents to understand how, exactly, these tools can be practically integrated into the day-to-day routines of professionals. While previous studies have investigated the impact of AI agents on specific job categories, like software engineering and IT, the Stanford researchers analyzed individual categories of tasks, allowing them "to better capture the nuanced, open-ended, and contextual nature of real-world work," they noted in their report.

When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It's very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth's company. But it indeed was true. Boz is now Lieutenant Colonel Bosworth. The other newly commissioned officers include Kevin Weil, OpenAI's head of product; Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI head of research now advising Mira Murati's company Thinking Machines Lab; and Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir.