The Hugo Awards began honoring video games for the first time back in 2021. This week, the organization revealed the list of six finalists for the 2025 awards ceremony. Let's go over the nominations. Two AAA titles are up for the award. The gameplay involves summoning monsters and items to solve puzzles and do battle.

An underwater robot can delicately propel itself in any direction with its 12 flexible arms, inspired by the flagella of bacteria. Its creators claim it can carry out underwater inspections without endangering humans or wildlife, as propeller-driven robots would. Flagella are tiny, hair-like protrusions found on many bacteria that can spin clockwise or counterclockwise to create propulsion. "[Bacteria] have something called a biological motor, which rotates this elongated structure, and this elongated structure produces thrust, and that's how bacteria is propelled," says Anup Teejo Mathew at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi,…

Google has dominated the search engine market for decades. However, the rise of generative AI has presented a new form of competition -- AI search engines. With its AI Mode, Google provides users with exactly that: an AI chatbot that understands and outputs conversational search queries. As you might have expected, it looks a lot less like a traditional Google search and a lot more like ChatGPT Search. Google's AI Mode was met with such high interest that the feature went from being exclusive to Google One AI Premium users who pay 20 monthly to any Google account user via Google Labs.

Maintaining a perfect lawn takes time, effort, and dedication, and mowing the grass can become a relentless, repetitive chore. Not keeping up with maintenance could mean your garden quickly starts to resemble a jungle. Two new robot lawn mowers from eufy hope to change your outlook on garden maintenance. The eufy E15 and E18, available for sale now, are a pair of connected robot lawn mowers. These clever gadgets can take this chore off your hands by bringing smart tech into your yard.

Google is bringing AI Mode to more people in the US. The company announced on Monday it would make the new search tool, first launched at the start of last month, to millions of more Labs users across the country. For uninitiated, AI Mode is a new dedicated tab within Search. It allows you to ask more complicated questions of Google, with a custom version of Gemini 2.0 doing the legwork to deliver a nuanced AI-generated response. Labs, meanwhile, is a beta program you can enroll your Google account in to gain access to new Search features before the company rolls them out to the public.

Popularity in the tech world is hard to measure. I've talked at length about this in my discussions of programming language popularity. It really comes down to what you use to measure popularity -- and how available those metrics are to those doing the analysis. It's difficult to generically define popularity, especially when you're including tools that do wildly different things. For example, is a general-purpose text-to-image generator like Midjourney inherently more popular than a tool that removes backgrounds from images like Remove.bg?

Movies based on video games have become a pretty big deal in recent years. Just look at those box office returns for A Minecraft Movie for proof of that. This means that more films are coming down the pike, including a motion picture based on Hideo Kojima's delivery simulator Death Stranding. We first learned this was coming back in 2022, but now there's a writer and director attached to the project. The production company A24, which is helping to finance the film, just announced that it will be written and directed by Michael Sarnoski.

Later than expected, Google has begun rolling a pair of new Gemini Live features to Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25 devices. The company first previewed Gemini live video and screensharing during Mobile World Congress in March. As you might have guessed from their names, the two features allow you to take advantage of Gemini's multi-modal capabilities to ask Google's chatbot questions about what you see in front of your or on your phone's screen. It's here: ask Gemini about anything you see. If you don't own a Pixel 9 or Galaxy S25, Google says you can still access the new features through the Gemini app on Android.

While the Nintendo Switch 2 had its splashy debut last week, including details about the hardware and launch games, there's still lots about the console that Nintendo has yet to clear up. For instance, the company hasn't gone into specifics about the CPU and GPU that are powering the Switch 2, other than to touch on the performance enhancements that they offer over the Switch (NVIDIA separately confirmed that the Switch 2 uses its Deep Learning Super Sampling tech). However, since last Wednesday's blockbuster Direct, Nintendo has touched on some new Switch 2 details in interviews with the press. For one thing, Nate Bihldorff, Senior Vice President of Product Development & Publishing at Nintendo of America, told Nintendo Life that the console's Joy-Con 2 controllers do not use Hall effect tech. "The Joy-Con 2's controllers have been designed from the ground up," Bihldorff said.

Microsoft unveiled a swath of new AI features during its 50th birthday bash in Redmond last week, and I got to try many of them. Copilot Vision holds the most potential for consumers, but Copilot's shopping features aren't far behind. If you're concerned about Copilot's new Memory and Personality traits, I wouldn't be -- it looks way too early to get a sense of what it will eventually be. Those were my impressions after sampling most of the new Copilot demonstrations on display at Microsoft's 50th anniversary celebration. Microsoft talked about its vision for a personable Copilot that could shop for you and walk you through tech issues step-by-step.