These WIRED-tested wearables reduce your reliance on a phone while keeping you connected. It elevates your outfit and makes you feel good. The best smartwatch can do even more, from tracking your workouts and heart rate to serving as a notification hub and accessing voice assistants. You can leave your phone in your pocket and use your wrist for simple tasks. Like many consumer gadgets today, wearables have gotten pricier, driven by several factors, including rising component costs and supply chain pressures. There are plenty of solid options, in various styles, at a range of prices, and with different levels of smarts. Below is a roundup of the best smartwatches I've tested. While not a major upgrade from its predecessor, the Apple Watch Series 12 is the best everyday smartwatch for most iPhone users.

The first thing you'll notice about the Beam Ultra is that it looks like a more serious speaker than previous Beams, simply because it's a bit wider. Keep that in mind if an old Beam already takes up most of your TV stand. Otherwise, it has the same perforated metal design and it's still just 2.5 inches tall. It also weighs 6.35 pounds, just like the earlier models, despite its larger stature. That more expansive case makes room for the Beam Ultra to be a much more capable speaker -- especially since it now supports genuine Dolby Atmos, instead of just virtualizing immersive audio.

Nearly four years after the debut of ChatGPT, no company has managed to convince regular people to replace their smartphone with an AI gadget. Certainly, more than a few have tried (and failed miserably), but the phone remains the dominant way people interact with modern technology, including large language models. Now, a company called Plaud is trying to tackle that nutshell in a way that's different from the likes of Rabbit and Humane. If you're not familiar with Plaud, don't worry, you're not the only one. The company is perhaps best known known for the Plaud Note and Note Pro, a pair of devices you can magnetically attach to your phone to record in-person conversations to be later automatically transcribed and summarized for you.

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We tested hundreds of options--our top picks from Apple, Google, Samsung, and Beats are standout favorites that are ready for any task. I use Wireless earbuds constantly. I use them for work, running, working out, relaxing, traveling--whatever I am doing, chances are I have a pair of wireless earbuds on me, just in case. While some of the earliest models were huge and inconvenient, earbuds nowadays are slim, comfortable, and often affordable. The WIRED Reviews team doesn't just use earbuds--we test them. And after weeks of music, calls, commutes, and rogue earbuds flying out of our ears, we've chosen these favorites that are the best for most people.

Ukraine said it has hit two oil refineries in multiple strikes deep inside Russia with patrol boats and other vessels in the Black Sea also hit. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Bashneft-Novoil and Slavneft-Yanos refineries were struck in the attacks aimed at limiting oil revenues Moscow uses to finance its war. Yaroslavl regional governor Mikhail Evraev said Slavneft-Yanos was on fire after what he called the largest enemy drone attack. He said four people were injured. Meanwhile, Ukraine said at least 11 people were killed in Russian attacks, and the southern city of Kherson reported a total blackout.

The deals are almost feral. We are still here in the trenches digging up the deals and trends. It is the final day of Amazon Prime Day--the final countdown, the time of FOMO dread, the last official day of the best deals. The fourth day is the day when we bring you the sun, the moon, and the stars. After today, many things will cost a little bit more for the foreseeable future-- especially laptops. But new deals are still rolling out all day today. Friday is the day when a lot of you get your paychecks, and so Amazon is filling up the virtual racks with impulse buys.

Understanding the geometry of neural network loss landscapes is a central question in deep learning, with implications for generalization and optimization. A striking phenomenon is linear mode connectivity (LMC), where independently trained models can be connected by low-or zero-barrier paths, despite appearing to lie in separate loss basins. However, this is often obscured by symmetries in parameter space--such as neuron permutations--which make functionally equivalent models appear dissimilar. Prior work has predominantly focused on neuron reordering through permutations, but such approaches are limited in scope and fail to capture the richer symmetries exhibited by modern architectures such as Transformers. In this work, we introduce a unified framework that captures four symmetry classes--permutations, semi-permutations, orthogonal transformations, and general invertible maps--broadening the set of valid reparameterizations and subsuming many previous approaches as special cases. Crucially, this generalization enables, for the first time, the discovery of low-and zero-barrier linear interpolation paths between independently trained Vision Transformers and GPT-2 models. Furthermore, our framework extends beyond pairwise alignment, to multi-model and width-heterogeneous settings, enabling alignment across architectures of different sizes. These results reveal deeper structure in the loss landscape and underscore the importance of symmetry-aware analysis for understanding model space geometry. Our code is available here.

The ability to extract oriented edges from visual input is a core computation across animal vision systems. Orientation maps, long associated with the layered architecture of the mammalian visual cortex, systematically organise neurons by their preferred edge orientation. Despite lacking cortical structures, the Drosophila melanogaster brain contains feature-selective neurons and exhibits complex visual detection capacity, raising the question of whether map-like vision representations can emerge without cortical infrastructure. We integrate a complete fruit fly brain connectome with biologically grounded spiking neuron models to simulate neuroprocessing in the fly visual system. By driving the network with oriented stimuli and analysing downstream responses, we show that coherent orientation maps can emerge from purely connectome-constrained dynamics. These results suggest that species of independent origin could evolve similar visual structures.

A common view of sensory processing is as probabilistic inference of latent causes from receptor activations. Standard approaches often assume these causes are a priori independent, yet real-world generative factors are typically correlated. Representing such structured priors in neural systems poses architectural challenges, particularly when direct interactions between units representing latent causes are biologically implausible or computationally expensive. Inspired by the architecture of the olfactory bulb, we propose a novel circuit motif that enables inference with correlated priors without requiring direct interactions among latent cause units. The key insight lies in using sister cells: neurons receiving shared receptor input but connected differently to local interneurons.