Like a true Midwesterner, my dad has been feuding with the squirrels in his backyard for years. Every few months, he comes home with a new "squirrel-proof" bird feeder, each more expensive than the previous, each one promising to finally do the trick. My mom rolls her eyes at the pile of hardware-store receipts and discarded feeders. I shake my head watching this all play out--knowing full well those feeders never stood a chance. Walk down the birdseed aisle in any hardware store and you'll find an entire product category promising "squirrel-proof" solutions.

Save on Petlibro essentials, including automatic feeders, water fountains, and accessories to keep cats and dogs fed, hydrated, and comfortable every day. As the pet tech writer here on the WIRED Reviews team, I've tested over 100 pet-related products, including automatic pet feeders, pet water fountains, and pet cameras . The one brand I keep buying for myself--and recommending to friends and family with pets--is Petlibro. Petlibro dominates the game when it comes to high-tech, seamlessly designed automatic feeders and pet fountains . Most of their products have a connected app to make pet parenting easier, whether you're near or far.

These smart bird feeders use connected cameras to capture up-close images and videos of visiting birds. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Birds are difficult to photograph. They move quickly, arrive sporadically, and have an uncanny knack for avoiding the camera. Birdfy's smart bird feeders make it easy to capture photos and videos of your feathered friends with a connected camera.

Gear Home Smart Home Bird Buddy's best smart feeders are only $229 during Amazon's Black Friday sale, and some models are even less If you've been waiting to try a smart bird feeder that lets you see new avian pals up close, it's the best time of the year to get almost half off. Your backyard paparazzi career starts now. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. The Bird Buddy smart feeder has turned a lot of readers into accidental birders over the years. This editor-approved source of avian infotainment was PopSci's most-clicked Black Friday deal in 2023, then sold out again during Prime Day in 2024.

Gear Home Smart Home Take 50% off the best smart feeder with Bird Buddy's Early Black Friday Deals If you've been waiting to try a smart bird feeder that lets you see new avian pals up close, it's the best time of the year to get almost half off. Your backyard paparazzi career starts now. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. The Bird Buddy smart feeder has turned a lot of Popular Science readers into accidental birders over the years. It was PopSci's most-clicked Black Friday deal in 2023, then sold out again during Prime Day in 2024.

Rapid electrification and decarbonization are increasing the complexity of distribution grid (DG) operation and planning, necessitating advanced computational analyses to ensure reliability and resilience. These analyses depend on disparate workflows comprising complex models, function calls, and data pipelines that require substantial expert knowledge and remain difficult to automate. Workforce and budget constraints further limit utilities' ability to apply such analyses at scale. To address this gap, we build an agentic system PowerChain, which is capable of autonomously performing complex grid analyses. Existing agentic AI systems are typically developed in a bottom-up manner with customized context for predefined analysis tasks; therefore, they do not generalize to tasks that the agent has never seen. In comparison, to generalize to unseen DG analysis tasks, PowerChain dynamically generates structured context by leveraging supervisory signals from self-contained power systems tools (e.g., GridLAB-D) and an optimized set of expert-annotated and verified reasoning trajectories. For complex DG tasks defined in natural language, empirical results on real utility data demonstrate that PowerChain achieves up to a 144/% improvement in performance over baselines.

Abstract--Accurate voltage estimation in distribution networks is critical for real-time monitoring and increasing the reliability of the grid. As DER penetration and distribution level voltage variability increase, robust distribution system state estimation (DSSE) has become more essential to maintain safe and efficient operations. This paper presents a hierarchical graph neural network for substation-level voltage estimation that exploits both electrical topology and physical features, while remaining robust to the low observability levels common to real-world distribution networks. Leveraging the public SMART -DS datasets, the model is trained and evaluated on thousands of buses across multiple substations and DER penetration scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves up to 2 times lower RMSE than alternative data-driven models, and maintains high accuracy with as little as 1% measurement coverage. The results highlight the potential of GNNs to enable scalable, reproducible, and data-driven voltage monitoring for distribution systems. Distribution System State Estimation (DSSE) is the process of determining the state variables of a distribution network given a limited set of measurements [1], [2]. Historically, distribution networks were operated as a passive part of the grid, delivering electricity from transmission substations to customers in a unidirectional manner [3].

Whether your giftee loves bird watching, bird feeding, or just putting a bird on it, these gifts are sure to be a hit. 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. You may be familiar with the various memes detailing the fact that once you reach middle age, you're automatically sorted, Harry Potter hat-style, into one of a handful of hobbies, such as sourdough bread making, gardening, or bird watching. I can't contradict this, since I'm a middle-aged person who got sorted into bird-watching.

Birds can use a snack during the fall migration season and Amazon has a ton of great feeders on clearance. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. If you're in the US right now, you're probably starting to get into the fall mood. So are the birds, which means they would really appreciate a snack from a well-stocked bird feeder . While there are some great smart bird feeders out there with built-in cameras, you could also get a ton of enjoyment out of a basic model.

If pop culture is to be believed, there's an age where birdwatching becomes extremely appealing. It's a slow-burn hobby that rewards patience and a knack for observation (think Detective Cordelia Cupp in "The Residence"). But if you can't tell a Yellow-throated Longclaw from an Eastern Meadowlark, you might need a little help from an AI-powered identification system and an always-on backyard camera. Amazon's running a limited-time sale (or until stock flies away) on smart bird feeders with built-in 2K cameras and AI bird recognition, which give you the thrill of birdwatching at home without the binocular neck strain or standing around. This solar-powered 2K camera with AI recognition is basically a paparazzi setup for your native species, capturing pictures and video automatically.