Every time my cat Mira walks across a keyboard, I learn a few new Mac and PC keyboard shortcuts I never knew about. All cats love keyboards (but this is not a photo of my cat). My cat Mira is perfect, and has never done anything wrong. She also loves walking on laptop keys--both my MacBook and my wife Kathy's Windows PC . You might think that walking on laptops is an example of Mira doing something wrong. And, in any case, we've both learned a lot about how our computers work because of this.

Could Contact-Tracing Apps Help With the Hantavirus? Contact-tracing apps were widely deployed during the Covid pandemic. After three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They're trying to trace the spread of the virus. It's a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection.

Fi Mini and Tractive: Which Smart Cat Tracker Should You Buy? For months, I tested Tractive and Fi Mini smart collars on my cat to find the best for activity, sleep, and GPS tracking. Wearable health-monitoring devices, like smart rings, smartwatches, and fitness trackers, help people stay on top of key wellness markers. By providing data on steps, heart rate, sleep, and more, these gadgets allow people to better understand their health, along with the opportunity to improve it with lifestyle shifts. But why should humans have all the fun?

The secret to this acrobatic skill lies in an extremely flexible part of the spine that allows cats to twist in the air and land safely. It's well established that when cats fall, they're able to land perfectly most of the time, nimbly maneuvering to right themselves before they hit the ground. Now, researchers at Japan's Yamaguchi University have advanced our understanding of this extraordinary ability, focusing on the mechanical properties of feline spines. What they found, as detailed in a recent study in the journal The Anatomical Record, is that those sure-footed landings are due in part to the fact that a cat's thoracic region is much more flexible than its lumbar region. While a cat's ability to rotate in the air without something to push again seems to defy the laws of physics, it's instead a complex righting maneuver.

"Ask Maps," rolling out today to Google Maps on mobile, lets you ask Gemini questions about locations and even to plan trips on your behalf. There's a new button in Google Maps: "Ask Maps." Google started rolling out this new generative AI feature today, a conversational, in-app tool that combines data from Maps with a user experience similar to the company's Gemini chatbot. It's designed to answer questions about locations and schedule routes in the navigation app. This is part of Google's overall strategy of adding Gemini to all its products.

I turned myself into an AI-generated deathbot - here's what I found If a loved-one died tomorrow, would you want to keep talking to them? Not through memories or saved messages, but through artificial intelligence - a chatbot that uses their texts, emails and voice notes, to reply in their tone and style. A growing number of technology companies now offer such services as part of the digital afterlife industry, which is worth more than £100bn, with some people using it as a way to deal with their grief. Cardiff University's Dr Jenny Kidd has led research on so-called deathbots, published in the Cambridge University Press journal Memory, Mind and Media, and described the results as both fascinating and unsettling. Attempts to communicate with the dead are not new.

Mistral's New Ultra-Fast Translation Model Gives Big AI Labs a Run for Their Money "Too many GPUs makes you lazy," says the French startup's vice president of science operations, as the company carves out a different path than the major US AI companies. Mistral AI has released a new family of AI models that it claims will clear the path to seamless conversation between people speaking different languages . On Wednesday, the Paris-based AI lab released two new speech-to-text models: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime. The former is built to transcribe audio files in large batches and the latter for nearly real-time transcription, within 200 milliseconds; both can translate between 13 languages. Voxtral Realtime is freely available under an open source license.

I Let Google's'Auto Browse' AI Agent Take Over Chrome. Auto Browse can shop for clothes, plan a trip, and buy tickets for you. So, while testing Google's new "Auto Browse" feature for Chrome, I was filled with a strange sense of loss as I watched the AI agent open browser tabs and attempt to complete digital tasks with automated clicks. Sure, I felt some loss of control as the bot tapped away on my laptop screen. But also a kind of preemptive nostalgia for how the internet currently works, flaws and all, considering Google's plans to fundamentally alter the user experience.

Immigration agents have used Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of countless people in the US--including many citizens. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security published new details about Mobile Fortify, the face recognition app that federal immigration agents use to identify people in the field, undocumented immigrants and US citizens alike. The details, including the company behind the app, were published as part of DHS's 2025 AI Use Case Inventory, which federal agencies are required to release periodically. The inventory includes two entries for Mobile Fortify--one for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), another for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)--and says the app is in the "deployment" stage for both. CBP says that Mobile Fortify became "operational" at the beginning of May last year, while ICE got access to it on May 20, 2025.

The Doomsday Clock Is Now 85 Seconds to Midnight. Catastrophic risks are increasing, cooperation is declining, and swift action is needed from global leaders to correct course. The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than ever. The Doomsday Clock has just been set to 85 seconds to midnight. Nearly 80 years after its creation, this time represents the closest the clock has ever been to midnight.