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.

Gmail Is Killing POP and Gmailify Access. If you have multiple email accounts, your Gmail setup may soon need some reorganizing. Google giveth, and Google taketh away. Two long-standing features are being removed from Gmail, and they both relate to how you access messages from other, non-Google email accounts through the Gmail interface. The features we're talking about are Gmailify and POP access, and if you rely on them to consolidate multiple email accounts into your Gmail inbox, you're going to have to find a different approach.

With excellent noise canceling, the QuietComfort Ultra 2 would love to join you on your next long-haul flight. Our favorite pair of wireless headphones for traveling are currently marked down by $50. You can pick up the Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2 from Amazon for just $399 in both Black and Driftwood Sand, with the other colors remaining at their full price. Bose is known for incredible active noise canceling, and the latest generation of QuietComfort over-ear headphones is no different. Our reviewer Ryan Waniata was extremely impressed with the Bose, despite only minor upgrades, and considers them among the top three headsets when it comes to ANC, rivaled only by Sony's WH-1000XM6 and Bose's first-generation QuietComfort Ultra .

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.

The new "Send to Alexa" feature lets you send Kindle Scribe notebooks to your Echo device with just a couple of taps. Alexa+ has been rolling out to users across the board (well, users with Prime, that is) as its Early Access becomes more widely available. Now, there's a new feature to explore if you're also a Kindle Scribe user: Send to Alexa. This lets you send your Kindle Scribe notes to the AI-powered assistant so you can ask questions about them without having to refer back to your Kindle. It won't automatically do this with all your notes.

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.