ICE is spending millions on shock gloves designed to overpower subjects through intense, localized pain. With the revelation that ICE will spend up to $20 million by March on gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to subdue an individual, according to a notice published earlier this week by the Department of Homeland Security, it's worth looking at how this apparel, designated as a nonlethal tool for law enforcement, actually works. These shock gloves go by the unsubtle acronym of GLOVE (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter) and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies, based in Lexington, Kentucky. The GLOVE, previously used in jails and police departments in the US, looks and functions like a normal pair of patrol gloves until officers press a switch to activate an electrical mode. Classified as a CD3 (conductive distraction and de-escalation device), the gloves don't work like stun guns or Tasers, which shoot out probes or use high voltages to cause neuromuscular incapacitation that overrides the central nervous system.

Google's Pixel Camera chief, Isaac Reynolds, thinks year-to-year upgrades to smartphone cameras are still critical, even though some detractors think they're passé. "A person who is a casual photographer and desperately wants to be a hobbyist--they're never going to break that ceiling unless you give them the tools, he says. The features that others call'meh'--for some people, those features are life-changing. Take the 30X Super Res Zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro from 2022, which uses machine learning to stitch together multiple frames in a digitally zoomed photo to give you a result that's much sharper than you're used to. Reynolds says that because of this feature, Google now sees people using 30X zoom dramatically more than before. The new Pixel 11 Pro, announced today, can zoom up to 120X, though in addition to the digital stitching, it relies on AI-generated pixels to fill in some details. Reynolds says maybe having that capability is enough to get someone interested in, say, wildlife photography. After experimenting on their phone, they'd be ready to invest in a professional camera and a big zoom lens. "There's a reason I work on low light and zoom every single year, he says.

The Pixel 11 smartphone lineup is here, alongside the Pixel Watch 5 and the all-new Pixel Tag. Google is dialing things up to 11 this year with its Pixel phones . Ahead of its annual Made by Google event in New York City, the company unwrapped the Pixel 11 smartphone family--which includes the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold--alongside the Pixel Watch 5 smartwatch . There's also a new hardware addition: the Pixel Tag, which seems designed to be the AirTag of the Android world. Here's everything you need to know about the hardware changes and software upgrades on Google's latest devices.

Honor's Robot Phone Has a Gimbal-Powered Camera for Vloggers Honor's new China-exclusive Android phone features a pop-out motorized gimbal camera designed to replace your action cam. You hear it often: Smartphones have plateaued . A small boost to battery life here, a minor camera upgrade there--our glass slabs don't seem to change all that much from year to year. That's exactly the kind of sentiment Honor wants to counter with the Robot Phone, which has a motorized camera that pops up out of the top. Honor has been teasing the phone since late 2025 .

Platforms are finally recognizing that people don't want to consume AI slop. A growing number of sites and apps now have tools and policies to flag, label, and ban AI-generated content. I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta's now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process . Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San Francisco behind and be off-grid sheep farmers.

There are endless ways to record and transcribe your virtual meetings with AI. It's perhaps the least hyped, and most useful, feature of the AI age: transcription . As a young journalist, I dreamed of a computer that could turn recordings into text. Now we have that, and it's amazing. A variety of services, called meeting assistants, promise to transcribe and summarize your meetings for you.

New AI toolbars and prompts are showing up in Google Docs and Gmail. If you don't want Gemini's help in writing documents and emails, here's how to turn that stuff off. Have you noticed how desperate tech companies are to get you to use their artificial intelligence features, even if you don't want to use them? They're adding buttons to user interfaces and using pop-up tool tips to implore you to click them and become a dedicated user of their AI creations. Google Docs, for example, is rolling out a giant Gemini bar at the bottom of the screen for some users.

We're still in the dog days of summer--keep your cool with deals on the best fans we've tested for on the go and at home. We've been testing fans for far longer than just this summer, and while historically this is one of the worst times of the year to try to save money on anything "cooling, a few of our top picks are on sale. If you could use some extra chill, check them out before the deals are gone. Our favorite portable fan goes on sale pretty often, but not for less than it is right now. It's discounted in nearly every color.

Plastic-Free Drip Coffee Is a Holy Grail. Microplastics are in everything, especially your coffee. A new generation of plastic-free coffee brewers is trying to change this. The era of plastic-free drip coffee has finally arrived. It couldn't come soon enough. Drip coffee is my first true love when it comes to caffeine. But sadly, my first love is hopelessly addicted to plastic. From the very first Mr. Coffee machines in the 1970s, nearly every drip coffee maker on the market, including many of my favorite drip coffee makers, has included plastic at some point in the brewing process. But plastic, as we're now learning, can leach tiny particles called microplastics into coffee or water, which you then happily drink in your morning cup.

I put handheld, wearable, and misting fans through a sweltering summer to see which ones kept me coolest. When I was first hired as a commerce editor at WIRED in summer 2024, one of the first media requests I fielded was from a nationally renowned talk show. The ask was for an editor to speak on the popularity of portable and neck fans. High-temperature records were breaking all over the US, and abroad, neck fans were suddenly the "it" accessory at the Paris Olympics, hugging the nape of athletes like Simone Biles. "I can't do this," I told my manager at the time.