Late October is typically a quiet time in aviation, but that was not the case at a California test site. A sleek matte gray jet with a mostly empty interior took off from Victorville’s runway, rose slowly, and was able to negotiate its own path through the sky without even a remote pilot at the controls. It was a historic event; no one was inside, and the entire route had essentially been left in the hands of the YFQ-44A, also known as Anduril’s Fury.
DJI’s Zenmuse L3 drops into your world as a compact, clip-on package that finally makes your drone a serious mapping machine. Throw it onto your trusty Matrice 400, and suddenly, you’ll be beaming a powerful laser 950 meters down the road, bouncing it off reflective surfaces that barely let a tenth of the light through.
An East Coast-based grocery store chain has finally given us a pretty clear look at Yoshi from the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy movie. Tops Friendly Markets recently posted some pictures of Pillsbury Ready-to-Bake Yoshi Egg Sugar Cookie Dough, – a 9.1 oz package of pre-cut, egg-shaped treats stuck to a film. Yoshi’s face is front and center on the front of the packaging, looking as expressive as you’d see in any Illumination film.
Visual Instruments has just unveiled the Phantom, a 24-inch monitor that allows you to see beyond it while you’re working. You can connect it to any computer, console, or phone via a USB-C connector or an HDMI cable, and the content seems to float on a sheet of glass, with no bulky bezels blocking the view behind it. This is the first entirely transparent computer display, according to the founders, although it is aimed at those who work at a desk rather than those who want to show it off in a shop.
Apple offers AirPods 4 in two versions. The low-end one has come down to $89 (from $129), and gives up on active noise cancellation. The more expensive one is $179 and includes that feature. Lots of reviewers make a strong case for the pricier model. They point to noise blocking and wireless charging as the key things you can’t live without – fair enough if you’re stuck in a noisy city or always on the move. But after living with both models for a while now, the base model is still the smarter choice for everyday life.
Circus SE out of Munich built a robot called the CA-1 that sits inside a glass box no bigger than a small bathroom. Two arms swing round at the command of a touchscreen, plucking ingredients from refrigerated bins, spooning them into a pot, cooking the whole thing on a induction burner and sliding out the finished plate to a take-out window. No human has to flip the food, wipe down the counters, or yell for the next order. This whole kitchen just runs by itself.
Five years on and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla still is a Viking epic across misty fjords and rugged cliffs. But on a standard setup, distant mountains fade into soft haze and torchlight casts flat shadows on wooden longhouses. Drop in an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, crank the resolution to 8K, add a few mods – and suddenly everything is clear, or clearer.
Gamer Joseph Hallam spent years fixated on a single all-consuming goal: bringing the rush of WipEout’s anti-gravity racing to life in a way he could get his hands on. Those computerized ships flying through neon-lit tracks had a hold on him unlike just about any game he’d ever played. As a long-time slot car enthusiast, he’d always loved Scalextric and the vintage Carrera models, but the stiff tracks just didn’t capture the same sense of wild unpredictability he got from the original Wipeout. But all that changed when the Carrera Hybrid came on the scene.
Last month, on the Shanghai-Chongqing-Chengdu high-speed railway line, something amazing happened…a silver bullet train zoomed by at 281 mph. That single run on October 21 means that the CR450 is now the fastest conventional wheeled train ever tested. Engineers measured one prototype at 453 km/h, as well as two trains passing each other at 896 km/h.
Honda unveiled the EV Outlier Concept at the 2025 Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo, a motorcycle that goes beyond just swapping gas engines for batteries. Designers wanted to build something unconstrained by conventional rules, using ideas from Honda’s global teams. The project leader, Yuya Tsutsumi, said they wanted to deliver surprises through characteristics only electrification allows.