Anyone who needs a laptop that can carry a full day of serious work without constant pauses still lands on the same machine. Apple’s 16.2-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro, priced at $2,499 (was $2,999) in the Space Black configuration with 24GB of unified memory and a 1TB solid-state drive, remains the cleanest answer for the money.
Photo credit: 2026 EPFL LMTS CC BY SA 4.0
Engineers in Lausanne have built a motor easy to mistake for a length of heavy sewing thread. FiberMotor, from the Soft Transducers Laboratory at EPFL, measures only 1 to 3 millimeters across and turns electricity straight into a push or a pull. Herbert Shea, who leads the lab, calls it the first fiber-format sliding motor, and the description fits once the inner strand starts to move.
Amazon spent years selling Fire tablets as cheap doorways into Prime Video and Kindle. Yesterday, the company set that approach aside and introduced three devices that carry the Alexa name instead: an 8.7-inch model from $229.99, an 11-inch model from $329.99, and a 12-inch Pro from $499.99. Orders opened the same day. Shipments in the United States, Mexico, and Canada start October 14, with the United Kingdom and several European countries following on October 19.
Citroen just opened the order books in Germany for the Ami Outdoor, a special edition of the boxy electric two-seater that has been scooting around European side streets since 2020. List price starts at €9,690 including tax, the rough equivalent of $11,000, before delivery and plates. A lease is offered at €65 a month over 36 months after a €1,350 payment up front, with a yearly allowance of 5,000 kilometers. Dutch pricing sits at €9,940, about €1,190 above a plain Ami. Belgium has matched the German figure for private buyers through the end of October. Wider European availability is expected after that first wave. In Germany the car is sold online only.
On March 4, 2024, a radio array in South Africa caught a flash that lasted only a few milliseconds and then vanished. MeerKAT, working with the MeerTRAP search system, logged it at 00:50 UTC and gave it the name FRB 20240304B. The pulse arrived stretched and delayed by free electrons along the path, with a dispersion measure near 2,458, a peak of about half a jansky, and a scattering time of 5.6 milliseconds at 1 gigahertz. Those numbers already hinted that the source sat far beyond nearly every localized burst on record.