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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young —Antonio Regalado I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” when a company called Generation Lab offered me the…
Valve’s redesigned Steam Controller sold out inside an hour of its May 4, 2026 launch, and eight months later it is still the hardest gamepad to actually buy. That scarcity has pushed a lot of PC and Steam Deck owners back toward the two controllers everyone already owns: Microsoft’s Xbox Wireless Controller and Sony’s DualSense.…
Not every retro handheld wants you to load a ROM. A small but growing corner of the handheld market skips emulation folders and cartridge slots entirely, shipping instead with a fixed library of licensed games baked straight into the hardware. Turn it on, and the games are already there. In August 2026, three devices define…
Meta put a number on the table on August 10, 2026, and the number is 30 billion. That is the parameter count of Muse Glimmer, an open-weight AI model that Meta Superintelligence Labs says is small enough to run on a single consumer GPU, no data center required. The release, detailed on Meta’s official research…
Transferring files and data across platforms is more straightforward than ever.
The budget retro handheld market hit an odd inflection point in August 2026. DRAM prices are up double digits year over year, several small manufacturers have paused production, and yet three of the most talked-about clamshell and pocket emulation handhelds of the year all launched or remained in active rotation under $70. The Anbernic RG…
A worn-out hard drive is still the single biggest drag on an otherwise capable PC in 2026. Swapping it for an SSD or a faster NVMe drive can cut boot times from over a minute to single digits, but only if you clone the drive correctly the first time. Reinstalling Windows from scratch means hours…
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such…
The advisory arrived from CISA on August 12, 2026, and it read like most of the ones before it: patch known exploited vulnerabilities, keep offline immutable backups, and segment the network so a single infected laptop can’t become a company-wide outage. That last instruction is the one most organizations still skip. The NIST Zero Trust…
Google AI Pro costs $19.99 a month. Google AI Ultra starts at $99.99 and tops out near $199.99 for the highest-limit tier. Those numbers look simple on Google’s own pricing page, but the real cost of getting into Gemini’s top model depends heavily on where you live, what payment methods your bank supports, and whether…
