This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. A few days ago, I walked into the basement of a midtown gym. Smoothies and healthy snacks were passed out. […]
Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and coauthor of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I can’t recommend it enough. I wanted to have Ryan on the show because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX […]
Some of the AI industry’s biggest rivals have put their many, many grievances aside for a common cause: making it harder for people to use their technology to develop biological weapons. In an open letter to US lawmakers, tech leaders are pressing Congress to enact rules closing what they say is an alarming biosecurity gap […]
By the time the Children’s Hospital closed its doors to trans patients, Sage had already stopped taking testosterone. A nonbinary high school student, they originally received treatment for the rapid onset of puberty. The changes their body experienced felt frightening and sudden. They developed PMOS, a relatively common hormonal disorder that can lead to hair […]
Microsoft claimed last year that it had made a key breakthrough in quantum computing with Majorana 1, the company’s first quantum processor. While physicists were immediately skeptical of Microsoft’s claims, the software giant is announcing Majorana 2 today, the next generation of its topological quantum chip. Majorana 2 contains qubits, a unit of information in […]
Though Gen Z has developed a reputation for being so disinterested in sex that they don’t even want to see it on TV, the popularity of series like Heated Rivalry and The Summer I Turned Pretty has made it very clear that more than a few young people do, in fact, like their entertainment a […]
On Saturday, at around 2:06 pm ET, a meteor streaked over the northeastern US and exploded north of Cape Cod Bay. The fireball was caught on camera by several people, shook houses, and can even be seen clearly in satellite imagery, lighting up the sky. Some residents initially thought that the shaking and boom may […]
I haven’t seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time – that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder. Lots of the top-line […]
The Pentagon awarded SpaceX a $4.16 billion contract to build missile-tracking satellites linked with President Donald Trump’s planned “Golden Dome” defense system, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. In an announcement on Friday, the US Space Force says the sensor-equipped satellites will allow it to detect and track targets from space. The Elon Musk-owned SpaceX – […]
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. At this time last week, I was getting ready to ask people what drugs they were on. I was waiting […]