Author: Anna Kentick
Anna Kentick is GeekBlog's wearables and health-tech writer, covering smartwatches, fitness trackers, smart rings and connected health devices. From the Apple Watch, Whoop and Oura to Withings scales and budget trackers, she cuts through spec sheets and marketing claims to test what these gadgets actually do on your wrist and in daily life. Anna focuses on real-world accuracy, battery life, subscription costs and value, translating the numbers into clear, practical buying advice that helps readers pick the right device for their goals and budget.
Johan and Johanna ran on the same GPT-4 model, yet workers in a VR office gave the male-presenting avatar more money, while insisting gender did not matter. Here is what the NordiCHI paper actually found, and what it cannot prove.
Katie Zacharia started as White House press secretary on October 12. The same day, CNN’s KFile published a review of her social media history, including posts she had deleted years ago. Here is what was found, how deleted posts get recovered and how her first briefing went.
YouTuber Jack Doherty says he signed a deal with crypto casino Shuffle.com without reading it, and that one clause bars him from posting online. Shuffle CEO Noah Dummett says the six-month term is real and the company will not scrap it. Here is how the deal came together, and why it might also be a stunt.
OpenAI fired safety researchers Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang in late September. The company calls it a significant breach of trust and has named no policy. Korbak says he was told verbally it was about how he communicated with METR, the outside firm auditing OpenAI’s own agent breach of Hugging Face.
A new browser simulation drops you at Elizabeth Holmes’s 2015 desk, with a laptop you can open, a phone you can scroll and an Edison you can switch on. The contents are not invented: the builder says all of it comes from 1,169 exhibits entered in the Holmes and Balwani fraud trials. It is also marketing for a documentary out October 16.
Joe Rogan has renewed with Spotify in a multiyear deal the Wall Street Journal values at around $250 million. The number is not the interesting part. Spotify is paying it for a show that stays on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music, which is a complete reversal of why it bought him in the first place.
Jean Philanthrope appeared on September 17, went viral shadowboxing around Paris, and has since acquired a sister, a mother, a wife and a son. He is also attached to a Solana meme coin, which is the detail that explains the family. Here is what the bot traffic numbers actually say, and what they do not.
A Telegraph report says YouTubers are being paid thousands to warn their audiences about AI. The organization doing the paying published its entire playbook a month earlier: nine sponsored videos, 6.3 million views, disclosure in every description. Here is what is actually hidden, what is not, and why both sides of the AI argument are now buying airtime in other people’s videos.
A 28-year-old technician at Russia’s Irkutsk anti-plague institute died after reportedly breaking a test tube of live bacteria. Nearly 200 contacts went under observation, public events were cancelled, and a criminal case was opened. Then the federal health agency recorded her death as pneumonia of unknown cause. Here is what the record actually supports, and what a lab-acquired plague infection normally looks like.
A team at Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies has measured a lutetium ion clock to an uncertainty of one part in ten billion billion, the lowest ever reported for an optical atomic clock. Two of their clocks then agreed with each other more precisely than any clock comparison in history. The reason this matters is not the record. It is that the second itself is up for redefinition.