Month: March 2025

At Mobile World Congress, Google confirmed that a long-awaited Gemini AI feature it first teased nearly a year ago is ready for launch. The company's conversational Gemini Live will soon be able to view live video and screen sharing, a feature Google previously demoed as Project Astra. When Gemini's video capabilities arrive, you'll be able to simply show the robot something instead of telling it.

Right now, Google's multimodal AI can process text, images, and various kinds of documents. However, its ability to accept video as an input is spotty at best—sometimes it can summarize a YouTube video, and sometimes it can't, for unknown reasons. Later in March, the Gemini app on Android will get a major update to its video functionality. You'll be able to open your camera to provide Gemini Live a video stream or share your screen as a live video, thus allowing you to pepper Gemini with questions about what it sees.

It can be hard to keep track of which Google AI project is which—the 2024 Google I/O was largely a celebration of all things Gemini AI. The Astra demo made waves as it demonstrated a more natural way to interact with the AI. In the original video, which you can see below, Google showed how Gemini Live could answer questions in real time as the user swept a phone around a room. It had things to say about code on a computer screen, how speakers work, and a network diagram on a whiteboard. It even remembered where the user left their glasses from an earlier part of the video.

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Ein neues Shared Universe soll es werden, und zwar auf Basis von drei Sci-Fi-Klassikern des Visionärs Irwin Allen. (Science-Fiction, Unterhaltung & Hobby)

Droplets bouncing off surfaces are an everyday phenomenon, like raindrops bouncing off lotus leaves or water drops sizzling in a hot pan, levitating and sliding around—aka the Leidenfrost effect. There is also an inverse Leidenfrost effect, first described in 1969, that involves a hot object such as a droplet levitating above a cold surface. Understanding the mechanisms behind these phenomena is crucial to a broad range of practical applications, such as self-cleaning, anti-icing, anti-fogging, surface charge printing, or droplet-based logic systems.

Droplets usually only bounce if the surface is superheated or engineered in some way to reduce stickiness. Physicists from the City University of Hong Kong have figured out how to achieve this bouncing behavior of hot oil droplets off almost any surface, according to a new paper published in the journal Newton.

As we've reported previously, in 1756, a German scientist named Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost reported his observation of the unusual phenomenon. Normally, he noted, water splashed onto a very hot pan sizzles and evaporates very quickly. But if the pan's temperature is well above water's boiling point, "gleaming drops resembling quicksilver" will form and skitter across the surface. It's called the "Leidenfrost effect" in his honor.

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Bei Amazon gibt es für kurze Zeit die beliebte iPhone-Schutzhülle Torras Guardian Mag zum Tiefpreis. (iPhone, Technik/Hardware)

Der Discounter Tchibo Mobil hat seine Smart-Tarife und Jahrespakete aufgewertet. Kunden erhalten mehr Datenvolumen ohne Aufpreis. (Tchibo, Mobilfunk)

The idea of flying satellites in "very" low-Earth orbit is not new. Dating back to the dawn of the space age in the late 1950s, the first US spy satellites, as part of the Corona program, orbited the planet as low as 120 to 160 km (75 to 100 miles) above the Earth.

This low vantage point allowed the Kodak cameras on board the Corona satellites to capture the highest-resolution images of Earth during the height of the Cold War. However, flying so close to the planet brought a number of challenges, most notably that of atmospheric drag.

For much of the space age, therefore, satellites have flown much higher orbits. Most satellites today fly at an altitude of between 400 and 800 km (250 and 500 miles), which is high enough to avoid the vast majority of atmospheric drag while still being close enough to offer good communications and a clear view of the planet.

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Apple's slow trickle of early 2025 product announcements is apparently set to continue this week, following the introduction of the iPhone 16e a couple of weeks ago. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the company plans to refresh its 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air laptops "as early as this coming week," adding the M4 processor that Apple put in the iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro lineups last fall.

An M4 refresh for the MacBook Air was always likely, but Apple has kept us guessing about the timing. Usually, the MacBook Airs are among the first devices to get new M-series processors from Apple, but Apple surprised us by bringing the M4 to the iPad Pro just a few months after introducing the M3. In mid-December, concrete references to the M4 MacBook Air appeared in the macOS 15.2 update, suggesting that the laptops were in testing, even if they weren't ready for a public launch yet.

The laptops are unlikely to look too different from the current M2 or M3 MacBook Airs, which got an "update" of sorts last fall when Apple discontinued the versions with 8GB of RAM in favor of 16GB versions that kept the same prices.

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Amazon hat federleichte In-Ear-Kopfhörer von Soundcore by Anker mit adaptivem ANC, Hi-Res-Audio und bis zu 50 Stunden Spielzeit im Angebot. (Kopfhörer, Bluetooth)

Auch Broadcom und AMD sollen eine Fertigung bei Intel prüfen. Neue Konkurrenz hingegen gibt es im Telekommunikationsmarkt. (Intel, AMD)

This summer Lenovo will release a laptop with a rollable OLED display that extends from 14 inches to 16.7 inches, giving you 50% more screen space when you need it. Now the company is introducing a 13 inch laptop with a screen that extends to 18.1 inches, effectively doubling the amount of screen real estate. […]

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