Starting on April 10, Amazon Prime subscribers will pay $5 per month for ad-free Prime Video without ads, up from the current $3 per month on top of their Prime subscription, Amazon announced today.

On that date, Amazon will introduce a new ad-free Prime Video subscription tier called “Prime Video Ultra.” Amazon will also increase the number of simultaneous streams supported by the tier from three to five and the number of downloads permitted from 25 to 100.

Currently, Prime Video with ads is part of Amazon’s Prime membership, which starts at $15 a month. Today, ad-free Prime Video users can watch supported titles in 4K, but starting on April 10, a new Prime Video Ultra subscription will be required for 4K viewing.

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The M5 Pro and M5 Max in the new MacBook Pros are interesting not because they deliver a solid speed increase for Apple's fastest laptop processors but because they also include substantial under-the-hood changes. And the MacBook Neo is interesting because, while the hardware has limits , it's quite a capable and high-quality computer for its $599 starting price.

And then there's the M5 MacBook Air, which was also released this week.

Apple sent us a 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro, the MacBook Neo, and a 15-inch MacBook Air to test, and the MacBook Air was the only one without a standard review embargo. As if to say, "we know the other stuff is more interesting—if you want to cover the Air, get to it when you can."

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One of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe,” says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the University of California Santa Barbara. For years, astrophysicists tried to understand what exactly makes superluminous supernovae so absurdly powerful. Now it seems like we may finally have some answers.

Farah and his colleagues have found that these events are most likely powered by magnetars , rapidly spinning neutron stars that warp the very space and time around them.

The power within

Magnetars have been a leading candidate for the engine behind superluminous supernovae. The theory says these insanely magnetized stars are born from the collapsing core of the original progenitor star and emit energy via magnetic dipole radiation. “This core is roughly a one solar mass object that gets crushed down to the size of a city,” Farah explains. As its spin slows down, a magnetar bleeds its rotational energy into the expanding material of the dead star, lighting it up.

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In January 2025, a measles outbreak erupted on the western edge of Texas and soon spilled over to New Mexico and other states. The overall outbreak would become the largest the country has seen since 2000, when measles was declared eliminated from the US. In Texas, it was the largest outbreak recorded since 1992. And in New Mexico, it was the first measles outbreak the state had even seen since 1996.

But the trajectory of the two states' measles cases diverged. Texas declared the outbreak within its borders over on August 18 , with an end tally of 762 cases. In New Mexico, officials declared its outbreak, which began in February, over on September 26 , with a total of just 99 cases.

One of the key differences, according to a new study, was that in New Mexico, the rapid spread of the highly infectious virus spurred a massive surge in measles vaccinations among children and adults. Overall, shots of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine increased 55 percent statewide from January to September compared to the same period in 2024.

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Modern gamers are used to loading up a new game for the first time and being forced to wait multiple minutes while a "compiling shaders" step whirs away, optimizing advanced 3D effects for their specific hardware. This week at GDC, Microsoft provided some updates about its Advanced Shader Deliver for Windows efforts, which are designed to fix the problem by generating collections of precompiled shaders that can be downloaded ahead of time.

In a console environment, developers can optimize and precompile their graphics shaders to work well with a set driver and GPU environment. On PC, though, developers tend to leave their shaders as uncompiled code that can then be compiled and cached at runtime based on the specific hardware and drivers on the player's machine.

Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery infrastructure aims to fix this problem by automating the process of precompiling shaders that work across "a large matrix of drivers and GPUs in the Windows ecosystem," as the company puts it. To enable that, developers use Microsoft's Direct3D API to create a State Object Database (SODB) that represents in-game assets at the game engine level. That database of assets is then fed into multiple shader compilers to create a Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) that supports multiple display adapters from different hardware vendors.

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There are different marketing strategies when it comes to movie trailers. One is the Project Hail Mary approach, in which the final trailer pretty much gives away the entire movie, trusting that the audience will still come along for the ride because it's a sci-fi adventure, not a whodunnit. The other extreme is Universal Pictures' deliberately vague trailers for Disclosure Day , director Steven Spielberg's return to his "aliens are among us" roots, which give tantalizing hints about the basic premise and little more.

Per the official logline: “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to 7 billion people. We are coming close to… Disclosure Day.”

As previously reported , David Koepp, who has worked with Spielberg on numerous projects (including Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds ), wrote the screenplay, while John Williams composed the score. Emily Blunt stars as a TV meteorologist in Kansas City. Her co-stars include Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, Elizabeth Marvel, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Michael Gaston, and Mckenna Bridger. Professional wrestlers Chavo Guerrero Jr., Lance Archer, and Brian Cage will also appear.

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China’s BYD will aim to take on Porsche and BMW in the European luxury car market with a premium electric vehicle that can be charged in just five minutes.

BYD, which overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker last year, first demonstrated its “flash charging” technology, which enables an EV to be charged almost as quickly as filling a car with petrol, a year ago.

The Z9GT model, part of the premium Denza brand, can be 70 percent charged in five minutes and be almost full in 12 minutes, even in temperatures as low as -30° C.

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Within hours of the US and Israel launching airstrikes on Iran two weeks ago, security professionals warned organizations around the world to be on heightened watch for destructive retaliatory hacks. On Wednesday, the predictions appeared to come true as Stryker, a multinational maker of medical devices, confirmed a cyberattack that took down much of its infrastructure, and a hacking group long known to be aligned with the Iranian government claimed responsibility.

Where things stand

When and how did the attack come about?

The first indications were social media posts and a report from a news organization in Ireland. Messages posted by purported Stryker employees or their family members on social media said workers’ phones and computers had been wiped. A report the Irish Examiner published Wednesday morning, citing multiple anonymous sources, made the same claims and said some employees witnessed login pages on wiped devices displaying the logo of Handala Hack, a group that researchers who have followed it for years say is aligned with the Iranian government.

What is the status now?

Stryker said Thursday that it’s in the midst of responding to a “global network disruption to our Microsoft environment as a result of a cyber attack.” The update went on to say responders have no indication that ransomware or malware—the usual causes for such outages—were involved. The responders believe the incident is now contained and limited to the internal Microsoft environment.

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Newly unsealed documents show that a Live Nation regional director boasted of gouging ticket buyers and "robbing them blind" with fees for ancillary services such as slight upgrades to parking.

Live Nation has tried to exclude Slack messages from a trial that seeks a breakup of Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary, claiming the messages are irrelevant to the case, "highly prejudicial," and would "inflame the jury." The US government and state attorneys general opposed the motion to exclude evidence. US District Judge Arun Subramanian of the Southern District of New York hasn't ruled on the motion yet, but ordered the documents unsealed yesterday.

Live Nation has touted the experiences it offers concertgoers at amphitheaters but sought "to exclude candid, internal messages in which the individual who is currently Head of Ticketing for these amphitheaters calls fans 'so stupid,' explains that he 'gouge[s]' them, and brags that Live Nation is 'robbing them blind, baby,'" said a memorandum of law filed by the US and states.

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