When the Steam Deck OLED launched three years ago, we were glad to see that the new, more brilliant screen fixed the biggest flaw of Valve's original handheld hardware. So we're unsurprisingly excited about today's announcement that Asus is preparing a new, OLED-equipped ROG Xbox Ally X20 for the coming holiday season. Still, it's a bit worrying that Asus is positioning the new upgrade as a niche collector's item rather than its new handheld gaming standard.

The X20 expands the 7-inch screen found on last year's ROG Xbox Ally line to 7.4 inches, matching the display on the Steam Deck OLED and approaching the 7.9-inch screen on the Switch 2. The 1080p HDR panel also increases the maximum brightness from 500 nits on original Xbox Ally models to a full 1400 and adds some new anti-glare coating that should help when playing in direct sunlight. The X20's 120 Hz display now supports Dolby Vision HDR colors and FreeSync Premium Pro to help smooth frame rates while still providing a larger color gamut.

On the control front, the X20 introduces magnetic TMR thumbsticks , replacing the carbon-film potentiometers that made the original Xbox Ally more prone to stick drift and physical wear. A new d-pad on the X20 also introduces a neat little lift-and-twist design that can transform it from a four-direction cross to a more circular eight-direction pad, similar to the convertible d-pad found on some now-classic Xbox 360 controllers .

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These days, Nvidia primarily sells AI data center products, and its traditional consumer devices feel like more of a side project. But the company occasionally still releases something designed for consumers. After a couple of years of rumors, Nvidia has announced an Arm-based chip designed to power Windows PCs. Dubbed RTX Spark, the new chip combines a 20-core Nvidia Grace CPU co-developed with MediaTek, up to 6,144 Blackwell-based GPU cores (the same architecture as the RTX 50-series GPUs), and support for up to 128GB of unified LPDDR5x memory.

Nvidia and its partners offered nothing about expected pricing, but both "slim Windows laptops with all-day battery life and premium displays" and "compact desktop PCs" are slated to be "available this fall" from partners including Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte.

This isn't Nvidia's first chip for Windows PCs; earlier chips in the Tegra series powered several of the short-lived Windows RT tablets . But Tegra chips largely stopped appearing in consumer devices following the Tegra X1 in the late 2010s (variants power the original Nintendo Switch and the apparently unkillable Nvidia Shield TV box ). Modern Arm-based PCs in the Windows 10 and Windows 11 eras have all used processors from Qualcomm.

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Intel plans to ship an AI chip by the end of this year that uses cheaper memory and cooling technology than rival offerings from Nvidia and AMD, as the US chipmaker seeks to capitalize on a sharp turnaround in its fortunes.

Kevork Kechichian, who leads Intel’s data center group, told the FT that the company is “starting with the basics” as it tries to challenge its rivals in the booming market for semiconductors that power AI.

Its new “Crescent Island” graphics processing unit is designed to speed up “inference” tasks, the stage when a user makes their request, rather than the training of models, an area where Nvidia’s processors are dominant.

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In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 years.

OpenAI gave several mathematicians early access to the result and published their reactions . Tim Gowers —who won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics—wrote that “there is no doubt that the solution to the unit-distance problem is a milestone in AI mathematics.”

University of Toronto professor Daniel Litt wrote that “this is the first example of a result produced autonomously by an AI that I find exciting in itself, as opposed to as a leading indicator.”

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Forty years ago, the future seemed just around the corner—and the vehicle that was going to take us there was NASA's Space Shuttle. Originally envisioned as part of a larger integrated space transportation system , the shuttle was billed as a fully reusable vehicle, totally unlike the one-and-done capsules of the fading Apollo era, capable of making monthly (and perhaps even weekly) ferry flights to low Earth orbit.

The shuttle, it was hoped, would transform human space flight from extraordinary to mundane. Brands like Coke and Pepsi were quick to hop aboard and expand the Cola Wars into space , and there were even plans to blast Sesame Street's Big Bird into orbit .

The loss of Challenger in January 1986—carrying educator Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first private citizen in space—put the kibosh on all of that. The shuttle, while fantastically advanced, would never be the vehicle to help humankind slip all of our surly bonds, so to speak. Even operating at its most frantic peak in 1985 just before Challenger's loss, the shuttle hardware managed a maximum of nine flights in one calendar year; for most of the 1990s, it performed at five or six flights per year. Civilians in space—to say nothing of Big Bird—would have to wait.

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On a blazing hot day in South Africa, female southern pied babblers can’t think straight. The medium-sized black-and-white birds are trying to get at tasty mealworms behind a see-through barrier. On cooler days, the birds can quickly figure out that all they have to do is go around the small wall of plastic. But when the mercury goes up, the birds just keep stubbornly pecking at the barrier.

That experiment is part of a growing body of research showing that animals get their minds muddled during heat waves. When it’s hot outside, birds struggle to learn, dogs bite more often, goat-like chamois pick fights. This is bad news not just for those who get on Fido’s toasted nerves. If the animals can’t stay alert enough to find food or avoid predators, their chances of survival go downhill, says Amanda Ridley , a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia who coauthored the pied babbler study.

With climate change making heat waves more common, such cognitive impairments across the animal kingdom could ripple through entire ecosystems, putting already fragile species at greater risk. If pollinators forget which flowers to visit, crops and wild plants may fail. If birds can’t find food as easily, their young may not survive. And on a warming planet, a sharp mind is particularly vital. “A changing climate means that your ability to behaviorally adapt is even more important,” Ridley says.

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Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in developing a number of vaccines over the course of his career. He recently said that he’s “beginning to regret having lived so long—because we’re going downhill.” How could we possibly have gotten here?

Maybe we’ve always been here. It turns out that the anti-vaccine arguments currently flooding the Internet have been around for as long as vaccines have. In his new book A Pox on Fools , Thomas Levenson breaks them down into three categories, as made clear in the book’s subtitle: “The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines.” The accusations these people levy against vaccines can just as easily be used to categorize the arguments themselves: They are wrong, they are bad, and they are intolerable.

Wrong

As Levenson tells it, in the early 18th century, a couple of forward-thinking Westerners learned about inoculations against smallpox from Ottoman women and an enslaved African. At that point, infectious disease was by far the leading cause of death, as it had been forever. In the 19th century, roughly 40 percent of babies died of infection before they turned 5.

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At a virtual public comment hearing hosted by the US Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, a long line of environmental advocates voiced strong opposition to proposed new regulations weakening requirements that utilities must follow in cleaning up toxic coal ash residue at hundreds of sites across the country at which coal was burned to produce electricity.

“The Trump administration has jeopardized the nation’s drinking water supplies as a favor to polluters,” Lisa Evans, senior counsel at Earthjustice and a former EPA attorney, said in a statement. “It’s just not right.”

The Trump administration announced in April that it would repeal a rule put in place in 2024 by the Biden administration’s EPA that required utilities to monitor coal ash sites at inactive coal plants. The Trump EPA also said it would loosen requirements for protecting groundwater near those sites. Now the Trump administration wants to rely on states for coal ash monitoring and enforcement and enable them to bypass national standards in some cases.

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Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US a scientific superpower, peer reviewers rated the scientific quality and feasibility of grant applications, and subject-matter experts within the funding agencies used these ratings to determine which grants got funded. Under the proposed rules, political appointees would have the final say, and they were specifically instructed not to "routinely defer" to peer reviewers.

In the interim, the administration has lost many court cases because it turns out that issuing executive orders doesn't circumvent legal requirements , and the orders can be vacated if they lack strong justification. To avoid that same fate, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has decided to merge the executive order with other administration priorities and send it through the formal federal rulemaking process.

The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn't in the "national interest." The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.

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