2025-07-12 19:12:00
If you’re an electric vehicle enthusiast, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) is anything but. The legislation, signed by the president last weekend, cuts all sorts of US government support for emission-light vehicles. The whole thing creates a measure of uncertainty for an American auto industry that’s already struggling to stay afloat during a sea change.
Still, nearly one in four US vehicle shoppers say they’re still “very likely” to consider buying an EV, and 35 percent say they’re “somewhat likely,” according to a May survey by JD Power—figures unchanged since last year. On those EV-curious folks’ behalf, WIRED asked experts for their tips for navigating this weird time in cars.
First things first: The new bill nixed the electric vehicle tax credit of up to $7,500, bringing to an end years of federal support for EVs. This program was supposed to last until 2032 but is now set to expire on September 30. This extra oomph from the feds helped some of the “cheapest” electrics—like the $43,000 Tesla Model 3, the $37,000 Chevy Equinox EV, and the $61,000 Hyundai Ioniq 9—feel more accessible to people with smaller (but not small) budgets.
2025-07-12 06:01:10
When Stanford University researchers asked ChatGPT whether it would be willing to work closely with someone who had schizophrenia, the AI assistant produced a negative response. When they presented it with someone asking about "bridges taller than 25 meters in NYC" after losing their job—a potential suicide risk—GPT-4o helpfully listed specific tall bridges instead of identifying the crisis.
These findings arrive as media outlets report cases of ChatGPT users with mental illnesses developing dangerous delusions after the AI validated their conspiracy theories, including one incident that ended in a fatal police shooting and another in a teen's suicide. The research, presented at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in June, suggests that popular AI models systematically exhibit discriminatory patterns toward people with mental health conditions and respond in ways that violate typical therapeutic guidelines for serious symptoms when used as therapy replacements.
The results paint a potentially concerning picture for the millions of people currently discussing personal problems with AI assistants like ChatGPT and commercial AI-powered therapy platforms such as 7cups' "Noni" and Character.ai's "Therapist."
2025-07-12 05:35:11
A 51-year-old man showed up at a hospital in Germany looking as though he was wasting away, with swelling and tenderness in his ankles and knees. Then, his heart stopped.
Doctors were able to resuscitate him. Then, they got to work trying to figure out what was wrong. The man told them that for three months he had been suffering from diarrhea, weight loss, joint pain, and fever. His case was reported in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Blood tests didn't detect any infection, but imaging of his heart told a different story. Doctors saw "vegetation" on both his aortic valve and mitral valve. Vegetations are clumps or masses that often build up from an infection, generally containing a bundle of proteins, platelets, and infecting germs stuck together. While they cause damage where they are, if they fully dislodge, they threaten to move to other parts of the body, such as the brain or lungs, and cause dangerous blockages. In the man's case, the vegetation on his aortic valve appeared mobile.
2025-07-12 04:56:40
Microsoft is adding a new recovery mode to Windows to help revive crashing PCs. Called quick machine recovery (QMR), this technology enables Windows 11 PCs to boot into the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE, also used by Windows install media and IT shops for various recovery and diagnostic purposes), connect to the Internet, and download Microsoft-provided fixes for "widespread boot issues" that could be keeping the PC from booting properly.
Initially announced in late 2024 as part of the "Windows Resiliency Initiative," QMR is one of a couple of steps that Microsoft is taking to prevent a repeat of mid-2024's CrowdStrike outage, when a bugged update to one of CrowdStrike's security products brought down millions of Windows PCs and servers and caused widespread service outages in many industries. Fixing some of those PCs required booting and fixing each one individually; QMR should make it possible to apply that kind of fix remotely even if a PC is so broken that it can't boot into Windows proper.
The initial version of the QMR feature is rolling out to Windows 11 PCs enrolled in the Canary channel of Microsoft's Windows Insider testing program. This is the least stable and most experimental of the four Windows 11 testing channels. As Microsoft adds features and fixes bugs, it should gradually move to the Dev, Beta, and Release Preview channels before rolling out to the Windows user base more broadly.
2025-07-12 02:54:57
In a somewhat anticipated move, Belkin is killing most of its smart home products. On January 31, the company will stop supporting the majority of its Wemo devices, leaving users without core functionality and future updates.
In an announcement emailed to customers and posted on Belkin’s website, Belkin said:
After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to end technical support for older Wemo products, effective January 31, 2026. After this date, several Wemo products will no longer be controllable through the Wemo app. Any features that rely on cloud connectivity, including remote access and voice assistant integrations, will no longer work.
The company said that people with affected devices that are under warranty on or after January 31 “may be eligible for a partial refund” starting in February.
2025-07-12 02:27:51
I'll be frank: I had mixed feelings, based solely on the trailers, about James Gunn's Superman reboot. Sure, the casting seemed great, Gunn has a winning track record on superhero fare, and Krypto the dog stole the show every time he appeared. The trailers struck a nice balance between action, humor, and heart. Yet the film also seemed overpacked with super-character cameos, and it was hard to get any sense of the actual plot.
I've now seen the film, and those impressions were largely correct. But I'm happy to report that the positives far outweigh any negatives. Superman is a super-fun ride that unabashedly embraces its early comic book roots, naive optimism and all.
(Spoilers below, but no major reveals.)
