O iPhone Duo ainda não chegou ao mercado, mas seus acessórios oficiais já começaram a ser entregues a consumidores — algo que possibilitou uma revelação bastante importante a respeito da capa de policarbonato da Apple.
Vendida por R$830 no Brasil (ou US$80 nos Estados Unidos), ela se mantém presa ao dobrável da Maçã com a ajuda de adesivos — detalhe que não é mencionado em nenhuma parte da sua página de venda na Apple Store Online.
Embora não seja um conceito exatamente novo entre dobráveis, esse detalhe pode interessar quem tem o costume de remover a capa de proteção com frequência ou gosta de alternar entre modelos de acessórios de vez em quando, uma vez que os adesivos provavelmente perderão sua força caso sejam descolados repetidas vezes.
La funda oficial para el iPhone Duo se pone con adhesivo, tomar nota al adquirir estas fundas, porque solo podras ponerlas una vez, despues ya no servirá el pegamento. #iphoneDuopic.twitter.com/kehNyWmLOI
Essa abordagem difere da solução adotada para a capa Folio com suporte, que se prende ao iPhone Duo por meio de ímãs. Ela, no entanto, é consideravelmente mais cara, saindo por R$1.300 no Brasil (ou US$130 nos EUA).
Embora cases com adesivos, como dito, não sejam incomuns no mundo dos dobráveis, essa revelação desagradou alguns compradores do iPhone Duo, tendo até mesmo motivado cancelamentos/devoluções.
iPhone Duo
Cores: branco-estrela ou céu noturno Armazenamento: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB ou 2TB
NOTA DE TRANSPARÊNCIA: O MacMagazine recebe uma pequena comissão sobre vendas concluídas por meio de links deste post, mas você, como consumidor, não paga nada a mais pelos produtos/serviços ao usar os nossos links de afiliado.
October is officially Bat Appreciation Month. In the spirit of the season and conservation, a team of biologists in California recently spent time finding bats at Muir Woods National Monument and Samuel P. Taylor State Park. And while Halloween is fast approaching, the activity had nothing to do with spooky festivities and everything to do with tracking hoary (Lasiurus cinereus) and western red bats (Lasiurus blossevillii).
The goal of their survey was to put GPS trackers on bats from the two migratory species. Hoary bats have grey-white fur and are the most widespread bat species in North, Central, and South America. Western red bats, also known as southern red bats, sport a reddish fur and are found in parts of South America. In redwood forests, bats like nesting within holes inside large trees.
“When they migrate, those little guys can cover a LOT of ground!” the Golden Gate National Recreation Area writes, referencing both species. “By learning about these migratory patterns, we can better understand entire ecosystems like Muir Woods.”
The bats were released back into the wild after getting their trackers. Image: NPS / Emily Pellegrini.
Bats are important members of such ecosystems. They are pollinators, they spread seeds, and they help manage insect populations. To catch these helpful agents, scientists set up a sheer, delicate net called a “mist net” over a creek at dusk. All bats are nocturnal, and when they went searching for their next meal—bugs—they flew into the net.
It was a bit of a trick for the winged mammals, but a treat for the human team. “Expert bat wranglers” carefully took them out of the nets, noted their weight and size, presumably attached the GPS tracker, and then returned them to the wild.
The Golden Gate National Recreation Area’s shared pictures of tiny, disgruntled looking bats carefully pinched between gloved fingers. In one image, an expert holds a bat wing up to the light of a colleague’s headlamp. In fact, illuminated wing membrane patterns literally shed light on the bat’s age and developmental stage.
A bat’s membrane can tell biologists how old the animal is and what developmental stage it is in. Image: NPS / Emily Pellegrini.
While this survey focused on two bat species, researchers at the Muir Woods National Monument have previously spotted 10 different species.
When zoology professor Daniel Baldassarre traveled to the remote Galápagos Islands of Wolf and Darwin with two other researchers, getting there proved quite a challenge. With no beaches to land a boat on, they had to approach the islands’ cliffs in a small dinghy and wait for a lull in the waves before jumping onto sharp, black lava rocks.
But their efforts paid off. On that trip, they saw a bird that very few people have ever set eyes on in the wild: the vampire ground finch. These finches are only found on Wolf and Darwin, and feed on the blood of much larger birds called Nazca boobies that also live on the islands.
Up close, Baldassarre and his colleagues noted the vampire finches’ blood-stained bills and their throats visibly engorged with blood. They also saw them in action.
“We observed scores of vampire finches clamouring all over the backs, tails, and wings of boobies, opening up substantial wounds with their sharp beaks, and drinking their fill of blood,” they wrote in an article for The Conversation.
Why only some birds drink blood
“Blood is a notoriously difficult food source to process and extract nutrients from, which probably partly explains why so few animals have evolved to feed on it,” Baldassarre tells Popular Science. He suspects that on these islands where freshwater is extremely rare, blood might serve as a water source for the finches.
Two Nazca boobies perform their species’ mating call. Vampire ground finches feed on Nazca boobies on the remote Galápagos Islands of Wolf and Darwin. Image: Getty Images / inthedark72
It’s not the only component of the vampire finches’ diet, however. Based on unpublished data collected by Baldassarre and his colleagues, blood makes up about one-tenth of the vampire finches’ diet.
“These finches are quite opportunistic, so they will eat just about anything they can find,” Baldassarre says. “We observed them feeding on everything from seeds to insects to broken seabird eggs.”
One theory is that vampire finches rely more on blood feeding in periods of extreme drought, when other resources are scarce. But more research is needed to see if this idea holds up in practice.
How this strange behavior evolved
Vampire finches weren’t always vampires, scientists think. The relationship between vampire finches and boobies probably started off with the finches eating parasites found on the skin and feathers of the boobies. This would have been mutually beneficial because it provided a cleaning service for the boobies and food for the finches.
But at some point in evolutionary history, in the process of picking off parasites, the finches started to create lesions on the boobies’ skin, and eventually began feeding on their blood.
Over time, their bills became more scalpel-like, perfect for making skin incisions. Their digestive system also changed. When Baldassarre and his colleagues studied the microbes found in vampire finches’ guts, they found that their gut microbiome was very different from that of other, non-blood-consuming finches on the Galápagos Islands, something they attribute to their unique diet.
Until recently, vampire finches were considered a subspecies of the sharp-beaked ground finch (Geospiza difficilis).
“But they have now been designated as their own species [Geospiza septentrionalis] because of the differences they have evolved because of blood feeding,” Baldassarre notes.
Vampire ground finches on Wolf island have been seen drinking nectar from Galápagos prickly pear flowers and other flowers. Image: Peter Wilton / CC BY 2.0
How the boobies cope
Baldassarre and his colleagues have seen vampire finches gang up on and kill nestling boobies,“but that was quite rare,” he points out.
“In most cases, the finches seem to inflict just enough damage to break the skin and extract some blood, but not too much to harm the boobies significantly.” This is similar to many parasite-host relationships, such as fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes on mammals. “You can kind of think of the vampire finches as giant mosquitoes,” Baldassarre says.
“For one, as in large animals being bitten by mosquitoes, often the damage is minimal and not noticeable, so it doesn’t elicit a strong reaction. Also, the boobies sometimes have a vested interest in staying put and guarding their spot in the colony, or perhaps nest or nestlings, so may not want to fly away. Finally, the finches seem to target hard-to-reach areas on the boobies like the base of tail feathers, so it’s likely difficult for the boobies to deter them.”
I, for one, was feeling very sorry for the boobies being constantly hounded by these small vampire birds. Until I learnt that Nazca boobies practice something called “obligate siblicide,” which essentially means that the first-hatched chick routinely attacks and kills its younger sibling. It’s a harsh, bird-eat-bird world in the Galápagos Islands.
In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.
It takes a village to raise a child, and sometimes it takes more than one wildlife rehabilitation center to care for a bat. Even if the bat in question weighs only six grams (about two ounces).
The recent rescue of the juvenile bat in Lancaster, Pennsylvania involved teamwork from the beginning. The “sky puppy” had been hanging on a local porch for two days. While that might not sound off, the bat’s exposure to the elements in a single location for that period of time made the situation an emergency, according to Raven Ridge Wildlife Center in southern Pennsylvania.
The rescued bat perched on a local porch. Image: Raven Ridge Wildlife Center.
Pennsylvania Bat Conservation and Rehabilitation contacted Raven Ridge, who sent a team member to get the bat. The winged mammal was very dehydrated and underweight. It was also unlike the bats that typically arrive at Raven Ridge. The team stabilized her, recontacted PA Bat Conservation and Rehabilitation, and the two organizations realized that they had a northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis) on their hands.
“Sadly, northern long-eared bats are now critically endangered in North America, with their population dropping by as much as 97% to 100% because of white-nose syndrome,” Tracie Young, Raven Ridge Wildlife Center director, tells Popular Science. White-nose syndrome is a fungal disease that has killed millions of bats in the U.S. and Canada.
“They are now protected at both the state and federal levels,” Young adds.
A Raven Ridge volunteer ultimately drove the youngster to the PA Bat Conservation and Rehabilitation facility about an hour away, where the team is expert in critically endangered bats. The bat was eventually returned to the wild, with a video featuring the little bat launching from a woman’s gloved hand into the night.
“Even though this is just one bat, it was important to get this bat to the rehabber who specializes not only in bats but also in those in a critically endangered status,” Young adds. “The video shows her flying beautifully. This effort was a wonderful partnership between Raven Ridge Wildlife Center and PA Bat Conservation and Rehabilitation.”
In the mid-1970s, Linnda Caporael was a college student facing a seemingly mundane decision.
A science major at U.C. Santa Barbara, she needed a humanities course to graduate. The course she chose, on women in American history, came with a term paper, and she had to pick a topic.
Caporael’s first choice—Lydia Wardell, a Quaker woman who protested Puritan persecution by walking naked into a meeting house in the 1660s—was intriguing, but already taken. So Caporael instead settled on her second choice: Ann Putnam, one of the accusers in the 1692 Salem witch trials. In doing so, Caporael reshaped the way millions of people view a nearly 300-year-old chapter of American history.
Caporael’s paper introduced the theory that the visions, convulsions, and distress the “afflicted” girls reported might not have been supernatural after all. Instead, she proposed, they could be explained by ergot, a fungus that grows on rye grain and produces a hallucinogenic toxin. In other words, blame moldy bread.
The ergot theory, despite being debunked within a year of being published, has continued to spread and thrive like fungus on rye. As recently as 2023, comedian-turned-podcasting-juggernaut Joe Rogan discussed the theory enthusiastically on his show, effectively reanimating a story that seems destined to never fully die.
“It’s sexy,” says historian Margo Burns about the enduring appeal of Caporael’s ergot theory. “It’s about drugs. It’s about witches. It’s about killing people. Also, we like to think that when there’s an unjust sentence or execution, there’s someone or something to blame.”
Burns, a Salem scholar who has spent years tracing how the ergot theory took hold and persisted, says she rarely gets through a talk on the trials without someone in the audience bringing up moldy bread.
It was long thought that Ann Putnam, one of the primary accusers during the Salem witch trials, had grown up in this house, but historians now know this house was built much later, around 1891, near the Putnams’ original home location. Image: Public Domain
How a term paper went viral
The fact that a single undergraduate college paper could have such a lasting and wide-ranging impact on our understanding of the Salem witch trials seems bizarre, but it can be explained in part by a thoroughly modern phenomenon: virality. Although the World Wide Web was still decades away, Caporael’s paper found a way to spread fast through newspaper wire services.
After she started graduate school, Caporael submitted the paper to Science, which, to her surprise, published it in April 1976. That alone might have kept the theory confined within academic circles. Instead, newspaper editors saw a story with mass appeal.
“Editors and newspapers just grabbed it, saying, ‘Oh, here’s a human interest thing,’” Burns says. “And when they put it in their papers, like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, it got syndicated. And the syndication of those articles went through the whole country and Canada within a matter of weeks.”
Caporael, who had explored the topic through the lens of the scientific method, wasn’t claiming to know what had happened at Salem. At the suggestion of a pre-med friend, she began looking into ergot poisoning as a possible explanation, not a definitive answer.
According to Burns, who has spoken with Caporael directly, she was only testing whether ergot could be ruled out. Working from the limited sources available to her, Caporael determined that she couldn’t rule it out. Even then, though, she called her own findings “suggestive,” not conclusive.
But that nuance didn’t survive exposure to the public, which in 1976 was already fixated on LSD and what it might do to young people. The press coverage essentially retrofitted 1692 with the anxieties of 1976, recasting the Salem girls as teenagers on a bad trip.
“You give that to the American public, which doesn’t understand there’s a difference between scientific inquiry and historical storytelling, and it’s just so compelling,” Burns says.
Debunked, but far from dead
Not all the viral attention was positive, though. Within that same year, researcher Nicholas Spanos and graduate student Jack Gottlieb published a rebuttal in Science, dismantling Caporael’s argument point by point. By their reckoning, various aspects of the Salem girls’ symptoms did not add up.
“There are a couple of different kinds of ergot poisoning, and one of them is gangrenous, so people’s fingers would start rotting,” Burns says. “And they would have gastrointestinal problems, and we don’t have any instances in the records that either of those things happened.”
This 1880 print shows Martha Corey and her prosecutors in Salem, Massachusetts, during the witch trials. Martha Corey was accused of witchcraft, found guilty, and executed by hanging. Her husband, Giles, who defended Martha against the allegations, was also put to death. Image: Print Collector / Contributor / Getty Images
The problems for the theory didn’t end there. Ergot poisoning was thought to hit hardest among people with vitamin A deficiencies, but Salem’s residents had dairy cows and the sea nearby, and likely plenty of vitamin A. (Ironically, Burns notes, that the vitamin A argument was itself based on a discredited 1930s source that relied on circumstantial evidence and has never been replicated.) And while whole families ate from the same supply of rye, usually only one or two people per household fell ill.
The rebuttal, though methodical and logical, was little more than a momentary speed bump for the runaway popularity of the psychedelic bread story. In fact, it may have helped.
Arguing with a claim, however insubstantial, implies that it’s worth arguing about, and a formal rebuttal in Science can make a student’s term paper look like one side of a valid scientific debate.
“It’s really hard to refute something,” Burns says. “If anything, it just sort of nails it and makes it more permanent.”
“They were eating their own”
Whatever was causing young women in Salem to convulse, the atrocities that followed are much harder to grasp. By the time the panic ended, 152 people had been formally accused, 19 had been hanged, and one man, Giles Corey, had been pressed to death with stones for refusing to stand trial. Several more died in jail.
“The people who were responsible were the adults in the room,” Burns says.
To the modern eye, this looks like lunacy. To most people in 1692, though, witchcraft wasn’t superstition. It was an accepted fact, part of an invisible world in which Satan and his agents wreaked havoc on everyday life. Conflict with Indigenous peoples on the Maine frontier had sent traumatized refugees into the region, relating horror stories of attacks on their homes. Many colonists thought Satan engineered those attacks, too.
In a way, the people of Salem did exactly what Americans would do nearly 300 years later, when the psychedelic era latched onto the ergot theory: They explained strange behavior through the lens of what frightened them most.
In such a charged social climate, suspicion could fall on just about anyone, and it did. The accused weren’t just outcasts, Burns says. Many were fully covenanted members of the Puritan church.
“We’re not talking about going after ‘The Other,’” she says. “They were eating their own.”
Someone to blame
Burns knows the cost of Salem’s betrayals about as well as anyone. An associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, the definitive collection of the trials’ legal records, she is also the 10th-generation great-granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged on the charge of witchcraft in 1692.
The Rebecca Nurse Farmstead still stands and is open to the public in Danvers, Massachusetts. Image: Fletcher / CC BY 4.0
Nurse, a respected member of the church in Salem Town, was tried and found not guilty. But Chief Justice William Stoughton refused to accept the verdict. He sent the jury back to reconsider a remark Nurse had made when confessed witches Deliverance Hobbs and her daughter, Abigail, were brought in to testify against her: She had said the two were “of our company.” Nurse meant that they had been jailed together, but the court heard that they were fellow witches.
When jurors asked her what she meant, the courtroom was in such an uproar that Nurse didn’t hear the question. At the time, failing to answer an accusation was treated as a confession, and the jury returned a guilty verdict. In a later appeal, Nurse wrote that she was “something hard of hearing, and full of grief,” and didn’t realize she was being asked to explain herself.
It was the kind of injustice no mere fungus could cause.
“[Chief Justice] Stoughton was singularly, individually responsible for her execution,” Burns says.
The question of who is to blame is rarely so straightforward, though. Which might be part of the ergot theory’s appeal; it offers “one silver bullet” that tidily explains everything.
“There are just so many reasons that all came together,” Burns says.
But when pressed on why she thinks it happened, she offers an answer that’s part joke, part harsh reality: “People are mean.”
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, most surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
The Ojai Raptor Center released the final necropsy results for Jackie, an internet-famous bald eagle mother who was in their care this summer. Jackie was brought into the bird rehabilitation center weak and dehydrated following an altercation with another eagle in July.
Officially designated as Patient 26-519, Jackie’s necropsy revealed a “complex and unusual disease process involving severe, chronic inflammation and ulceration of the stomach, persistent internal bleeding, anemia and secondary bacterial sepsis.” She was also diagnosed with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) commonly called bird flu, which was behind severe stomach ulceration. Raptors (eagles, hawks, falcons, owls, etc.) are highly susceptible to the virus
All of these medical complications developed over time and ultimately contributed to her death on August 10.
“These findings have helped connect many of the pieces we were seeing throughout her hospitalization and provided a better understanding of the challenges she faced,” the Ojai Raptor Center wrote. “We are grateful to the many veterinary specialists, laboratories, wildlife agencies and partner organizations who worked alongside our team to understand her illness and provide her with the best possible care. Caring for her was an extraordinary privilege for our entire team.”
The full report can be read in Jackie’s veterinary medical journal. The necropsy was preformed by veterinary pathologists at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV), the non-profit organization that runs the live cameras where viewers from all over the world watched Jackie and her partner Shadow, said that they will follow up with their thoughts once their team has had time to process the report.
“The story of the Big Bear bald eagle reflects the powerful connection people feel to these iconic birds,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Meghan Hertel added. “We’re grateful to everyone who cared for her and worked to support her well-being. Understanding the results of these tests is an important part of learning from this case and can help inform the care and treatment of other eagles and wildlife in the future.”
Jackie on a perch at the Ojai Raptor Center in July. Image: Ojai Raptor Center.
Jackie’s story
Jackie was born, raised, and lived in Big Bear Valley in Southern California. Prior to the 2011-2012 nesting season, no bald eagle chicks were known to have ever hatched in Big Bear Valley. Then came Jackie, named after a forest ranger and born to parents Ricky and Lucy in 2012.
During the 2016-2017 nesting season, Jackie took over a nest where Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) had a camera stationed. In 2018, she had two chicks named Stormy and Big Bear Baby (or BBB) with her first mate, Mr. B.
Her long-time partner Shadow entered the picture in summer 2018. He showed up at the nest and would not leave. FOBBV called the new male Shadow because he appeared so determined to stay in the nest, and the team initially believed he was one of Jackie’s siblings, also named Shadow. The eagle’s plumage indicated he was one year older than the other Shadow and not Jackie’s sibling, but the name stuck.
Shadow continued to hold his ground and Mr. B gave up and eventually left. Jackie then accepted Shadow as her new mate.
Wildlife cameras documented Jackie and Shadow’s life together, offering viewers a direct look into the brutality and beauty of nature. The pair successfully raised chicks in 2019 (Cookie and Simba) and 2022 (Spirit). The pair’s eggs failed to hatch in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, Jackie laid three eggs that all hatched in early March. However, a strong snowstorm dumped up to two feet of snow and battered the nest with strong wind and only two of the chicks (Sunny and Gizmo) survived.
In January, Jackie laid two eggs in the nest, but ravens destroyed them. She later laid two more eggs that hatched in April and named Luna and Sandy. The name Sandy is in honor of FOBBV’s former executive director Sandy Steers who died from cancer in February.
Jackie, Luna, and Sandy on their nest in May 2026. Image: Friends of Big Bear Valley.
Jackie’s injury and death
On July 17, Jackie was found injured on the ground near Dana Point Park, California. Cell phone video from a witness confirmed that she had an altercation with two other subadult eagles. She successfully fended off the other eagles by turning over and using her talons, but could not fly far away.
She was transferred to the Ojai Raptor Center, where she was diagnosed with severe anemia. Her anemia worsened during the first week of August, the Ojai Raptor Center said that she was in unstable condition on August 9. Her packed cell volume (PCV) fell below percent, before rising to nine percent.
On July 17, Jackie was found injured on the ground near Dana Point Park, California. Cell phone video from a witness confirmed that she had an altercation with two other subadult eagles. She successfully fended off the other eagles by turning over and using her talons, but could not fly far away.
She was transferred to the Ojai Raptor Center for care, where she was diagnosed with severe anemia. Her anemia worsened during the first week of August, the Ojai Raptor Center said that she was in unstable condition on August 9. Her packed cell volume (PCV) fell below percent, before rising to nine percent.
Jackie died early in the morning on August 10. The necropsy did not reveal a single cause of death, and instead pointed to several factors including severe anemia, blood clots in her wing and one kidney, and liver and lung abnormalities.
2026 is coming to an end, so it's that time again for the long-running Golden Joystick Awards show to celebrate the best games of the year we've played.
On September 25, 2026, the Golden Joystick Awards announced all the shortlist nominees for 21 game-of-the-year categories, including PC Game of the Year, Console Game of the Year, Best Indie Game, and more.
However, time for voting for the winners is running out, as it closes next week on October 23, 2026 at 4:00pm PT / 7:00pm ET / 12:00am BST.
Here is the full list of nominees for all the Golden Joystick Awards' shortlist categories, which you can vote for on GamesRadar.com, to see if your favorite games of 2026 made the cut.
Golden Joystick Awards — Ultimate Game of the Year
On October 26, 2026, the Golden Joystick Awards will reveal nominees for its Ultimate of the Gear award, and voting for the winner will open that day.
Additionally, journalists from GamesRadar+, PC Gamer, Future Games Show, Edge magazine, Knowledge, Retro Gamer, and Future's trusted network of freelance writers and content creators will select winners in other categories.
The winners for the following awards will be selected on the night:
Streamers’ Choice Award
Breakthrough Award
Critics’ Choice Award
Golden Joystick Awards — Where can we watch the show?
All of the winners will be announced during the Golden Joystick Awards ceremony on November 11, 2026, and will be hosted at Troxy, London, United Kingdom.
No start times or streaming platforms have been announced as of yet, but it is likely the show will be broadcast on major streaming platforms like YouTube, as it did last year.
Who will sweep this year's Golden Joystick Awards?
We are honored to be nominated for an incredible 5 categories at this year’s Golden Joystick Awards.🏆 Console Game of the Year🏆 Best Storytelling🏆 Best Soundtrack🏆 Best Lead Performer - Patrick Gibson🏆 Best Supporting Performer - Lennie JamesVoting is open now!https://t.co/n6fVfrXkF6 #007FirstLight #GoldenJoystickAwards #WeAreIOISeptember 30, 2026
This year, it seems the only games that have a chance to sweep awards are Resident Evil: Requiem and 007: First Light, as they've been nominated in five categories thus far.
Both of these are games incredible in their own right, but will they be nominated for the Golden Joystick Awards' Ultimate Game of the Year? Even if they do, will Resident Evil Requiem or 007: First Light be able to win it, or will an unexpected, underdog entry take home the gold?
Tune in on November 11, 2026, to find out when the Golden Joystick Awards announce its winners.
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Chinese AI agents took exposed credentials from a company’s source code and bypassed safeguards in an attempt to find information on mapping service Amap, according to a report on Wednesday from a group of researchers known as “swarmchasers.” Although the agents self-identified as instances of ...
Griffith Observatory is one of Los Angeles’s most iconic landmarks. Part of the city’s sprawling “urban wilderness,” Griffith Park, the free public science center boasts dozens of exhibits and displays, including one of the first planetariums in the United States and the most-viewed telescope in the world.
But there’s a dark secret behind Griffith Observatory’s founding. It might never have been built if it weren’t for the desperation of its namesake, Griffith J. Griffith, a wealthy real estate magnate who had once been a pillar of his community. In 1906, when Griffith first proposed the observatory as a gift to the city, he was hoping to salvage his reputation after the shocking crime he had committed three years earlier: the attempted murder of his wife.
Who was Griffith J. Griffith?
Born in Wales, Griffith immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1865, initially settling in Pennsylvania. A few years later he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a business journalist covering the West Coast mining industry. Griffith then used his expert knowledge of mining to work as a consultant for mining companies, earning himself a fortune.
In 1882, Griffith moved to the rapidly growing city of Los Angeles and purchased 4,000 acres of the Rancho Los Feliz land grant with an eye toward development. He rented out parcels of this land for various businesses, from homes and hotels to an ostrich farm. (Although the farm eventually failed, it proved a popular tourist attraction: Some of California’s first passenger railways were built to bring sightseers to the ostriches.)
Acquaintances described Griffith as “a roly-poly pompous little fellow” and “an egomaniac.” Known for his brash personality and humor, he dressed flamboyantly, favoring a gold-handled cane and a top hat. Griffith also called himself “Colonel,” despite having never served in the military. His grandiosity led to the mocking nickname, “the Prince of Wales.”
Acquaintances described Griffith as “a roly-poly pompous little fellow” and “an egomaniac.” Image: Public Domain
Griffith’s doomed marriage
By the mid-1880s, Griffith was a member of Los Angeles high society. He rubbed shoulders with fellow wealthy developers whose names are still visible on city maps, such as the Bixbys, the Sepúlvedas, and the Mesmers.
While some of these families traced their lineages back to the colonial aristocrats of Mexico or New England, the Mesmers, like Griffith, were recent European immigrants, having come to the United States from Alsace, France. Griffith soon began courting 22-year-old Christina Mesmer, nicknamed Tina, who was considered one of the city’s most eligible young ladies.
Not only did Tina have prominent parents, she had personally inherited a major property from a childless family friend in 1885. Known as “the Briswalter tract” after the previous owner, Andre Briswalter, it was 240 acres in a prime development area just south of downtown L.A. Worth at least 35 million dollars today, the land was used by Briswalter himself for fruit orchards, but now encompasses the neighborhood of Historic South-Central.
Griffith knew that the Briswalter land would be his if he married Tina Mesmer, and made no secret of his motives. Three weeks before they were to be married, Tina informed Griffith that she had transferred partial ownership of the property to her father. It is unknown if Tina performed this transfer willingly, but Griffith wrote to her of his fear that she had become her father’s “pawn.” In the same letter, Griffith threatened to call off the wedding unless he was made sole owner.
Wishing to avoid scandal, the Mesmers relented and the wedding proceeded in 1887. However, the rocky start to the marriage was an ill omen of things to come. In public, the two presented a harmonious image of a high society couple. In private, tensions plagued their marriage, including over religion (the Mesmers were Catholic, while Griffith was Protestant).
In 1887, Christina ‘Tina’ Mesmer, a young Los Angeles socialite, married Griffith. Image: Public Domain
At home, Griffith was paranoid and menacing. Despite publicly supporting the Temperance movement, he was secretly an alcoholic, and his drinking worsened his behavior. Griffith’s paranoia reached a fever pitch after a narrow brush with death in 1891.
While the Griffiths were in a carriage on their way to the grave of Tina’s recently-deceased mother, someone fired a gun at them from another carriage, grazing Griffith’s head. The attacker, who fatally shot himself before he could be apprehended, turned out to be an investor from the failed ostrich farm, who had been ruined and owed Griffith back rent.
How the idea of Griffith Park first emerged
In 1896, despite his private troubles, Griffith was at the height of his power. Ever-ambitious, he sought a way to immortalize himself. He was also flush with cash, having sold off most of the Briswalter tract acquired from Tina, but still owed a tax debt that he hoped the city would forgive. That Christmas, the Griffiths donated more than 3,000 acres of Rancho Los Feliz to the city of Los Angeles for the formation of a public park, to be called, of course, Griffith Park.
While Griffith spoke of wanting to give back to the community and create “a place of rest and relaxation for the masses,” generosity may not have been his only motive. Critics called the huge donation a tax scheme, and pointed out that Griffith could afford to part with the land. Not only did he have Tina’s fortune, he had already rented out the most profitable parts of the Rancho Los Feliz, and what remained was no good for purposes like farming.
Griffith shoots his wife Mrs. Tina Griffith
The more his influence grew, the more unstable Griffith became. According to Tina’s later testimony at Griffith’s trial, he pulled a gun on her for the first time in May 1903, when she threatened to leave him during an argument. “He is very proud and did not want the public to know” of their marital disputes, she said.
A few months later, the Griffiths stayed at the Hotel Arcadia in Santa Monica with their only child, 15 year-old Vandell. Tina hoped that a family vacation would calm Griffith’s nerves, but Griffith was on edge. He repeatedly asked servers in the hotel restaurant to change his food and drink, believing it had been poisoned.
On the last night of the trip, Vandell Griffith went to the beach with the hotel owner’s son, leaving his parents alone in the hotel room. While Tina was packing, Griffith approached her with a gun in his hand. He forced her to kneel and started asking her about the death of Andre Briswalter years earlier.
Apparently, Griffith now suspected that the Mesmers had poisoned Briswalter, and planned to poison him next. Griffith then asked Tina if she had ever been unfaithful. She assured him that she had not, and that Briswalter’s death had been natural, but he fired off a bullet at point-blank range.
Tina Mesmer Griffith survives
Tina leapt from the window and rolled to safety, breaking her shoulder in the fall. Hotel staff soon found her and took her to a doctor. A surgeon who attended her injuries later reported that “if the bullet had struck Mrs. Griffith one-sixteenth of an inch below where it did, it would have gone through the eye socket and into the brain.”
Tina lost her right eye, and due to the risks of infection and blood loss, doctors were not sure whether she would survive. Miraculously, she did.
Police began searching for Griffith immediately, but it was three days before they found him at a nearby bar in the midst of an alcoholic bender. The subsequent trial became a massive media scandal. Tina took the witness stand wearing a veil and black glasses to hide her injuries.
A sketch published in The Los Angeles Times shows how Christina ‘Tina’ Mesmer wore a veil in the courtroom to conceal her injuries. Image: Public Domain
When she entered the courtroom, “she looked at [Griffith] casually as though he were someone she had never seen,” the Los Angeles Times reported, while Griffith remained motionless, listening intently. Tina testified for an hour before fainting from exhaustion, returning later that day for a second round of questioning. Only then did the extent of the Griffiths’ private problems become public knowledge.
The outcome of the trial
Griffith’s attorneys argued that he was not in his right mind; instead, his drinking had made him delusional, a case of “alcoholic insanity.” Griffith was fined and sentenced to just two years in prison.
Tina was granted a divorce on grounds of cruelty, one of the few legal justifications for divorce in 1903. She also received a cash settlement and full custody of Vandell, but she was unable to receive half of the estate, as she had asked for.
The couple’s properties had long been under Griffith’s name only, including what remained of Tina’s inheritance. As one of her lawyers told the Los Angeles Times, the law prevented her from obtaining “any approximation of what really should be hers.” However, Tina was left with enough to live on, and Griffith agreed to pay for Vandell’s future education as long as he didn’t attend a Catholic university.
The aftermath
After the trial, Tina moved in with her sister. Though she stepped away from city development, she devoted herself to Catholic charities and social events. She was apparently a big fan of whist, a four-player card game. She never remarried and continued to be known as “Mrs. Griffith” until her death in 1948 at the age of 86.
When Griffith emerged from San Quentin in December 1906, he appeared to be a changed man. He gave up drinking and devoted himself to the cause of prison reform, as well as improving facilities for visitors in the park that bore his name. He also came up with an idea for a second “Christmas gift” to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the Los Angeles public: a free science center and an outdoor theater.
However, the city was now reluctant to associate with him. As one newspaper op-ed stated, Los Angeles was “neither so poor nor so lost to [a] sense of public decency that it can afford to accept this money.”
Griffith died of liver disease in 1919 without seeing this dream become reality, but he bequeathed the funds for the Observatory and the nearby Greek Theatre to the city in his will. The project would finally move forward more than ten years after his death.
It was Griffith and Tina’s son, Vandell Griffith, who oversaw the construction of the Observatory as president of the Los Angeles Park Board. (Vandell would later become a city police commissioner, and was described in a 1951 newspaper as “a dead honest man.”)
When the Griffith Observatory opened in 1935, it was an instant success, part of a new wave of interactive museums that made astronomy and other sciences accessible to the public. And it all goes back to a man who destroyed his own reputation. It’s a strange chapter in the history of Los Angeles, and a reminder that the legacies people leave can be complicated.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, most surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
Gears of War: E-Day is seemingly still full of surprises, and according to the latest Xbox US store data, the game is flying off (digital) shelves. It has secured the number one spot, overtaking titles like Minecraft Dungeons 2 and the critically acclaimed Star Wars: Galactic Racer.
Gears of War: E-Day reaching the top spot in the US isn’t the only news, too. The game also topped the UK store and many others across the globe, which is great to see.
I will say, I am a bit surprised, obviously given the games on Game Pass, that does come with a certain, how would you say, online drama? Especially as it's often thought Xbox gamers don’t buy games, which of course has been debunked time and time again, but I digress.
We also know, thanks to reporting from TrueAchievements, that Gears of War: E-Day is 2026’s second-biggest Xbox launch. It surpassed Halo: Campaign Evolved by 8.6% but fell just shy of Forza Horizon 6, managing only 67.3% of Forza’s player count at launch, which of course was a massive success on both Xbox and PC.
I’m impressed with how well Gears of War: E-Day has done, and it's honestly well deserved. Having beaten the game myself, it has given me the Gears itch, and I am probably going to run through Gears 2, 3, 4, and 5 on Insane, just like I have done with the first game and E-Day.
Hopefully, everyone has enjoyed E-Day as much as I have, and I hope the game continues to perform well. There was, of course, reporting from Alinea Analytics, which estimated 230,000 copies sold across both Steam and Xbox. Steam accounted for 168,000 of those, with Xbox (console and PC) selling 62,000.
Alinea also estimated that 1.7 million people played the game via Game Pass, and of that 1.7 million, 722,000 paid for the five-day early access upgrade. Alinea also reported that the game grossed $37 million in revenue, and they called for the game to be released on PlayStation 5 too to help recoup development costs.
I won’t dive into that drama, though. Don't worry. For now, let me know your thoughts on E-Day, how it's performed, whether you're impressed, or if you expected it to do better, in the comments, and be sure to take part in our poll!
Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.
Microsoft's blueprint for making Windows 11 apps has received an update that allows developers to try more experimental features. WinUI Gallery just received a bump to version 3.0, and with that update comes a new approach to experimental features.
WinUI Gallery is Microsoft's sample app for developers, showing how Windows UI components work and helping app makers build software that looks and behaves like a native Windows 11 application. It's available through the Microsoft Store.
WinUI Gallery used to receive new controls after those controls had reached a stable Windows App SDK release. Because of that, Microsoft was limited in how much it could change those controls based on feedback. WinUI Gallery now includes the experimental Windows App SDK so developers can play with new controls earlier and provide feedback to Microsoft in time to drive changes.
🚀 WinUI Gallery 3.0 is here!Starting with this release, we're embracing Experimental versions of the Windows App SDK, giving you earlier access to new control/API samples so you can try them out more easily, share feedback, and help shape what's next!And this release is packed with new controls! 🚀✒️ Inking in WinUI!!📑 TableView📊 Charts🔢 Pagination control🪟 Simpler windowing APIs🎁 WrapPanel and StackLayout✨ And much more!Learn more👇:https://t.co/srgiSPUI29October 13, 2026
WinUI Gallery 3.0 also adds some quality of life changes that are outlined by Niels Laute, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft:
Mouse back and forward buttons now navigate through the Gallery, just like in your browser (#2195), thanks @hoshiizumiya!
Search finds more. Every control page now has search tags, so searching for terms like “context menu”, “carousel”, or “WCAG” finds the right page even when the query doesn’t match the control’s name (#2185).
No more dead ends. When a search has no results, you now see your query, a few search tips, and a button to view all samples (#2255), thanks @Zakariathr22!
Since experimental controls are now in WinUI Gallery 3.0, there are several new samples available in the app, including TableView, Charts, and Wrap Panel and LayoutPanel. Those controls allow apps to present data in a way that's easier to digest.
WinUI Gallery is an app that everyday PC users will likely never download or even see. But it's an important tool for developers who want to create modern applications. The latest update should lead to more quality apps being available on Windows 11.
What is WinUI Gallery?
WinUI Gallery is a developer tool that acts as a digital showroom for Windows app development. Developers can see what UI elements look like on a PC by using the app and see relevant code samples to help create applications that align with Microsoft's design framework and guidelines.
Microsoft has had some form of a digital showroom since 2018, but the app has gone through a few name changes. Its current name is a bit confusing because of similar terms being used in different settings.
The latest update to WinUI Gallery brings that app to version 3.0, so it's referred to as WinUI Gallery 3.0. But despite the similar name, that is different than WinUI 3, which is the framework developers currently use.
Regardless of its slightly confusing name, WinUI Gallery is a useful tool for app development and helps push developers toward making apps that perform well and appear natural on Windows 11 PCs.
Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.
Alongside the Fitbit Edge launch, Google announced a partnership with Flo Health to improve health features for women.
Women will find a more personalized experience across topics that don't get enough attention, i.e. perimenopause, postpartum recovery, and more.
The Fitbit Edge launched with a starting price of $180.
Google's latest partnership will strengthen the health features available for women's health on the new Fitbit Edge and Pixel Watch.
This morning (Oct. 12), Google announced that it's entering a multi-year partnership with Flo Health. This platform is reportedly used by over 80 million women every month to improve their health, an area that Google feels it should improve too. Google states, "we’re building a personal health experience that adapts to your lifestyle, habits, and biology — which is especially important for women."
Google Health wants to give women a complete view of their well-being from top to bottom. As such, it states that its partnership with Flo Health will focus on "ground-breaking research." Google's focus will lie in topics that don't get enough attention, such as perimenopause, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), pregnancy, and postpartum recovery.
Since Flo Health is coming on board for a few years, Google Health will continue to rely on its cataloged insights and algorithms to improve its systems for new products tailored for women.
Flo Health data integration with the Google Health app will offer personalized guidance and suggested actions for women based on sleep, cycle health, and recovery data.
Your information and privacy will be kept under lock and key, the companies said. Beginning in early 2027, users will have the option to sync their Flo Health data with Google Health. Google says its Flo Health partnership will work to help women manage their well-being on the Fitbit Air, Fitbit Edge, and Pixel Watch 5.
Flo Health for Google's wearables
(Image credit: Google)
The Fitbit Edge is Google's latest launch. It's a fitness tracker that improves upon what consumers enjoyed from the old Charge 6. Google states the Fitbit Edge offers a touchscreen and the same advanced health features you'd expect from a more powerful smartwatch. Comparing it to the Charge 6, the Fitbit Edge's OLED is 45% larger and 40% brighter.
Users will find several key features, such as built-in GPS, heart rate monitoring, ECG, blood oxygen tracking, and more. Additionally, the Fitbit Edge features a replaceable battery that should extend its life beyond what we'd normally expect. If you've got a Fitbit subscription, the Gemini-powered AI Health Coach is available for the Fitbit Edge.
Android Central's Take
It's always good to have more personalized care or in this case, understanding and insight. This is an issue that anyone can run into. You're trying to understand or see a snapshot of what's going, but you're unsure of where to look. Google partnering with Flo Health is a good place to a start. It's a platform that's already well-known with years of data and understanding. Everyone deserves care, and improving that starts with steps like this.
As the summer drew to a close, aerial surveyors with the New England Aquarium saw more than 2,000 animals across 15 different marine species in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, southeast of Cape Cod. Among that vast diversity, the team spotted Chilean devil rays (Mobula tarapacana). This ethereal fish is “one of the ocean’s best-kept secrets,” according to the aquarium.
“We rarely see Chilean devil rays on our aerial surveys,” Katherine McKenna, a researcher in the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, tells Popular Science. McKenna was one of the observers on the team that saw the Chilean devil rays from above.
The rays were spotted southeast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Image: New England Aquarium.
“The Monument’s deep sea canyons, complex oceanographic conditions, and productive waters support a remarkable diversity of marine life, especially in the summer months when warm water protruding from the Gulf Stream draws in seasonal visitors like Chilean devil rays,” she says.”
Chilean devil rays, also called sicklefin devil rays, are olive-green- or brown-colored and are found in the planet’s tropics and warm temperature seas. These large fish have an 11- to 12.5-foot-wide wingspan and weigh 715 to 1,100 pounds. They’re named after the country where they were first scientifically documented, and McKenna says that the “devil” was inspired by the horn-shaped cephalic fins around their mouths. They are classified as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, and mainly threatened by by-catch and overfishing.
These rays are more solitary, but the team still spotted a small fever of them. Image: Image: New England Aquarium.
What’s more, the species is relatively difficult to study. They can travel very far, and they are frequently solitary and usually found offshore. When rays like these are found in a group, however, it’s called a “fever.” One thing we do know is that Chilean devil rays are the deepest diving ray species. They can dive almost 6,000 feet deep.
“This is possible due to a specialized network of blood vessels surrounding their brain that allows them to keep their brain warm even at very cold water temperatures at deep depths,” says McKenna.
“He said his biggest concern was that nobody would supply him with chips.
“I told him: ‘Don't worry. As long as you're willing to pay, your chips will definitely be there.’”
Good Evening from Taipei,
Two years ago TSMC Chairman CC Wei made a promise to a client.
You need to be a registered (free) subscriber of Culpium to read further. Culpium offers exclusive news and unparalleled insights from veteran award-winning tech journalist Tim Culpan.
The Supply-Chained Podcast: When Thai Floods Hit HDDs Tim & Jon recall the year massive floods hit Thailand, and the lessons to be learnt for the supply-chained.
Typical brains function smoothly, with neurons (nerve cells) firing rhythmically like predictable weather patterns.
But in epileptic brains, a sunny day can suddenly turn dark and stormy. Neurons will just be trucking along, operating in the controlled and routine way that keeps a body’s mental and physical functions stable when, all of a sudden, they freak out, pulsing with an electrochemical intensity that causes confusion and uncontrollable jerking.
The broken doll movement and unexpected mental interruptions of epileptic seizureshave probably always been unsettling. Some cultures have explained their onset as the consequence of religious sin, others as divine intervention or a sign of sacredness.
To the ancient Romans, epilepsy was a contagious disease caused by evil spirits or demonic possession, and there was only one way to cure it—with the blood of a gladiator.
Drinking the “hot blood from the throat of a gladiator” is first recommended in the Book on Medicine in 40 C.E. and, over the next 500 years, Roman doctors experimented with exactly how to administer the cure: three spoonfuls a day for 30 days, sucking directly from a bleeding wound, filling a cup with the dripping blood of the slaughtered.
In the sixth century, one physician’s method was to burn a rag soaked in the blood of a swordsman and mix its ashes with wine. “With seven doses you will free the patient of epilepsy,” he wrote. “Often applied with excellent results.”
This famous fourth-century C.E. Roman mosaic at the Villa Borghese depicts gladiators fighting to the death. Image: Public Domain / Picasa
“Magic is not logic,” he explains. “People are healed by those things and procedures they expect to be healed from.”
Gladiators weren’t exactly average Romans. In the early days of the republic, their death in combat had religious associations, with fallen gladiators believed to be offerings to the gods or escorts for the dead into the next world. Even as gladiatorial combat later lost its religious connotations, the dramatic circumstances of the contestants’ deaths still made their blood a potent epileptic cure.
Belief in the remedy likely had something to do with what Moog and Karenberg describe as “the illusion of therapeutic effectiveness.” Since the symptoms of some forms of epilepsy affect only children before disappearing completely around puberty, a child who consumed gladiator blood while still symptomatic would appear to anyone unfamiliar with the disorder as having been cured by it.
When gladiatorial combat was outlawed in the Roman Empire around 400 C.E., physicians were forced to look for an alternative treatment for epileptic patients. They found it in the blood of those executed by decapitation.
“The blood of the decapitated was the blood of ‘noble’ criminals, and this might have been important when searching for a substitute for gladiator’s blood,” says Moog. It seems not to have been the legendary strength and virility of the gladiator that imbued a person’s blood with healing power, then, but the way they died—by the blade of a sword (or later a guillotine).
There was a practical element to using blood from an execution too, Moog continues. “In the case, for example, of a hanging, you’d have to hurt the body of the executed yourself. And wounding a corpse was in many cultures regarded as a bad thing.”
The blood spilled by decapitation, on the other hand, “was easy to get.”
The new twist on the old remedy apparently proved just as enduring as the original. The blood of the executed was a “miracle cure” for epilepsy all the way until the 20th-century invention of anti-epileptic pharmaceuticals.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, most surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
Amazon shuts off Prime Big Deal Days at 11:59pm PT tonight, or 2:59am ET on Thursday, October 8, so these prices have a few hours left. The picks we’d steer people toward first are things that get used every week: AirPods Pro 3 for $179, a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra that dropped another $30 since our morning check, and robot vacuums from Roborock and iRobot that mop as well as vacuum. We rechecked every deal on this page Wednesday evening. Nearly all of them are holding, and we pulled the handful that sold through or went back up during the day. Many of these prices need Prime, and a free 30-day Prime trial covers what’s left of the sale.
Update, 7:45pm ET, Wednesday, October 7: The sale is in its final hours, and we rechecked every price on this page. The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra dropped to $949.99 and no longer needs Prime, and the Logitech MX Master 3S dropped to $75.99 for Prime members. The Anker SOLIX C2000 Gen 2 and EcoFlow RIVER 2 Pro prices are now open to everyone. We removed the Shark AI Ultra robot vacuum and the Shark Vertex upright, which are now sold only by a third-party seller at higher prices, the Ninja DualZone air fryer and the YETI Rambler mug, whose deals ended, and the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool, which Amazon no longer has in stock.
Update, 11:30am ET, Wednesday, October 7: This is the last day of the sale. We rechecked every price on this page and added 12 new deals, including a Samsonite Freeform luggage set for $175, the Shark FlexStyle hair styler and Anker’s SOLIX C2000 Gen 2 power station. The Google Pixel 11 Pro dropped to $834, and the Nest Thermostat dropped to $85.49. We removed the KitchenAid bowl-lift mixer, which is out of stock, along with the Fire HD 8 Kids Pro and the Instant Pot Duo, whose deals ended.
Update, 6:45pm ET, Tuesday, October 6: We rechecked every price on this page and added nine new deals, including the Ultimate Ears BOOM 4 speaker and the Logitech MX Master 3S mouse from our Logitech deals post, two YETI coolers, and three Moultrie trail cameras. We removed five deals that ended or are no longer available at their sale price: the Dyson V8, the Blink Mini Pan-Tilt Camera, the Ooni Karu 2, the iRobot Roomba 105X Combo and Pokémon Legends: Z-A.
Update, 2:15pm ET, Tuesday, October 6: We rechecked every price on this page and added 21 new deals, including a new phone section with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and Google Pixel 11 Pro, Roborock and Dyson vacuums, an Ooni pizza oven, and Nintendo Switch 2 gear. Beats Studio Pro went up to $149.95. We removed three deals that ended, plus a camera that’s now available only from a third-party seller with a few left.
Update, 9:15am ET, Tuesday, October 6: We rechecked every price on this page, and all of them are holding. We added power station and camera sections, more Anker chargers, and links to all of our category deal posts.
Apple AirPods Pro 3: $179 (was $249)
Apple AirPods Pro 3 $179 (was $249)
Noise-canceling earbuds that pair with an iPhone in one tap
If you carry an iPhone, AirPods Pro 3 pair with it in one tap and move between your Apple devices without a trip to Bluetooth settings. Apple builds active noise cancellation into them, so they work as well on a plane as they do on a walk. They’re $70 off, and you don’t need Prime.
The Galaxy S26 Ultra has a privacy display that hides your screen from the people sitting next to you, and Samsung says you can set it to turn on by itself when you type a password or open certain apps. This is the unlocked 256GB model, sold by Amazon, and it’s $450 off at $949.99 whether or not you have Prime.
Microsoft Surface Laptop (2026): $1,329.97 (was $1,699.99)
Microsoft Surface Laptop (2026) $1,329.97 (was $1,699.99)
A thin Snapdragon laptop at its lowest Amazon price
Microsoft’s 13.8-inch Surface Laptop runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite chip, which Microsoft pitches for long battery life and on-device AI features. It dropped to $1,329.97 on Tuesday morning, the lowest price Amazon has charged for it, and it’s still there.
Unlocked Android phones are some of the bigger-ticket deals still running, all sold by Amazon. The Pixel and Galaxy A57 prices need Prime. Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra doesn’t, and it’s $450 off at $949.99 for the 256GB model. Google’s Pixel 11 Pro dropped again to $834, and the Pixel 10 is $599.
Coffee makers are all over this sale. The Keurig K-Express brews a cup from a pod for $59.99 for Prime members, and the Ninja CREAMi turns a frozen pint base into ice cream or gelato.
The Roborock Q10 S5+ is the cheapest self-emptying robot here that also mops, at $249.99 for Prime members. If you’d rather push a vacuum yourself, Dyson’s Cyclone V10 Origin is $329.99. The iRobot Roomba 415X Combo is almost gone, with three left at our Wednesday evening check.
Polaroid’s Now+ instant camera comes with film for 16 photos and connects to Polaroid’s app for manual controls, and it’s $149.99 for Prime members. For video calls and podcasts, the Shure MV7i is a USB-C mic with an audio interface built in. Logitech’s StreamCam is $94.99, down from $169.99, and Moultrie’s Edge 3 cellular trail camera is $66.49. The camera and creator deals post has drones, gimbals and more mics, and our Moultrie trail camera deals post covers the rest of that lineup.
Prime Big Deal Days ends tonight at 11:59pm PT, which is 2:59am ET on Thursday, October 8. A few deals are selling out before then. The iRobot Roomba 415X Combo was down to three left at our Wednesday evening check, and the Nespresso Vertuo Pop+ was down to two, so look at the listing before you count on any price here.
Do you need Prime for Prime Big Deal Days?
For many of the deals, yes. The deals marked “for Prime members” above need a membership, like the Roborock Q10 S5+ at $249.99, while others, like AirPods Pro 3 at $179, are open to everyone. A free 30-day Prime trial covers the sale.
Is Prime Big Deal Days the same as Prime Day?
No. Prime Day is Amazon’s summer sale, and Prime Big Deal Days is its October event, which runs October 6 and 7 this year. Both are built around Prime membership.
Are Amazon devices on sale for Prime Big Deal Days?
During the still night above California’s Big Bear Valley, a meteor recently soared across the sky. Cameras stationed to document the lives of the area’s bald eagles captured an image of the fireball on its journey.
“This morning in the wee hours, a quiet meteor flashed across the night sky. It moved at incredible speed, vanishing in the blink of an eye while the inhabitants of the valley slept,” FOBBV wrote. “This is another reminder of the beautiful land that our eagles and friends inhabit. Nature surrounds us everywhere; in the skies, in the trees, and beyond.”
This year has been an eventful year for Big Bear Valley’s bald eagles. In January, bald eagle mom Jackie laid two eggs that ravens attacked and consumed. She later laid a second clutch of two eggs that both hatched in April. Tens of thousands of fans followed the chicks’ journey as Jackie and her longtime partner Shadow raised the pair. All seemed well on the nest in July when it Jackie disappeared from the cameras’ views.
The meteor lit up the dark skies for a brief moment. Image: FOBBV
On July 17, Jackie was found injured on the ground near Dana Point Park, California. Cell phone video from a witness confirmed that she endured a scuffle with two subadult eagles. After being transferred to the Ojai Raptor Center for care, she was diagnosed with severe anemia. Her anemia worsened during the first week of August, and the Ojai Raptor Center reported that she was in unstable condition on August 9. Jackie died early in the morning on August 10. A memorial for Jackie was held this past weekend at Bear Mountain Ski Resort in Big Bear Lake, California.
Shadow and Kaydee were not in the nest when the meteor passed overhead. Without eggs or chicks to care for, most bald eagles sleep in other trees like the nearby Roost Tree. According to FOBBV, the pair spent the morning moving from the Roost Tree to the Lookout Tree before settling to perch on the Twin Pines that afternoon.
It’s not clear what will happen between Shadow and Kaydee, but after an eventful year in Big Bear Valley, a moment of peace under a celestial light show is a welcome pause.
Tune into FOBBV’s livecams for glimpses of the duo.
For the first time since 2019, Union Pacific’s Living Legend No. 844 will be hitting the rails with Big Boy No. 4014. These historic locomotives will be together for a special holiday tour this November.
On November 21, the pair of steam locomotives will run during a fundraising tour from Greeley to Denver, Colorado. The trip will benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation, with a donation from Union Pacific’s Community Ties Giving Program. The steam duo will also be on display to the public at Denver’s Union Station. Santa Claus and his elves will even be in the terminal handing out limited-edition gifts. Admission to this event is free and open to the public.
Tickets for the holiday fundraising tour to take a ride in vintage passenger cars pulled by Big Boy and No. 844 go on sale to patrons of the Union Pacific Railroad Museum on October 16. The general public can purchase any remaining tickets on October 19. Families can still visit Denver’s Union Station to view the locomotives free of charge.
Nicknamed the “Living Legend,” No. 844 is a famed high-speed passenger locomotive. It was built in 1944 and the last steam locomotive built for Union Pacific. It hauled some of the company’s most recognizable passenger trains, including the Overland Limited, Los Angeles Limited, Portland Rose, and Challenger. No. 844 is also the last Class I North American steam locomotive and never permanently retired from service. Instead, it was reassigned to freight service in Nebraska from 1957 to 1959, when diesel locomotives took over passenger service duties. Unlike nearly every other steam locomotive of its era, No. 844 escaped the scrap yard in 1960 and Union Pacific retained it for special service.
No. 844 was not scrapped in 1960 like other steam locomotives of its class. Image: Union Pacific.
No. 844 will chug alongside a more famous locomotive, Big Boy No. 4014. Big Boy is currently the world’s largest operating steam locomotive and one of only eight remaining Big Boys in existence and the only one still in operation. These powerful locomotives were constructed during World War II to transport heavy equipment to support the war effort.
Earlier this year, Big Boy drew millions of spectators during a coast-to-coast journey celebrating the United States’ 250th birthday. The first leg began on March 29. Big Boy then traveled to several states including California, Utah, and New York.
The steam locomotive celebrated the Fourth of July in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776. Thousands of train enthusiasts braved temperatures of 102 degrees Fahrenheit (with a real-feel of 112 degrees) to catch a glimpse of the 133-foot-long and 1.2-million-pound train.
What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.
This year’s Ig Nobel Prize in biomechanics went to researchers trying to answer a surprisingly complicated question: what’s a kiss? Their definition—”non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”—was concocted to exclude such exchanges as ants feeding each other with their mouths, bees and birds vomiting at one another, and fish that fight by smashing their open jaws together.
Defining a kiss might seem like a silly scientific endeavor, but it was a crucial first step for their research. Once they had definite criteria for a kiss in place, they went looking for that specific behavior in research about all sorts of primates. By mapping the appearance of kissing the same way they might map any other evolutionary adaptation, they came up with an estimation of how far back the trait could have evolved. The number they landed on is some 20+ million years.
Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about the 2026 Ig Nobel winners, and to learn why kissing is such a mysterious—and unique—human behavior.
FACT: The “American cheetah” wasn’t a cheetah at all
This week’s episode features special guest Riley Black. Her new book, Tyrant Lizard Queen: The Love, Life, and Terror of Earth’s Greatest Carnivore, comes out later this month.
For her guest spot on this week’s Weirdest Thing, Riley decided to tell us all about the fastest—and perhaps fattest—cat in North America.
For decades, paleontologists thought that an extinct cat called Miracinonyx evolved into a cheetah-like springer specifically to chase down North America’s speedy pronghorns. It was a tidy, romantic story of predator and prey evolving together in lockstep until one had gone extinct; it explained why pronghorns were so dang fast, too. But Riley always found the story a little fishy, and she wasn’t the only one: in 2023, researchers noted that these American cats had forearm bones more suited for grasping prey (cougar-style) than for running super fast (like a cheetah).
New research has put another nail in the coffin of the “American cheetah.” For starters, their fossils were found as far north as the Yukon—where they wouldn’t have had any pronghorns to hunt. And based on their DNA, the researchers say, they’re much more closely related to modern pumas. They also had a unique diet: according to isotope analysis, the researchers think the Yukon-dwelling cats feasted on salmon. That leaves us with one big question: what were pronghorns running from?
FACT: Rich people love building little stone houses for themselves (to be dead in)
Old friend-of-the-pod Amanda came back to join us this week. She took us on a tour of mausoleum history.
Walk into Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery, and you’ll find it hard to miss the sphinxes. They’ve got ample bosoms, appropriative headdresses, and nothing whatsoever to do with actual Egyptian funeral traditions. They’re actually monuments to the fortune (and ego) of the late industrialist Emil Winter.
Emil, who got to move into these fancy digs in 1941, was not unique in desiring such an opulent postmortem dwelling. In fact, he decided to have it built after seeing a similar one by the same architect: the Woolworth family mausoleum in New York City.
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about humanity’s enduring desire to build fancy houses for the deceased.
SpaceX and Terafab founder Elon Musk today confirmed my story on talks between TSMC and Terafab.
Late Friday I reported exclusively that TSMC was exploring ways to work with SpaceX’s Terafab project. “The most likely scenario is for TSMC to try to own and operate the new factory,” I wrote. “These plans are not set in stone, with other variations on the cooperation also being considered.”
“Just discussions, but something may come of it,” Musk wrote on X a few hours later.
Musk was guarded in his confirmation. He should be, and I can understand why.
He’s dealing with many competing issues when it comes to founding and scaling a hugely ambitious semiconductor project. Choosing a partner is very big decision, and he’d be wise to not rule anything out, or in, until a deal is signed.
Since publication I have had numerous further conversations with people familiar with the project.
The story of how a TSMC-Terafab collab came to be on the table is fascinating, and one which I plan to share with you soon.
To that end, make sure you’re subscribed to Culpium because I’ll be delivering the fuller rundown in coming days.
Got a tip? Want to share something with me? I am looking to learn more about TSMC, Texas, Terafab and anything else in the chip space. I will need to verify your credentials, but can protect your identity. No source has ever lost their job from talking to me — and I’ve been doing this 25 years. No PR pitches, please.
Reply to this email, or Email tculpan (A) proton (.) me (don’t send anything sensitive, I’ll move you to something secure)
But there’s another thing.
My original report, here at Culpium, started an unintentional flame war. Apparently Intel fans felt aggrieved, calling it fake news and BS.
I am writing this note to all my subscribers — free and premium — not as a victory lap, though it’s nice to have official public confirmation of something I already knew to be true.
Instead, I want to let you know how I operate and what you can expect from Culpium.
Early readers know my work, and many have followed me for 20 years since I started writing for Bloomberg (start date: 30 May 2026). I left two years ago to run Culpium independently, and those loyal supporters have joined me here. I am truly thankful.
What You’re Getting
But many people do not know me and are new to my work, and thus are quick to brand my reporting as rumor-mongering or fake news.
First, I don’t publish rumor and I don’t make up stories. There are plenty of fascinating stories about the business of tech to not need to fabricate it.
Secondly, I take a lot of time to investigate tips and ideas. I very rarely publish based on a single source.
By way of example, I was kicking myself Wednesday morning when Digitimes’ Monica Chen and Reuters’ Lee Wen-yee published news of TSMC exploring a Texas investment beyond its Arizona footprint. I’d known about these plans for around six weeks, but I didn’t have enough corroborated information to bring it to you.
So, to you, my readers I apologise for sitting on news I believed to be true — but I won’t hit publish until I am confident I have spoken to enough people and got a full picture of the situation. That sometimes means you will not get it first from me.
But when you do, be confident I’ve done the work.
Finally, yes I charge money.
Culpium was operating for two years — including a health hiatus — before I turned on the cash register. My plan is to keep delivering as much as I can for free. But sometimes I’ll need to put it behind a paywall.
Culpium is priced well below peers, and I know for a fact that there’s no one covering the technology sector from Taiwan — the home of hardware — with the same rigour and diligence.
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