AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 were fairly well received when they were released in March, ably competing with Nvidia's RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti for the same or a little less money. We were impressed by the cards' performance and power efficiency, even if they still have some of the same caveats as older Radeon cards (lack of DLSS upscaling and lower relative ray-tracing performance being two).

Today AMD is formally expanding its family of RDNA 4 graphics cards with the Radeon RX 9060 XT, a GPU that will go up against Nvidia's RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti GPUs. These GPUs have just half the compute units of the RX 9070 XT, but at $299 and $349 for 8GB and 16GB configurations, they ought to be decent options for 1080p or entry-level 1440p gaming PCs (with the eternal "if you can find them" caveat that comes with buying a GPU in 2025).

AMD says the new GPUs will be available starting on June 5th from the typical range of partners—AMD released renders of a reference GPU design, but sometimes these are starting points that manufacturers can take or leave, rather than products AMD intends to manufacture and sell itself.

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Three-dimensional printing is transforming medical care, letting the health care field shift from mass-produced solutions to customized treatments tailored to each patient’s needs. For instance, researchers are developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands specifically designed for children, made with lightweight materials and adaptable control systems.

These continuing advancements in 3D-printed prosthetics demonstrate their increasing affordability and accessibility. Success stories like this one in personalized prosthetics highlight the benefits of 3D printing, in which a model of an object produced with computer-aided design software is transferred to a 3D printer and constructed layer by layer.

We are a biomedical engineer and a chemist who work with 3D printing. We study how this rapidly evolving technology provides new options not just for prosthetics but for implants, surgical planning, drug manufacturing, and other health care needs. The ability of 3D printing to make precisely shaped objects in a wide range of materials has led to, for example, custom replacement joints and custom-dosage, multidrug pills.

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Self-hosting is having a moment, even if it's hard to define exactly what it is.

It's a niche that goes beyond regular computing devices and networks but falls short of a full-on home lab . (Most home labs involve self-hosting, but not all self-hosting makes for a home lab.) It adds privacy, provides DRM-free alternatives , and reduces advertising. It's often touted as a way to get more out of your network-attached storage (NAS), but it's much more than just backup and media streaming.

Is self-hosting just running services on your network for which most people rely on cloud companies? Broadly, yes. But take a look at the selfh.st site/podcast/newsletter, the r/selfhosted subreddit , and all the GitHub project pages that link to one another, and you'll also find things that no cloud provider offers.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google rolled out early versions of Gemini 2.5 earlier this year. Marking a significant improvement over the 2.0 branch. For the first time, Google's chatbot felt competitive with the likes of ChatGPT, but it's been "experimental" and later "preview" since then. At I/O 2025, Google announced general availability for Gemini 2.5, and these models will soon be integrated with Chrome. There's also a fancy new subscription plan to get the most from Google's AI. You probably won't like the pricing, though.

Gemini 2.5 goes gold

Even though Gemini 2.5 was revealed a few months ago, the older 2.0 Flash has been the default model all this time. Now that 2.5 is finally ready, the 2.5 Flash model will be swapped in as the new default. This model has built-in simulated reasoning, so its outputs are much more reliable than 2.0 Flash.

Google says the release version of 2.5 Flash is better at reasoning, coding, and multimodality, but it uses 20–30 percent fewer tokens than the preview version. This edition is now live in Vertex AI, AI Studio, and the Gemini app. It will be made the default model in early June.

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In sparking his global trade war, Donald Trump seems to have maintained a glaring blind spot when it comes to protecting one of America's greatest trade advantages: the export of digital services.

Experts have warned that the consequences for Silicon Valley could be far-reaching.

In a report released Tuesday, an intelligence firm that tracks global trade risks, Allianz Trade, shared results of a survey of 4,500 firms worldwide, designed "to capture the impact of the escalation of trade tensions." Amid other key findings, the group warned that the US's fixation on the country's trillion-dollar goods deficit risks rocking "the fastest-growing segment of global trade," America's "invisible exports" of financial and digital services.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr celebrated an FCC court loss yesterday after a ruling that struck down Biden-era diversity reporting requirements that Carr voted against while Democrats were in charge.

"An appellate court just struck down the Biden FCC's 2024 decision to force broadcasters to post race and gender scorecards," Carr wrote . "As I said in my dissent back then, the FCC's 2024 decision was an unlawful effort to pressure businesses into discriminating based on race & gender."

The FCC mandate was challenged in court by National Religious Broadcasters, a group for Christian TV and radio broadcasters and the American Family Association. They sued in the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, where a three-judge panel yesterday ruled unanimously against the FCC.

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Under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration is unilaterally terminating universal access to seasonal COVID-19 vaccines; instead, only people who are age 65 years and older and people with underlying conditions that put them at risk of severe COVID-19 will have access to seasonal boosters moving forward.

The move was laid out in a commentary article published today in the New England Journal of Medicine , written by Trump administration FDA Commissioner Martin Makary and the agency's new top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad.

The article lays out a new framework for approving seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, as well as a rationale for the change—which was made without input from independent advisory committees for the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Microsoft is updating Windows 11 with a set of new encryption algorithms that can withstand future attacks from quantum computers in an attempt to jump-start what’s likely to be the most formidable and important technology transition in modern history.

Computers that are based on the physics of quantum mechanics don’t yet exist outside of sophisticated labs, but it’s well-established science that they eventually will. Instead of processing data in the binary state of zeros and ones, quantum computers run on qubits, which encompass myriad states all at once. This new capability promises to bring about new discoveries of unprecedented scale in a host of fields, including metallurgy, chemistry, drug discovery, and financial modeling.

Averting the cryptopocalypse

One of the most disruptive changes quantum computing will bring is the breaking of some of the most common forms of encryption, specifically, the RSA cryptosystem and those based on elliptic curves. These systems are the workhorses that banks, governments, and online services around the world have relied on for more than four decades to keep their most sensitive data confidential. RSA and elliptic curve encryption keys securing web connections would require millions of years to be cracked using today’s computers. A quantum computer could crack the same keys in a matter of hours or minutes.

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On Monday, the developer of a large offshore wind farm being built off the coast of New York announced that the federal government had lifted a hold it had placed on the project roughly a month ago. The entire process has been shrouded in mystery. The government never fully enunciated its justification for the hold and hasn't yet commented on the fact that it had been lifted, although there is some hint that it was coupled to a reconsideration of a cancelled natural gas pipeline.

Empire Wind is a large project being built off the southeast shore of Long Island by Equinor, a Norwegian energy company. The first of two phases, Empire Wind 1, will have an 800 MW capacity and has already received permitting and environmental approval. Equinor had started construction of the foundations for the towers that would hold the wind turbines and onshore facilities that would support this and future offshore projects.

All that changed in mid-April when Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced via a social media post that the approval for Empire Wind had been rushed and his department would be reviewing it. A Fox News article published a few days later suggests that a review by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "found the Empire Wind approval process relied on rushed, outdated, and incomplete scientific and environmental analysis." But nobody else has indicated that any such report exists, despite requests from the press.

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