Photo credit: NBC News
Months after paying a deposit and chasing down answers through repeated calls and emails, NBC News opened the box on the Trump Mobile T1 smartphone. Inside waited a gold-colored device that turns heads the moment it leaves the packaging. An American flag covers the back, though it carries only eleven stripes instead of the standard thirteen. Trump branding appears in four separate spots across the body, making the origin unmistakable from the first glance.

Unboxing the phone reveals a couple of essential accessories straight away, including a charging cord, wall block, and a clear protective cover, so you don’t have to go out and acquire any other stuff to get started. The item feels really substantial in the hand, however a bit of a handful due to its height. However, the 6.78-inch screen, which is somewhat taller than the new iPhones, gives you some extra real estate to play about with when browsing or checking out some material.

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When you turn on the phone, you can see that it is running standard Android with all of the customizations that make it distinctive. Truth Social is already set up and ready to go, with little effort on your part. 512 gigabytes of storage is plenty for all of your programs, photographs, and data. The 50 megapixel camera performed well for ordinary photos, and they were particularly impressed with the wide angle photographs, which were sharp and had excellent colors.

Phone conversations were fine, and texts got through without any problems. Everything just worked as intended, with no hiccups or surprises. The inclusion of a 3.5 mm headphone connector will be a significant plus for those of you who still rely on wired earphones, especially since so many modern products have abandoned it. To add added security, the fingerprint sensor and facial unlock were both lightning fast.

The phone is presently on sale for $499, which is a reasonable price if you’re considering giving it a try. The construction quality appears sturdy enough for daily usage, and the gold finish appears to be durable enough to withstand the occasional scratch without exhibiting too much wear. The marketing pitch used to be all on how it was created in the United States, but now it appears to be about how it was developed there. The package boldly states ‘proudly assembled in the United States,’ yet when you look at the specs, they’re basically the same as the HTC U24 Pro from Taiwan.
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• Huawei-linked LineShine supercomputer crams 2.45 million Arm cores into one enormous AI cluster
• Huawei’s processors power one of China’s largest AI computing installations today
• CPU-only supercomputers eliminate costly data transfers between processors and accelerators during workloads

China has deployed a massive CPU-only supercomputer called LineShine that delivers 1.54 exaflops of AI training performance without using any GPUs at all.

The system packs 20,480 compute nodes, each containing two LX2 processors for a total of 40,960 chips across the entire machine.

• Brands with no Trustpilot account only appeared in 1% of AI-generated answers
• Review and trust platforms are the second-most cited source type
• Relevance, recency and ranking are vital in a good GEO strategy

Trustpilot claims businesses could effectively be “invisible” in AI-generated answers if they fail to build visible trust signals through customer reviews and engagement, indicating a new post-SEO era.

While optimizing for search engines remains key, generative engine optimization (GEO) has introduced yet more challenges for companies looking to survive in 2026 and beyond.

Keri Rodrigues, a mother of five boys, knows the value of screens.

For her boys, four of whom receive school accommodations, screens serve a practical purpose at school.

“When you get a kid who’s got [a learning plan] for anxiety and a substitute teacher that hasn’t read his 504 [plan] and there’s nobody there to de-escalate him, he’s got to use his phone to call mom so I can FaceTime with him and do a breathing exercise,” Rodrigues says.

But this use of screens bumps against a new concern. Fueled by distress over the mental health impacts of too much screen time, lawmakers have begun to pass device bans and other restrictions for schools, in a rising “techlash” across state capitols.

Now, as the country wrestles with restricting screens, some parents and disability advocates are beginning to express concerns about whether students who rely on accessibility tools are being excluded from the rulemaking process. Some of these advocates say they agree that new tech restrictions are necessary, but they are calling for careful consideration in how these rules are written.

Many neurodiverse students need assistive technologies for learning, and it’s common for digital tools to be prescribed in the plans schools use for these students. Assistive technologies support functional and social needs for these students’ daily lives, argued Sambhavi Chandrashekar, global accessibility lead for D2L, an online learning platform, in a series of emails to EdSurge.

Chandrashekar and others worry that lawmakers aren’t consulting families with neurodiverse students enough when crafting new restrictions, and that screen time laws could impinge on accessibility tools. They worry that the gains these students have made are becoming swept up in larger political battles.

Advocates are calling for a proactive approach to avoid potential problems down the road, and EdSurge has not yet found an example of a student blocked from using an assistive device because of these new bans.

Students with ADHD might use screens for reminders, alarms, timers, or even medical alerts, says Rodrigues, the mom. Students with autism use it for self-regulation, and students with anxiety, epilepsy, asthma, or vision and hearing differences rely on specific accessibility features on their phones. One of her own sons, a senior in high school, uses a meditation app to de-escalate, she says.

In her position as president of the advocacy group National Parents Union, Rodrigues wants caution from lawmakers. The new legislation is “really well intended,” she says. But: “We’ve got to make sure we’re not stomping on kids that are actually utilizing these devices for really important reasons.”

“Phones aren’t just toys for kids,” Rodigues says.

Inclusion as the Norm

Disability laws such as the Individual with Disabilities Education Act guarantee students the right to assistive technologies, sometimes including screens.

But the new restrictions occur at a particularly tense time for these families.

Mass firings and funding cuts under the Trump administration have cast doubt on the reliability of federal civil rights protections and processes, some argue, leading to an increase in accessibility-related lawsuits, as families look to protect their rights. For instance, according to a nonpartisan government watchdog report, the Trump administration’s cuts to the office which reviews civil rights complaints contributed to a 90 percent dismissal of student civil rights complaints in the later months of 2025.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice delayed a long-anticipated deadline that required schools and vendors to meet widely accepted accessibility guidelines, after it became clear that schools and governments were not ready.

And advocates have already called attention to bills that would subject students with disabilities to surveillance cameras in classrooms, in the hopes of curbing physical restrains against these students, as EdSurge has reported.

‘Unintentional Segregation’

As for the latest screen restrictions, many of the bills note that they do not apply to students with disabilities under law. For example, laws from Alabama and Tennessee carve out blanket exemptions for students with disability plans. And Tennessee’s bill also includes an explicit exception for literacy and dyslexia screenings.

Still, advocates are concerned.

Local and regional policies can limit access to tools like screen readers and predictive text software even if they don’t mean to, argues Andrew Kahn, an associate director for Understood, a support organization for people with learning differences. But these tools can be necessary for those students to keep up in class. It’s not obvious to everyone that these tools can help students, even some who don’t have formal plans, Kahn says.

Typically, when these rules mention students with disabilities, they will exclude anyone covered by disability law, says Lindsay Jones, CEO of CAST, a nonprofit focused on assistive technology and learning. But they are still relying on local school districts or other agencies within the state to provide guidance about how to implement the law, she adds.

Without sufficient guidance, a concern is that teachers might become uncomfortable working with students who need screens for accessibility reasons and might restrict these tools because of that, Jones says. For instance, advocates fear that a teacher, wary of breaking the new law, might tell a student not to use a screen, even though it was prescribed by an individualized education program, or IEP.

“It’s not typical that a student [with disabilities] is sitting alone at a screen, which I think is what seems to be driving much of the concern,” Jones says.

But even if students with disabilities aren’t prevented from using the screens, there’s unease about whether these new rules will contribute to shaming or separation.

Reading some of these laws without guidance, it’s unclear how to implement them without banning screens in the classroom, Jones says. In order to follow these rules, it’s possible that students who are exempt from the bans could be moved into another room, she worries.

“That’s immediately going to bring — or raises our concerns about — stigma for these kids,” Jones says. “One of the beautiful things is when technology is built into systems that we’re all using, and we can use them together, and it reduces the feeling that you’re separate and different in a way that can be especially harmful.”

It’s an apprehension that others in the space share.

“You would be restricting [students with disabilities] because the access to technology is creating that stigma and that segregation,” says Kahn of Understood. “Anything that leads to difference between kids, that accentuates and magnifies, has the really strong potential to further stigmatize and make these kids feel singled out.”

Education should always take place in the least restrictive environment possible, he adds.

Rodrigues says that she and other parents also worry about whether students will become reluctant to use their disability tools because of the stigma. “Kids might actually choose to suffer rather than being singled out socially,” she says.

But ultimately, for some proponents of accessibility tech, the disquiet is largely about who gets consulted for new rules and how they get enforced.

It’s not that these restrictions shouldn’t be pursued, but that families of students with disabilities should be more thoroughly included in the rulemaking process, these advocates argue.

“Parents with children who have a disability must have a seat at the table,” Chandrashekar wrote: “Blanket rules that are blind to fundamental human differences will do more disservice than good to students at the margins.”

Apple TV has shared the upcoming slate of Peanuts content, including a new special “There’s No Place Like Home, Snoopy” and a feature-length film “Snoopy Unleashed” alongside more classic releases.

Apple TV announced on May 19 that “Camp Snoopy” will return for a second season on June 26, followed by a new special, “Snoopy Presents: There’s No Place Like Home, Snoopy,” on July 31. The service is also bringing “This Is America, Charlie Brown” and “The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show” to Apple TV for the first time in July.

The Peanuts brand has slowly made Apple TV the modern home for Snoopy and the gang. Apple repeated that its expanded partnership with WildBrain, Peanuts Worldwide, and Lee Mendelson Film Productions runs through 2030.

Even though Apple TV has focused on exclusives and original content since its inception, a few established series and brands have made their way onto the service. The Peanuts are the most prominent example, but there’s also “Fraggle Rock” and “Long Way Up.”

Apple keeps expanding Peanuts beyond nostalgia programming

Much of Apple’s early Peanuts push focused on bringing the holiday specials to the platform and a few new original specials. The latest slate shows the company moving deeper into franchise-building with returning series, library expansion, and new film development happening simultaneously.

“Camp Snoopy” season two follows Snoopy and the Beagle Scouts at Camp Spring Lake. The new July special centers on Snoopy trying to recover his accidentally sold doghouse.

Apple is also adding two older Peanuts productions that have been less visible on streaming platforms in recent years. “This Is America, Charlie Brown,” originally released in 1988, mixes Peanuts characters with episodes focused on American history and culture.

“The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show,” which originally aired from 1983 through 1986, adapts classic Charles M. Schulz comic strip storylines. Its 18 episodes from the classic series that will help increase Apple’s catalog just a little bit more.

Apple also shared that “Snoopy Unleashed” is a feature-length film coming soon. It follows Snoopy after he runs away from home, sending Charlie Brown and the rest of the gang into a large city to search for him.

“Camp Snoopy” season two follows Snoopy and the Beagle Scouts at Camp Spring Lake

Streaming services are now battling it out with recognizable intellectual properties rather than just offering a vast library of content. Disney leans on Marvel and Star Wars, Netflix pours money into its established franchises, while Apple struggles with fewer major existing brands beyond Peanuts.

Unlike many streaming exclusives, Peanuts also aligns closely with Apple’s family-friendly image. The franchise carries decades of cultural familiarity without the licensing complications or tonal risks tied to larger blockbuster properties.

Apple TV currently costs $12.99 per month in the United States and is available through the Apple TV app across Apple devices, smart TVs, game consoles, Roku, Fire TV, and web browsers.

Nintendo just dropped a new mobile game called Pictonico, and it turns everyday photos into a nonstop stream of short, goofy challenges built around the faces staring back at you. Available on iOS and Android starting May 28, the title comes from the same studio behind the WarioWare series, and that shows in every quick burst of action. You open the app, grab shots from your phone library or fire up the camera for fresh ones, and the game spins them into dozens of tiny experiences where your friends and family take center stage. No photos leave your device. Nintendo never sees them.

You’re following your cousin’s portrait on a wild goose chase through a horde of zombies while frantically tapping your screen to clear the road. The next thing you know, Grandpa’s face is staring up at you mid-sky dive, and you’re anxiously attempting to tilt the phone just right to direct him to a safe landing. A headshot transforms into a furious game of corn-munching pandemonium, with you dragging the mouth open and shut at the perfect speed to avoid being clipped. Then there’s another round in which the crabs are pulled off someone’s cheek before they pinch too hard.

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Each round lasts only a few seconds, yet the results are so replayable that you’ll stay glued to the screen. The cast of characters changes all the time because you can just feed it a fresh photo and let the fun begin. Give your uncle a ballerina costume and watch him perform on a makeshift catwalk. A married pair receives the royal treatment on a red carpet that can be controlled with a single swipe of the finger. You need to pluck the nose hairs, zip up the mouth, or extract a genie from a lamp carried by your best friend’s still smiling mug. The variety keeps piling up across roughly eighty minigames split into purchasable packs after the free starter set of three.

There’s more to the game than just the main rounds, since there are other additional modes that allow you to really stretch your legs. Want to get a high score on your favorite game? There is a mode for it. Want to combine multiple rounds to create a longer, more extended run? There is a board game map for that. Even a crazy fortune-telling segment that reads your chosen photo and makes incredibly ridiculous predictions that always seem to hit the mark. Saving all the craziness is as simple as creating it; simply press the screen, record a brief film or take a photo of the wildest moments, and send it directly to the group chat.

It’s completely self-contained, since you can play the entire game offline once you’ve downloaded the volumes you want, with data required simply to launch it for the first time or to purchase more. Volume 1 is $5.99, while Volume 2 is a little more expensive at $7.99, but it provides a very straightforward path to the entire collection without any devious hidden traps. Pre-registration is now open on the official website, and you can be one of the first to get in.

If you’ve ever had a medical team investigating cardiac issues, you’ve probably had a bunch of electrodes stuck all over your chest and been hooked up to an electrocardiogram. This is the gold standard when it comes to understanding electrical activity in the heart and can diagnose a great many conditions. However, sometimes doctors just need the basic information—your pulse rate, and whether or not there’s actually any oxygen in your blood.

Thankfully, there’s a cheap and simple device that can offer that exact information. It’s the pulse oximeter, and it’s a key piece of equipment that’s just about vital for monitoring vitals. Let’s learn how it works!

Pump It

If you’re unfamiliar with pulse oximeters, they’re that little plastic thing that clips on your finger at the doctor’s office. The device places two LEDs on one side of your finger, and a photodiode on the other. With just these simple components, it’s possible to determine the percentage of your blood’s hemoglobin that is currently carrying oxygen. It’s also possible to discern pulse rate, which also comes in handy when you’re trying to determine a patient’s current status at a glance.

Pulse oximetery was the brainchild of Takuo Aoyagi, an electrical engineer at Nihon Kohden in Tokyo. In 1972 he was working on a non-invasive way to measure cardiac output using the dye dilution method, which involves injecting a tracer dye and watching how its concentration in the blood decays over time. He was reading that decay optically through an ear oximeter. These devices used red and infrared light passed through the ear tissue to determine blood oxygen levels, but required frustrating calibration to work properly and often required fussy steps like first squeezing blood out of the tissues prior to measurement. The problem was that early oximeters worked based on the total absorption of light, and were affected by things like the skin, tissue, and venous blood, when really the goal was to measure the oxygen levels in the arterial blood itself.

As Aoyagi worked with the device, he noted that the patient’s pulse kept showing up as an annoying ripple in the output. He spent some effort trying to cancel that ripple by balancing red and infrared signals against each other. Then he noticed that when a patient’s oxygen saturation dropped, the cancellation fell apart. This led to the realization that the ratio of how much red and infrared light was absorbed could be used to determine the oxygen saturation of the arterial blood.

It all comes down to the nature of blood itself. Hemoglobin comes in two flavours relevant here: oxyhemoglobin, which is carrying an O₂ molecule, and deoxyhemoglobin, which isn’t. They are different colours, which is why arterial blood is bright red and venous blood is darker. They absorb light differently, to the point that it’s actually clinically useful. At a wavelength of 660 nm (red)—deoxyhemoglobin absorbs noticeably more light than its oxygenated cousin. At around 940 nm (near-infrared), oxyhemoglobin absorbs more. Almost every pulse oximeter uses these two wavelengths; both penetrate tissue quite easily, and it’s easy to find LEDs that spit out these wavelengths.

Reading the blood oxygen level is relatively straightforward. The device will typically alternate the two LEDs on and off, many times a second, also including a third phase with both off so the photodiode can subtract out ambient room light as well. The photodiode sees light that has passed through an entire finger, including the skin, bone, fat, as well as the venous and arterial blood. Most of that doesn’t change from second to second, but the arterial blood does, with every pump of the heart. Thus, when sampling light from the infrared and red LED pulses, the photodiode puts out a signal that’s mostly a continuous level from light passing through the finger, with a little wiggly bit on top that throbs at a human pulse rate. That’s due to the pulsing of the arterial blood, and the frequency can be used to measure pulse rate. Meanwhile, the continuous component is removed by subtracting the trough of both the infrared and red signals from the peak, which solely leaves the component of light absorption due to the fresh arterial blood itself.

The level of oxygenation in the arterial blood itself can then be measured by comparing the ratio of red to infrared light picked up in this part of the signal. The light ratio is converted into an human-parseable number via a lookup table, based on the Beer-Lambert law of concentration of substances in a solution. The displayed number is flagged as “SpO₂.” The “p” stands for “peripheral,” to indicate it’s an optical measurement rather than determined directly with blood-gas measurement techniques. This distinction is important, as there are a range of conditions under which pulse oximetry readings can be inaccurate. At a very base level, pulse oximeters can get confused if a patient is moving while wearing the device, which makes the pulsatile signal itself less clear.  The device also cannot tell carboxyhemoglobin from oxyhemoglobin, because they absorb light very similarly at 660 nm.  Carboxyhemoglobin is the result of carbon monoxide entering the blood, so a smoke inhalation victim can display a high apparent SpO₂ figure while their blood is carrying very little oxygen. Nail polish and skin tone can impact the amount of light transmitted through the finger, impacting readings, while limited bloodflow to the fingers can also frustrate things.

It may not be perfect, but pulse oximetry is nevertheless very useful a lot of the time. It enables medical teams to get a near-instant look at a patient’s most vital signs in a completely non-invasive manner. The use of this technology has revolutionized both emergency care and surgery, where it has played a huge role in patient monitoring under anaesthesia. Plus, the simplicity of the device has made this critical medical insight accessible to anyone that can afford a $20 device with a few LEDs and a photodiode in it. It’s now even possible to track your oxygen saturation during sleep with an off-the-shelf smartwatch due to developments from this technology, helping aid in the diagnosis of complex conditions like sleep apnea. All because blood tends to pass light a little differently depending on how oxygenated it is. Sometimes you have to thank nature for those little conveniences.

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is preparing to launch futures contracts tied to the cost of computing power, marking the latest sign that Wall Street sees AI infrastructure as the next great commodity market.

ICE announced on Monday that it will team with Ornn, a financial-infrastructure firm whose index products track GPU computing costs in real time, to develop the new contracts. The futures will be US dollar-denominated, cash-settled, and referenced against Ornn’s indexes covering a variety of major GPU types. The plans remain subject to regulatory approval.

What ICE and Ornn are building

The partnership pairs one of the world’s largest exchange operators with a startup that has quietly built the plumbing for compute price discovery. Ornn, formally Ornn AI Inc, publishes the Ornn Compute Price Index, which tracks live traded spot prices for GPU compute across hardware types including Nvidia’s H100, H200, and B200 chips. The index, now available on the Bloomberg Terminal, draws on real transaction data from live GPU markets and has attracted more than 400 data centre operators, investors, and AI companies to its platform.

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Trabue Bland, senior vice president of futures markets at ICE, framed the move as a response to a market that has outgrown its informal pricing mechanisms. The compute market, he said, is “in desperate need of a globally accepted pricing mechanism and risk management tool” as AI shifts from research labs to becoming a central driver of the global economy.

The contracts will settle in cash rather than through physical delivery, a structure familiar from energy and financial futures. For AI companies planning large model training runs or cloud providers locking in capacity, the instruments would offer a way to hedge against the kind of volatile compute costs that have accompanied Big Tech’s $650 billion capex surge in 2026.

A two-horse race with CME

ICE is not alone in spotting this opportunity. CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, announced its own compute futures contracts on 12 May, partnering with Silicon Data to build products based on daily GPU benchmark rental rates. CME’s contracts will reference the Silicon Data H100 Rental Index, which tracks the cost of renting high-end GPUs used for AI training workloads.

The fact that two of the world’s most established futures exchanges have moved on compute within days of each other signals that institutional conviction in compute-as-commodity has reached a tipping point. It mirrors the early days of energy futures in the 1980s, when competing exchanges raced to establish benchmark contracts for crude oil and natural gas. The exchange that captures the most liquidity early on will likely set the reference price for the industry, just as ICE Brent and CME WTI did for oil.

The competitive dynamic also extends beyond the big two. Architect Financial Technologies partnered with Ornn in January to launch exchange-traded perpetual futures on GPU and RAM prices through its AX platform, and prediction market Kalshi has offered contracts allowing users to wager on Nvidia GPU compute prices. But ICE and CME bring something the newer entrants lack: deep institutional liquidity, regulatory credibility, and the clearing infrastructure that large-scale GPU-as-a-service providers and their customers will demand.

Why compute needs a futures market

Kush Bavaria, co-founder and CEO of Ornn, put the scale of the problem bluntly. Compute, he said, “has grown into a trillion-dollar market, yet it still lacks the pricing and risk-transfer infrastructure that every other major commodity relies on.”

That gap has real consequences. GPU rental prices have been wildly volatile, with Ornn’s own index showing the Nvidia Blackwell spot rental price surging 48% between mid-February and mid-April 2026, from $2.75 to $4.08 per GPU-hour. For AI companies whose training runs can cost tens of millions of dollars, that kind of price swing can blow through budgets with little warning. Cloud providers, data centre operators, and the lenders financing billions of dollars in AI infrastructure buildouts face similar exposure.

A functioning futures market would allow these participants to lock in forward prices, transfer risk to willing counterparties, and plan capital expenditure with greater certainty. It would also generate transparent price signals that the broader market currently lacks, giving investors, analysts, and policymakers a clearer view of where compute costs are heading.

Broader implications for the AI economy

The emergence of compute futures reflects a deeper structural shift. As AI moves from an experimental technology to core economic infrastructure, the inputs that power it are being financialised in much the same way that energy, metals, and agricultural products were in previous decades. The surging demand for advanced semiconductors has already reshaped chip supply chains and driven record capital investment across the technology sector.

Futures contracts add a new layer to this ecosystem. They create standardised benchmarks that can underpin lending decisions, insurance products, and investment strategies tied to AI infrastructure. A bank financing a new data centre, for instance, could use compute futures to assess the facility’s projected revenue against forward GPU prices, much as energy lenders use oil futures to evaluate drilling projects.

There are complications, of course. Unlike oil sitting in a tank, compute is what traders call a flow commodity, one that is consumed in real time and cannot be stored. Ornn has addressed this by designing its futures with Asian-style settlement, meaning contracts settle on the arithmetic average of daily index values across the contract’s tenor rather than on a single expiry-day price. This structure aligns the financial instrument with the way compute is actually purchased and consumed.

Whether ICE or CME ultimately captures the lion’s share of this market will depend on liquidity, the breadth of GPU types covered, and which index providers gain the most institutional trust. But the direction of travel is clear. Computing power, the resource that underpins everything from energy-hungry AI data centres to autonomous vehicle development, is being transformed from a bespoke procurement headache into a standardised, tradable financial asset. For an industry accustomed to negotiating GPU access through opaque, bilateral deals, that is a significant change.