The project consists of a small board full of old-school ICs that can be used to drive WS2812Bs in a simplistic manner. A 74HC14 Schmitt trigger oscillator provides the necessary beat for this tune, generating an 800 kHz clock to keep everything in time and provide the longer pulse trains that represent logic one to a WS2812B. A phase-shifted AND gate generates the shorter pulses necessary to indicate logic zero. Meanwhile, a binary counter cycles through 24 bits (8 per R, G, and B) to handle color. Pressing each one of the three pushbuttons allows each color channel to be activated or deactivated as desired. It can make the strip red, green, or blue, or combine the channels if you press multiple buttons at once. That’s all the control you get—it would take a bit more logic to enable variable levels of each channel. Certainly within the realms of possibility, though.
We’ve featured some other nifty tricks for driving WS2812Bs in unconventional ways, like using DMA hardware or even I2S audio outputs. If you’ve got your own tricks, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline. Video after the break.
This week, theUncanny Valley team dives into the feud that has been brewing between Anthropic and the Pentagon—and what it says about how the government interacts with tech companies. Later, Zoë Schiffer tells us why figuring out whether you are agentic or mimetic has become the new litmus test in Silicon Valley. Plus, we discuss the key takeaways from the State of the Union address and give a farewell to the TAT-8 undersea cables—the ones that made our modern internet possible.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett: Hey, it’s Brian. Zoë, Leah, and I have really enjoyed being your new hosts these past few weeks, and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute, please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people. And for any questions and comments, you can always reach us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. Thank you for listening. On to the show.
Leah Feiger: Hey, how’s it going?
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Zoë Schiffer: I feel great. Brian?
Brian Barrett: I feel terrific, and I know Leah does too, because Survivor‘s back tonight, another thing that we care about and you don’t.
Zoë Schiffer: How do you know I don’t? I mean, I don’t. I don’t, except for my best friend from childhood tried to go on it and then she didn’t get on, so it’s irrelevant.
Leah Feiger: Famously, one day I’m going to apply, and both Brian and our colleague Tim have assured me that I can leave for a month to the beaches of Fiji and come back and still keep my job.
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Zoë Schiffer: I think most people would be like, Leah, you’re not going to survive out there, but they don’t know about your deep-sea-diving prowess.
Leah Feiger: I actually think I would be fine. I really, really want to do this. One day, you guys.
Brian Barrett: But Leah, it would require you to potentially kill some fish to eat them, which is not normally—
Leah Feiger: That’s OK.
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Brian Barrett: Oh, OK.
Leah Feiger: No, no, no, no, fishing’s fine. Subsistence living, that’s very OK. It’s, like, the larger institutionalization of the mass murder of our sea that I take a bit of a bigger issue with.
Zoë Schiffer: And on that note, welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry.
Brian Barrett: I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor.
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Leah Feiger: And I’m Leah Feiger, senior politics editor.
As electric vehicles roll off assembly lines, a bottleneck sits upstream: lithium refinement. Turning raw lithium into the compounds needed for batteries is expensive, messy, and energy-intensive, but Mangrove Lithium, a Vancouver-based startup, has a better way. The company has developed an electrochemical refining process that converts lithium feedstocks into battery-grade lithium hydroxide.
Converting raw lithium to lithium hydroxide typically requires roasting spodumene—a mineral from which lithium is derived—at high temperatures, and then leaching it with acid to convert it to lithium sulfate. That compound then needs to be converted to lithium hydroxide. “It’s a thermochemical reaction that uses heavy amounts of reagent chemicals, and generates a sodium sulfate waste stream,” says Ryan Day, Mangrove Lithium’s director of operations.
Further tightening the bottleneck, the majority of the world’s lithium—60 to 70 percent—is now refined in China, and export restrictions and geopolitical tensions have disrupted supply chains in recent years. Shipping raw lithium overseas to be refined also adds to batteries’ total carbon footprint. A new model for lithium refining could reshape not just the economics of electric vehicles, but the geography and environmental footprint of the global battery supply chain.
Mangrove’s demo plant in British Columbia is scheduled to start production in the second half of 2026.
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How Does Mangrove’s Refinement Work?
Mangrove replaces the conventional, resource-intensive reaction with a process that uses electricity, water, and oxygen. In an electrochemical cell, they flow brine through an electrolyzer, which consists of a metal box with three compartments between the cathode and anode. The compartments are separated by ion exchange membranes, semipermeable barriers that only allow certain ions to pass. Lithium sulfate flows through the central compartment, and the cell’s electric field splits the salt apart. “Lithium, which is a positive ion, will move across a membrane toward the cathode,” says Day. There, “we are reacting oxygen and water to create hydroxide ions, which join with the lithium from the salt to make lithium hydroxide.”
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the cell, the sulfate—a negative ion—moves towards the anode, where water is being split to produce protons and oxygen gas. The protons combine with sulfate ions to make sulfuric acid.
“You run that process continuously, and over time you’re generating lithium hydroxide, which you can send to a crystallizer,” Day says. “There’s no significant waste product and all you’re feeding in is brine, water, oxygen, and electricity.” The sulfuric acid is recovered and can be circulated back upstream to leach more brine from the raw feed material.
In general, keeping the ion exchange membrane intact is one of the biggest challenges for scaling this type of process, says Feifei Shi, assistant professor of energy engineering at Penn State. Shi, who researches electrochemical-based refinement methods, notes that the approach can more easily activate the necessary reactions, but faces limitations for large-scale applications.
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The electrochemical process separates out lithium by passing it through three compartments separated by semipermeable barriers. Mangrove Lithium
Mangrove’s Oxygen-Based Cathode
Mangrove’s key innovation and what enables the process is an oxygen-based cathode. “Driving the reaction requires detailed engineering,” says Day. The company designed an electrode that lets a gas and a liquid react together, using just enough water to make the oxygen reaction work—without adding so much that it floods the system and creates hydrogen gas instead.
The electrodes are made with a proprietary process that combines several dedicated layers which allow for a balanced flow of water and oxygen to access the active catalyst sites. This design favors the oxygen reduction reaction for over 99.5 percent of the total cathode activity. It also reduces the amount of electricity needed to drive the process, because “oxygen reduction requires less voltage than water reduction,” Day says. Demand for battery minerals is surging beyond just lithium, with automakers competing for supplies of nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese. Simultaneously, utilities are deploying grid-scale batteries that use the same materials in even larger volumes. Refining capacity—not just mining—could become the critical choke point in this buildout, because battery makers require highly specified, ultra-pure compounds.
While Mangrove is initially targeting lithium, their electrochemical architecture is not inherently lithium-specific, and could be adapted to other battery materials that face similar purification bottlenecks. Nickel and cobalt sulfate production, for example, still rely on multi-step precipitation and solvent-extraction processes that generate significant waste and require large reagent inputs. “It would work immediately in application to other alkali-metal salts,” Day says.
Mangrove’s demo plant in British Columbia will make 1,000 tons per year of lithium hydroxide. If the company can scale its technology as it hopes, it could begin to reshape not just the battery supply chain, but the geopolitics of the energy transition.
Among the titles added are three drama shows that really stood out to me. If you want a gripping story to keep you on the edge of your seat, there’s plenty to lose yourself in with my three new Netflix picks. They’re different types of dramas, but I think there’s something for everyone here.
Check out my three February recommendations to blow.
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Lead Children
Lead Children | Official Trailer | Netflix – YouTube
Creator: Maciej Pieprzyca Cast: Joanna Kulig, Kinga Preis, Michał Żurawski, Agata Kulesza, Marian Dziędziel, and Zbigniew Zamachowski Seasons: 1 Age Rating: TV-MA
This Polish-language series is based on the life of Jolanta Wadowska-Król, a doctor who noticed that the children living near the Szopienice Steelworks were becoming very ill with lead poisoning.
Following this horrifying discovery, Wadowska-Król does everything in her power to save the sick children and confront those responsible. It’s a harrowing yet inspiring watch as we witness one woman who refused to back down, even though fighting the oppressive communist state of 1970s Upper Silesia was a seemingly impossible task.
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You may not be familiar with Wadowska-Król’s work, but this excellent drama will teach you so much about her.
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The Lincoln Lawyer
The Lincoln Lawyer Season 1 Trailer | Rotten Tomatoes TV – YouTube
Creator: David E. Kelley Cast: Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Neve Campbell, Becki Newton, Jazz Raycole, Angus Sampson, Yaya DaCosta Seasons: 4 (5 on the way) Age Rating: TV-MA
The fourth season of The Lincoln Lawyer is now on Netflix, making it the perfect time for you to watch it from the beginning if you haven’t seen it yet. If you have, then you can skip straight to the new episodes, so everybody wins.
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The Lincoln Lawyer is an addictive series that follows lawyer Mickey Haller as he works in the back of his Lincoln Navigator and takes on various cases across Los Angeles. If you love the drama of an intriguing legal case, you won’t want to miss this.
Better yet, it’s been renewed for season 5, so there’s plenty more where that came from.
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The Way Home
Preview – The Way Home – Hallmark Channel – YouTube
Finally, fantasy lovers will get a real kick out of The Way Home, which currently has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. It was originally a Hallmark release, and you can now watch all three seasons on Netflix.
Time travel is at the heart of this drama as we follow three generations of strong, willful, and independent women. They embark on a journey to find their way back to each other and learn many important lessons along the way.
A fourth season of The Way Home has been confirmed, so if you enjoy it, more episodes are heading our way soon.
It may not feel like it, but the Ford Mustang Mach-E has become a bit of an elder statesman in the electric crossover segment. Ford first unveiled this ambitious EV that controversially borrowed the Mustang’s name in 2019 and, in the years since, has given the now-familiar Mach-E some minor tweaks, including the addition of an exciting, rally-focused performance model for 2024.
The latest change that Ford’s given the Mach-E, though, feels like more of a head-scratcher or, for lack of a better word, a cash grab. It doesn’t involve adding a new feature to the car, but rather taking one away and charging buyers extra if they’d like it back. For 2026, the Mustang Mach-E’s formerly standard front cargo compartment, better known as a “frunk,” is now a separate option that will set buyers back an extra $495.
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Yes, this is a relatively small change in the context of a car that starts at nearly $40,000, but removing any formerly standard feature (without an equivalent price drop) and then charging extra for it is generally not something that buyers appreciate. But Ford is justifying the move by arguing that few buyers were actually using the Mach-E’s frunk in the first place.
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What’s in a frunk?
There are a lots valid arguments that could be used against electric vehicles when comparing them to gas cars, but even the most dedicated EV critics would have to admit that the availability of a frunk is one of the best benefits of an electric vehicle. Not every single EV on the market has a frunk, but many use their lack of an engine to turn their underhood areas into an extra cargo compartment — as the name suggests, a front trunk.
Every Tesla currently on sale has a frunk, and Ford’s own F-150 Lightning has a massive “Mega Power Frunk” where its engine would be. Though not nearly as large as the Lightning’s frunk, the Mach-E has always had extra cargo space up front, and we listed this frunk as one of the Mach-E’s 10 coolest features back in 2022. Ford even filled a Mach-E’s frunk with shrimp and buffalo wings for a 2020 publicity stunt.
Adding extra cargo space without impeding on the cabin seems like it’d be a win-win and a popular feature. But Ford found that Mach-E buyers were not using their frunks nearly as much as expected. According to Ford, this spurred the decision to change the frunk from a standard feature to a standalone extra on the options sheet.
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Smart decision or cash grab?
There wouldn’t be any issue with this move if Ford simply dropped the Mach-E’s price by $495 while making the frunk a $495 option, but that’s not quite how Ford is going about it. While Ford did drop Mach-E prices slightly for 2026, adding the frunk as an option on the base RWD 2026 Mach-E makes it around $350 more expensive than the identical 2025 model. In a similar move to the frunk change, Ford has also removed the 2026 Mach-E Rally’s standard rear spoiler and made it a standalone option.
Are these changes likely to have a big impact on Mach-E demand on their own? Probably not, given that many buyers are already conditioned to expect car prices that creep up each year. But our reviews have shown that the Mach-E lags behind its competition in terms of value, and these price bumps certainly won’t help its case there.
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With the Mach-E’s relatively old age, it was once thought this EV would be due for a new generation, or at least a significant refresh by 2026, but industry reports suggest it could be a while longer before Ford redesigns the Mach-E. Instead, it’s said that Ford will continue working on the current platform to cut costs and increase profitability — and these small but notable equipment moves seem to back up that pivot.
Seattle startup Read AI launched a new “Digital Twin” product that works through email and can help schedule meetings, answer questions, and keep conversations moving.
The AI bot, branded as “Ada,” builds on the company’s existing meeting and productivity tools. Read AI says it’s the largest deployment of a digital twin product to date.
Digital Twin enters a crowded market of AI agents and workplace copilots from giants like Microsoft and Google, along with startups that offer AI‑driven scheduling, inbox triage and autonomous task management. Read is trying to differentiate by centering the agent in email, tightly coupling it to meeting and document context, and offering enterprise branding such as a custom name and company domain for customers with 25 or more licenses.
Here’s how it works. Users cc ada@read.ai on a thread and can ask it to find time on everyone’s calendars, draft replies, or answer questions using context from their meetings, email, files, CRMs and other connected systems. Read says its platform pulls from more than 20 native integrations and, on average, about 10,000 documents per user.
For anything beyond scheduling, Ada “sidebars” with the user first, proposing draft responses and waiting for approval before sending them, and it must be cc’d on email threads where it takes action. The idea is to let the AI cover for you when you’re too busy or out of the office, while giving you veto power on anything sensitive or high‑stakes.
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Read AI CEO David Shim likened Digital Twin to OpenClaw, an open source AI digital assistant tool that works with messaging apps and went viral this month. “What OpenClaw did for tinkers, Digital Twin brings to the mainstream,” he told GeekWire.
Shim framed the launch as an evolution from “AI assistant” to something closer to a software colleague that can act on your behalf. In internal beta, he said a quarter of user interactions with Ada were just to say “thank you,” a signal that people were treating the product more like a teammate than a tool.
He said the Digital Twin launch shifts Read AI from “a system of record for productivity” to an “extension of you.”
“This is the moment we change the way we interact with AI, from pull to push, where the agent acts on your behalf,” he said.
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More broadly, Shim is betting that digital twins — and AI assistants more broadly — will proliferate.
“If I said internet access was a human right 20 years ago, I’d be laughed out of the room — today, it’s an expected value,” he said. “We believe that digital twins will be a human right, akin to internet access, in the next few years, delivering a level playing field when it comes to AI and productivity.”
Founded in 2021 by Shim, Robert Williams, and Elliott Waldron, Read AI has raised more than $80 million and landed major enterprise customers for its cross-platform AI meeting assistant and productivity tools. It has 5 million monthly active users.
Google just debuted Nano Banana 2, an updated version of its AI image generator. It combines the abilities of Google’s previous release, Nano Banana Pro—like text rendering and web searching—with speedier image generation. This tool will be the new default in Google’s Gemini chatbot.
The first image model from Google under the Nano Banana moniker dropped last August, and the Pro version arrived three months later. The AI tool was widely adopted online to alter photos of real people, from generating custom action figures to nostalgic images of people hugging younger versions of themselves.
Nano Banana 2 is not only faster at crafting images, it’s also a more powerful photo editor. Despite some rough edges and unconvincing generations in my initial hands-on experience through Gemini, Google’s latest release marks the continued improvement of photorealistic AI tools that can manipulate existing images and serves as a stark reminder to always scrutinize unverified images you see online.
Getting Started
If you want to try the new image model, the easiest way to access Nano Banana 2 is through the Gemini app or website. You can either click the banana emoji to generate images or just put the request in your prompts to the chatbot. This new image model is also available through Google’s Search tools, AI Studio, Cloud, and other services.
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Google says the Nano Banana 2 image generator pulls real-time information from the web, which can be useful for generating infographics. To test this, I asked Gemini to generate a custom weather report for my upcoming weekend getaway. Here’s my prompt:
I’m going skiing in Dodge Ridge this weekend with some friends. Could you create an infographic that covers the weather conditions?
Nano Banana Pro made it easier to generate images with text—pulled from data on the web—and Nano Banana 2 makes that image generation speedier than ever.
AI-GENERATED BY REECE ROGERS
At first glance, the result looks decent. No wobbly text or disfigured skiers in the background. The forecast for each day includes expected temperatures as well as wind and snow conditions. A small disclaimer at the bottom of the infographic reads, “Weather and conditions subject to change. Check official sources.”
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I’m glad I did! When I looked up the forecast for this weekend from a different source, I realized that Gemini had messed up the dates and pulled the Google Weather context from last week. When I pointed out this mistake to the bot, it used Nano Banana 2 to replace the text from its first attempt with the correct weather data.
Tub Time
If you want more details about my getaway, I’m headed to a cozy ski lodge with friends who are skiers. I’m a novice and still deciding whether to actually hit the slopes or just turn into a wrinkly prune sitting in the hot tub all day long. Maybe Nano Banana 2 could make a dumb meme to send to the group chat? I uploaded a photo of myself to Gemini with this prompt:
Take this image and put me in a cozy outdoor jacuzzi surrounded by snow. Make my skin comically wrinkly from sitting in there for hours.
If you’re an esteemed Android user like me, and you felt left out of yesterday’s deal on the AirPods Pro 3, I’ve got you covered today with an even bigger discount on the Pixel Buds Pro 2. Both Amazon and Best Buy have the hazel color marked down from $229 to $180, a $49 discount on Google’s most upgraded wireless earbuds.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
The first change you’ll notice from the previous generation Pixel Buds Pro is that the newer model is much lighter, and the buds are 27 percent smaller. As a result, these are an excellent choice for anyone with small ears, and they stay put super well. Reviewer Parker Hall “had no problem doing hours of tree pruning and going on long sweaty runs in Portland’s early fall heat wave.”
With some help from top-notch physical sound isolation, the active noise-canceling on these is just as good as Apple’s and even goes toe-to-toe with big hitters like Bose and Sony. The transparency mode works just as well, too, with a wider range and clearer audio than a lot of other headphones offer. When it’s time to actually turn up the tunes, you can enjoy a wide, natural soundstage that has excellent detail in the midrange and clear, sparkling treble.
The Gemini integration, unfortunately, leaves a bit to be desired. It’s not the smoothest experience, particularly when asking multiple questions, and the Pixel Buds Pro 2 aren’t offering anything that other earbuds can’t do. Apple’s live translations and heart rate monitors are more useful features, but if you’re on Android, you’re locked out of them anyway.
If you’re interested in upgrading your earbud game, and you already have a Pixel, you can grab the Pixel Buds Pro 2 in hazel for $180 from either Amazon or Best Buy. If that color doesn’t suit you, I also spotted lesser discounts on the peony color for $189, or the porcelain color for $210. For anyone who isn’t already sold on the Pixel Buds Pro 2, make sure to swing by our guide to the best wireless earbuds, with picks for both Apple and Android owners.
A Guru3D forums user named “The Creator” recently shared a beta DLL file for an unannounced update to AMD’s FSR upscaler. It didn’t take long for users on Guru3D and Reddit to circulate mirrors and begin publishing side-by-side comparisons. The early verdict: noticeably less blur than the public release at… Read Entire Article Source link
Well, those Falcon 9 landings never get old. Imagine, just over a decade ago the idea of being able to land a rocket upright after it’d been to space seemed crazy. And then SpaceX went and did it.
Following its first successful touchdown in December 2015, SpaceX suffered the occasional mishap with its booster landings, but in recent years it’s well and truly nailed the process.
The Elon Musk-led spaceflight company shared a video (below) this week of its most recent landing, with dramatic footage captured by a camera attached to the rocket showing the spectacular early-morning ride home.
The Falcon 9’s mission started from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and involved the launch of 25 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit.
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This was the 11th flight for the first-stage booster (B1093) supporting this mission, which previously launched SDA T1TL-B, SDA T1TL-C, and now nine Starlink missions.
As the video shows, after deploying the upper stage, the 41.2 meter-tall (about 135 feet) booster returned to Earth minutes later, landing on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship waiting in the Pacific Ocean.
To achieve an autonomous landing like this, a Falcon 9 booster begins by performing a flip using cold gas thrusters after stage separation, sometimes followed by a boostback burn. As it descends, the booster deploys its grid fins to steer through the atmosphere before performing an entry burn to slow down. Finally, it executes a landing burn while deploying its legs for a stable touchdown.
The landings allow SpaceX to reuse its boosters multiple times, reducing the cost of spaceflight and opening access to more companies and organizations.
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Just last weekend, another Falcon 9 booster set a new reuse record of 33 flights after launching for the first time in June 2021.
A Greek court has convicted four individuals linked to the marketing of Predator spyware in the wiretapping scandal that shook the country in 2022. The BBC reports: In what became known as “Greece’s Watergate,” surveillance software called Predator was used to target 87 people — among them government ministers, senior military officials and journalists. The four who had marketed the software were found guilty by an Athens court of misdemeanours of violating the confidentiality of telephone communications and illegally accessing personal data and conversations.
The court sentenced the four defendants to lengthy jail sentences, suspended pending appeal. Although they each face 126 years, only eight would be typically served which is the upper limit for misdemeanors. One in three of the dozens of figures targeted had also been under legal surveillance by Greece’s intelligence services (EYP). Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who had placed EYP directly under his supervision, called it a scandal, but no government officials have been charged in court and critics accuse the government of trying to cover up the truth.
The case dates back to the summer of 2022, when the current head of Greek Socialist party Pasok, Nikos Androulakis – then an MEP – was informed by the European Parliament’s IT experts that he had received a malicious text message containing a link. Predator spyware, marketed by the Athens-based Israeli company Intellexa, can get access to a device’s messages, camera, and microphone. Its use was illegal in Greece at that time but a new law passed in 2022 has since legalised state security use of surveillance software under strict conditions. Androulakis also discovered that he had been tracked for “national security reasons” by Greece’s intelligence services. The scandal has since escalated into a debate over democratic accountability in Greece.
The electrochemical process separates out lithium by passing it through three compartments separated by semipermeable barriers. Mangrove Lithium
