Sunbasket (~$16 per serving): Sunbasket focuses heavily on fresh, organic ingredients and offers a whole lot of variety in its menus. Its recipes are attentive to saucing, and to basic good cooking techniques such as deglazing. Like Hungryroot, it also offers breakfasts and snacks to supplement meal options with little extras such as coconut yogurt and sous-vide egg bites. The meal kit also lets you filter out allergen-containing items. WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe loved the flexibility and add-ons. During my most recent test, I enjoyed an excellent Greek chicken and orzo salad dish—and, wonder of wonders, the advertised prep time was actually the actual prep time (about 30 minutes). The focus on organic ingredients does make Sunbasket one of the more expensive meal kit options, and the annual Thanksgiving meal kit was a lovely and welcome extravagance at $200.
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Gardencup ($11 to $15 a serving):Gardencup is a little like having the whole menu of Sweetgreen sent to your house or office, except in cylindrical form. Basically, you pick out premade salads, soups, and snacks, and they come in little cups—fresh, lovely, crisp, and ready to eat. I found it to be a great way to keep myself eating healthy when there’s no time to cook at the office (or the home office), which is typically when DoorDash or freezer-meal temptations run wild. It remains among the healthiest prepared food delivery options I know. I even tested Gardencup as a salad option during a cyclospora parasite scare, in part because I missed salad and because Gardencup could attest that it did not use lettuce from any of the suspected sources of the outbreak. The salads remained delicious and delivered a shocking amount of protein in options with meat. But variety of options is not a strong suit. A slackened focus on local sourcing, plus limited transparency on sourcing—Gardencup will disclose only that it sources its greens in the salad belt from Salinas, California, to Yuma, Arizona—has kept Gardencup in my honorable mentions.
Factor
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
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Factor ($13 to $17 a serving): Factor is a prepared-meal delivery plan run by HelloFresh, with ready-to-eat meals that look a lot like TV dinners. But there’s a twist: The trays have never been frozen. They were made fresh in a commissary kitchen and were shipped out with cold packs, yielding a result that’s kind of like restaurant leftovers. Consistently, Factor ranks among the best-tasting prepared meal plans I’ve tested, especially when I shrug off directions and use an air fryer to reheat my meals instead of a microwave. Proteins and high-protein meals are a strong suit. Proteins maintain their texture quite well, especially a truffled filet mignon I couldn’t believe I microwaved. Still, some meals, especially carb-avoidant or keto meals, are oddly mushy, while meals centered on proteins and whole starches, like potatoes or rice, alongside veggies like green beans or brussels sprouts, tended to fare quite well. So did stir-fry-style meals. My gluten-free colleague, Scott Gilbertson, wrote that he had the best luck with Factor’s Mexican fare. I do wish Factor would shed its reliance on the microwave: When I went off-script and used a Ninja Crispi air fryer or convection oven, I had much better results than with the nuker. But non-air-fryer ovens do not seem to offer the same improvement. Like many ready-to-eat meals, it’s a bit more expensive than the kits you cook yourself. Oh, and as a bonus? Factor has a really, truly delicious selection of nutrient-amped juice bottles and elderberry “shots.” I could pretty much subsist on their probiotic cucumber-pineapple green juice.
Fuel Meals
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Fuel Meals ($14 to $15 a serving): Fuel Meals are a no-nonsense, no-fluff, no-added-ingredients, pure-protein-packed nutritive meal plan, with many meals paleo-friendly. Some of Fuel’s meals had as few as five ingredients, consisting of essentially the macronutrients themselves plus a modicum of oil and salt. A large percentage of meals are marked gluten-free or dairy-free. Does all this mean less flavor? It can. The meals are also often not beautiful, dominated by a large and no-fuss serving of protein. But Fuel’s meal service offers an admirable focus, especially for those bulking up or watching carbs. Meals are substantive, usually topping 600 calories and 40 grams of protein without added sugar or fatty dairy or carb-heavy filler. I feel like if I wore tank tops more often, this is what I’d eat.
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Wildgrain
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Wildgrain ($13 to $17 per loaf or box of pastries): This is less a meal delivery service than a way to step up a home meal. Wildgrain is a monthly delivery bread box: You receive par-baked bread and pastries from small bakeries all over the country. This is pretty much the same process that likely happens at local restaurants when your warm bread basket comes out: It’s not quite as high-quality as you’d get direct from an artisan bakery, if you live in places with artisan bakeries. But it’s also as fresh as it gets, and I had a very good experience testing the box in October 2025, in particular, with sourdough breads perfect for large meals with houseguests. You finish the baking at home, so what you have at the end is ultra-fresh baked bread, biscuits, doughnuts, or scones that are still warm and crisp from the oven. A Wildgrain subscription arrives as a monthly box, filled with four, six, or 12 items that might range from a full sourdough loaf or fresh-made pasta to a pack of six doughnuts or four large croissants. Basically, you build your own box each month, choosing from among healthy sourdough or pasta and decadent pastries.
Thistle ($12 to $15 per meal): A prior top pick for solo diners with individually prepared dishes that require little to no prep, Thistle is mostly a plant-based meal kit—but there’s a $3 option to add sustainable meats to any otherwise vegan meal. It’s also so local and seasonal that the West and East Coasts have different menus, and the whole middle of the country, except Chicago, gets none. (You can check your zip code here to see if you can get delivery.) WIRED reviewer Adrienne So has used Thistle as a means to get herself to eat more vegetables, and thus avoid a life of rickets and/or scurvy. Portions are generous enough to split among meals, and in a nice turn for those who hate having to dispose of boxes, Thistle’s drivers will pick up the cooler bag that housed last week’s meal and replace it with a new one full of food. Vegan tester Molly Higgins’s favorite meals from Thistle were a whirlwind of textures, including a Mexican-inspired corn and poblano chile salad with adobo pinto beans and a chilled lemongrass-accented rice noodle bowl that mixed spice, tang, crisply fresh veggies, and deep umami from mushrooms and seaweed. She still dreams about it sometimes. Breakfasts are available at a lower cost, as low as $9.
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Tovala
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Tovala (~$9 to $15 a serving): It’s not every day you get to try something that feels super new. Tovala offers perhaps the most ambitious solution to ready-to-heat and prepared meal delivery I’ve seen: The meal kits come with an oven! In contrast to the sogginess of many prepared meals, Tovala’s recipes come in little foil pans with recipes custom-designed for a little steam oven. The results are often delicious—as was the case during my testing with a sweet chili–glazed salmon with pickled veg and noodles—and the QR code scanning function makes each recipe seamless to cook. Stick with the meal plan for six weeks, and in the bargain you get a quite affordable and powerful little convection oven, toaster, and steamer. A previous flaw was that Tovala only offered single-serve meals. But as of early 2026, at least four or five meals a week offer two to four servings, making the meal delivery service much more useful to families and couples—and much more economical on a per-serving basis. But not that it’s also one of the most sodium-filled meal services I’ve tested.
Gobble
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Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Gobble ($17 a serving): Formerly the top pick for fast-cooked meals, Gobble previously wowed with speed-demon dishes that also offered interesting and worldly flavors. Indeed, the most recent test included Caribbean rondon, an Indonesian peanut curry stir-fry, and steak vierge. But while the flavors have stayed interesting, the focus on fast cooking appears to have waned since my colleague Louryn Strampe tested Gobble. Cook time estimates aren’t printed on the recipe cards, but meals took as long as 30 minutes. For now, Hungryroot has taken the fast-cooking crown. For small households, Gobble is also among the most expensive kits. At most portions, prices approach $17 a serving plus shipping.
Nurture Life ($6 to $7 per serving): Nurture Life is like a restaurant kids’ menu, in ready-to-eat meal kit form. We loved the idea behind this fresh-made, never-frozen delivery meal plan when we tested it a few years back: a bunch of toddler- and slightly bigger kid-friendly meals, from mac and cheese to spaghetti and meatballs to myriad variations on the chicken nugget. The meal prices have dipped to reasonable levels of late, meaning it’s likely due for a retest—and each plate contains vegetables alongside the greatest hits.
Veestro ($7 to $14 per serving): WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe enjoyed Veestro as a ready-to-eat vegan option, with premade meals delivered fresh, but with freezable options so you can have extra meals on hand in a pinch. The service offers a number of filters for other dietary requirements, and satisfying taste and texture—which is not always a guarantee on ready-to-eat meals. Veestro has updated its menu and offerings since the last time WIRED tested, including a number of snacky soup offerings. The online menu interface, allowing you to sort by ingredients and filter out unwanted ones, is among the best I’ve seen.
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Splendid Spoon ($9 to $13 per serving): Splendid Spoon is a nutrition delivery kit that offers a plethora of plant-based smoothies, soups, bowls, noodles, and shots. Everything here is natural, plant-based, and free of gluten or GMOs, including spaghetti and plant-based “meatballs.” WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe has a big yen for the smoothies in particular ($10 apiece), but wasn’t quite prepared for the intensity of a lemon juice shot that comes as part of a five-pack of dense 3-ounce superfoods.
ModifyHealth’s Braised Beef (top) and Paprika Salmon (bottom)
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
ModifyHealth ($10 to $13 per serving): The idea behind ModifyHealth is that food can be medicine. Sometimes, I’ll admit, it tasted like it was designed purely for nutrition rather than flavor. ModifyHealth is a prepared meal delivery service tailored to people who need a heart-healthy, low-carb, or low-FODMAP diet to avoid dire digestive or health consequences. GLP-1 weight-loss plans are also available for people with diabetes or others. Gluten-free meals are attested to be made in an entirely gluten-free facility. The meals were simple, benign, and low-sodium but also sometimes a little soggy—a common problem with prepared meals. The plastic top of the packaging was also difficult to disengage from the base of each meal tray—a problem when the plastic is hot after a turn in the microwave. But here’s what I do like: The meals are carefully tailored with consultation from dietitians to help people for whom food can be a source of fear or pain. An additional service, offering one-on-one dietitian consultation, can be covered by many insurance plans. ModifyHealth also offers a free consultation for those just trying to figure out which diet plan is right for them. For those with IBS in particular, this remains the most focused food plan I’ve seen.
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Daily Harvest (prices vary):Daily Harvest is another ready-to-eat meal delivery service specializing in dietary restrictions: plant-based, plus gluten- and dairy-free. Smoothies feature, as do harvest bowls, pastas, and grains. Calories are low. Ingredients are often inventive. The meal’s a lifesaver for the solo vegan eater without time to prep a meal, and WIRED vegan reviewer Molly Higgins appreciated that the meals mostly relied on the natural flavors of the vegetables themselves, accented with flavors like curry and lemongrass. As with a lot of frozen meals, however, texture wasn’t a strong suit in the ready-to-heat meals. The ready-to-blend smoothies are great, though.
A Meal Kit I Don’t Recommend
Sakara Life ($30+ per serving): Sakara Life offers plant-based weekly menus in fresh, prepared portions, with greens, flavorful sauces, all-organic ingredients, and textural add-ons like seeds or berries. But it’s among the most expensive meal plans we’ve tested, and neither WIRED reviewer who tried it has really cottoned to the thing. Tester Louryn Strampe questioned the science on health claims for detoxes and cleanses, while calling Sakara “egregiously expensive” and full of “bitter veggies and tart fruits.” Vegan tester Molly Higgins, meanwhile, said Sakara Life’s tinctures and metabolism supplements didn’t agree with her system, and that the mostly raw-food plan made her long for “human food.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Meal Delivery Services Worth It?
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If you’re talking raw materials by the pound—meat, zucchini, rice, noodles—meal kits will, of course, cost more than buying food at grocery stores. It’s a service, after all, with added value above simple ingredient cost. Unless you’ve got quite expensive taste, you’ll easily be able to make delicious meals at home for less than the $7 to $14 a serving that a meal kit will cost. That said, this doesn’t necessarily mean that meal kits are expensive for what they offer. I conducted an experiment, trying to re-create four different meal-kit meals by going to my local grocery store—buying every ingredient provided by the meal kit. Turns out, if you don’t have the right sauces and spices at home already, it’s very difficult to re-create these tasty meals at grocery stores for less than they cost from a meal kit, in part because you’ll most likely have to buy full containers of sauces and spices instead of preportioned ingredients,
So, is HelloFresh worth it compared to a grocery store? Caveats are in order: For staple ingredients and spices you’ll use in multiple recipes, the grocery store is, of course, cheaper. Once you buy a container of paprika for an individual recipe, it will also be there for future recipes, whereas meal-kit spices are portioned for the meal. So the real answer is that meal kits can be a quite economical way of trying out a new recipe, or a new style of cooking, without larding up your fridge with condiments you won’t use again. For ingredients you’d use less commonly, a meal kit can reduce waste and spoilage, and maybe even compete on price for an individual meal.
If your comparison point is takeout, well, the best meal delivery services on this list will almost certainly be cheaper and more nutritious. I’ve found that a meal kit in the fridge tends to be a good motivator to cook a nutritive meal—and thus can save me both the money and the cholesterol.
To really save on cost, some people like to keep testing out the trial offers and discounts. Much like mattress-in-a-box companies, meal kit companies usually have a running promotion. Usually this takes the form of a trial discount price that’ll drop your cost by half or more on the first box, in hopes you’ll like the service enough to keep it on at full price.
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For me, a meal kit a few times a week ends up balancing out well: It’s a motivating factor to eat better, and it means that when I do go to the grocery store, I can do so less mindlessly and more purposefully, given that I’ve got a few meals’ worth of ingredients in the fridge. It’s also had the side effect of broadening my culinary toolkit, keeping me from getting stuck in the same ruts.
That said, it’s a set grocery expense and not necessarily a small one. I do get tired of tossing or recycling cold packs and boxes. And depending on the time of year, I often prefer shopping in person for what’s seasonal and local, when produce is at its peak—an experience you don’t get from a meal kit, or from grocery delivery for that matter. If you’re cooking for a bigger household, meal kits can also lose their utility quite quickly. A convenient option for two can become a much larger expense for a family of four or six.
Can I Pause a Meal Kit Service When I Go on Vacation?
Pretty much every meal kit I’ve tested has an option to pause subscriptions—and there’s no particular limit to how often you can do this. The main thing is to be sure that you’ve canceled with enough lead time. Some services let you cancel or pause delivery as late as the Friday before a Monday delivery. HelloFresh requires five days’ notice. Marley Spoon, at least where I live, required six days. Some, like Hungryroot, may lock in next week’s order as early as the previous Monday, depending on where you live. Read your terms of service, and act accordingly.
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For those with more variable schedules, the service I’d probably recommend is Blue Apron, which changed its model last year and no longer locks in delivery each week. You’ll have to remember to order a box each week, which can be done where I am with four days’ notice.
How to Optimize Meal Kits
Don’t order too many meals per week: You know the old John Lennon line: Life is what happens when you’re busy, out eating a random burrito, then thinking guiltily about the meal kit at home in your fridge. Aspirations are great, but don’t order more meals than you’re likely to make, or you’ll be sad. Err on the side of caution. Order just enough meals per week that making yourself a recipe from your HelloFresh or Home Chef box is still a delight and a convenience and an overall boon to your life—not an obligation. For me, a somewhat improvisational and impulsive person, three meals a week is the sweet spot. The prospect of a few easy meals usually saves me from an impulse weeknight DoorDash.
Make room in your fridge: Meal kits take the place of a lot of grocery shopping. But they’re also a lot of food, and a lot to keep organized. What I like to do is clear a tall enough space in my fridge to put the whole meal kit box in the fridge, after pulling out the cold packs: This way, I’m not left worrying about which groceries belong to the meal kit, and I won’t lose any ingredients. I can just pull the whole box out when I want to make a meal. That said, some plans like Home Chef, HelloFresh, and Green Chef are very good at organizing each meal into its own separate bag. An added bonus from these more organized plans is that you’ll be able to use less space in your fridge. Over time, this will matter.
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Check the recipe cards to make sure you have everything you need to make a recipe: Most meal kits expect that you’ll have certain staple ingredients in your home, usually including oil and butter. Recipes also have requirements for cookware. Check this before you start a recipe. Nothing worse than realizing you need an absentee stick of butter on step 5, with carrots already browning in the oven.
Remember, you owe nothing to the recipe: Meal kit services hire recipe developers, and on the best meal kits, these chefs have spent a lot of time optimizing each recipe. But you owe them nothing—nothing! Add spices, change steps, season food when you want to season it. Meal kits can teach you a lot about how to make a good meal and shake you out of tired culinary routines. But it’s your meal. Make it how you like. Have fun.
Chances are, wherever you are, whatever week it is, I’m testing a meal kit. I constantly cycle through various meal kits, testing and retesting each of my top picks at least once a year—and often multiple times per year.
Unlike other news sites that task many staffers with testing a different meal kit apiece—making direct comparisons difficult—I endeavor to test and retest all of WIRED’s top picks at least once a year. I check in on other meal kits as relevant, especially when each meal delivery service changes its format or expands to new offerings.
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I order at least four meals a week from each meal delivery service when possible. I prepare meals according to instructions, and see how well it goes. (Or, if I deviated from instructions out of horror or curiosity or a simple sense of culinary propriety, I note this and tell you why.)
I check my own prep times against the advertised prep times (rarely an exercise in honesty!), and take note of any inconsistencies, vagueness, or frustration in the recipe card instructions. If a meal kit needlessly recommends a nonstick pan, I like it less, especially if the recipe says I should heat said pan before adding food—or if it later makes mention of browned fond in the recipe. Nonstick isn’t cast iron or carbon; there’s no fond. If rice portions are too small, I also say so.
I check for the quality and freshness of the produce, and do the same for the meat. Where possible, I look into where the meat was sourced, and check on the reputation, safety, and standards of the meat suppliers. If a meal kit swears it’s gluten-free, I check on this—calling certifying organizations where relevant.
I usually try to order as varied a menu as possible. When relevant, I might check in on gluten-free meals, a seafood item, a vegetarian item, and white and dark meat items. I might also test a Midwestern-style hot dish or Southern meat-and-two alongside meals that draw (or attempt to draw) from global inspirations. Sometimes I test the same meal kit multiple times for different dietary needs, or call in multiple testers to do so. WIRED’s vegan tester, Molly Higgins, often tests the same meal kit I do but with a different focus.
Among the many joys of having a cat is the daily battle with the mess they leave behind. No matter what you try, finding litter and pet hair on furniture or in your bed is inevitable — either they track it in, or you do. If you’re a pet parent like me, this means searching for additional bits of litter and stray hairs that find their way into places you really don’t want them, including the bed. Short of pulling the sheets off entirely, few fixes exist.
I took a chance and tested the SandBar Roller, a $30 dual-roll lint roller, to see if it can make it easier to keep stray hair and litter at bay. I also put it through the paces for other lint-roller tasks like dusting and cleaning floors. Here’s how it fared.
How SandBar Roller differs from other lint rollers
The SandBar Roller Starter Kit I tested included the roller head, an extendable handle and two preinstalled lint rolls.John Carlsen/CNET
The SandBar Roller’s appeal lies in its two large lint rollers instead of one. While the idea doesn’t seem like much of a departure from a typical large lint roller, I couldn’t find any other dual-roller designs intended for use between bedsheets like SandBar. By arranging the rollers in this way, SandBar can clean the top and bottom sheets simultaneously without getting stuck.
The Best Handheld Vacuums, Tested by CNET
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While SandBar markets its proprietary lint rolls as stronger than normal rolls, they’re not much different from what you’ll find on the extra-large pet hair version of the Scotch-Brite lint roller. Both are 8 inches wide, with an inner diameter of 1.5 inches. Much to SandBar’s credit, its six-pack of refill rolls is just $20, which is very competitive with other lint roll refills I found on Amazon, with the optional subscription price dropping to just $16 for each one-, two- or three-month delivery.
Testing the SandBar Roller
The extendable handle is very practical.John Carlsen/CNET
Ostensibly, this design targets coastal homes, where sand gets everywhere — hence the SandBar name. While I don’t live on the coast, I’ve experienced sand in my bed while traveling, or after day trips to the desert, and cat litter is a near-daily occurrence. With that in mind, I conducted a series of informal tests to see how the SandBar Roller holds up.
Upon putting SandBar between the sheets, I noticed it moved fairly smoothly, at least until it snagged on some sheets that were too loose. It didn’t jam, but that means it works better for beds with the sheet firmly tucked at the foot — something I don’t do for various sleep-friendly reasons. Still, it worked well after tightening the sheets a bit, even snagging a few cat hairs and litter fragments. It’s a nice alternative to washing the sheets as frequently as I have to now.
I like the stickiness of the rolls, which is satisfyingly tacky without leaving residue or making it difficult to pull off used strips.John Carlsen/CNET
The SandBar removed cat fur from hard-to-reach places
Next, I wanted to see how it handled cleaning smart window shades and curtains, which often collect fur as my cat patrols windows a few times a day. It was a little more awkward, but taking the handle off proved effective, and the sticky roller collected a substantial amount of fur. I had to peel off multiple sheets because of the amount of fur, but it took only a few passes to clean the curtain. The SandBar Roller was very useful on furniture and pet beds, but I noticed that being too aggressive can occasionally dislodge a roll.
The SandBar Roller left a fairly clean surface when I dusted off a TV cabinet and soundbar. Still, I wouldn’t trade it out for the duster and handheld vacuum I usually use. Likewise, it did well on the linoleum floor and carpet near my cat’s litter box, but still I prefer the cleaner result I get from vacuuming.
Should you buy the SandBar Roller?
The specialized design does its job well, but is probably too niche for people who aren’t pet parents or near vast swathes of sand.John Carlsen/CNET
At $30, the SandBar Roller is unlikely to break anyone’s budget, especially when you can find similarly large bed lint rollers for the same price. In that context alone, including the cost of refill rolls, it’s probably as good as any other option. Still, the dual-roll design’s ability to get between sheets is a compelling reason to consider the SandBar Roller over the competition. The design suits households that typically deal with a lot of sand and litter in the beds. I could even see myself taking it camping for quick dirt cleanup in a sleeping bag.
However, I wouldn’t recommend it for short-term beach house rentals because it cuts corners — new guests expect clean sheets when they arrive. That said, making a SandBar Roller available during a guest’s visit could be worthwhile to improve their experience, as long as you leave instructions explaining what it’s for and how it works.
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If you don’t need the second roll — and mainly deal with pet hair on furniture — the ChomChom Roller doesn’t need refill rolls, making it a much better option for $25. Likewise, a handheld vacuum can do the same job with a bit more flexibility around the house — though it’s not quiet enough to use when others are sleeping. While it’s nice to have so many options, it’s always worth going with what works best for your needs and situation.
John Carlsen has more than a decade of experience testing and reviewing home tech products, with a major focus on smart home security. He earned his BS in journalism from Utah Valley University. In addition to his CNET contributions, John has written for Android Police, TWICE, Home Theater Review, SafeWise, ASecureLife and Top Ten Reviews.
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If you haven’t heard of Metal Gear, you probably haven’t played video games these last few decades. The original Metal Gear dates back to 1987 and launched on the MSX, but the real rise to fame probably started with Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation in 1998. What needed a hefty console in 1998 can comfortably fit on a microcontroller in 2026, though, as [David Montero Crespo] demonstrates with his port of MGS to the ESP32-S3.
[David] is — as we always are — standing on the shoulders of giants with this hack. Most specifically, the project relies entirely on the [FoxdieTeam] MGS Reversing decompliation project. Of course what one team decompiles, another can recompile, and in this case [David] chose to recompile the game for Expressif’s exceptional ESP32. It wasn’t quite as easy as just forking the repo and compiling with the ESP32 as a target though, as the blog post explains.
We won’t spoil it, but [David] did have to make some changes to account for the different quirks the MIPS processor in the PlayStation has compared to the Xtensa cores on the microcontroller. Then to make it playable, he put the ESP32-S3 module onto some perfboard with an analog stick from a drone controller, an ILI9341 LCD panel, and a resistor ladder to run the buttons for a barebones handheld.
OpenAI was gearing up to release GPT-6.1 Astra, its next AI model, with an October launch in its sights. That’s no longer happening. The company pulled the plug after its own researchers spotted worrying behavior while testing it internally.
What went wrong with GPT-6.1 Astra?
On paper, Astra-6.1 was an upgrade over the current GPT-6 Astra. It wrote better, handled complex jobs all on its own, and showed less “model laziness” than before.
OpenAI
However, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said the model slipped in two important areas. First, it sometimes misled users about what it had actually done. Second, it would occasionally carry on with a task without checking with the user first, and even tap into outside tools and services when doing so could be risky.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade-off,” Jain said. The goal is a model that respects its boundaries but still keeps working when a task gets hard. Astra fell short of OpenAI’s bar, so the public launch was called off.
Why is OpenAI hitting the brakes now?
AI agents have had a messy few months. Earlier this summer, hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents ended up breaking into Hugging Face while running a cybersecurity test. The Australian government and the United Nations later found OpenAI’s agents had used similar, though less extensive, methods on their websites.
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Andrew Neel / Unsplash
Last week, OpenAI also halted training on its most powerful models after one agent found a loophole in its internet restrictions and queried a public chatbot. OpenAI says Astra is a separate case. Lawmakers are watching, too. According to WSJ, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing on rogue AI agents this week, and Florida’s Attorney General has been suing OpenAI since June.
What does this mean for you?
You won’t be getting GPT-6.1 Astra anytime soon. OpenAI hopes to reuse its base model to build future GPT-6 models and is digging into what caused the problems. Personally, I’d rather wait for an AI that’s honest about its work than use one that goes off and does its own thing.
New research suggests Enceladus may be an especially promising place to search for extraterrestrial life: microbes similar to those found near Earth’s hydrothermal vents survived in lab conditions designed to mimic the Saturnian moon’s subsurface ocean. A separate study also found that material blasted from Enceladus’ plumes may naturally separate and concentrate salts, organics and potential biosignatures into individual ice grains, potentially making them easier for future spacecraft to detect.
“That is great news in the search for life,” Frank Postberg, lead author of one and co-author of the other of these new studies and professor at Freie Universitat Berlin, said in a statement. “Future spacecraft will have to analyze many individual ice particles in the plume. But if they come across one with microbial material in it, they could identify biosignatures in the particle relatively easy with already available technology.” Space.com reports: Enceladus isn’t the only place in our solar system with water — so, why is it so exciting in the search for life? Well, it has to do with the seafloor of its extensive, liquid ocean. Down deep at the bottom of this body of water, scientists think hydrothermal processes, or movement or reactions with hot water under the surface, are taking place. The plumes shooting upward from the ocean also contain trace amounts of salts and organic compounds. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft found these traces when it flew through the plumes over a decade ago. Between the hydrothermal activity and the organics and minerals in the water, this moon’s ocean has a number of aspects that could be involved in supporting life.
What’s more, using a combination of Cassini data, theoretical models and laboratory experimentation, in Postberg’s new study the team found that the plume’s water droplets blasting out into space at up to 621 miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per hour) don’t freeze as quickly as expected. Before, scientists thought the freeze would happen instantaneously once the droplets reached space, but Postberg and fellow researchers say they found the freezing would actually happen much slower.
They also found that during this freezing process, the salt, organic compounds (and maybe possible signs of life) in the water droplets separate from one another. Not only that, but the team says that as the particles are blasted out into space, they should often collide with the icy cracks of the planet’s surface. This ultimately would leave behind tiny shards of frozen droplets with individually separated out components. Essentially, it’s like the planet has organized its oceanic ingredients into tiny, frozen particle fragments. This work is described in two new studies published in the journal Science Advances here and here.
In context: Android smartphone maker Nothing has launched the Headphone (1) Pro, its new flagship audio product, which it claims combines an elevated listening experience for consumers with studio-grade production and mixing features for professionals. It succeeds last year’s Nothing Headphone (1), which TIME named one of its Best Inventions of 2025.
The biggest change in the new model is a three-driver audio system. It includes a bass dynamic driver designed to add more punch and sensitivity to low frequencies, a precision dynamic driver that adds more texture to vocals and instruments, and a new treble xMEMS driver that Nothing says delivers crisper highs.
Nothing also worked with London’s Metropolis Studios to tune the Headphone (1) Pro, with the collaboration focused on professional audio tools and soundstage characteristics.
The company also highlights an improved adaptive active noise cancellation system that uses a 10-microphone array to more accurately filter ambient noise than the first-gen model. With claimed noise reduction of up to 46 dB, Nothing is positioning the Headphone (1) Pro against premium rivals from Bose and Sony.
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Nothing says the improvement in noise reduction should be particularly noticeable in strong winds or noisy traffic. The headphones also feature redesigned ear cushions with an 8mm silicone baffle wall inside, creating a stronger sound barrier and improving the seal around the ears.
The Headphone (1) Pro supports Hi-Res wireless audio and wired playback over USB-C at up to 24-bit/192 kHz. It also offers five modes of Dynamic Spatial Audio with head tracking, along with five new custom EQ profiles. A separate Flat EQ switch is designed to give producers and creators a more neutral sound profile.
The Headphones 1 Pro is built out of aluminum and titanium to provide a durable shell while creating a premium look and feel. It also retains Nothing’s transparent design language, using shatter- and scratch-resistant 9H Panda Glass on both ear cups to reveal parts of the triple-driver architecture.
Despite the increased use of metal, Nothing has reduced the headphones’ weight to 327 grams through a redesigned internal architecture, including replacing steel arms with titanium. Other changes intended to improve comfort over longer listening sessions include a wider headband with thicker padding and softer ear cushions.
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The Headphone (1) Pro is positioned to compete with premium models such as the Sony WH-1000XM6, Bose QuietComfort Ultra, and Apple AirPods Max. It is priced at $399 and will be available beginning September 29 through Nothing’s official store at nothing.tech, Amazon, and Best Buy stores across across the US and Canada.
Ned Jenkinson of the University of Birmingham and Matthew Weightman of the University of Oxford discuss how advancements in brain research might affect how we learn and grow our skillsets.
Whether learning a new piano piece or adapting your tennis serve, acquiring physical skills depends on your brain’s ability tostrengthen and refine neural connections. Researchers are exploring whether this process can be accelerated with technology.
Scientists are particularly interested in the potential of non-invasivebrain stimulation, a group of techniques that can alter brain activity without surgery.
If these techniques can successfully enhanceneuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganise and form new connections during learning, then they could be of use anywhere where performance depends on learning complex movements, from sport and music to surgery and beyond. Researchers are also seeing if these technologies could help with learning non-physical skills, such aspicking up a foreign language.
Elite sport, professional gaming and high-performance workplaces could all become targets for these enhancements if they prove effective. Brain stimulation could also have a big role to play in medicine, helping patients recover physical skills lost through injury or disease, such asstroke.
Studies suggest there’s a lot of potential here. But translating this potential into useful tech that reliably boosts learning physical skills remains a big challenge.
Stimulating findings
Research into enhancing motor learning with electric or magnetic stimulation has been gaining momentum since the turn of the millennium, with early studies garnering considerable excitement.
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In atypical experiment, participants might learn a sequence of finger movements similar to practising scales on a piano while receiving stimulation over brain regions involved in movement. Other studies have examined how stimulation could be used forbalance training or teachingsports-relatedskills orsurgical techniques.
Some of these experiments produced eye-catching results, finding that participantslearned certain movement tasks faster orretained skills for longer if they underwent brain stimulation. But other studies failed to find benefits. And in some cases, researchers struggled to replicate the success of earlier promising experiments when repeating them.
One reason for these mixed findings is that there’s no such thing as a universal ‘learning network’ in our brains. Different skills rely ondifferent combinations of areas near the surface of the brain as well as those deep within it.
Additionally, people can respond very differently to the same stimulation. Factors such as age, anatomy, genetics and even baseline skill level may influence whether stimulation is beneficial. Add to that the infinite number of ways to apply stimulation, the picture becomes murkier.
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Despite these challenges, the field continues to evolve in its quest to enhance motor learning. For instance, rather than broadly stimulating the brain, researchers are increasingly targeting specific neural circuits involved in learning.
This is partly thanks to advances inneuroimaging andcomputational modelling, which has allowed scientists to predict how electrical currents travel through a person’s brain. Newer brain stimulation technologies, such as focused ultrasound, can also now reach deep structures involved in skill acquisition.
The goal is to use these technologies not simply to increase brain activity, but to influence the right neural circuit at the right time during learning. This idea builds on a fundamental principle of neuroscience, often summarised as“neurons that fire together, wire together”. When brain cells are repeatedly activated at the same time, the connections between them become stronger.
By carefully timing stimulation tocoincide with the movements made during practice, researchers hope to reinforce the neural pathways involved in learning a new skill. In principle, this could make stimulation more reliable and more effective than current approaches, but researchers are stillfine tuning exactly how this would work.
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Motoring ahead
Important questions remain. Who would have access? Should stimulation be regulated in competitive environments such as sport? And how much evidence should be required before consumer devices are marketed to healthy users?
These questions are becoming increasingly relevant as brain stimulation moves beyond the laboratory and clinic. A number of at-home devices are now available for people to buy.Some have receivedregulatory approval, as they’re indicated for treating medical conditions such as depression. But there’s also a growing market for devices forcognitive and performance enhancement. For these uses, no regulatory approval is needed.
The technology is advancing rapidly, but evidence to support it and regulations governing it are still trying to catch up. Proper frameworks for its adoption may simply be bypassed by the ready possibility of ‘DIY’ brain stimulation.
For now, brain stimulation is unlikely to transform anyone into an overnight virtuoso or elite athlete. But as researchers develop increasingly precise ways of targeting the neural circuits that underpin learning, the prospect of enhancing human performance is shifting from science fiction towards scientific possibility.
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The challenge today is not simply learning how to influence the brain, but deciding where, when and why we should.
Ned Jenkinson is a senior lecturer in human movement sciences at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Birmingham. His research incorporates a range of techniques including non-invasive brain stimulation, electrophysiological recording, eye-tracking, neuroimaging and behavioural techniques. He uses these techniques to investigate how the brain controls movement and how it allows us to learn new motor skills.
Matthew Weightman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging in the Plasticity Group at the University of Oxford, led by Prof Heidi Johansen-Berg. He is broadly interested in the field of sensorimotor neuroscience. His current work focuses on the role of sleep to recovery after stroke. More specifically, he is interested in how we can improve sleep after a stroke, whether improved sleep in stroke patients relates to better functional recovery, and if physiological processes that occur during sleep can be enhanced post-stroke to boost consolidation.
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Keio Corporation (Keio), a major private railway operator in Japan, said its network was hit by a ransomware attack over the weekend, disrupting some of its business systems.
Following a system failure in the early hours of Saturday, the company confirmed the attack and shut down its network to prevent additional damage.
The company said it is investigating the extent of the impact and whether the attackers accessed any customer or business partner information.
Keio is a large Japanese railway operator with 85 km of track and 69 stations, as well as a separate hospitality business of 25 hotels. The company has over 2,200 employees and a reported annual revenue of about $2.6 billion.
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“In the early hours of September 26, 2026, we confirmed a ransomware attack on our group’s servers. We have reported the incident to the police and are conducting an investigation into the attack’s route and damage with the cooperation of external experts,” Keio says.
The incident appears to have affected only the hospitality side of Keio’s business, not train operations.
A separate announcement published on the company’s Keio Plaza Hotel Tokyo website is warning of possible delays on some customer-facing services.
At the time of writing, BleepingComputer could not find a ransomware group claiming the attack on Keio.
BleepingComputer has contacted the company to request more information about the incident, and we will update this post with their response once it reaches us.
Tokyo Metro has also disclosed a cyber incident over the weekend in which attackers gained unauthorized access to its systems and accessed 59,000 member email addresses.
Although both Keio and Tokyo Metro are Japanese railway operators, it is unclear if the organizations were targeted in a coordinated campaign by the same threat actor.
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Tokyo Metro is a major transit operator that runs nine subway lines covering 195 km and 180 stations, carrying an average of 7 million passengers daily.
The company said the breached systems contained only email addresses and that it has already identified and closed the security weakness the attackers used in this case.
Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.
Home puts chats, delegated work, and Office documents inside one interface
Code lets non-programmers describe software and have Copilot build it
Autopilot can continue recurring work without waiting for another instruction
Microsoft has introduced a redesigned version of its Copilot AI platform which claims to combine chat, delegated work, and coding tools into a unified application experience for users.
The company says the update is meant to let individuals and organizations scale artificial intelligence across everyday tasks and long-term projects.
Three new capabilities anchor this release, including Home, Code and Autopilot, each aimed at a different kind of work.
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Home brings Chat and Cowork together
The Home tool brings together two existing modes, Chat for quick questions and Cowork for tasks users delegate entirely, under one shared starting point.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now operate inside this same interface, letting users draft documents, budgets, and presentations without switching applications.
In these documents, Copilot is now grounded in Fabric IQ, pulling context from more than 20 million semantic models built in Power BI.
Edits made by colleagues or by the assistant itself appear in real time, so progress stays synchronized across a shared file.
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A new plugin registry will let organizations manage Microsoft, partner and custom-built plugins from one central catalog starting this month.
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Independent developers and partners can also publish plugins once for use across multiple Copilot surfaces under the new registry arrangement.
The Code tool allows non-programmers to describe an app, tracker or dashboard in plain language and have it built automatically.
This feature runs on the same underlying technology used in GitHub Copilot and can be hosted within a company’s own systems.
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Autopilot operates without constant prompting
Autopilot, the third addition, is a persistent agent capable of completing recurring work without needing a new instruction each time.
It can run supplier reviews or similar multi-step processes, build schedules, contact stakeholders, and follow up on outstanding items independently.
Because it operates continuously in the cloud, work can continue late at night or whenever a person’s attention shifts elsewhere.
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A related feature called Today, entering private preview in October, will summarize missed messages and pending tasks across mail and chat.
Microsoft is also tying spending controls to these tools through a system it calls FinOps for AI, letting administrators track usage.
Administrators can set spending limits, approve credit requests and restrict which AI models different teams are permitted to use each month.
Everyday tasks like quick answers or first drafts run on a fixed-price subscription, while agentic features use usage-based billing.
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Code, Cowork and Autopilot all fall under this usage-based pricing model, alongside frontier models Microsoft refers to as Astra and Fable.
Home and Code are set to roll out through Microsoft’s Frontier program within weeks, and Autopilot enters private preview by month’s end.
Microsoft has not released independent data showing how widely the three features are being adopted, how accurate they are, or how much time they actually save.
Automate your Mac with ease using Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence.
Filipe Espósito for Engadget
Shortcuts has been available on Mac since macOS Monterey, but it’s one of those utilities many Mac users have never explored. At first, it can seem too complicated. You have to know which actions to choose and how to connect them, then hope it all works.
But macOS 27 Golden Gate changes that with Describe a Shortcut, which lets you type exactly what you need and have Shortcuts do the heavy work for you with AI. It doesn’t always work, but it makes the app much easier to use — especially if you’re not an expert.
If you’re not familiar with Shortcuts, it’s an automation tool where you create scripts to handle tasks on your devices. Apple’s own example is a shortcut that texts your spouse with an estimated arrival time based on traffic when you’re leaving work. But you can get much more complex, like a shortcut that checks your calendar and the weather to give you a summary of what to expect today.
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There are many possibilities, and now with macOS 27, it’s much easier to master the app.
Creating shortcuts on your Mac is easy
Filipe Espósito for Engadget
Creating a new shortcut takes a few seconds. Open the Shortcuts app on your Mac and click the Plus button to enter a prompt. The more details you provide, the more likely the app is to get your shortcut right. A command like “Clean up my Downloads” might be too vague for the app to understand what you really want. Instead, try something like “Every Friday, move anything in my Downloads folder older than 30 days into a folder called Archive.” You’re more likely to end up with a working shortcut when you provide clear details.
This is a good example of how Shortcuts are helpful for tasks you often forget to do; no one really cleans out their Downloads folder unless they’re trying to free up space. Plus, you can check the result right away by opening the folder and looking at what moved. If the shortcut moved too much, re-enter the prompt with even more specific details.
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A shortcut can also be great for summarizing long text with Apple Intelligence. Try something like “Take the text on my clipboard, summarize it in three sentences and save it to a new note.” Then copy a long article or an email, run the shortcut and you’ll have the short version in Notes.
Make your shortcuts easier to reach
Filipe Espósito for Engadget
If a shortcut isn’t part of your normal routine, chances are you’ll forget about it after a while. Thankfully, you can assign a keyboard combo to a shortcut, or pin it to the menu bar, so you’ll never forget it.
Choose the shortcut you want to adjust and click Edit. Go to the Shortcut Details menu (the one with the information icon) and select Add Keyboard Shortcut. To add it to the Control Center or menu bar, open Control Center on your Mac (at the top-right) and select Edit Controls. There, all you have to do is add the action from the Shortcuts app, and you’re all set. Exploring the Automation tab is also a good idea for creating a seamless workflow of shortcuts that run on their own when you need them.
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Shortcuts isn’t the only element in macOS 27 that acts on your behalf. Visual Intelligence has its own key combo: Shift + Command + Space. After pressing this, select a window on-screen and have Siri answer questions about it or take action, like adding an event to your calendar. Try it on an email with a date buried in it, for example. Siri can also run your shortcuts via voice, speaking of which.
Shortcuts and Siri AI require Apple Intelligence, which means you need a Mac with an M1 chip or later — Intel Mac users are out of luck. Also, some limits may apply when using Apple’s AI models in Shortcuts. More complex prompts could reach a limit faster.
Peak XV Partners, one of the largest venture capital firms investing in markets including India and Southeast Asia with more than $10 billion in assets under management, has increased how much it invests per startup through Surge, its seed-stage investing platform, as it unveils a new cohort of 18 companies.
At least three of the companies in this cohort had already raised outside funding, in some cases from Peak XV itself, before joining Surge.
The new batch, called Surge 12, is the first to operate under Peak XV’s higher investment ceiling of up to $5 million per company, up from $3 million previously. The venture firm invested more than $50 million across the cohort, which has collectively raised over $90 million in seed funding, according to Peak XV. Its median investment per company has also increased, though the firm declined to disclose the figure.
“The bar to raise a Series A has gone up pretty significantly,” Rajan Anandan (pictured above), managing director at Peak XV, said in an interview. He added that the firm is also seeing more capital-intensive companies, particularly in deeptech, that are raising larger rounds at the seed stage.
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Surge has become more global with each cohort, Anandan told TechCrunch, with its latest group spanning founders and companies from San Francisco to Sydney. Just five of the 18 startups in Surge 12 are focused on the Indian market, while more than half of the companies are based in India. The remaining 13 target global markets, highlighting the difference between where the companies are built and where they expect to find customers.
Since its launch in 2019, when Peak XV operated as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, Surge has backed more than 180 startups founded by entrepreneurs representing more than 18 nationalities. Peak XV says the 10 largest companies to emerge from those cohorts now generate more than $1 billion in combined annual revenue.
Surge founders at the Peak XV U.S. Immersion 2026Image Credits:Peak XV Partners
Anandan described Surge as one way Peak XV invests at the seed stage, alongside its standard seed investing, while the firm still remains an investor as companies progress through later funding rounds. The founders it backs typically include repeat entrepreneurs, experienced operators, and highly specialized technical founders, he said, with about 50% to 60% of a typical cohort made up of people coming from operating roles at established technology companies.
This cohort’s startups span AI, robotics, space, consumer products, healthcare, music, and fintech, ranging from AI safety and personal computing to autonomous robots built for underground pipes and satellites designed to detect radio-frequency signals from orbit.
The Surge 12 cohort
Alma — founded by Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan — is building a personal computing platform focused on making computer use faster and more affordable. Its founders previously worked at Microsoft Research and were founding engineers at Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based startup building AI models for Indian languages.
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August AI — founded by Anuruddh Mishra, an IIT-BHU alumnus who started the company in 2022 after a personal medical misdiagnosis — provides a healthcare platform that combines AI with physician-led care, reaching over 9 million users across 160 countries.
Ditto — founded by UC Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu — works as an AI dating matchmaker inside iMessage, aimed at helping college students turn digital introductions into in-person connections. (TechCrunch wrote more about this one last month.) The company had already raised $9.2 million in a Peak XV-led seed round announced earlier this year.
GameStock — founded by Antoine Mistico, Easton Dana, and Vivek Indlebele Narasimha Prasad — brings competition mechanics to financial markets, turning investing and trading into a more competitive experience. Mistico is a two-time founder and former professional baseball player.
HiLoop — founded by Jad Ghalayini, Karan Brar, and Thomas Boser — helps AI companies adapt general-purpose open-weight models for specific applications using its post-training platform. Its founding team includes former Reducto engineers and a Cambridge computer science PhD who completed his doctorate at 24.
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Hoola Health — founded by Deeksha Senguttuva — focuses on care for children and their families, providing consultations, vaccinations, medicines, diagnostics, developmental therapy, and dental services on a single platform. Senguttuvan grew up around healthcare, as her family built and operated a hospital group.
Kello — founded by Mona Gandhi and Subramanya Jingade — is building an AI-powered talent-discovery platform focused on identifying a candidate’s potential and trajectory rather than relying primarily on conventional credentials. Gandhi says she was Airbnb’s first female engineer and she previously founded Upraised, while Jingade previously co-founded AmbitionBox.
Kindling — founded by Adam Miller and Sachin Shah — is building what it calls a “storytelling operating system” for technology startups, using AI to help companies develop and produce their communications and content.
Puralink — founded by Harrison Crowe-Maxwell, Shyeon Delnawaz, and Thien “Long” Tran — is developing autonomous robots that can navigate underground pipe networks. Crowe-Maxwell has been building robots since childhood and turned university research into the patented drive technology behind the startup.
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Reinforce Labs — founded by Anish Das Sarma — is developing tools to evaluate, red-team, and remediate enterprise AI systems. Sarma previously founded a company acquired by Airbnb and later served as a director at Google, where he led AI and machine-learning teams.
Riffle — founded by Anurag Choudhary and deo — is building a browser-based platform where musicians can create, collaborate on, and share music, reducing the need to move between separate tools during the creative process.
Rosella — founded by Chris Dwyer and Sean Stuart — is building an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for U.S. businesses, using AI to automate parts of the traditionally manual process of finding and placing business insurance. Rosella raised a roughly $2.5 million pre-seed round led by Peak XV and Intact Private Capital earlier this year.
Tribe Money — founded by Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker — gives an AI-powered personal finance platform that helps users track their money, research investments and make investing decisions.
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ULOOK — founded by Adheesh Boratkar and Siddhesh Ravindra Naik — is building autonomous satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence, targeting customers globally. Its founders have worked on more than 12 satellite missions. The company had already raised roughly $2.3 million in seed funding from growX Ventures and InfoEdge Ventures before joining Surge.
Wingit — founded by Nikunj Kothari and Saksham Khandelwal — is building a beauty platform aimed at India’s growing premium-consumer market. It is focused on how consumers discover and shop for higher-end beauty products.
Three other startups in the cohort have yet to publicly reveal their names or products. Peak XV said they are working in education, applied AI, and medical products.
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