The union representing staff at Apple Towson Town Center has announced a public rally for May 27, 2026, protesting against Apple’s treatment of its workers.

Apple Towson is not the only store that Apple has decided to close, but it is the only unionized one. It was the first Apple Store to unionize, and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Union claims that its members are being discriminated against because of this.

Known as the Machinists’ Union for short, it has now announced a public protest.

“[Elected] officials, “labor allies, and community leaders will hold a #DoRightApple public solidarity rally on Wednesday, May 27,” says the union, “to demand accountability from Apple and support for the nearly 90 IAM Local 4538 members facing job loss.”

Apple has said that it is closing this store, and two others in June 2026, because of changes in the shopping malls where they are based.

“Following the departure of several retailers and declining conditions at Trumbull Mall, the Shops at North County, and Towson Town Center,” said Apple when the closures were announced, “we’ve made the difficult decision to close our stores at these locations.”

Local council members have objected to Apple’s decision to close the store. But the Machinists’ Union is calling out Apple over how it is treating its members differently from staff in the non-unionized stores.

Specifically, Apple has said that staff from those stores can continue in their jobs at other Apple Store locations. For the Towson store, it says those staff are “eligible to apply for open roles at Apple in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement.”

That agreement is the one established between Apple and the union. However, the Machinists’ Union claims that there is no clause in it which would prohibit Apple from relocating its staff.

The Machinists’ Union has previously filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge against Apple with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB has previously been successful in accusing Apple of illegal union-busting activities.

This public protest rally on May 27 will start at 11 a.m. Eastern at Patriot Plaza, 400 E. Washington Ave., Towson, Md., just over half a mile away from the store. It will be streamed live on the Machinists’ Union’s Facebook page.

The $20B search engine preference deal with Apple was “fair and square,” Google insists in its antitrust appeal against the Department of Justice.

In August 2024, a court ruled that Google was a monopolist in the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet. One that involved an investigation into Google’s $20 billion deal with Apple to make Google the preferred search engine of Safari.

On May 22, Google filed its appeal against federal rulings that it held illegal monopolies in search and advertising.

The filing posted by Reuters covers many areas, including that Judge Amit Mehta made legal errors in his 2024 ruling. Google doesn’t believe that it had illegally blocked competitors with its search deal, but really, it’s because Apple chose it.

In the filing, Google claims that, whether the court believes Google has monopoly power or not, it “did nothing” to harm competition. Google didn’t block rivals to make their own offers, and it didn’t block Apple from choosing a better one either.

There is no evidence that Google’s customers would have chosen a rival, even if those agreements didn’t exist, it continues.

It even pointed to Apple’s conclusion that the Microsoft rival Bing was “inferior” and “horrible at monetizing advertising,”

“Google just prevailed in the marketplace fair and square,” it declares.

Apple could’ve promoted other engines, the filing explains, and that Safari also does list alternative options within its settings. Ultimately, Google says that the court interpreted there to be “exclusivity” when really it was for “sound business reasons” on Apple’s part.

Aiming for a reversal

While Google has managed to escape major injury from the lawsuit, it still has some duties to take care of.

The later ruling was in September 2025, when it was decided that Google didn’t have to sell off Android or Chrome. It was also permitted to continue its $20 billion search deal with Apple.

However, it was decided that Google had to share search data with its competitors.

The appeal is an attempt to go back on this and other remedies that Google was ordered to carry out. Reversing the ruling wouldn’t affect things like the Apple search deal, but it would stop the data-sharing requirement entirely.

A section of the appeal discusses how this applies to rival companies that, to Google, shouldn’t be classed as such. Specifically, companies that deal strictly with AI.

To Google, it has to share data with firms like OpenAI, which is behind ChatGPT, which doesn’t offer its own general search engine. They provide answers that reference what would normally be search results.

Google argues that it is wrong to be forced to supply data to OpenAI as a rival. Generative AI products didn’t really exist in a substantial way at the time, so the court couldn’t incorporate ChatGPT and others as rivals when considering its ruling.

AI companies are already massively succeeding, without any need to “free-ride on Google’s success,” it proposes. As such, Google believes that the data-sharing remedies shouldn’t apply to AI companies that don’t offer a general search engine.

At the time of publication, the court has not responded nor scheduled any further courtroom activity. Based on typical scheduling patterns, the case could continue in late 2026, or even in 2027.

A supply chain attack targeting the Laravel Lang localization packages has exposed developers to a sophisticated credential-stealing malware campaign after attackers abused GitHub version tags to distribute malicious code through Composer packages.

Security firms StepSecurity, Aikido Security, and Socket warned about the compromise on Friday, warning that attackers had rewritten GitHub tags across four repositories maintained by the Laravel Lang organization rather than publishing entirely new malicious versions.

The affected packages include laravel-lang/lang, laravel-lang/http-statuses, laravel-lang/attributes, and possibly laravel-lang/actions. The Laravel Lang packages are third-party localization packages and are not part of the official Laravel project.

According to Aikido, the attackers compromised 233 versions across three repositories, while Socket said roughly 700 historical versions may have been impacted. 

What made the attack stand out is that the actual project’s source code was not modified to include malicious code, but instead the attackers abused a GitHub feature that allows tags to point to commits in forks of the same repository.

“Rather than publishing a new malicious version, the attacker rewrote every existing git tag in each repository to point at a new malicious commit,” explained StepSecurity.

“The rewrites started at 22:32 UTC against laravel-lang/lang (the flagship Laravel translations package, with 502 tags) and finished by 00:00 UTC against laravel-lang/actions. All four repositories share the same fake author identity, the same modified files, and the same payload behavior, which makes them almost certainly the work of one actor using one compromised credential with org wide push access.”

This allowed the attackers to publish what appeared to be legitimate release tags for the project, which actually led to malicious commits stored in an attacker-controlled fork of the repository.

When developers installed the package via Composer, it would download the malicious code while it appeared to install legitimate Laravel Lang releases.

Executes a credential-stealer

The researchers found that the malicious releases introduced a malicious file named ‘src/helpers.php’, which was automatically loaded by Composer.

The injected code acted as a dropper that downloaded a second payload from the attacker’s command and control server at flipboxstudio[.]info.

The downloaded PHP payload [VirusTotal] was a large cross-platform credential stealer for Linux, macOS, and Windows that harvests cloud credentials, Kubernetes secrets, Vault tokens, Git credentials, CI/CD secrets, SSH keys, browser data, cryptocurrency wallets, password managers, VPN configurations, and local `.env` configuration files. 

The malware also contains regular expression patterns used to extract AWS keys, GitHub tokens, Slack tokens, Stripe secrets, database credentials, JWTs, SSH private keys, and cryptocurrency recovery phrases from files and environment variables. 

On Windows systems, the PHP payload also extracts a base64-encoded executable [VirusTotal] embedded within the file, which is written to the %TEMP% folder as a random .exe filename, and then launched.

BleepingComputer’s analysis of the Windows infostealer shows it is named ‘DebugElevator’ and designed to target Chrome, Brave, and Edge, and extract App-Bound Encryption keys needed to decrypt stored browser credentials.

An embedded PDB path also references the Windows account name ‘Mero’ and contains ‘claude,’ potentially indicating that AI was used to assist in developing the Windows malware.

C:\Users\Mero\OneDrive\Desktop\stuff\claude\Chromium-DebugElevator\x64\Release\DebugChromium.pdb

The researchers say that once the sensitive data has been extracted, the malware encrypts it and sends it back to the C2 server.

Aikido says they reported the incident to Packagist, which responded quickly by removing the malicious versions and temporarily unlisting the affected packages to prevent additional installations.

Developers using Laravel Lang packages are advised to review installed package versions, rotate exposed credentials, inspect systems for indicators of compromise, and, if possible, check for historical outbound connections to flipboxstudio[.]info.

Automated pentesting tools deliver real value, but they were built to answer one question: can an attacker move through the network? They were not built to test whether your controls block threats, your detection rules fire, or your cloud configs hold.

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Art lovers searching for a meaningful summer project will enjoy the LEGO Ideas Vincent van Gogh The Starry Night set, priced at $136 (was $170). This 2,316-piece model turns the 1889 painting into a three-dimensional display that captures the original’s swirling energy in brick form. The project began as a fan submission on the LEGO Ideas platform. Designer Truman Cheng translated the famous canvas into a build that uses clever layering instead of flat mosaics.

Every stage directs your hands through the painting’s composition, beginning with a peaceful village and a large cypress tree at the bottom. Small details such as rooftops and windows begin to appear. The big black tree begins to rise, using some care to give it true presence. These early stages go quickly enough to keep things exciting without distracting you from paying attention to all of the nuances that make the scenario appear authentic.

LEGO Ideas Vincent Van Gogh The Starry Night – Building Set for Adults, Ages 18+ – Beautifully Detailed…

• Starry Night LEGO – Channel the spirit of Vincent van Gogh to construct a 3D LEGO wall art homage to one of his most beloved paintings: The Starry…
• Vincent Minifigure Display – This detailed home décor set comes with an adjustable display arm for the Van Gogh minifigure holding a paintbrush and…
• Capturing Art Techniques – Capture Van Gogh’s colors and brushstrokes with clever building techniques that mirror the original swirling clouds and…

Once you’ve completed the lower sections, the spotlight moves to the sky. Layers of flat brick plates begin to rise and fan out in repetitive patterns resembling Van Gogh’s thick brush strokes. With each additional row, the arcs of the clouds and stars become deeper, resulting in an amazing three-dimensional texture rather than a simple outline. Fans describe this section as almost meditative because, while the action remains basic, the outcomes become far more amazing with each handful of bricks. The color palette is also spot on for the artwork, so you get the typical mix of blues, yellows, and whites developing gradually, which keeps you going till the end.

The set includes a detailed Vincent van Gogh minifigure. He’s holding a paint brush and palette and stands on an adjustable arm in front of a tiny printed easel displaying a miniature replica of the same artwork. The arm gives the impression that he is either working on the large model or simply inspecting it. That simple touch gives warmth to the entire exhibit, making it feel more personal than just a beautiful piece of decoration.

When all is said and done, the model measures about 12 inches tall, 15 inches wide, and 5 inches deep. You can either place it on a shelf or hang it on the wall with the provided hook. In either case, you’ll have a showcase that makes you want to stop and take a closer look, not just because it’s a really good LEGO model, but also because it looks exactly like the renowned painting.

UK law enforcement is done waiting for tech companies to sort themselves out. The National Crime Agency (NCA) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) have jointly called for children under 16 to be blocked from any social media, gaming apps, or AI that fails to disable what they describe as “high-risk” features.

This comes as the UK government is actively consulting on whether to introduce a full social media ban for under-16 users, per the BBC.

UK police want these six features to be banned from kids’ apps

Police want platforms to disable six features they say are enabling serious harm to children online. These include strangers being able to contact kids directly, private or encrypted messaging, algorithms pushing harmful content, nude image sharing, weak age checks, and anything that makes children easily discoverable by other users.

A lot of these are already covered under the UK’s Online Safety Act, which lets Ofcom, the UK’s official communications watchdog, investigate and fine platforms that break the rules. Police want to go further, though, pushing for legislation that blocks under-16s from any platform offering these features entirely, along with device-level nudity controls for all under-18s.

The online threat to children is getting worse

The stats are genuinely alarming. The NCA logged 92,000 reports of potential child sexual abuse activity online in 2025, and NCA director general Graeme Biggar says victims are getting younger, and that children are increasingly becoming offenders too.

NPCC chair Gavin Stephens put it bluntly, calling the internet a “wild west” where regulation just has not kept up. The government responded by backing Ofcom to go after platforms that do not comply, and said it is exploring everything from age limits and app curfews to outright bans.

These proposals do not go as far as Australia’s full under-16 social media ban, but the message from UK police is pretty clear. Time is up for tech companies dragging their feet on child safety.

Samsung Electronics and its unions failed to reach a deal on Wednesday, leaving a threatened 18-day walkout set to begin on Thursday.

Last-ditch South Korean government-mediated talks collapsed today (20 May), leaving an 18-day strike at the world’s biggest memory chipmaker set to begin on Thursday. As SiliconRepublic.com reported on 18 May, Samsung Electronics and its unions had entered what prime minister Kim Min-seok described as a final round of negotiations to avert a walkout by over 45,000 workers.

Unions had accepted the Korean National Labour Relations Commission’s mediation proposal, but Samsung rejected it, reported CNBC, with shares falling by 4.4pc on the news, according to Bloomberg.

Samsung Electronics said it “deeply regrets” the breakdown in mediation talks, in a statement published by Korean financial outlet Money Today, adding that it “will not give up on dialogue until the last moment”.

The dispute centres on Samsung’s performance-based bonus system. Unions are seeking bonuses equivalent to 15pc of operating profit, the removal of a cap limiting payouts to 50pc of base salary and formal multi-year contractual guarantees. Samsung has consistently refused to meet those demands in full.

The economic stakes remain huge. The prime minister had estimated direct strike losses at 1trn won ($664.7m), potentially rising to 100trn won if chip production disruptions force Samsung to scrap wafers already in production.

Officials have so far declined to invoke emergency arbitration powers – which could suspend the strike for up to 30 days – with the labour commissioner saying mediation could still restart, according to Reuters.

A court injunction requires safety and facility staffing to remain at normal levels during any industrial action, which is expected to limit the immediate production impact.

The company accounts for 22.8pc of South Korea’s exports and revenue equivalent to 12.5pc of GDP. With talks over and the strike set to begin on Thursday, attention turns to whether Samsung management will make a fresh approach to the unions tonight – or whether the government will finally reach for its emergency powers.

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from the turning-gold-into-lead dept

Elon Musk, business genius. When Elon Musk announced his plans to buy Twitter, some of his billionaire friends rushed to text him to say they’d throw whatever money they wanted into the deal. Larry Ellison casually offered “a billion… or whatever you recommend.” Marc Andreessen offered $250 million, no questions asked. This all came out in the lawsuit when Musk tried to back out of the deal:

Publicly, these billionaires insisted that Elon was a sure shot business genius who would easily make them much richer. Elon then sent around a presentation to other investors who would perhaps take a bit more convincing. The NY Times got its hands on Elon’s clearly pulled-out-of-his-ass projections. $26.4 billion in revenue by 2028! That included $12 billion from advertising, $10 billion from subscriptions and the rest from licensing.

Remember, at the time, Twitter’s ad revenue was decent: $4.51 billion in 2021 (its last full year as a public company) with another half a billion in licensing revenue. So Elon was suggesting he had the magic formula for massively increasing ad revenue and subscription revenue.

There was plenty of reporting over the last few years on how the opposite happened. Ad revenue absolutely tanked. It got so bad that the company started suing advertisers for not advertising on the newly renamed X (and threatening advertisers that choosing not to advertise would get them added to the lawsuit), pretending that it was some sort of antitrust violation. It took a court to point out that this was utter nonsense.

Anyway, given the private nature of X, we didn’t have any real official confirmation on some of the revenue numbers. But in the last year and a half, Elon has been merging his Xs. He merged X into xAI, then merged xAI into SpaceX. And now SpaceX has filed for a massive IPO, giving us an S1 with some financial information about how X is actually performing after all.

Of course, by merging all these companies, it gives Elon a bit of a chance to obfuscate the numbers. The user metrics, for example, show both users of X and xAI’s grok (which are not all the same). Also, somewhat ironically given Elon’s pretextual whining about how there were too many bots on Twitter, the S1 admits that a lot of the activity on X these days is almost certainly bots and they apparently have no way to break out how many humans still use the service:

“supported accounts” refers to, when used in the context of our X platform and Grok, a human, bot or similar account that logged into the X platform or Grok. The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active.

Gosh. I thought you were taking over the site to get rid of all the bots and spam.

Anyhoo, now that we have some numbers, let’s compare them to what Elon sold his investors.

Remember, the plan was $26.4 billion by 2028. We’re more than halfway there. How’s it going? Well… when he combines xAI (grok) revenue with X revenue (so not even just breaking out X’s ad revenue)… we get… a total of $3.201 billion in 2025. So, just to put this in perspective… when he took over in 2022 he laid out a five year plan to take the company that had $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before he bought it up to $12 billion in five years. Three years in and… it’s now somewhere pretty far below $3 billion. And they’re proud of the fact it’s finally started to go up again:

Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025 increased by $581 million, or 22.2%, compared to the prior year ended December 31, 2024. This increase was primarily due to an increase in advertising revenue of $116 million as advertising spend increased from advertising partners on X and an increase in AI solutions and infrastructure revenue of $465 million.

So… from 2024 to 2025… they increased advertising revenue on X… by… $116 million, after knocking it down by somewhere in the range of $2 billion? BUSINESS GENIUS.

But, that’s okay. Part of the pitch was that he was going to get advertising to be less than 50% of Twitter’s revenue by 2028 because it was going to be replaced by a massive wave of subscription revenue. $10 billion by 2028! Musk predicted 69 million users of Twitter Blue (what became X Premium) by 2025 and 159 million in 2028. And then also another 104 million subscribers to a mysterious “X” subscription by 2028, which was not explained in the pitch. Even though this was before the rollout of ChatGPT, if we want to grant Elon credit to think he had already planned to launch an AI subscription service called “X” by then… how are we doing towards those numbers?

As of March 31, 2026, we reached approximately 6.3 million active paid subscribers, which was comprised of approximately 4.4 million X Premium and Premium+ paid subscribers and approximately 1.9 million SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy and SuperGrok Lite paid subscribers.

Leaving aside the Grok subscribers… they have… 4.4 million X Premium subscribers. That seems a bit short of the 69 million paid subscribers (which was almost certainly chosen because Musk is, emotionally, a 12-year-old boy). Once you combine that with the Grok subscribers (most of those plans cost significantly more than X Premium) and you get a grand total of… $365 million. Given the breakdown of X vs. Grok subscribers and the different pricing, X subscribers likely account for less than two-thirds of that revenue — call it under $250 million. That seems juuuuust a bit short of $10 billion.

His initial pitch to investors also projected that by 2028 the payments business would be bringing in over a billion dollars. It’s now 2025 and while the S1 mentions payments, it’s very much a future thing:

We plan to further broaden the value proposition of X through offerings like Money, a product we launched in beta in November 2025, which aims to expand platform utility by enabling payments and other financial services.

In the pitch to investors, the plan was to have that generating revenue by 2023. A bit behind schedule, it seems.

Also, part of the pitch was that all the debt he’d taken on would be paid back through free cash flow. He even says that by 2025 (hmm… last year…) the company would grow to $3.2 billion. Uh, not so close. Again, that almost matches the revenue number, but the cash flow was… decidedly negative. The entire AI part of the business lost over $6 billion last year. I don’t think Elon’s paying off the debt with free cash flow any time soon.

Look, obviously, forward looking projections and investor pitches are fantasies. They always are. That’s kind of the point. And also, obviously, the consumer AI/LLM race which really became a consumer phenomenon started right after Musk closed the purchase, and shifted the landscape somewhat. Also, obviously, by merging X into xAI and then merging that combined company into SpaceX, the various investors are likely to make out just fine (even if it is stacking multiple houses of cards on top of each other).

But, given how there was a group of Silicon Valley VCs and Wall Street banker types who absolutely insisted that Elon had a Midas touch and would absolutely know how to turn Twitter into revenue gold, it seems worth checking in on just how badly those plans failed. Yes, he’s been able to paper that over with mergers between companies he owns, but the actual numbers don’t lie.

So where does this leave the investors who lined up to hand Elon a few billion dollars, no questions asked? Probably fine, actually. The SpaceX IPO will almost certainly value the combined entity at a number that makes early Twitter/X investors more than whole. That’s what merging a struggling social network into a so-so AI startup into a deeply in debt (but in strong demand) rocket company will get you — the underlying failure gets laundered by the valuation of everything else in the stack.

But the operational track record is what it is. Twitter was generating $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before Musk bought it. Three years into his five-year plan to reach $12 billion, the combined X/xAI advertising business is at somewhere under $3 billion — and that’s counting the separate AI business he launched after acquisition. The 69 million paid subscribers became 4.4 million. The $10 billion subscription business became $250 million. The payments business that was supposed to be generating revenue in 2023 just launched in beta in November 2025.

The “business genius” narrative was always doing a lot of work. Now we have the numbers. They don’t.

Filed Under: advertising, business, elon musk, ipo, projections

Companies: spacex, twitter, x, xai

Apple may already be testing one of the biggest iPhone redesigns in years, with a new leak suggesting the company has started evaluating a futuristic “all-screen” style display for its 2027 handset.

According to well-known Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station, Apple has reportedly entered production testing for a new iPhone featuring a quad-curved OLED display. This means the screen would curve around all four edges of the device rather than just the sides.

If accurate, this could become the most dramatic iPhone design shift since the introduction of the iPhone 12 range.

The rumoured device is currently being referred to online as the “iPhone 19 Pro,” though Apple’s actual branding remains unclear. Given that 2027 marks the iPhone’s 20th anniversary, there’s also a decent chance Apple skips ahead and calls it the iPhone 20 Pro instead.

Either way, the display sounds like the real focus here. Previous leaks have described it as a “Liquid Glass Display,” with ultra-thin bezels and subtle curves wrapping around the edges of the phone. Thankfully, reports suggest Apple is avoiding the aggressive waterfall-style screens seen on some older Android devices that often looked impressive but could be awkward to use in practice.

Instead, the curvature is said to be much more restrained and seamless.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time these rumours have surfaced. Reports from late 2025 claimed Samsung Display was already developing advanced OLED panels for Apple using something called COE, or Colour Filter on Encapsulation technology. More recent leaks also suggested that Samsung would become the primary supplier of curved display panels.

What makes this leak more believable is the source itself. Digital Chat Station has a fairly solid track record when it comes to Apple hardware leaks. The leaker previously revealed accurate details about the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro camera upgrades ahead of launch.

Of course, there’s still a long way to go before any of this becomes official. Apple is reportedly still focusing on the iPhone 18 lineup for this year, and if rumours are true, the first part of 2027. The company could also launch its foldable “iPhone Ultra” sometime in late 2026 if it resolves its production issues.

Still, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Apple sees 2027 as more than just another yearly iPhone refresh.

Nvidia smashed revenue records in its first quarter of fiscal 2027, with sales up 85pc year-on-year to $81.6bn.

The Santa Clara-based company saw its data centre division lead the charge, with revenue reaching $75.2bn, up 92pc from a year ago. Demand for Nvidia’s AI chips from hyperscale cloud providers and enterprise AI factories showed no signs of slowing, with quarterly revenue also up 20pc.

Gross margins held firm at around 75pc, and net income more than tripled to $58.3bn compared to the same period last year, reflecting Nvidia’s central role in the current AI infrastructure boom.

CEO Jensen Huang was typically ebullient, describing the moment as a major inflection point for the industry. “The buildout of AI factories – the largest infrastructure expansion in human history – is accelerating at extraordinary speed,” he said.

“Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value and scaling rapidly across companies and industries.”

Huang described “an extraordinary quarter” in closing out yesterday’s (21 May) earnings call, according to CNBC. “Demand has gone parabolic. The reason is simple: agentic AI has arrived,” he said.

“AI can now do productive and valuable work. Tokens are now profitable, so model makers are in a race to produce more. In the AI era, compute capacity is revenue and profits.”

Looking ahead, the company guided for Q2 revenues of $91bn, pointing to continued explosive growth, although it did note that it is not counting on any data centre revenue from China in that forecast.

Not everyone is without reservation. Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester, struck a note of caution: “At a roughly $5trn valuation, the question is no longer whether growth is strong, it’s whether growth can be sustained at this level.

“Nvidia’s continued success creates an extraordinary level of pressure that’s difficult to maintain, though the company has consistently risen to the challenge so far.”

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What if the humidity in the air around you could charge your fitness tracker or power your smart home sensors? That is exactly what an international research team led by scientists at Queen Mary University of London has achieved.

Their new device, called a Moisture-Electric Generator or MEG, turns ambient moisture into usable electricity using just three ingredients you could find in any kitchen: gelatin, table salt, and activated charcoal.

How does it work?

The MEG works by absorbing water molecules from the surrounding air or directly from human skin. When the gelatin and salt mixture dries, it naturally separates into three distinct layers without any complex manufacturing steps.

This structure creates a moisture gradient that drives ion movement through the material, generating a stable electrical output of around 1 volt per unit for over 30 days.

When you connect 100 units together in a series, the output scales up to 90 volts and 5.08 milliamps, enough to power a string of 40 decorative lights. That 100-unit stack also weighs just 6.7 grams and takes up less space than a standard AA battery, which only delivers 1.5 volts by comparison.

It can sense your breathing and dissolve in soil when you are done with it

Beyond generating power, the MEG doubles as a self-powered sensor. It can detect breathing patterns in real time by picking up changes in exhaled moisture. It can also read the number of syllables in spoken words and track skin hydration levels.

Even touchless proximity sensing is possible, since natural moisture from a hovering fingertip is enough to trigger a voltage response. The best part is that the device biodegrades in soil within three weeks and can be recycled by dissolving it in water and recasting it, with no loss in performance.

The MEG joins a growing list of battery-free energy ideas. Researchers have previously demonstrated a protein nanowire device that harvests electricity from air moisture, a bionic mushroom that generates power through bacteria, and near-invisible solar cells thin enough to coat a car window.