What once started as a health companion and second screen on your wrist has turned into something a lot more useful. Over the years, smartwatches have continued to become smarter, and their health tracking features are even more accurate. So after reviewing wearables for years, I got used to each new smartwatch generation having just a few polishes and updates.

But Huawei managed to have me obsessed with one of its latest models–and it’s the strap that has my attention. Packed on the underside of the strap is a thin inflatable bladder that runs along the inside of the band. Start a blood-pressure measurement, and that bladder begins expanding against your wrist, tightening in a way that’s familiar to how a doctor wraps a cuff around your upper arm.

This might make the Huawei Watch D3 sound like a thick and heavy wearable tech. But in reality, the Watch D3 is only 11.3mm thick, weighs just over 70 grams with its strap, and has a 1.92-inch AMOLED display. Huawei has also narrowed the inflatable section and made the strap 7.5 grams lighter than before. The blood-pressure feature is fascinating, as the company isn’t making it a software feature.

How does a blood pressure cuff fit inside a watch?

The trick starts with what Huawei calls its 2-in-1 strap-airbag. Rather than having a normal watch band sitting flush against your skin, part of the D3’s strap contains a thin mechanical airbag. When a measurement begins, the watch pumps air into that chamber, causing it to expand inward and apply pressure around your wrist.

Huawei uses the oscillometric method, the same broad measurement principle used by many electronic blood-pressure cuffs. A high-precision pressure sensor works alongside Huawei’s TruSense system to detect the pressure changes created by your pulse while the airbag is inflated. From those changes, the system calculates systolic and diastolic blood pressure.

Again, this is a proper mechanism that doesn’t rely purely on an optical sensor and an algorithm to infer your blood pressure. You can see it in the photos I took. The strap may look unusually thick, but that’s only because it was inflated to take a BP reading. Put the watch on, and that extra material pretty much disappears. You don’t particularly feel it out of place compared to your usual strap. Once you start the measurement, you can physically feel the pressure build as the bladder expands.

Even taking the reading has a very specific posture

To make things as accurate as possible, Huawei gives you some tips for the best possible results, and it starts with your posture. Your watch arm should be steady, elbow bent with your palm facing your chest, while the wrist and palm remain relaxed. It also needs you to support that elbow with your other hand so the Watch D3 sits roughly level with your heart.

Your feet should be flat on the floor and uncrossed, and you’re supposed to remain quiet and avoid moving your fingers, arm, or body while the cuff is working. I was explaining the watch to a friend when taking a measurement, and the Watch D3 promptly told me to pipe down. You can see the posture in the images I’ve shared.

The watch is trying to recreate, on your wrist, the controlled conditions that make a conventional cuff useful. Huawei even asks users to enter their wrist circumference so the watch can match the correct airbag size, with separate M and L strap-airbags supplied for wrists between 130mm and 210mm. So there’s a lot more thought put into this to avoid any kind of misreading. Health is a pretty serious matter for many, so avoiding any false results is key here.

Huawei is doing something very different from Apple and Samsung

Apple’s current Watch implementation looks for patterns associated with hypertension using its optical heart sensor over a 30-day evaluation period. It does not give you an on-demand systolic and diastolic measurement. If the Watch flags possible hypertension, Apple specifically recommends using a third-party cuff for seven days and discussing the results with a healthcare professional.

Samsung goes further. Compatible Galaxy Watches can produce blood-pressure values, but the system first needs to be calibrated against an upper-arm cuff, including three measurements during initial calibration, and Samsung requires recalibration every 28 days. Huawei’s solution, on the other hand, is mechanical by comparison. Sure, the Watch D3 is slightly bulkier and more specialized than a conventional smartwatch, but I find the engineering much more interesting.

It takes it one step further

The Huawei Watch D3’s strap also enables another cool feature, which is ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, or ABPM. You can start a 24-hour monitoring plan and have the watch take readings at preset intervals throughout the day and night. Huawei’s default schedule can prompt daytime measurements every 30 minutes. At night, the Watch D3 can automatically inflate while you’re asleep without requiring you to assume the daytime measurement posture.

Once the monitoring period ends, Huawei Health can show daytime, nighttime, and 24-hour averages and generate an ABPM report that can be saved or printed. Of course, the trade-off here is battery life. Huawei rates the watch for up to six days in typical use, while continuous ABPM cuts that estimate to about one day.

The Watch D3 is still a smartwatch, but it’s also certified

The engineering on the Watch D3 is quite intriguing. Its mechanical moving parts are things that set it apart. Still, it doesn’t look like dedicated medical equipment. On the outside, it has that familiar shape of a smartwatch. The white strap unit I have looks elegant and sleek. Its 1.92-inch display dominates the front. All of the UI and other elements function exactly as you’d expect them to.

It might not look like it, though this is kind of impressive when you read the marketing material. Huawei advertises the Watch D3 as a medical-grade wrist blood-pressure monitor in supported markets, and the UK product page says it is CE-MDR certified. However, measurement availability and regulatory status vary by country. It is worth noting that the measurements should only be treated as guidance. Any unusual results should be properly discussed with an actual healthcare professional. The main advice is not to self-diagnose from a single smartwatch reading.

The first week of BMSD 2026 has wrapped up, and it has already delivered one of the biggest upsets of the tournament. Team Soul and Nebula Esports, champions of BGIS 2026 and BGMI Masters Series Season 5 respectively, have both been relegated after failing to finish in the top eight of Group A. Meanwhile, GodLike Esports and defending champions Orangutan survived the cut to retain their place in the top group.

With 48 invite-only BGMI teams competing for a ₹1 crore prize pool and six BMIC 2026 qualification spots, Week 1 has reshuffled the standings ahead of the next stage of the qualifiers.

Team Soul misses survival by just one point

Group A featured several of India’s strongest BGMI organizations, making it the toughest group in the opening week. Gladiator Esports finished at the top with 58 points, followed by Vasista Esports with 54 and 8Bit with 51.

The biggest storyline, however, came further down the table. Team Soul finished just outside the top eight after missing qualification by a single point, sending the BGIS 2026 champions down to Group B for Week 2. Joining them in relegation are Nebula Esports, Apex Gaming, and Revenant XSpark.

GodLike Esports narrowly escaped the same fate, claiming the eighth and final survival spot by that same one-point margin, while Orangutan comfortably retained its position in Group A.

Quantum Spark leads the overall standings

Across the three groups, Quantum Spark emerged as the standout performer of Week 1. The team topped Group C with 62 points, including an impressive 49 finish points, making it the highest-scoring team of the tournament so far.

Group B was equally competitive, with Welt Esports and BLEG finishing tied on 60 points each. Rapid Chaos secured third place with 56 points, keeping itself firmly in contention heading into the next round.

At the end of Week 1, the group leaders are:

The Promotion & Relegation format means the top eight teams in each group either advance or retain their position, while the bottom eight move down a group. As a result, 24 teams move up the ladder and 24 head into a more difficult group for the second week of qualifiers.

Week 2 of the BMSD 2026 Promotion & Relegation stage runs from September 25 to September 27, with matches streaming live on the KRAFTON India Esports YouTube channel from 1:00 PM IST every day.

The US government is trying to get Elon Musk and his social media platform X out of a $137 million fine by the European Union in an escalation of its criticism of the bloc’s tech rules.

The US Department of Justice said it had filed an application with the help of the Department of State to support a legal challenge by Musk to annul the case in the EU’s General Court. The Luxembourg-based court will now decide whether the US has a right to intervene.

The US government is arguing that it should be involved in the case to protect American companies. The fine is precedent-setting as the bloc’s first sanction under the Digital Services Act, which requires online platforms to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content, especially the largest sites. Many of those, which include Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn, are headquartered in the US and contribute significantly to the US economy, it pointed out.

“We will not tolerate the European Commission engaging in regulatory overreach to try and control American engines of innovation and economic growth,” said assistant attorney general Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

The case also has “implications” for US-EU relations, it warned. The act has become a major source of tension between officials, with US President Donald Trump calling the penalties “overseas extortion.” Last year, he threatened imposing tariffs on any country implementing digital regulation, which he said were “all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American technology.” Vice President JD Vance has criticized the DS’s content moderation rules as “authoritarian censorship.”

The European Commission slapped X with the €120 million fine in December following a two-year-long investigation which found X had breached transparency obligations. Claiming users with blue checkmarks are “verified accounts” when they simply have to pay for the status is deceptive, the Commission ruled. X’s inaccessible and incomplete advertising repository and failure to provide access to public data for researchers is also hindering research into the platform’s risks, it said. In July, the Commission accepted X’s plan to fix the data access issues, which X now has six months to implement.

Both Musk and X launched appeals against the ruling on behalf of both parties in February. The EU’s investigation was “incomplete and superficial” and the interpretation of the DSA obligations “tortured,” they said. They also complained they had not been given “rights of defence … suggesting prosecutorial bias.”

Musk has also complained about the financial and administrative burden of heightened transparency requirements as governments globally try to get a better understanding of—and limit—social media platforms’ risks of harm. In July, he argued Australia’s “invasive” information-gathering powers within the country’s under-16 social media ban interfered with international law. At the time, professor of internet law at Queen Mary University of London, Julia Hörnle, told WIRED that Australian regulators were within their rights to order disclosures related to a company’s operations in that particular country.

Farmers around the world face a pressing problem: the equipment they use to till, plant, and harvest their fields is killing their margins. Studies have estimated that soil compaction can reduce yields by 20% to 60%. 

Plowing can help, but it’s a laborious and expensive task that harms soil health in different ways. Muju Earth has developed an alternative, the Aeropod, which automatically aerates the soil without machinery or robotics. The startup says it can promote better soil health while cutting farmers’ tilling costs by half or more.

The device is “built like a seed, it sows like a seed, and it ships like a seed,” Afolayan said. The device is about the size of a fingernail, and farmers drop it in the soil alongside their seeds using the same equipment. There’s no need to till the soil in advance.

“It just really seems like a no-brainer,” Ifeoluwa Afolayan, the company’s co-founder and CEO, tells TechCrunch.

After the Aeropod is exposed to a combination of temperature, pressure, and moisture, it bursts open, loosening the soil and creating small channels that let air, water and roots move through it more easily.

Muju Earth — one of the 200 startups in this year’s TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in October — has tested its devices in lab settings and is embarking on paid field trials this fall in the UK. Nine farmers are participating, and the startup has more than 30 on a waitlist.

Its initial target market is onion growers in the UK since onions are particularly sensitive to soil compaction, Afolayan said.

Tilling a field once might cost around £250 to £400 per hectare when factoring in labor costs, diesel, and wear-and-tear on equipment, Afolayan said. Aeropods should produce similar results at just £100 per hectare, she said.

Aeropods were born during Afolayan’s and co-founder Wangyang Hu’s time at Imperial College London, where they sought to design a product that would improve farmers’ bottom lines while also aiding soil health. The Aeropod’s development was driven by a single question: “How do you make this as simple as sowing a seed?” Afolayan said. “That’s the most equitable practice across every farmer on the planet.”

In addition to farmers, the startup has also heard from companies developing biologic amendments — products added to soil, often containing living microbes, that boost or replace chemical fertilizers. Because those companies’ products work best in aerated soils, they’re interested in pairing with Aeropods.

But Afolayan said that farmers themselves have been leading adoption. Most of the marketing to date has been inbound. “The best thing about Aeropod is the farmers intuitively understand the proposition,” she said.

Muju Earth is one of 200 startups in this year’s TechCrunch Startup Battlefield, a pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in October in which 20 finalists will present on the main stage.

Anthropic lost a legal battle to overturn one of the supply-chain risk labels that the US Department of Defense slapped on the company, as a federal appeals court in DC on Friday refused to second-guess the Trump administration.

“The department had ample support for its conclusion that the continued integration of Claude into the department’s information systems, by the department or its contractors, presented a statutorily covered national-security risk,” the judges wrote in a majority opinion. “As Anthropic admits, the company encodes restrictions into Claude that prevent the model from performing tasks that Anthropic wishes to prevent.”

Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Cohen says the company remains confident in its position and is considering all options. That could include appealing to a broader panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals or the US Supreme Court.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon sanctioned Anthropic under a pair of separate supply-chain laws to remove the company’s Claude AI models from the military and other parts of the federal government by this month. Anthropic executives have said that the company would not allow the government to deploy its current AI models to support autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth deemed the stance a significant national security risk.

The laws designating Anthropic had to be challenged in separate courts. A federal judge in San Francisco tossed out one of the supply-chain risk labels in March and confirmed that decision last month, but Friday’s ruling means the other one will stay in place indefinitely, meaning the Pentagon’s blocking of Anthropic can continue. Both rulings face the prospect of years of appeals before being fully resolved.

In the immediate aftermath of the designations, Anthropic said it lost out on revenue because customers were concerned about doing business with a government pariah. Anthropic hasn’t provided further updates about how the designations have affected its bottom line. But the company has generally touted growing sales in recent months and is moving toward a potential initial public offering of its shares later this year.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon hasn’t provided detailed updates about its progress in replacing Claude with alternatives such as SpaceX’s Grok, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s GPT models. Some employees at Google and OpenAI have objected to their employers striking a deal with the US military that Anthropic had rejected, citing ethical concerns. But the companies have brushed aside protests and described supporting the US government as crucial.

The new decision by a US appeals court in Washington, DC, was somewhat expected. In April the same panel declined to temporarily block the supply-chain-risk designation after finding that Anthropic failed to meet “stringent requirements” for an immediate reprieve.

During a hearing ahead of their ruling, the three judges on the panel challenged both Anthropic and the US government on their arguments and appeared divided on how to rule on blocking the designation completely. The final decision came in 2-1.

The majority also rejected Anthropic’s claims that its due process and free speech rights were violated, saying that the government followed procedure and that the dispute was standard contract negotiations. The Pentagon “excluded Anthropic from its supply chain based on the company’s refusal to assent to a contract term that the Department deemed essential, not based on the company’s support for greater governmental regulation of AI technology,” the judges wrote.

Anthropic had argued that the government had acted beyond what the supply-chain law allows. But for now, the Pentagon and much of the rest of the Trump administration will be able to continue to steer clear of Claude ahead of Anthropic’s expected IPO.

Music Piracy is Back: A recent case of “physical piracy” in the UK highlights the significant resurgence the recording industry is experiencing. Record labels are taking note, however, and trying to curb the growth of the unauthorized market that could accompany rising sales.

A Londoner named Rehan Ahmed sold thousands of vinyl records featuring music by popular artists, earning millions of pounds in the process. However, the vinyl discs were all “fake,” and Ahmed is now going to jail after being caught by police. Representatives from the music industry were instrumental in uncovering the illegal printing operation.

The BBC reports that 40-year-old Ahmed’s music “business” was caught in 2024 after a representative from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) made a “test” purchase from his company, Phoenix of Vinyl. London police raided the premises soon after, discovering what the agency described as the largest archive of fake records ever found in the UK.

Ahmed had amassed a total of 2,791 vinyl records featuring music by 108 different artists, including popular stars such as Adele, Ariana Grande, Bad Bunny, Drake, Beyoncé, and Rihanna. Classic bands such as the Beatles were available as well, highlighting the forger’s attempt to cover different genres and eras of music.

Phoenix of Vinyl employed several methods to sell its unlicensed records. The company supplied records to London’s surviving music stores and sold directly to customers through online platforms such as eBay and Discogs. The discs were made using 70-year-old presses, which means they were genuine vinyl records from a manufacturing standpoint.

According to BPI director of content protection Peter Ratcliffe, Ahmed’s operation had stolen tens of millions of pounds from artists, record labels, and other professionals working in the music industry. Phoenix of Vinyl exploited the resurgence of physical music by creating a highly organized and highly profitable counterfeit operation.

Physical music is indeed enjoying a return to growth after being decimated by streaming platforms over the past couple of decades. The RIAA said revenue from CD audio music grew by 58.6% in the first quarter of 2026, while vinyl record revenue increased by 17.7% over the same period.

Now that physical media is making a comeback as a legitimate listening format, music pirates such as Ahmed are trying to make an easy buck from it. Ratcliffe said counterfeit records are damaging the legal music economy once again, while customers who fall prey to the illegal releases are being affected as well.

Ahmed pleaded guilty to operating the illegal business and copyright infringement, and is now set to spend the next three and a half years in prison.

Google just gave its newest live conversation model a face. Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar became generally available on September 24 for Gemini Enterprise customers, one week after the audio-focused Gemini 3.8 Live models launched and months after a first look at Google Cloud Next 2026. The update generates a 24-frame-per-second video of an animated person or cartoon character whose mouth and expressions stay locked to the spoken words, pairing the existing speech model with low-latency streaming video in a single pass.

Live Avatar listens to any speech in real time, watches live camera feeds or screen sharing at one frame per second, and responds swiftly with a 24 kHz voice and a real-time moving face. Lip movements remain in sync even when moving from English to Japanese or any of 97 languages, and Google claims the quality never decreases or loses crispness. It can also display more information on the screen as the avatar continues to speak. Furthermore, affective dialog is the default, so the emotions will alter subtly in tandem with the tone of the words you’re saying.

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Businesses can choose from a library of pre-made faces, ranging from cartoon characters to very lifelike humans, and have them paired with a matching voice. Any organization on the approved list may simply provide a still photo, and the system will generate a personalized talking version that looks just like a live person while maintaining the original branding. In one instance, the avatar checked in a hotel guest in the middle of a conversation as the system ran booking tools in the background without halting the chat. Before you realize it, Live Avatar is being used in real life by shopping assistants and multilingual support representatives.

Those fluid interruptions function exactly the same as in the audio-only version, so a caller can simply jump in mid-sentence and the context remains intact, including any background work the avatar has already begun. There is no separate transcription step between what you say and what the face replies – this is all native speech-to-speech stuff.

Every second of music and video has an invisible watermark known as a SynthID, which later programs can use to verify that the clip was created by Live Avatar. Google also added some more identification precautions and keeps custom faces under review. Sessions are only a few minutes long (rather than hours as we would prefer), and they are slightly more expensive than using voice alone. As with all of those large models, the occasional delusion or slowness is still possible.

Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar is now live on endpoints in the United States and the European Union, complete with the necessary configuration and typical enterprise security. The more powerful Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking version is still in private preview and does not yet have the face feature. For the time being, the talking heads are entirely internal in company accounts, intended at support desks, product demos, virtual receptionists, interactive assistance that get to see what a customer is pointing to while they speak, and so on.