A portable, easy-to-use sound machine which is let down by its mediocre at best sound quality. Despite having the widest volume range of any machine we’ve tested, it doesn’t make up for the constant static and looping.
Cordless machine, rechargeable with USB-C
Six different sound profiles
Rechargeable, portable, doubles as a nightlight
Sound quality is poor, with regular looping and static
Too expensive for the quality at full price
Introduction
It’s a proven fact that babies respond well to white and pink noise after birth. As a first-time mum, it’s one of the reasons I’ve been looking into white noise machines in the hopes of improving my co-sleeping environment, but with so many options to choose from, working out what to buy is a bit of a minefield.
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There are plenty of baby-specific options out there from the Ewan Deluxe, the SnuzCloud, and the Luna Dream Machine, but I wanted to try something that’s catered to adults too just to see if there are any major differences between the two, especially when it comes to things like sound quality.
That’s where the Groov-e Serenity comes in – a sleep aid, which is designed to give you and your family a restful night’s sleep. Unlike the others I am testing, this is the only noise machine that can’t be suspended, and acts more like a night light.
Design and Features
Looks a bit like an Amazon Echo
Unimposing design
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The Serenity looks a little bit like a third generation Amazon Echo Dot. It’s small, circular, lays flat on a table, and has several buttons sitting on its surface. A LED ring surrounds it, acting as a night light when enabled.
It’s fairly unimposing and sits quite nicely on a bedside table, more so because it’s cordless too. I had mine placed there – next to my next-to-me crib – and didn’t really think much about it unless the light was turned on.
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As for ease of use, the Serenity is pretty straightforward: the power button and light sits at the bottom, the volume buttons either side, which are then flanked by the six sound options, and the timer at the top. Getting used to these controls can take time, but once you know your preferred sounds and settings, you’ll memorise where each button is and be able to switch it on in the dark.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
Sound-wise, the Serenity comes with six different profiles: white noise, calm, relax, ocean, forest, and rain.
I’ll be honest, I found the sound quality of the speaker quite bad, especially with harsher noises, so I spent most of my time listening to either white noise or forest for sleep and relaxation, respectively. I’ll elaborate on the quality in a minute, but I found the speaker disrupting my already precious moments of sleep more often than not.
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If you do find a sound that you like, you can set a 15/30/60 minute timer to turn the speaker off once you’ve dropped off. This is a little bit abrupt, but similar to others in the group test. You can leave it to continuously play too, by either not setting a timer and relying on the battery or by plugging it in and leaving it on.
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The LED ring can also be used as a night light or a relaxation device. You can either have this switched on as a solid white light or in a breathing mode, which pulsates every few seconds or so. I would have liked to have had the option to change the colour, but I’ll admit the white light is handy in the middle of the night – especially to check if the baby is stirring. Frustratingly, there’s no option to just turn on the light. You can turn the volume all the way down, but that requires extra button presses and the risk of noise.
Sound Quality
One of the more restrained machines tested
Weak sound
Since the Serenity is designed to be placed on a flat surface – unlike the other white noise machines in our group test, which could all be suspended – we placed the machine on a table next to our bed and baby’s next-to-me crib. The distances are consistent with our other tests, though, just to make comparisons easier.
Here’s what I found:
30cm min volume
30cm max volume
100cm min volume
100cm max volume
200cm min volume
200cm max volume
38 dB
64 dB
33 dB
59 dB
31 dB
57 dB
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At its quietest, the Serenity is one of the more restrained machines that we’ve tested – only the Snuzcloud manages a lower minimum volume across all three distances. That makes it a good option if you’re after something gentle for co-sleeping setups.
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But when you turn the dial up, the Serenity is capable of outputting maximum volume readings similar to the Ewan Deluxe, the loudest machine in our test group, and the gap between the two volumes is the widest (a 26 dB swing) we’ve measured.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
However, while the Serenity has range, the sound quality is the weakest of the machines I’ve tested. Since the sound is coming from a very small speaker on one side of the machine, I’ve found that there’s a lot more static clouding the audio due to the vibrations caused by being placed on a flat surface – something that’s particularly noticeable in ‘relax’ mode. There’s also audible looping on some profiles like forest, which can be distracting.
Safety
Can get quite loud
No child lock
Since the Serenity isn’t developed with babies in mind, you’ll need to make some considerations when using it around little ones. These largely come down to placement and volume.
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As it’s designed to be placed on a flat surface and can get quite loud, you’ll need to make sure that it’s out of reach of little hands and at a volume that is safe for them. Obviously there’s no child lock on this device either, so that’s worth considering too.
Just because it’s not designed for children doesn’t mean you can’t use it in a nursery setting – you just have to be careful, as with all electrical devices.
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Battery Life
The Serenity is packed with a 400mAh battery, which gives up to eigtht hours of runtime. If you’re using the timer function, you’ll get multiple uses out of the white noise machine before needing to recharge it. If you want it on all night, though, you can just plug it in and use it at the same time to get you through a full night.
It goes without saying that if you have the LED lights on too, the battery life will be less than eight hours.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
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Final Thoughts
The Serenity does the basics well – it’s compact, portable, cordless and rechargeable, making it easy to move around or take away. The LED light is a nice touch – especially when used as a night light – and the three timer settings give you reasonable flexibility for planning night time routines. However, it is let down by its small, single-sided speaker, which introduces noticeable static, particularly on relax mode, and there’s audible looping on profiles like forest that become distracting the longer you listen to it.
At full price, we can’t recommend the machine, especially since it retails similarly to the Snuzcloud and Luna Dream Machine, but we might consider it if the price was slashed.
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How We Test
We test every white noise machine thoroughly in the appropriate setting. We check how loud the machine is, its sound quality, and safety – especially if it’s marketed for babies – and its battery life. We will always tell you what we find and we never, ever accept money to review a product.
Used for over a week in a bedroom setting
Thorough testing and checking safety compliance
FAQs
How long does the Groov-e Serenity battery last?
It lasts approximately eight hours per charge, but you can enable continuous play by plugging it in overnight.
What sounds does the Groov-e Serenity play?
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Ocean, Forest, Rain, Relax, Calm, and White Noise.
Is the Groov-e Serenity good for nurseries?
The Serenity is not designed with babies in mind. It can work as a general sound machine in a nursery, but it doesn’t have baby specific features that many products like Ewan Deluxe and SnuzCloud have.
Garmin watches aren’t the only ones with the power of illumination.
Ringo Chiu/Shutterstock
Gather close, curious passersby, and gaze upon my wrist orb! Behold the notifications it annoys me with, the nearly incessant reminders and DoorDash delivery updates. Gasp as I use it to ask Google things I should already know, like whether it’s possible the milk I left on the counter last night is still good. Do not accuse me of witchcraft when you see me take a phone call with it, in public, while using both hands to eat my lunch.
But what is this mockery I hear as I activate the flashlight? Do my ears deceive me, or did you snort derisively in my direction when I lit this shining beacon? Oh, I get it. You think smartwatch flashlights are stupid. You assume that a small, white screen turned up to maximum brightness won’t do jack diddly squat to help me find the pill I just dropped on the floor. But you’re wrong. I just found the pill even though it was deep in the shag carpeting under my nightstand, and I did it all without digging through the kitchen junk drawer for an actual flashlight.
Yes, it’s time you realized just how useful the flashlight in your smartwatch can be. Whether you’ve got an Apple Watch, Google Pixel Watch or a Samsung Galaxy Watch, all of them have similar flashlight features. The temptation to put “flashlight” in air quotes makes sense. After all, the feature does nothing more than turn the watch’s display white and crank the brightness up to eleven. Moreover, your watch is a companion device to your phone, which has a much better flashlight built right into it in the form of a camera flash. But answer this: Is your phone strapped to your wrist?
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In brightest day, in blackest night, a smartwatch casts perfectly adequate light!
Max Miller for Engadget
Is that a gaggle of Garmin users I hear, gloating about the actual LED flashlights built into their smartwatches? We get it, you go outdoors. This message is for the rest of us, the unwashed masses with smartwatches from mainstream brands. We have denigrated the flashlight functionality of our little wrist computers for too long. But the line must be drawn here. This far, no further!
Look at the photo above. I mean, don’t look too closely. Stop judging my bathroom and instead observe how well the light from my dinky little Galaxy Watch illuminates the space. No, it’s not the power of the sun in the palm of my hand, but it’s fine! This is an entirely adequate amount of light! If I were looking for something in there, I’d find it.
Ah, but the elephant remains stubbornly in the room. Why not use a phone flashlight? Well, if you’re anything like me, you don’t have your phone glued to you. One of the reasons you probably bought a smartwatch was so that you could set your phone aside without missing important calls and texts. So, when your phone is charging in another room and you need a quick light source, who you gonna call? You already know the answer.
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Moreover, your phone is a relatively heavy object that occupies at least one hand, and it’s cumbersomely shaped. If you need light while using both hands, you can either prop your phone awkwardly against something, or you can take the honorable path and activate the flashlight on your smartwatch. You can even strap the watch to your palm and use it in what I’m officially dubbing ‘Iron Man mode.’
Chairs stay chairs. Tables stay tables. Anything that needs to become both usually grows hinges, motors, and a tangle of wires that quit the first time you twist the thing the wrong way. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab spent years looking for a quieter option, and they landed on Bifur-circuits: a kit of 3D-printed blocks that snap together, fold into new stable poses, and keep an electrical map of whatever form they just became.
Each printed unit is one of these smart auxetic lattices, which are repeating designs that widen when stretched rather than pinched inwards. You can find one unit in three different positions. When you link a couple of these devices with some connector pieces, a new behavior emerges. Pushing or twisting past a specific point causes the entire assembly to snap into a new stance and lock it in place. That rapid change is identical to the mechanical ‘bifurcation’ that occurs when a weak plastic ruler finally gives way under strain. When you combine more and more blocks, the number of viable stable positions skyrockets, far beyond the three fixed shapes employed by the same scientists in their previous shape-shifting antenna research.
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Conductive filaments for the connectors are built into the units as you print the flexible plastic, and they remain linked even if the entire structure is stretched, squished, rotated, or bent whatever you wish. When neighboring blocks meet in different orientations, contact pads at the joints close in a unique circuit, giving each position its own electrical signature. Then, a small controller at the assembly’s root pokes about the connections, asking the units who they are and where they are in respect to one another, and creates a map of the entire thing, all without the need for any further wire between the units.
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The difficult part was finding a filament that could flex back and forth thousands of times without losing the signal. The units have stretchy TPU hinges, stronger PLA connectors, and a unique conductive flex filament for the actual electrical connections. If you need a specific position to be locked in tightly, you may even insert tiny magnets into the pockets during the print. After 10,000+ compression cycles, we discovered that the electrical contact remained firm. Larger assemblies take longer to scan; twenty units or so can take a few seconds to generate a comprehensive map.
A tool in Fusion 360 allows you to specify the size, thickness, and stiffness of each joint before exporting the file to be printed on one of those multi-material machines. There is also some companion software that allows you to preview the assembly, detects the finished pose when it occurs, and then creates code so that another app can react to that pose. Parts come out the printer ready to clip together, and all you need to do using heat and solder is add a little board to the end that communicates with the rest of your system.
One functioning model became a piece of furniture with twenty-four units, expanding into a tea table, folding up into a chair with a storage hole, and collapsing flat to store itself. While the geometry changed, the item communicated with a display to determine its new position. A second piece was a game controller that could be folded one way to launch a racing game, another way to launch a washing game, and a third way to launch a balloon-inflating game. You can simply add or delete units, and that controller will evolve into something else entirely. [Source]
These aren’t isolated moments, but the visible rise of a travel category: the “race-cation.” Fitness enthusiasts aren’t just picking a gym or a training plan anymore; they’re picking a destination, buying flights, booking hotels, and building entire holidays backwards from a finish line.
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And the businesses that spotted it early—airlines, hotel chains, even government tourism boards—are already building entire products and services around it.
The businesses that got there first
(Left): AirAsia x HYROX aircraft; (Right): World of Hyatt’s advertisement./ Image Credit: AirAsia/ Grand Hyatt
A handful of brands were quick to build entire commercial products around the race-cation the moment they saw it coming.
These intentionally built products have found a big customer base designed around a specific new kind of trip, one where the itinerary is built backwards from a start line.
The fitness trend that started it all
HYROX’s workouts include sandbag lunges and sled pulls./ Image Credit: Dittaya Mhosomboon/ Elizabeth Low
So a Singaporean who trains for it at home can fly to Seoul or Bangkok and compete in something functionally identical, just with a new stadium, a new crowd and a fresh excuse for a holiday wrapped around it. It’s this portability that turns signing up for a race into a whole vacation.
(Left): Amelia Yeo (middle) in Incheon, South Korea, with her family; (Right): Amelia competing at the HYROX event in Incheon./ Image Credit: Amelia Yeo
That appeal shows up in how people actually build these trips.
Singapore-based orthopaedic surgeon Alan Cheung has completed nine HYROX races, six of them overseas across Seoul, Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Taipei and Bangkok—using each one as much as a way to reconnect with friends and relatives living abroad as a competition to win.
For fellow Singaporean Angus Tan, a fitness influencer who flew to Jakarta with his partner for his first overseas race, the pull is partly practical—a short flight, minimal leave needed—but mostly about what the race gives the rest of the trip. “There’s something really satisfying about earning your holiday,” he told CNA Luxury.
For some, the race becomes the reason a family finally gets together. When Singapore marketing lead Amelia Yeo signed up for her first HYROX in Incheon, her parents, brother and his girlfriend flew out to support her, turning into the family’s first holiday together in almost eight years.
And for whole gyms, the race-cation becomes a group pilgrimage: Hong Kong’s DOP Training Club brought around 90 members, roughly 70% of its membership, to Bangkok in Mar 2026, closing the gym for the week so the club could compete and celebrate together, continuing a pattern of earlier group trips to Taipei, Kobe and Beijing.
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None of this is cheap, either, which is arguably the more telling part.
For a lot of racers, the entry fee, the flight and the months of training aren’t a deterrent, but may be what makes the finish line worth flying for in the first place.
Singapore & Singaporeans are jumping on the bandwagon
The annual Gold Coast Marathon (left) and the Great Wall Marathon (right)./ Image Credit: Gold Coast Marathon/ Worlds’s Marathons
Beyond HYROX, Singaporeans are also willing to fly out for other fitness events.
This regional travel-for-a-race pattern now has numbers to back it up, too. Similar to race-cation, travel platform Agoda has coined the term “run-cation” for the phenomenon of people travelling for marathons.
One of them was Vijay Andrews, a 32-year-old Indian fitness coach who’d spent months recovering from an injury that kept him out of a HYROX event in New Delhi earlier in the year. When he heard Singapore’s edition was coming up, he booked his flight.
The workout itself isn’t new. What’s changed is that a fitness class has become something people plan a whole trip around, train months to earn, and fly across the region to share with the people who train alongside them.
The race gives these trips a reason. Everything else—the city, the food, the extra few days off—is just the reward for having shown up at the start line.
Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.
In the modern world USB has become a truly universal connector, with its inclusion on almost every major piece of consumer electronics. It has even expanded well beyond things that we’d think of as consumer electronics, like the solenoids on automatic sprinkler systems.
This project comes to us from opensprinkler.org who have been working on various ways of controlling the old sprinkler standards, which generally rely on a 24 VAC power supply to drive solenoids. This tests uses the power available from USB-PD and closely examines four methods of energizing the solenoids: unipolar PWM, dual voltage, synthesizing an AC wave from a DC supply, and producing a bipolar square wave. The bipolar square wave had some interesting results, being able to get pretty close to the behavior of a true sine wave while minimizing the demand on power electronics.
For those working on old sprinkler systems, or many other antiquated systems that still rely on 24 VAC, this project shows that USB can deliver a surprising amount of power in unique ways, and the fact that it’s near-ubiquitous and affordable makes it that much easier to adapt into situations it was never really designed for.
Outside the UK? Use NordVPN to unblock your free stream
Watch Aston Villa vs Arsenal live streams as the Gunners look to inflict more misery on the home side who lost their opening Premier League 2026/27game 4-0 after seeing a host of their best players depart over the summer.
It’s been a tough start to the campaign for Aston Villa boss Unai Emery. The Spaniard has seen Youri Tielemans, Lucas Digne, Morgan Rogers and Ezri Konsa all depart, while Ollie Watkins and Emiliano Martinez could soon follow suit. His decimated squad was then thumped 4-0 by Brighton, with João Gomes seeing red. With injuries also sidelining strikers Brian Madjo and Tammy Abraham, Villa fans will be fearing the worst against the reigning champions.
In stark contrast to the negativity around Villa Park, Arsenal will head to Birmingham brimming with confidence. The Gunners eased past Coventry 3-0 on the opening weekend, with new signing Christos Tzolis particularly impressive in attack. Mikel Arteta’s side will relish the opportunity to expose Villa’s problems and will expect the likes of Tzolis, Bukayo Saka and Kai Havertz to create plenty of chances.
Here’s how to watch Aston Villa vs Arsenal in the 2026/27 Premier League from anywhere in the world.
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How to watch Aston Villa vs Arsenal from anywhere
A VPN is handy piece of software that can make your device appear as if it’s back in your home country, so you can unlock your usual service. The best VPN right now? We recommend NordVPN – it does everything and comes with a 75% discount and and extra three months for free…
How to watch Aston Villa vs Arsenal live streams in the USA
Soccer fans in the US can watch Aston Villa vs Arsenal in the Premier League on USA Network.
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There is no dedicated streaming platform for USA Network, but it is available on cord-cutters like YouTube TV, Hulu+Live TV,Sling(select markets),FuboorDirecTV, many of which carry free trials.
Outside of the US? Use a VPN while you’re traveling away from home to unlock your stream.
How to watch Aston Villa vs Arsenal live streams in the UK
(Image credit: Future)
In the UK, Aston Villa vs Arsenal is being broadcast on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Premier League.
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Sky Sports packages cost £35 per month for new customers, or £22 per month if you already have a 24-month Sky TV contract.
If you’re out of the UK but still want to tune in, explore the VPN route set out above, which will help you access your accounts from anywhere.
How to watch Aston Villa vs Arsenal live streams in Canada
Fubo is the Premier League’s broadcast partner in Canada and has live coverage of Aston Villa vs Arsenal.
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Prices start from CA$31.49 per month for Fubo’s Sports Monthly package. However, the best option right now is the Quarterly Package which costs just CA$27.99 CA$14.99 for each of the first three months. You can also watch Fubo’s content if you have a selected DAZN subscription in Canada.
Not in Canada? Use NordVPN if you’re away from home, in order to tap into your preferred coverage from anywhere.
How to watch Aston Villa vs Arsenal live streams in Australia
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An Aston Villa vs Arsenal live stream is available in Australia on Stan Sport.
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You can pick up a Stan Sport subscription for as little as AU$29.99 per month for the basic plan containing adds. That price consists of the AU$9.99 Stan subscription fee plus the Sport add-on for AU$20.
Outside of Oz? You can use NordVPN to access your usual Premier League coverage.
What is the Aston Villa vs Arsenal start time?
Aston Villa vs Arsenal kicks off at 8pm BST / 3pm ET / 12am PT on Monday, August 31.
If you are Down Under, the game will be broadcast at 5am AEST on Tuesday, September 1.
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We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
Techmoan already owned an 18-inch Hughes Wave Motion Machine that set him back about $500. He wanted something longer, so he paid $300 for the biggest model waveshop listed, a 25-inch unit shipped from India.
Website images appeared to be quite polished until he realized they were AI-generated. Prices sat in rupees. PayPal stayed unavailable on the main site, forcing a bank transfer unless you switched to the nearly identical waveshowcase.com page that accepted cards. A scam-checking site scored the operation at 50%. He ordered anyway and used PayPal through the dollar site for some protection.
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UPS delivered the box faster than expected after a short email exchange. Everything he bought was in the box, including the acrylic chamber, motorized base, funnel, a bare-bones set of instructions, and three little Minute Maid-style bottles holding transparent mineral oil. One of the thin plastic end caps shattered when he attempted to open the box to begin using it, and for some reason, the distilled water he had ordered did not arrive in the delivery.
Filling the reservoir is a two-step process: first, mix 1 1/2 liters of distilled water with the supplied blue dye until it reaches the designated 45% line, shake it well, and then gently add mineral oil through the air trap hole until it is full. The instructions are a little vague about which brands or ratios to use, but once that’s done, all you have to do is run the motor for twenty minutes, turn it off for another twenty to allow the bubbles to collect in the side reservoir, then turn it back on and let it go.
A small motor within moves a wheel, causing the entire chamber to rock back and forth in a gradual, soothing seesaw motion. Two liquids of differing densities collide and eventually mix to generate these continuous waves. The motion is quiet and even, and for the most part it remains that way. Unlike some of the older 1980s machines he used to witness, these waves do not crash or break apart in a spectacular manner, as one of his buddies, Techmoan, must have experienced. Bubbles still clung to the acrylic after the settling cycle, and a seam leaked slightly, which he fixed with tape. After a few hours of use, the blue layer began to emit a faint mist and form small floaters.
It’s evident that the budget materials match the price tag on this device. The base appears to have been 3D printed and is just weighted to provide stability. The end caps feel fragile and fit loosely. To be honest, the device lacks a power switch, so you must either unplug it or add a remote on/off socket to your own power strip, which is inconvenient. He tried adding some shims beneath the base to give it more stability, as well as altering the voltage to see if he could make it to rock quicker, but neither of these methods provided any further drama. The Hughes 18-inch unit may appear thicker and more polished, but it is actually not much different, having the same leaking concerns and edge blobs as this one. Both of these contemporary equipment are noticeably quieter than the old machines you used to see in the shop decades ago. This Indian version essentially uses the same process but scales it down to make it cheaper.
Pollen Robotics has unveiled a bipedal robot called Microduck, at an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping. The Bordeaux company is owned by the AI platform Hugging Face. Its new machine has one eye and 15 motors, stands 25cm tall, and weighs under 800g. Preorders opened on Thursday. Pollen is targeting first deliveries before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe and the UK.
The robot walks, crouches, rights itself when it falls, and picks small objects up with its beak. Videos on the launch post show it collecting socks and a marker pen. An optional accessory pack adds wheeled feet so it can roller skate, along with a ball, an NFC chip and tags, and a laser pointer it follows with its camera.
Microduck runs on a Rockchip RK3566 with an AI accelerator, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage, a part number first reported by The Verge. It sees through a front camera and judges distance with a compact LiDAR, an 8×8 time-of-flight matrix. One inertial measurement unit sits in the body and a second in the head. A 50Hz policy loop connects the onboard model to those sensors and decides what the robot does next, The Register reported.
It runs on a removable NP-F550 camera battery, a 2600mAh cell common in video kit, giving around an hour of runtime.
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The software is open, the hardware is not
The whole software stack ships open source, and it is out already. The SDK and robot software sit in one GitHub repository, the reinforcement learning and sim-to-real tools in another, months before the first robot arrives. A developer can teach a skill in simulation, then push it onto the machine. European robotics firms increasingly work this way, and NEURA Robotics is building robot gyms.
The hardware is a different matter, and Pollen is unusually direct about it. Its press kit tells journalists that the open-source statement covers the software stack only. The mechanical and electronic design files are not open, and it asks reporters not to describe the robot as open-source hardware. A Pollen representative separately told The Register the company has no plans to open source it.
Buyers get an open stack on a closed chassis. Pollen already uses that arrangement for Reachy Mini, which it says has sold more than 10,000 units since launching last year.
Clement Delangue, Hugging Face’s chief executive, called it “a tiny $399 open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning”. His post on X has drawn 4.4 million views. He has spent the past year arguing that open models are winning. “Welcome to the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI and world models,” he wrote.
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It cannot lift much
Santiago Pavon of Pollen Robotics put the robot’s lifting capacity at roughly 100 grams. That is about the weight of a bar of soap. The beak articulates and the camera can find an object, but Pavon accepts that grasping will stay limited on a machine this size. TechCrunch published a correction to its launch story after misstating how much the beak could carry.
Pollen is not selling a household helper. The Register called Microduck a cheap testbed for teaching people about hardware AI, machine learning and modern robotics. It is not an in-home butler or a cleaner. The framing matters in a year when robot demonstrations have outrun the machines. The humanoid that beat Usain Bolt’s record in Beijing left roboticists unimpressed.
Autonomy is left to the community
What Microduck does not have is any purpose of its own. Pollen wants owners to build voice recognition, navigation and grasping on top of the platform. It also wants simultaneous localisation and mapping. The company is asking for help rather than promising a roadmap, which makes this a bet on a user base that does not exist yet.
“Adding purpose and autonomy to the robot is something we are still working on, and we expect the community to pick up and contribute,” Pavon said. He described autonomous behaviour as a community objective, and called the idea exciting. Anyone can train new behaviours in simulation using reinforcement learning, he said.
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Pollen’s own answer to what people should build is more ducks. It says the robot is about ten times more fun in groups. Races, football and robots reacting to each other are what made it feel alive internally. For developers it is a cheap way into multi-robot behaviour, without a room full of hardware.
Pollen is not the only firm trying to standardise how AI models reach real hardware. Anthropic published a standard for lab hardware on the same day Microduck went up for preorder.
Every robot gets its own voice
Microduck sings, and no two sound alike. Pollen says it “communicates through weird little sounds, closer to a creature than an assistant”, and that each robot generates its own audio identity the first time it wakes up. That voice stays with the unit for life. It comes in cream, graphite, lavender and sky.
The launch lands in the middle of a $12.9bn deal
Hugging Face bought Pollen Robotics in April 2025 to build cheap open hardware. The two launched Reachy Mini a couple of months later. That desktop robot now sells in two versions. A $499 model runs on a Raspberry Pi, and a $399 Lite runs off a Mac or a PC.
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Microduck arrives in the middle of a takeover. The Information reported that Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn. That followed reports days earlier that put the two in talks over a sale. Business Insider put the figure above $13bn, citing a person familiar with the matter, and said the two sides had not finalised an agreement.
Nobody involved is discussing it. Pavon answered questions about Microduck but not about the Nvidia deal. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face replied to The Register, and both have stayed quiet since the Business Insider story broke. Nobody has said what the deal would mean for a small French robotics subsidiary.
A camera in the bedroom
Microduck carries a camera and a microphone, and Pollen expects people to put it in their homes. There is at least a light: the robot has a dedicated camera-use indicator, which Pollen says is modelled on the REC lights of old camcorders.
That is the fix Meta reached for on its smart glasses this month, after people worked out how to cover the LED. Delangue has argued before that robots running open models beat “a black box system” controlled by a handful of organisations, “especially if these organizations’ CEO is not the most stable person in the world,” he told TechCrunch.
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Open source gives developers auditability, TechCrunch noted, but it does not guarantee that data stays private. Owners install applications on top of the model, and those apps can reach the camera and the microphone. What they do with it depends on how a developer builds them.
Some numbers are still soft. Pollen says camera resolution, LiDAR range, radio versions, SDK languages and any age recommendation are provisional.
Two things will show whether the pitch holds. The first is whether units ship before Christmas 2026, the date Pollen has given. The second is whether anyone outside the company publishes a behaviour worth installing, because the autonomy Pollen is promising is work it has asked other people to do.
The researchers discovered Fire Ant’s new tactic after finding an active GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) tunnel interface on a Cisco IOS XR router that could not be explained by a running configuration or commit history.
According to incident response company Sygnia, the threat actor switched from targeting VMware hypervisors to compromising Cisco routers, TACACS authentication servers, and Linux management hosts.
The researchers discovered Fire Ant’s new tactic after finding on a Cisco IOS XR router an active GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) tunnel interface that could not be explained by a running configuration or commit history.
Further analysis revealed that Fire Ant had deployed custom malware on the devices, enabling persistence through a fake system service that ran the implant only during alternating hours.
The malware selectively suppressed syslog messages to hide tunnel-related information from legitimate administrators, established outbound Telnet connections to Fire Ant infrastructure, and supported interactive shell access with no logging.
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Fire Ant’s evasion tactics Source: Sygnia
The attackers also used their administrative access to capture traffic from multiple routers and upload the resulting PCAP files to external FTP servers.
These captures could expose internal topology, administrative connections, authentication flows, routing relationships, and traffic exchanged with connected networks.
“This behavior shifts the router’s role from a transit device to a collection platform,” Sygnia explains.
“Once the actor controlled the router, the device became a vantage point for observing traffic moving through trusted network paths.”
The concealed GRE tunnel connected one compromised router to a legacy Linux server, which Fire Ant used as a staging and reconnaissance system.
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From there, the attackers probed systems in connected high-value environments, including systems associated with critical infrastructure, over ports commonly used for SSH, web services, SMB/RPC, and RDP.
Sygnia believes that Fire Ant’s operation aimed to compromise trusted infrastructure at an initial victim and use it as a covert bridge to explore access paths into connected high-value networks, a tactic which they dub “target behind the target.”
Operational overview Source: Sygnia
The researchers also discovered a previously undocumented backdoor called ‘BridgeAgent,’ which Fire Ant disguised as a legitimate Zabbix monitoring agent.
The backdoor persists as a root-level systemd service and supports TLS reverse shells and the execution of additional payloads on the compromised host.
The GRE tunnel function backing BridgeAgent Source: Sygnia
Sygnia says Fire Ant activity strongly overlaps with UNC3886, a Chinese espionage group previously documented by Google. However, the researchers say that there are differences in filenames, paths, and implementation details.
The researchers warned that Fire Ant systematically tampers with system logs and records, even changing file timestamps to obscure evidence that would benefit investigators, noting that logs retrieved from compromised infrastructure should be validated against other data.
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Sygnia’s report shares an extensive list of indicators of compromise (IoCs), along with hunting and YARA rules to detect Fire Ant activity.
Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.
The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.
What we know so far: Apple is widely expected to introduce its first foldable smartphone in September, joining Samsung and a host of other companies in the emerging market for ultra-premium handsets. It’s too early to know if Apple’s foldable will be the must-have gadget of the 2026 holiday season, or if a prototyped accessory will even make it to market.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has internally prototyped and tested a version of the Apple Pencil for its forthcoming foldable. The accessory is said to be stubbier than the version for the iPad due to the phone’s height, and attaches using magnets for storage and charging.
A stylus for what is essentially a small tablet doesn’t sound like a terrible idea, but there are drawbacks. Gurman said stowing the Pencil could get tricky when not actively using it. Perhaps even more concerning is the delicate nature of foldable displays. Most are manufactured using plastics, which can scratch just by dragging your fingernail across it. The last thing you want with something that fragile is a stylus with a pointy tip.
Then there’s the principal of the matter. When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone in 2007, he famously said that “nobody wants a stylus.” And thus, the iPhone has relied on touch inputs from the very beginning. Bringing in a stylus nearly two decades later would be a surprise, but Apple will be under new leadership by the time the iPhone Fold ships so it’s not an entirely impossible outcome.
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To be clear, Gurman doesn’t think Apple will actually launch the accessory as a consumer product when the foldable debuts in a couple of weeks and neither do I. While it could be helpful to a certain subset of buyers, it’s simply a bridge too far at this point. Foldable displays need to be much more robust to withstand the daily stresses introduced by a stylus, and the technology simply isn’t there yet.
Apple is set to announce its folding iPhone at an event scheduled for September 9.
MapQuest stood up to President Donald Trump, and now its app is reaping the rewards.
The “OG of online mapping,” as the company calls itself, announced on Thursday that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps to Lake America, despite Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. As a result, MapQuest’s mobile app downloads soared, sending the iOS app to the No. 4 position on the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts for apps (not including games) as of Monday morning on the U.S. east coast.
MapQuest also reached the No. 8 position overall in the U.S. App Store across both apps and games, and it became the No. 1 Navigation app in the United States.
In Canada’s App Store, the app reached No. 2 overall as of Sunday evening.
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The 30-year-old company remarked that it received “hundreds of thousands” of new downloads since its decision to keep the name Lake Ontario in place, and saw its app’s usage climb to 50 times above its normal levels.
Third-party data from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower confirms the surge, noting that MapQuest saw 184,000 and 162,000 total global and U.S. app downloads during the week beginning August 24, respectively, each representing an increase of more than 10x week-over-week. In the U.S., daily downloads were up 128% day-over-day from August 26 to August 30.
“We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they’re familiar with,” said Doug Berger, General Manager of MapQuest, in a statement. “Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right by downloading our app.”
MapQuest also released an online tool that lets you jokingly rename Lake Ontario to whatever you want it to be, then share the results on social media. The company had offered a similar tool last year, after Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
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Trump’s decision to rename the body of water bordering the U.S and Canada comes as trade talks broke down, leading the U.S. to impose new 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, with Canada poised to retaliate.
On Saturday, Google Maps announced it was complying with Trump’s decision, explaining that it updates Google Maps to reflect the name changes in official government sources. In the U.S., that’s the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). The updated map will only be shown to users in the U.S., while those in Canada will see Lake Ontario, and those outside of the two countries will see both names.
Both Apple Maps and Google Maps previously changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America last year, after Trump issued a similar name-changing executive order.
As of Monday morning, Apple Maps has yet to rename the Great Lake to Lake America and has not issued a statement about its plans.
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MapQuest has changed hands several times over the years, having been acquired by AOL shortly after going public. It then ended up with Verizon for a time, as a result of Verizon’s acquisition of AOL. In 2019, Verizon sold MapQuest to internet advertising company System1.
MapQuest’s app has been downloaded 687,000 times worldwide this year so far, up 29% year-over-year, SensorTower estimated. Since 2012, MapQuest has been downloaded 24.4 million times, with 97% of those installs coming from the U.S.
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