Most smartphones are preoccupied with being as slim and shiny as possible, but the 8849 TANK X doesn’t care. At 1.26 inches thick and 750 grams, it’s a hefty, heavy beast designed for places where your precious little smartphone would sugarcoat and die: dust storms, getting rained on, being dropped from chest level, -28°C or 56°C heat, you name it. It has IP68 and IP69K classifications, as well as military-grade ruggedness that would make even the most ardent outdoor enthusiast happy.

One of the Tank X’s most notable features is its built-in DLP projector, which will either convert you to the Church of Portable Movie Nights or make you laugh at the expense of some unfortunate soul who thought it sounded like a half-baked idea. The resolution is full 1080p (up to 1920×1080), and the brightness is 220 lumens. Plus, with laser focusing, you can expect razor-sharp shots from about half a meter to 3-4 meters away, and keystone correction ensures that the image remains level even if the phone is held at an angle. The projection area is around 10 feet square, making it ideal for movie evenings under the stars or displaying a map on a wall to confuse all of your lost buddies. You can get 5 hours of use out of it at maximum brightness in high mode or 6 in night mode. The previous Tank models were stuck to 720p, so this is a significant advance.

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The battery capacity is a whopping 17,600mAh, split between two cells to keep it going for ages, and by “ages,” I mean several days of average use or 25 hours of movie playback. Or, if you’re having a lengthy phone session, you could easily talk for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours. Now, I get what you’re thinking: “But what about when the projector turns on?” Well, the power management is fairly conscientious, so it does not drain the battery.

So, what makes this thing tick? It’s powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 8200, a very strong 4nm octa-core processor paired with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM (expandable by another 16GB, since who doesn’t like that?) and 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage. It’s all powered by Android 15, which, even on a beast like this, manages to keep things running smoothly whether you’re running multiple apps, playing a few games, or simply goofing around.

Connectivity is excellent, including 5G bands, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and GPS accuracy to within a few feet. There’s also a 3.5mm jack, an IR blaster for controlling your fancy TVs and appliances, and an FM radio for when you’re out of the loop.

Cameras are more than just good for taking casual images, beginning with the 50MP primary sensor, which employs Sony’s IMX766 to capture solid daylight shots with full-pixel focusing. Then there’s the 8MP telephoto, which can zoom in three times and should come in handy, but the true star of the show is the 64MP night vision camera, which is equipped with four infrared LEDs and autofocus, allowing you to see as clearly as day in almost complete darkness. A 50MP front camera for selfies and video calls completes the self-portrait package. With a dual-tone flash and a pair of extra IR lights to help you in low-light settings, you should look sharp.

On the back, there’s a 1,200-lumen RGB camping light that functions as a little spotlight; you can vary between modes such as white light, some great color options, SOS patterns, or even just a strobe or sound alert. It’s useful for emergencies or simply navigating a trail in the dark.

The 6.78-inch LCD display has 2460×1080 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate, with a maximum brightness of 750 nits. It’s nice to see they eliminated the PWM flicker that causes eye strain after long viewing periods. Furthermore, with this display, outside visibility is acceptable, and the panel works well with the projector.

The Tank X was priced at $1,049.99 (ugh), but an early bird pricing of $549.99 made it slightly more affordable. You can also place a pre-order beginning February 1, 2026, and they will ship from warehouses in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other locations beginning March 1.
[Source]

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I don’t know my Greek letters, so whenever there’s a clue like today’s 7-Across, I just have to hope the other answers fill it in for me. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: “The Rachel Maddow Show” channel, after a 2025 rebranding
Answer: MSNOW

6A clue: Childhood
Answer: YOUTH

7A clue: Greek letter after zeta and eta
Answer: THETA

8A clue: What helicopter parents do
Answer: HOVER

9A clue: Sound at the dog park
Answer: ARF

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: “Cats always land on their feet,” e.g.
Answer: MYTH

2D clue: Neighborhood in both London and Manhattan
Answer: SOHO

3D clue: ___ York, Spanish name for New York
Answer: NUEVA

4D clue: Furry mammal that eats crustaceans
Answer: OTTER

5D clue: Docking area
Answer: WHARF

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy today’s videos!

One of my favorite parts of robotics is watching research collide with non-roboticists in the real (or real-ish) world.

[ DARPA ]

Spot will put out fires for you. Eventually. If it feels like it.

[ Mechatronic and Robotic Systems Laboratory ]

All those robots rising out of their crates is not sinister at all.

[ LimX ]

The Lynx M20 quadruped robot recently completed an extreme cold-weather field test in Yakeshi, Hulunbuir, operating reliably in temperatures as low as –30°C.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

This is a teaser video for KIMLAB’s new teleoperation robot. For now, we invite you to enjoy the calm atmosphere, with students walking, gathering, and chatting across the UIUC Main Quad—along with its scenery and ambient sounds, without any technical details. More details will be shared soon. Enjoy the moment.

The most incredible part of this video is that they have publicly available power in the middle of their quad.

[ KIMLAB ]

For the eleventy-billionth time: Just because you can do a task with a humanoid robot doesn’t mean you should do a task with a humanoid robot.

[ UBTECH ]

[ KAIST ]

Okay, so figuring out where Spot’s face is just got a lot more complicated.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

An undergraduate team at HKU’s Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing developed CLIO, an embodied tour-guide robot, just in months. Built on LimX Dynamics TRON 1, it uses LLMs for tour planning, computer vision for visitor recognition, and a laser pointer/expressive display for engaging tours.

[ CLIO ]

The future of work is doing work so that robots can then do the same work, except less well.

[ AgileX ]

Apple on Tuesday announced a major update to its flagship developer tool that gives artificial intelligence agents unprecedented control over the app-building process, a move that signals the iPhone maker’s aggressive push into an emerging and controversial practice known as “agentic coding.”

Xcode 26.3, available immediately as a release candidate, integrates Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex directly into Apple’s development environment, allowing the AI systems to autonomously write code, build projects, run tests, and visually verify their own work — all with minimal human oversight.

The update is Apple’s most significant embrace of AI-assisted software development since introducing intelligence features in Xcode 26 last year, and arrives as “vibe coding” — the practice of delegating software creation to large language models — has become one of the most debated topics in technology.

Apple says that while integrating intelligence into the Xcode developer workflow is powerful, the model itself still has a somewhat limited aperture. It answers questions based on what the developer provides, but it doesn’t have access to the full context of the project, and it’s not able to take action on its own. That changes with this update, the company said during a press conference Tuesday morning.

How Apple’s new AI coding features let developers build apps faster than ever

The key innovation in Xcode 26.3 is the depth of integration between AI agents and Apple’s development tools. Unlike previous iterations that offered code suggestions and autocomplete features, the new system grants AI agents access to nearly every aspect of the development process.

During a live demonstration, an Apple engineer showed how the Claude agent could receive a simple prompt — “add a new feature to show the weather at a landmark” — and then independently analyze the project’s file structure, consult Apple’s documentation, write the necessary code, build the project, and take screenshots of the running application to verify its work matched the requested design.

According to Apple, the agent is able to use tools like build and screenshot previews to verify its work, visually analyze the image, and confirm that everything has been built accordingly. Before, when interacting with a model, it would provide an answer and just stop there.

The system creates automatic checkpoints as developers interact with the AI, allowing them to roll back changes if results prove unsatisfactory — a safeguard that acknowledges the unpredictable nature of AI-generated code.

Apple says it worked directly with Anthropic and OpenAI to optimize the experience with particular attention paid to reducing token usage — the computational units that determine costs when using cloud-based AI models — and improving the efficiency of tool calling.

According to the company, developers can download new agents with a single click, and they update automatically.

Why Apple’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol could reshape the AI development landscape

Underlying the integration is the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, an open standard that Anthropic developed for connecting AI agents with external tools. Apple’s adoption of MCP means that any compatible agent — not just Claude or Codex — can now interact with Xcode’s capabilities.

Apple says this also works for agents that are running outside of Xcode. Any agent that is compatible with MCP can now work with Xcode to do all the same things — project discovery and change management, building and testing apps, working with previews and code snippets, and accessing the latest documentation.

The decision to embrace an open protocol, rather than building a proprietary system, represents a notable departure for Apple, which has historically favored closed ecosystems. It also positions Xcode as a potential hub for a growing universe of AI development tools.

Xcode’s troubled history with AI tools — and why Apple says this time is different

The announcement comes against a backdrop of mixed experiences with AI-assisted coding in Apple’s tools. During the press conference, one developer described previous attempts to use AI agents with Xcode as “horrible,” citing constant crashes and an inability to complete basic tasks.

Apple acknowledged the concerns while arguing that the new integration addresses fundamental limitations of earlier approaches.

The company says the big shift is that Claude and Codex have so much more visibility into the breadth of the project. If they hallucinate and write code that doesn’t work, they can now build, see the compile errors, and iterate in real time to fix those issues — in some cases before presenting it as a finished work.

Apple argues that the power of IDE integration extends beyond error correction. Agents can now automatically add entitlements to projects when needed to access protected APIs — a task the company says would be otherwise very difficult for an AI operating outside the development environment dealing with binary files it may not have the format for.

From Andrej Karpathy’s tweet to LinkedIn certifications: The unstoppable rise of vibe coding

Apple’s announcement arrives at a crucial moment in the evolution of AI-assisted development. The term “vibe coding,” coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, has transformed from a curiosity into a genuine cultural phenomenon that is reshaping how software gets built.

LinkedIn announced last week that it will begin offering official certifications in AI coding skills, drawing on usage data from platforms like Lovable and Replit. Job postings requiring AI proficiency doubled in the past year, according to edX research, with Indeed’s Hiring Lab reporting that 4.2% of U.S. job listings now mention AI-related keywords.

The enthusiasm is driven by genuine productivity gains. Casey Newton, the technology journalist, recently described building a complete personal website using Claude Code in about an hour — a task that previously required expensive Squarespace subscriptions and years of frustrated attempts with various website builders.

More dramatically, Jaana Dogan, a principal engineer at Google, posted that she gave Claude Code “a description of the problem” and “it generated what we built last year in an hour.” Her post, which accumulated more than 8 million views, began with the disclaimer: “I’m not joking and this isn’t funny.”

Security experts warn that AI-generated code could lead to ‘catastrophic explosions’

But the rapid adoption of agentic coding has also sparked significant concerns among security researchers and software engineers.

David Mytton, founder and CEO of developer security provider Arcjet, warned last month that the proliferation of vibe-coded applications “into production will lead to catastrophic problems for organizations that don’t properly review AI-developed software.”

“In 2026, I expect more and more vibe-coded applications hitting production in a big way,” Mytton wrote. “That’s going to be great for velocity… but you’ve still got to pay attention. There’s going to be some big explosions coming!”

Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django web framework, drew an even starker comparison. “I think we’re due a Challenger disaster with respect to coding agent security,” he said, referring to the 1986 space shuttle explosion that killed all seven crew members. “So many people, myself included, are running these coding agents practically as root. We’re letting them do all of this stuff.”

A pre-print paper from researchers this week warned that vibe coding could pose existential risks to the open-source software ecosystem. The study found that AI-assisted development pulls user interaction away from community projects, reduces visits to documentation websites and forums, and makes launching new open-source initiatives significantly harder.

Stack Overflow usage has plummeted as developers increasingly turn to AI chatbots for answers—a shift that could ultimately starve the very knowledge bases that trained the AI models in the first place.

Previous research painted an even more troubling picture: a 2024 report found that vibe coding using tools like GitHub Copilot “offered no real benefits unless adding 41% more bugs is a measure of success.”

The hidden mental health cost of letting AI write your code

Even enthusiastic adopters have begun acknowledging the darker aspects of AI-assisted development.

Peter Steinberger, creator of the viral AI agent originally known as Clawdbot (now OpenClaw), recently revealed that he had to step back from vibe coding after it consumed his life.

“I was out with my friends and instead of joining the conversation in the restaurant, I was just like, vibe coding on my phone,” Steinberger said in a recent podcast interview. “I decided, OK, I have to stop this more for my mental health than for anything else.”

Steinberger warned that the constant building of increasingly powerful AI tools creates the “illusion of making you more productive” without necessarily advancing real goals. “If you don’t have a vision of what you’re going to build, it’s still going to be slop,” he added.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has expressed similar reservations, saying he won’t vibe code on “large codebases where you really have to get it right.”

“The security has to be there,” Pichai said in a November podcast interview.

Boris Cherny, the Anthropic engineer who created Claude Code, acknowledged that vibe coding works best for “prototypes or throwaway code, not software that sits at the core of a business.”

“You want maintainable code sometimes. You want to be very thoughtful about every line sometimes,” Cherny said.

Apple is gambling that deep IDE integration can make AI coding safe for production

Apple appears to be betting that the benefits of deep IDE integration can mitigate many of these concerns. By giving AI agents access to build systems, test suites, and visual verification tools, the company is essentially arguing that Xcode can serve as a quality control mechanism for AI-generated code.

Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, framed the update as part of Apple’s broader mission.

In a statement, Apple said its goal is to make tools that put industry-leading technologies directly in developers’ hands so they can build the very best apps. The company says agentic coding supercharges productivity and creativity, streamlining the development workflow so developers can focus on innovation.

But the question remains whether the safeguards will prove sufficient as AI agents grow more autonomous. Asked about debugging capabilities, Apple noted that while Xcode has a powerful debugger built in, there is no direct MCP tool for debugging.

Developers can run the debugger and manually relay information to the agent, but the AI cannot yet independently investigate runtime issues — a limitation that could prove significant as the complexity of AI-generated code increases.

The update also does not currently support running multiple agents simultaneously on the same project, though Apple noted that developers can open projects in multiple Xcode windows using Git worktrees as a workaround.

The future of software development hangs in the balance — and Apple just raised the stakes

Xcode 26.3 is available immediately as a release candidate for members of the Apple Developer Program, with a general release expected soon on the App Store. The release candidate designation — Apple’s final beta before production — means developers who download today will automatically receive the finished version when it ships.

The integration supports both API keys and direct account credentials from OpenAI and Anthropic, offering developers flexibility in managing their AI subscriptions. But those conveniences belie the magnitude of what Apple is attempting: nothing less than a fundamental reimagining of how software comes into existence.

For the world’s most valuable company, the calculus is straightforward. Apple’s ability to attract and retain developers has always underpinned its platform dominance. If agentic coding delivers on its promise of radical productivity gains, early and deep integration could cement Apple’s position for another generation. If it doesn’t — if the security disasters and “catastrophic explosions” that critics predict come to pass — Cupertino could find itself at the epicenter of a very different kind of transformation.

The technology industry has spent decades building systems to catch human errors before they reach users. Now it must answer a more unsettling question: What happens when the errors aren’t human at all?

As Apple conceded during Tuesday’s press conference, with what may prove to be unintentional understatement: “Large language models, as agents sometimes do, sometimes hallucinate.”

Millions of lines of code are about to find out how often.

Microsoft could launch the next-generation Xbox console sometime in 2027, AMD CEO Lisa Su has revealed during the semiconductor company’s latest earnings call. Valve is on track to start shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year, she said, while Microsoft’s development of an Xbox with a semi-custom SOC from AMD is “progressing well to support a launch in 2027.” While it doesn’t necessarily mean Microsoft is releasing a new Xbox console next year, that seems to be the company’s current goal.

Xbox president Sarah Bond announced Microsoft’s multi-year partnership with AMD for its consoles in mid-2025. Based on Bond’s statement back then, Microsoft is embracing the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in future Xbox games. She also said that the companies are going to “co-engineer silicon” across devices, “in your living room and in your hands,” implying the development of future handheld consoles.

Leaked documents from the FTC vs. Microsoft court battle revealed in the past that Microsoft was planning to make the next Xbox a “hybrid game platform,” which combines local hardware and cloud computing. The documents also said that Microsoft was planning to release the next Xbox in 2028. Whether the company has chosen to launch the new Xbox early remains to be seen, but it is possible when the Xbox X and S were released in 2020, and they haven’t sold as well as the Xbox One.

Dizzy Gillespie was a fan. Frank Sinatra bought one for himself and gave them to his Rat Pack friends. Hugh Hefner acquired one for the Playboy Mansion. Clairtone Sound Corp.’s Project G high-fidelity stereo system, which debuted in 1964 at the National Furniture Show in Chicago, was squarely aimed at trendsetters. The intent was to make the sleek, modern stereo an object of desire.

By the time the Project G was introduced, the Toronto-based Clairtone was already well respected for its beautiful, high-end stereos. “Everyone knew about Clairtone,” Peter Munk, president and cofounder of the company, boasted to a newspaper columnist. “The prime minister had one, and if the local truck driver didn’t have one, he wanted one.” Alas, with a price tag of CA $1,850—about the price of a small car—it’s unlikely that the local truck driver would have actually bought a Project G. But he could still dream.

The design of the Project G seemed to come from a dream.

“I want you to imagine that you are visitors from Mars and that you have never seen a Canadian living room, let alone a hi-fi set,” is how designer Hugh Spencer challenged Clairtone’s engineers when they first started working on the Project G. “What are the features that, regardless of design considerations, you would like to see incorporated in a new hi-fi set?”

The film “I’ll Take Sweden” featured a Project G, shown here with co-star Tuesday Weld.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

The result was a stereo system like no other. Instead of speakers, the Project G had sound globes. Instead of the heavy cabinetry typical of 1960s entertainment consoles, it had sleek, angled rosewood panels balanced on an aluminum stand. At over 2 meters long, it was too big for the average living room but perfect for Hollywood movies—Dean Martin had one in his swinging Malibu bachelor pad in the 1965 film Marriage on the Rocks. According to the 1964 press release announcing the Project G, it was nothing less than “a new sculptured representation of modern sound.”

The first-generation Project G had a high-end Elac Miracord 10H turntable, while later models used a Garrard Lab Series turntable. The transistorized chassis and control panel provided AM, FM, and FM-stereo reception. There was space for storing LPs or for an optional Ampex 1250 reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The “G” in Project G stood for “globe.” The hermetically sealed 46-centimeter-diameter sound globes were made of spun aluminum and mounted at the ends of the cantilevered base; inside were Wharfedale speakers. The sound globes rotated 340 degrees to project a cone of sound and could be tuned to re-create the environment in which the music was originally recorded—a concert hall, cathedral, nightclub, or opera house.

Diane Landry, winner of the 1963 Miss Canada beauty pageant, poses with a Project G2. Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

Initially, Clairtone intended to produce only a handful of the stereos. As one writer later put it, it was more like a concept car “intended to give Clairtone an aura of futuristic cool.” Eventually fewer than 500 were made. But the Project G still became an icon of mod ’60s Canadian design, winning a silver medal at the 13th Milan Triennale, the international design exhibition.

And then it was over; the dream had ended. Eleven years after its founding, Clairtone collapsed, and Munk and cofounder David Gilmour lost control of the company.

The birth of Clairtone Sound Corp.

Clairtone’s Peter Munk lived a colorful life, with a nightmarish start and many fantastic and dreamlike parts too. He was born in 1927 in Budapest to a prosperous Jewish family. In the spring of 1944, Munk and 13 members of his family boarded a train with more than 1,600 Jews bound for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They arrived, but after some weeks the train moved on, eventually reaching neutral Switzerland. It later emerged that the Nazis had extorted large sums of cash and valuables from the occupants in exchange for letting the train proceed.

As a teenager in Switzerland, Munk was a self-described party animal. He enjoyed dancing and dating and going on long ski trips with friends. Schoolwork was not a top priority, and he didn’t have the grades to attend a Swiss university. His mother, an Auschwitz survivor, encouraged him to study in Canada, where he had an uncle.

Before he could enroll, though, Munk blew his tuition money entertaining a young woman during a trip to New York. He then found work picking tobacco, earned enough for tuition, and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1952 with a degree in electrical engineering.

Clairtone cofounders Peter Munk [left] and David Gilmour envisioned the company as a luxury brand.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

At the age of 30, Munk was making custom hi-fi sets for wealthy clients when he and David Gilmour, who owned a small business importing Scandinavian goods, decided to join forces. Their idea was to create high-fidelity equipment with a contemporary Scandinavian design. Munk’s father-in-law, William Jay Gutterson, invested $3,000. Gilmour mortgaged his house. In 1958, Clairtone Sound Corp. was born.

From the beginning, Munk and Gilmour sought a high-end clientele. They positioned Clairtone as a luxury brand, part of an elegant lifestyle. If you were the type of woman who listened to music while wearing pearls and a strapless gown and lounging on a shag rug, your music would be playing on a Clairtone. If you were a man who dressed smartly and owned an Arne Jacobsen Egg chair, you would also be listening on a Clairtone. That was the modern lifestyle captured in the company’s advertisements.

In 1958, Clairtone produced its first prototype: the monophonic 100-M, which had a long, low cabinet made from oiled teak, with a Dual 1004 turntable, a Granco tube chassis, and a pair of Coral speakers. It never went into production, but the next model, the stereophonic 100-S, won a Design Award from Canada’s National Industrial Design Council in 1959. By 1963, Clairtone was selling 25,000 units a year.

Peter Munk visits the Project G assembly line in 1965. Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

Design was always front and center at Clairtone, not just for the products but also for the typography, advertisements, and even the annual reports. Yet nothing in the early designs signaled the dramatic turn it would take with the Project G. That came about because of Hugh Spencer.

Spencer was not an engineer, nor did he have experience designing consumer electronics. His day job was designing sets for the Canadian Broadcast Corp. He consulted regularly with Clairtone on the company’s graphics and signage. The only stereo he ever designed for Clairtone was the Project G, which he first modeled as a wooden box with tennis balls stuck to the sides.

From both design and quality perspectives, Clairtone was successful. But the company was almost always hemorrhaging cash. In 1966, with great fanfare and large government incentives, the company opened a state-of-the-art production facility in Nova Scotia. It was a mismatch. The local workforce didn’t have the necessary skills, and the surrounding infrastructure couldn’t handle the production. On 27 August 1967, Munk and Gilmour were forced out of Clairtone, which became the property of the government of Nova Scotia.

Despite the demise of their first company (and the government inquiry that followed), Munk and Gilmour remained friends and went on to become serial entrepreneurs. Their next venture? A resort in Fiji, which became part of a large hotel chain in that country, Australia, and New Zealand. (Gilmour later founded Fiji Water.) Then Munk and Gilmour bought a gold mine and cofounded Barrick Gold (now Barrick Mining Corp., one of the largest gold mining operations in the world). Their businesses all had ups and downs, but both men became extremely wealthy and noted philanthropists.

Preserving Canadian design

As an example of iconic design, the Project G seems like an ideal specimen for museum collections. And in 1991, Frank Davies, one of the designers who worked for Clairtone, donated a Project G to the recently launched Design Exchange in Toronto. It would be the first object in the DX’s permanent collection, which sought to preserve examples of Canadian design. The museum quickly became Canada’s center for the promotion of design, hosting more than 50 programs each year to teach people about how design influences every aspect of our lives.

In 2008, the museum opened The Art of Clairtone: The Making of a Design Icon, 1958–1971, an exhibition showcasing the company’s distinctive graphic design, industrial design, engineering, and photography.

David Gilmour’s wife, Anna Gilmour, was the company’s first in-house model.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

But what happened to the DX itself is a reminder that any museum, however worthy, shouldn’t be taken for granted. In 2019, the DX abruptly closed its permanent collection, and curators were charged with deaccessioning its objects. Fortunately, the Royal Ontario Museum, Carleton and York Universities, and the Archives of Ontario, among others, were able to accept the artifacts and companion archives. (The Project G pictured at top is now at the Royal Ontario Museum.)

Researchers at York and Carleton have been working to digitize and virtually reconstitute the DX collection, through the xDX Project. They’re using the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) to turn interlinked and contextualized data about the collection into a searchable database. It’s a worthy goal, even if it’s not quite the same as having all of the artifacts and supporting papers physically together in one place. I admit to feeling both pleased about this virtual workaround, and also a little sad that a unified collection that once spoke to the historical significance of Canadian design no longer exists.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “The Project G Stereo Defined 1960s Cool.”

The founder of David Protein, maker of popular high-protein nutrition bars, announced on X on Monday that longevity guru Dr. Peter Attia “has stepped down from his role as Chief Science Officer at David.”

The announcement comes after Attia’s name appeared in more than 1,700 documents, including email correspondence, released on Friday as part of a massive file dump related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to The New York Times. Attia served on the executive team of the food startup and was also an early investor.

For those unfamiliar, Attia is a Canadian American physician who has become one of the most prominent voices in longevity and preventive health. He’s best known for his bestselling book “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity” and his now seven-year-old podcast, wherein he explores optimization strategies. He was also hired just last month as a contributor to CBS.

Three-year-old, New York-based David Protein raised a $75 million Series A funding round in May of last year led by Greenoaks, with participation from Valor Equity Partners. The company has experienced significant growth since launching its flagship protein bar in September 2024, a product it describes as having 28 grams of protein, zero sugar, and 150 calories.

In a lengthy post on X, Attia wrote that he was “ashamed” of some of the crude content in his emails with Epstein, but he also said he was not involved in criminal activity and never visited Epstein’s island or traveled on his plane. Attia also discussed at length how he came to know Epstein and why he stayed involved with him even after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.

The fallout appears to extend beyond David Protein. It also appears that Biograph, the healthcare testing and longevity startup that Attia co-founded with entrepreneur John Hering, may be distancing itself from the physician. The company declined to comment on Attia’s ongoing participation with the startup or about the pages on its website that used to mention him but now omit his name or return a “file not found” error.

Biograph came out of stealth a year ago, TechCrunch previously reported, with backing from investors that include Vy Capital, Human Capital, Alpha Wave, and WndrCo, along with angel investors, including Balaji Srinivasan. Like a growing number of concierge medical service companies, Biograph offers premium preventive health services to subscribers who pay between $7,500 and $15,000 per year. Attia was previously named on the company’s press release and site as a co-founder.