Smoke from devastating wildfires in Canada is blanketing a large swath of the Midwest and Northeast this week, causing cities across the region to issue air quality warnings.

The extreme levels of smoke mean that even able-bodied adults would be wise to take some precautions to protect their health. The increasing severity of wildfires across the continent—driven in part by climate change—means that even places where blazes aren’t burning will still suffer the impact.

More than 100 fires are burning out of control across Canada as of Wednesday, with hundreds more being monitored or battled. The smoke has drifted south and east, turning skies hazy from Minnesota to New York. Particularly dramatic images have emerged from Toronto, where commuters went to work on Wednesday morning under orange skies. The region is also dealing with a heat wave, with temperatures well above 90 degrees Fahrenheit in many areas and an even higher heat index.

On Wednesday evening, the air quality index in New York City topped out at 180, putting the city’s air squarely in the “unhealthy” category as defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Other places were even worse off, with Duluth, Minnesota, seeing its AQI top out above 500. (Anything over 301 is labeled “hazardous” and considered unsafe for everyone.) Smoky conditions are expected to worsen in parts of the Northeast US on Thursday, including New York.

The wildfire smoke blanketing the area contains microscopic particles of matter known as PM2.5s—shorthand for particles that are smaller than 2.5 micrometers, or 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Exposure to PM2.5s can trigger or worsen a number of medical conditions, especially in vulnerable populations. Nicholas Nassikas, a pulmonologist and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, says that he would tell his patients with preexisting conditions, like asthma or lung disease, to limit their time outside. Children “have a faster breathing rate—they just breathe more,” says Nassikas, while the elderly, who often have compounding conditions and may live in less well ventilated homes and senior centers, are also at risk.

Jennifer Stowell, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, says that even healthy adults may want to take precautions on days when the air quality index goes over 100: “At the very least, it is important to limit your time outdoors to reduce your overall exposure.” she says. If you have to be outside for long periods, she recommends wearing an N95 mask. Stowell, who is currently in Boston, where the AQI hit 110 on Wednesday, says she wasn’t planning on attending outdoors events until the evening.

Dan Westervelt, an associate professor of climate physics at Columbia University, is similarly cautious. “I’m going to make sure my kids are staying indoors today,” he says. “I won’t be doing any physical exertion, like running, today or tomorrow.”

Climate change is driving up temperatures. That’s making wildfire season longer and creating hotter, drier conditions that lead to more explosive fires. A study published last year estimated that wildfire smoke already causes 40,000 deaths per year in the US, and could more than double to 70,000 deaths per year by 2050 if warming continues. As bad-air-quality days from wildfire smoke get more common, the research on prolonged exposure to that smoke is still developing. A similar blast of smoke from Canadian wildfires hit the Northeast in 2023.

“Exposure to high levels of air pollution over the course of a lifetime or a long period of time is demonstrated numerous times in research to lead to premature mortality,” says Westervelt. “You can chop off some months of your life expectancy if you are living in conditions where you’re very frequently exposed to high levels of air pollution.”

The headphone company Skullcandy has a reputation for lackluster audio quality. For the past year or so, it’s been on a mission to improve that reputation.

Its efforts started with a Bose partnership in 2025 and the release of the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC, a $130 pair of wireless earbuds that have surprisingly decent audio quality and noise cancellation for the money.

Next on the upgrade list are Skullcandy’s notorious Crusher headphones. These wireless cans have been around for more than a decade, and they are notable for letting users crank up the bass vibrations using a physical thumb wheel on the ear cup. Roll that wheel all the way, and the Crushers rumble and vibrate against your skull, thanks to a special driver design.

The company announced a new pair, the Crusher 1080 ANC, during an event in New York City on Wednesday evening. They’re on sale now.

The headphones emulate the feel of a thumping subwoofer—as if you’re in the front row of a concert—while usually sacrificing the mids and highs. But that’s what Skullcandy wants to correct with the new headphones, once again by heavily relying on Bose’s audio expertise.

The new Crusher headphones are the next step in Skullcandy’s brand-reinvention efforts.

Courtesy of Skullcandy

Skullcandy likes to tout that its first product was born on a ski chairlift in 2003 near its headquarters in Park City, Utah. Ever since, the company has specifically catered to the board sports community.

“From snowboarders for snowboarders,” Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy CEO, tells WIRED. Even though private equity firm Mill Road Capital now owns the company, Skullcandy is still seen more as a lifestyle brand than an audio company with serious audiophile chops.

“We’ve been really, really great at community building and nurturing and helping push cultures forward—not the greatest at the engineering part of innovation with products,” Garofalow says. “So we’ve really been honing our chops in the last few years.”

Garofalow says it has been an engineering challenge to pair the company’s proprietary Crusher bass-boosting technology with noise canceling. He says the team worked with Bose’s engineers to decouple Crusher from the rest of the acoustic tuning profile so that the low end sits on its own. Theoretically, this means that when you crank up the bass effect with the dial, the “mids and highs are still way, way sharp, versus in the past, when they tended to get muddy,” Garofalow says.

The Sound by Bose program adds three other improvements to Skullcandy’s new Crusher headphones: Bose’s noise-canceling chops, which will supposedly work well even if you have the bass cranked to 11; Bose’s spatial audio profile for a surround-sound-like feel; and a six-microphone array for call quality that Bose has come to be known for.

Apple has introduced 36-month carrier financing for cellular iPads purchased directly from the Apple Store. The option is available through AT&T and Verizon to existing customers who add a new line of service.

Until now, the main financing option offered directly by Apple was Apple Card Monthly Installments, which divides the cost of an iPad across 12 months. The new carrier plans stretch those payments across three years and cover the standard iPad, iPad mini, iPad Air, and iPad Pro.

The higher prices are easier to swallow

The new option arrives only weeks after Apple raised prices across its iPad lineup, and the sticker shock appears to have become significant enough for the company to offer buyers another way to pay. A cellular 11-inch iPad Pro now starts at $1,399. Apple Card financing works out to $116.58 per month for one year, while AT&T or Verizon financing reduces the hardware payment to roughly $39 per month for three years (via 9to5Mac).

The installment will appear on the customer’s carrier bill alongside the cost of cellular service. Buyers get the iPad without paying the full amount upfront, Apple completes the sale, and the carrier gains a new line from an existing subscriber. There is one important catch. Anyone who cancels the line or switches carriers before the iPad is paid off will need to clear the remaining device balance. Once the balance is settled and the carrier’s other requirements are met, the iPad can be unlocked.

Why iPads have become more expensive

Apple has linked its recent price increases to the rising cost of RAM and storage. AI companies are buying huge quantities of memory for data centers, leaving less supply available for consumer electronics. Prices are unlikely to return to normal soon. Until memory costs ease, Apple may lean more heavily on carrier financing for future products that include cellular connectivity.

PAAS AND IAAS

Retail foundation leader Dave Treadwell takes over as senior leader and 19-year vet Dave Brown departs for pastures unknown

Dave Brown, a 19-year veteran of AWS and member of its S-team leadership cabal, is leaving Amazon for parts undisclosed.

It’s hard to overstate Dave’s impact on AWS; the few times I’ve met him, it was very clear that there was nothing I could trot out in the realm of “arcane EC2 trivia” that he didn’t go orders of magnitude deeper on with zero forewarning.

This is a titanic loss for AWS, because that’s roughly how deep Dave routinely dove. He’ll be handing the reins over to fellow S-team member Dave Treadwell, currently the head of Amazon Retail’s “eCommerce Foundation” (itself an upscale term for “bargain basement”).

Brown probably isn’t going to be a direct competitor (though he’s definitionally going to some Amazon competitor short of his next move being “philanthropy”), unless the two-week notice period is simply a bunch of Amazonian goons beating the tar out of him in a dark room around the clock until August.

But the interesting part to me is that suddenly Dave Treadwell has an enviable job.

Think about it for a second: Amazon retail was, for a time, the largest AWS customer — and certainly one of the most complicated. If I think I have beef about AWS-isms, there’s no doubt that “Tread,” as he’s apparently called, has mountains to my molehill of complaints.

So if I can slip into his role for a second, here would be my to-do list if I were coming from an Amazon Retail background and suddenly had EC2 bequeathed to me to run:

1. GPU capacity acquisition: Special people get special allocation rules, balanced between Capacity Blocks, war-clicking past InsufficientInstanceCapacity screens, and having to know a guy. Amazon has an entire internal project to solve this for its own teams. If I’m Tread, take a page from retail and smash Spot Fleet dynamics into a proper capacity marketplace. “Only 2 p6-b300.48xlarge left in stock. Ships from and sold by GPUZ4LOLZ (91% positive feedback).”

2. Savings plans / Reserved Instances archaeology: These sometimes-but-often-not overlapping discount vehicles were clearly designed by folks who never had to explain them to a CFO with anger management issues. Treadwell has a golden opportunity here to roll out dynamic raw pricing: on-demand rates that themselves fluctuate hourly like a third-party listing on discontinued and incompatible printer ink, replacing traditional commitment vehicles with a “Subscribe & Save 5%” toggle on vCPUs.

3. Instance type proliferation: As of this writing, there are 1,354 EC2 instance types available in us-east-1 alone, and the console picker assumes that you already know the correct answer. Riiiight. There’s a solution here! “Customers who launched m7i.large also launched …” combined with sponsored placement by EC2 sub-departments means the top result is now suddenly the instance family that AWS overbought. Is this the best instance for the customer? Who gives a rat’s ass; it’s what’s best for Amazon, a north star that Amazon Retail has been chasing for years.

4. SageMaker is someone’s empire-building project: There are over 35 SageMaker products, or features, or whatever the distinction is supposed to be at AWS. Tread should leave this alone, and introduce the amazing source of truth that is Customer Reviews. “1 star. Not as described. Arrived as Jupyter notebook; what the hell do I do with it?” They can repurpose their fake review detection to take down fraudulent reviews from other SageMaker sub-teams.

5. Quota request supplication: You know the drill; beg, plead, and wait for the privilege to give AWS more money. The fix here is almost too easy; y’know who doesn’t have to wait for quota increases? That’s right: Amazon Prime members.

That’s the easy punch list if it were me. But I’m me, and Tread is not. I’m sure he’s got planned more treats with far greater nuance and customer hostility; we’ll know for sure that he’s settled in when the EC2 section of our AWS bills starts including ads – and when Josh Pigford’s excellent Knockoff extension starts working in the EC2 console. ®

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,500 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today — or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

ai and ml

One-two punch offers a glimpse of how low-precision AI can complement high-precision simulations

How AI will change the way scientific computing is done remains an open question. One relies on ultra-precise double-precision mathematics, while the other is perfectly happy working with 4 bits.

On the surface, the two are diametrically opposed, two extremes of a spectrum we call high-performance computing (HPC) — and yes, whether you like it or not, AI is HPC.

However, the latest AI offering from Cadence Design Systems, one of the biggest names in industrial HPC, offers a glimpse of how high- and low-precision compute could not just coexist, but work together to solve bigger and more complex problems faster and with fewer resources.

Announced on Wednesday, Cadence’s AuraStack is an agentic AI system built to assist electrical engineers to design and test printed circuit boards (PCBs), or conduct advanced packaging design and testing — two tasks that have historically relied on highly precise simulations.

AI is definitely a big piece of what Cadence has built; however the company isn’t replacing these tools with hallucination-prone AI models. Instead, AuraStack is a bit like Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex, but rather than writing, compiling, debugging, and running C or Rust in a sandbox, Cadence’s latest agent is designed to orchestrate its existing test and simulation suites.

“AI is amplifying the value of our engineering products and technologies,” Michael Jackson, CVP of Cadence’s system design and analysis division, told The Register.

In other words, the AI model — we’re told AuraStack integrates with a wide range of open and proprietary models — functions as a natural language interface capable of planning and orchestrating complex multi-step circuit design and testing workflows that run at higher precision using CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators.

“For example, if I’m going to check and fix the IR reliability, I need to identify the power management components. I need to create a simulation-ready power tree, and then I need to do the simulation, and then I need to provide feedback to the designer,” Jackson said.

Cadence’s existing product stack already automates many of these processes. The problem, Jackson explains, is that a PCB or package design often requires completing thousands of tasks throughout its development. “Sixty-five percent of an engineer’s day is spent navigating and dealing with a lot of these tasks,” he said.

By orchestrating that scutwork, Jackson claims that AuraStack can deliver a 15x boost to productivity by letting the designer focus on design and engineering decisions rather than the individual tasks.

These gains are enough that several large players in the electronics space, including Nvidia, have already signed up for the service.

Cadence isn’t just melding AI with HPC for chip design or advanced packaging. The engineering software provider has built similar agents for digital and analog chip design.

The idea of using low precision compute to run AI models that orchestrate more precise single- and double-precision physics simulations isn’t new. Nvidia is one of the biggest champions of this approach, which makes sense seeing as its GPUs aren’t limited to training and running AI models, even if that’s what most folks are buying them for these days.

Earlier this year, we explored how researchers at the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories used AI agents to develop and test new hypotheses. They described the system as a self-driving lab. However, those tests, while similar in concept to what Cadence is doing with AuraStack, didn’t use LLMs and instead used more mature architectures like variational auto-encoders.

But given the success of code assistants, it’s not hard to imagine agent harnesses similar to AuraStack being used to automate lab equipment, perform simulations, and then iterate on the results, enabling scientists to continue their research even after they’ve nodded off for the night. ®

OpenAI is building an AI-powered smart speaker nobody wants. That is, if you believe the Bloomberg report from Mark Gurman and you’ve read his description of said rumored device.

According to the report: