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Superagers’ ‘Secret Ingredient’ May Be the Growth of New Brain Cells

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alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to a study of 38 adult human brains donated to science, superagers — people who retain exceptional memory as they age — have roughly twice as many immature neurons as their peers who age more typically. Moreover, people with Alzheimer’s disease show a marked reduction in neurogenesis compared to a normal baseline. […]

Led by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, the team set out to examine a variety of postmortem hippocampal tissue samples to see if they could identify markers of neurogenesis — and if different groups had any notable differences. The brain samples were donated from five groups: eight healthy young adults, aged between 20 and 40; eight healthy agers, aged between 60 and 93; six superagers, aged between 86 and 100; six individuals with preclinical Alzheimer’s pathology, aged between 80 and 94; and 10 individuals with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, aged between 70 and 93. The young healthy adult brain tissue was first analyzed to establish the neurogenesis pathways in the adult brain. Then, they analyzed 355,997 individual cell nuclei isolated from the hippocampus, searching for three different stages of cell development: Stem cells, which can develop into neurons; neuroblasts, which are stem cells in the process of that development; and immature neurons, on the verge of functionality. The results were striking.

“Superagers had twice the neurogenesis of the other healthy older adults,” [says neuroscientist Orly Lazarov of the University of Illinois Chicago]. “Something in their brains enables them to maintain a superior memory. I believe hippocampal neurogenesis is the secret ingredient, and the data support that.” That’s an interesting result on its own, but the data from the individuals with preclinical Alzheimer’s pathology and Alzheimer’s diagnoses is where the real meat of the study sits. In the preclinical group, subtle molecular changes hinted that the system supporting new neuron growth was beginning to falter. In the Alzheimer’s group, a clear drop in immature neurons was evident. A genetic analysis of the nuclei also showed that superager neural cells have increased gene activity linked to stronger synaptic connections, greater plasticity, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a critical protein for neural survival, growth, and maintenance. Taken together, these three things can be interpreted as resilience. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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A Broken Game Boy Advance Returns Stronger Than Before

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Game Boy Advance Restoration Upgrade Mods
Plenty of old handhelds spend their retirement gathering dust in a box somewhere, and this Game Boy Advance was no exception. Abandoned, completely dead, and sporting a screen that had burned out from years of neglect, it was not an obvious candidate for a comeback. Odd Tinkering took it apart piece by piece anyway, worked through every problem methodically, and brought it back to life with a handful of modern upgrades that breathe new life into the hardware without losing any of what made it special in the first place.



From the start it was completely dead, just a dark screen and no response when you tried to power it on. Some thorough cleaning got the electricity flowing again, and original Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles loaded up without complaint. GBA games were a different story though, refusing to run no matter what. The small mode detection switch inside the cartridge slot got a good wipe, which seemed like it should have done the trick, but the games still wouldn’t cooperate. The real culprit turned out to be oxidation sitting on the pins of the main chip. One more cleaning session and the problem disappeared entirely, with the system reading every cartridge thrown at it without a single issue.

Game Boy Advance Restoration Upgrade Mods
The screen was in rough shape, covered in dark blotches from years of burn in. New polarizing film cleared that up, though the display was still noticeably dim by modern standards, so an IPS panel went in next and solved the brightness issue immediately. Colors are vivid and the viewing angles are excellent, exactly what you want from a handheld you are actually going to use. The upgraded screen meant the original shell no longer fit, so the team scanned it with a 3D scanner and printed a new one in resin, a deep blue that nods to the classic aesthetic while hiding the modern hardware inside. The fit is perfect, with no gaps or wobble anywhere.

Game Boy Advance Restoration Upgrade Mods
The toolkit was refreshingly basic, a set of screwdrivers for disassembly, a soldering iron and desoldering tool for any stubborn connections, and hydrogen peroxide with UV light to lift the yellowing from the plastic. No specialty equipment, no secret techniques, just a clean and methodical process from the first screw to the last.

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Tycoon2FA phishing platform returns after recent police disruption

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Tycoon2FA phishing platforms returns after recent police disruption

The Tycoon2FA phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform that Europol and partners disrupted on March 4 has already returned to previously observed activity levels.

Microsoft led the technical disruption, which involved seizing 330 domains part of Tycoon2FA’s backbone infrastructure that included control panels and phishing pages used in attacks.

However, the disruption caused by the law enforcement was short-lived, as CrowdStrike noticed the cybercrime service return to normal operational volumes within days.

“Falcon Complete observed a short-term decrease in the volume of Tycoon2FA campaign activity following the takedown, with daily volumes on March 4 and March 5, 2026, reducing to 25% of pre-disruption levels,” reads CrowdStrike’s report.

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“However, this volume subsequently returned to pre-disruption levels, with daily levels of cloud compromise active remediations returning to early 2026 levels.”

First documented by Sekoia roughly two years ago, Tycoon2FA appeared online as a PhaaS platform dedicated to targeting Microsoft 365 and Gmail accounts, featuring adversary-in-the-middle mechanisms that enable bypassing two-factor authentication (2FA) protections.

A month later, Trustwave reported that Tycoon2FA’s operators were actively improving the platform, adding new, advanced features, and enticing more cybercriminals to purchase access.

Tycoon2FA is a significant actor on the phishing scene, with Microsoft reporting that it generated 30 million phishing emails per month, accounting for 62% of all emails blocked by the tech giant.

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According to CrowdStrike, Tycoon2FA is back in business using largely unchanged techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs), and supported a diverse set of illegal activities, like business email compromise (BEC), email thread hijacking, cloud account takeovers, and malicious SharePoint links.

After the disruption action, Tycoon2FA has been used in malicious email campaigns that relied on malicious URLs and shortener services, legitimate platforms such as presentation tools, where redirection mechanisms are abused, and also compromised domains.

AI-generated decoy web pages used in Tycoon2FA attacks
AI-generated decoy web pages used in Tycoon2FA attacks
Source: CrowdStrike

Interestingly, some of the old infrastructure remained active, indicating that the disruption was incomplete, while new phishing domains and IP addresses were registered quickly following the law enforcement operation.

Regarding the observed post-compromise activity, this includes the creation of inbox rules, hidden folders for fraud emails, and preparation for BEC operations.

Ultimately, CrowdStrike comments that, without arrests or physical seizures, it’s easy for cybercriminals to recover and replace the impacted infrastructure. As long as the demand from the phishing ecosystem is high, the motive for PhaaS platform operators remains unchanged.

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Traefik becomes the de facto standard for Kubernetes Networking

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The Kubernetes community retired Ingress NGINX this month after years of under-resourcing. The migration scramble it triggered is now consolidating around one open source beneficiary, and Traefik Labs announced that convergence at KubeCon today.


For years, the kubernetes/ingress-nginx project ran on borrowed time. Maintained largely by one or two volunteers working evenings and weekends, it had accumulated technical debt that the community couldn’t sustainably address.

In November 2025, Kubernetes SIG Network made it official: ingress NGINX would retire in March 2026. No more releases, no more bug fixes, no more security patches. The Kubernetes Steering Committee followed up in January 2026 with language that left little interpretive room: organisations remaining on ingress NGINX after retirement “are vulnerable to attack.”

Ingress NGINX was not a minor component. Depending on the analysis, between 41 and 50 percent of internet-facing Kubernetes clusters used it. It shipped as the default ingress controller in RKE2 (SUSE’s enterprise Kubernetes distribution), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and Alibaba ACK, among others.

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The retirement deadline created a near-simultaneous migration event across the industry, and at KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe in London today, Traefik Labs announced the outcome of that scramble: IBM Cloud, Nutanix, OVHcloud, SUSE, TIBCO, and additional platform vendors have each independently selected Traefik Proxy as their replacement.

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The technical case for Traefik’s selection rests primarily on compatibility. Most ingress controllers require teams to rewrite their Ingress resources when migrating away from ingress NGINX, because each controller interprets annotations differently. Traefik built a specific NGINX Provider that translates ingress NGINX annotations into Traefik configuration at runtime, meaning teams can swap the controller without modifying a single Ingress resource.

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The company claims coverage of more than 90 percent of annotations actively used in real migrations, a figure it arrived at by instrumenting migration tooling and analysing actual annotation usage patterns rather than attempting to support every annotation in the specification.

The vendor quotes collected in the announcement reflect the range of use cases these platforms cover. Nutanix’s Dan Ciruli noted that K3s has used Traefik as its default ingress controller for years, and that the retirement “validates the decision we made years ago.”

SUSE’s Peter Smails confirmed that Traefik will become the default in RKE2 starting with v1.36, replacing ingress NGINX as the distribution default. OVHcloud’s Jacques Murez positioned the choice around Gateway API readiness. TIBCO’s Devu Heda described Traefik as already powering ingress for both customer deployments and TIBCO’s own SaaS control plane infrastructure.

This last point matters for how Traefik Labs frames its commercial opportunity. The company’s open source product, Traefik Proxy, is MIT-licensed and accounts for the migration wave being announced today. But Traefik Labs is also selling Traefik Hub, an enterprise platform that adds API Gateway, AI Gateway, MCP Gateway, and API lifecycle management on top of Traefik Proxy, deployable via a single Helm chart upgrade.

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The ingress NGINX retirement is, from the company’s perspective, not just a migration event but an entry point: engineering teams that are already updating their networking layer are positioned to evaluate whether to extend that investment into API management.

Traefik Proxy has 3.4 billion Docker Hub downloads and 62,000 GitHub stars, making it one of the most widely deployed open source networking projects in cloud-native infrastructure. Traefik Labs was founded in 2016 by Emile Vauge, who now serves as CTO, with Sudeep Goswami appointed CEO in February 2024.

The company is headquartered in both France and the United States. It has raised $11.1 million across two funding rounds, with Balderton Capital, Kima Ventures, and Elaia among its backers, a relatively modest capital base for a company whose open source software sits in front of a substantial fraction of the world’s containerised production workloads.

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Jay Leno Drives the New Tesla Semi Truck with 500-Mile Range

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Jay Leno Tesla Semi Truck 500-Mile Range
Jay Leno climbed into the cab of a Tesla Semi, settled into the center seat, and eased the truck forward with a fully loaded trailer in tow, right there on the tarmac outside his garage. The 500 mile range variant, and by all accounts it felt planted and composed from the moment it started moving, even with another Semi trailing behind it.



The drive was as smooth as you could ask, with no clunks or pauses during gear changes. Three motors pushing all of that torque straight to the rear axles, and the vehicle performed like a dream, with no difficulty or drama. Leno commented on how normal the center driving position felt after he was settled in, despite the fact that the cab does taper in little as you go up for optimal airflow. He just glided through several easy curves and straight stretches, and the cabin was quiet enough for normal conversation.

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Jay Leno Tesla Semi Truck 500-Mile Range
Dan Priestley, Director of Semi Truck Engineering at Tesla, rode along and walked Leno through some of the finer details as they drove. The front axle does the heavy lifting during hard pulls and climbs before stepping back at highway speeds to reduce drag and conserve energy, a smart piece of engineering that keeps efficiency high without any unnecessary mechanical overhead. Leno put his foot down more than once and the response was immediate, yet the ride stayed completely composed throughout. Braking on the downhill sections was handled almost entirely by regeneration, keeping the air brakes quiet the whole way down.

Jay Leno Tesla Semi Truck 500-Mile Range
Weight is central to how the Semi stacks up against its diesel competition. The Long Range model comes in at around 23,000 pounds curb weight with a gross rating of 82,000 pounds, helped along by a federal allowance that lets electric Class 8 trucks run up to 2,000 pounds heavier than conventional diesel rigs to account for the battery mass. That gives it enough headroom to hit its advertised 500 mile range with a competitive payload on board, though that payload does fall somewhat short of the 70,000 pound figure that diesel tractors can typically manage once trailer weight is factored in.

Jay Leno Tesla Semi Truck 500-Mile Range
The long range pack covers 500 miles, while the shorter 325 mile variant drops a battery module to shed weight and tighten the turning circle to something closer to a passenger car. Charging peaks at 1.2 megawatts and gets the truck back to 60 percent in around half an hour, which lines up neatly with the rest breaks drivers are already taking. Priestley mentioned a projected million mile battery life built around the same 4680 cells Tesla uses across its lineup, and the Semi has already racked up more than 13 million miles in real world fleet use to back that claim up.

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Denon’s Home 2.0 takes the fight for the living room to Sonos and Bluesound

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After several years where didn’t hear much from Denon’s Home speaker series, the Japanese brand has whipped up a brand new range, and it’s got Dolby Atmos support across the entire range.

The range is made up of the Home 200, Home 400, and Home 600; which sort of but not quite replace the previous models. The Denon Home 150, Home 250 and Home 350 haven’t been wiped from existence, but they’ll be bundled in their own group, dubbed the Home 1.0.

You’ll be able to operate the Home 1.0 and Home 2.0 systems through the same app, unlike some rivals who decided to cordon off their older products from their more recent models (cough, Sonos, cough).

You’ll be able to play music to the old and new speakers within the same Denon HEOS ecosystem, though of course you won’t be able to stereo pair models across generations. You can, however, pair the speakers with the Denon Home 550 Soundbar to create a surround system.

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In fact, the you can use a sole Home 600 speaker, which can split the audio signal into left and right channels to create the sense of two rear speakers.

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Almost the same price across all speakers

Denon Home 600 newDenon Home 600 new
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)

Pricing for the new models is as follows

  • Denon Home 200 — $399 | £299 | €349
  • Denon Home 400 — $599 | £449 | €499
  • Denon Home 600 — $799 | £599 | €699

Which is better than expected given that it’s been almost seven years since the Home 1.0 launched, and the prices are still relatively in a similar ballpark.

The Home 400 is the same price (in the UK at least) as the Home 250, and it’s the same case for the Home 350. The Home 200 is the one where the price has shot up, from £219 to £299. These aren’t necessarily equivalent devices with the Home 200 featuring virtual Dolby Atmos support.

New look, new sound

Denon Home 400 newDenon Home 400 new
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)

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The new Denon Home series share a “unified design and performance philosophy” that Denon says is built for modern living. There’s a choice of Stone of Charcoal finishes (we do like the Stone look), with physical controls used (depending on the device, they’re either on the side or top surface); and there’s support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB-C audio, aux-in.

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What ties the experience together is Denon’s HEOS app, through which you can connect up to 64 HEOS products (AV receivers, mini systems, etc) across 32 zones in your home. High-resolution audio support is provided from Tidal, Amazon Music and Qobuz; while you can stream audio with Spotify Connect as well.

Denon Home 200 newDenon Home 200 new
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)

We’ve heard the new speakers in the flesh and they sounded good, with an emphasis on rich, warm sound, decent bass thump and a wide soundstage. We also heard how they play with Dolby Atmos music, the soundstage stretching quite high with the Home 600 to create a sound bigger than the speaker itself.

It remains to be seen how well this new era of Denon’s Home speakers with Sonos set to release new speakers in 2026, and Bluesound releasing more models. But you can find out for yourself how good the Denon Home 2.0 serie is, as they’re on sale now from Denon and authorised retailers.

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Denon expands its multi-room speaker lineup with the Home 200, Home 400 and Home 600

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If the Sonos app saga still has you down, Denon has three new multi-room speakers that give you some fresh alternatives. The company’s Home 200, Home 400 and Home 600 offer audio flexibility with other HEOS-enabled products. These new devices were also designed so that they blend in with home decor better than most speakers, coming in stone and charcoal color options for that purpose. As you progress up in number, the speakers not only get physically larger, but their sonic output is also more robust.

The Denon Home 200 houses three drivers and three amplifiers for “natural, room-filling sound” in a compact speaker. More specifically, you get two 0.98-inch tweeters and a single 4-inch woofer. The Home 200 looks a kind of like the Sonos Move 2, although Denon’s new compact unit isn’t portable. However, you can use a pair of them for a stereo setup, or connect two 200s to Denon’s Home Sound Bar 550 and Home Subwoofer for a 5.1 home theater system.

Next up is the Home 400, which carries two 0.75-inch tweeters, two 4.5-inch woofers and six amplifiers, in addition to two 1-inch up-firing drivers. Here, Denon says you can expect “a wide, airy soundstage” that provides room-filling audio coverage. What’s more, those upward-facing drivers project sound overhead, so there’s a greater sense of dimensionality and immersion here.

Denon Home 600 speaker

Denon Home 600 speaker (Denon)

The Home 600 is the largest speaker in the new trio, with dual 6.5-inch woofers alongside two tweeters, two midrange units and two up-firing drivers. Denon explains that this configuration offers “deep, authoritative bass” that provides more depth in your tunes than other two models.

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All three of the new Home speakers have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth USB-C and aux connectivity with the wireless streaming powered by Denon’s HEOS tech. As such, you can connect these Home speakers with up to 64 other HEOS devices — including A/V receivers and Denon’s new DP-500BT turntable — and arrange your audio gear in up to 32 different zones. You’ll have access to tunes from Tidal, Amazon Music HD and Qobuz in the HEOS app, and all three new Home speakers support Dolby Atmos Music where available.

The Home 200, Home 400 and Home 600 speakers are available today for $399, $599 and $799 respectively. They’re available from Denon directly or other authorized retailers.

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Sony Dev Says This Is The Console Coming For Playstation

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We don’t really know anything concrete about PlayStation 6 just yet (it’s not even official at the time of writing), but you can be sure it’ll face considerable competition when it finally drops. That competition, however, may not be spearheaded by one of Sony’s traditional industry rivals. 

According to Peter Dalton of Bluepoint Games, a subsidiary of PlayStation Studios, which is sadly closing its doors in March 2026, it’s a historically very different gaming heavyweight that Sony really needs to fear: Valve. Steam is one of the biggest names in the medium, powering an immense storefront that’s essentially a one-stop shop for many customers’ gaming needs. According to Dalton, a system such as the Steam machine could herald a paradigm shift in the industry. He noted in a post on X, “If Valve releases a new Steam console that provides a console-like experience while still giving players access to the entire PC game library, that could become a very compelling option.” 

The resulting blend of “console simplicity with the full breadth of PC gaming,” Dalton goes on, could be a very potent one-two punch. It’s certainly possible that this could be a major threat to Sony, perhaps more so than Microsoft’s Xbox family or Nintendo’s Switch and Switch 2. However, some important factors could limit its reach.

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Steam Machine poses a potent new threat, with some caveats

The Steam Machine is a system with set specs out of the box, and with 16GB of DDR5 RAM, 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM, and a 4.8GHz CPU (AMD Zen 4), Digital Foundry‘s first conclusion was that it would offer “performance at some mid-way point between Xbox Series S and the standard PlayStation 5.” 

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Unfortunately, tied into that, potential leaks about the Steam Machine’s price back in January 2026 suggest it could be pricier than we’d hoped. Here, then, are two significant potential barriers to a Valve console/PC hybrid taking off to the extent it could: Its all-important price, which has yet to be officially confirmed for the Steam Machine at the time of writing, and the fact that its specs are so comparable to both Sony and Microsoft’s existing systems. On top of that, of course, the PlayStation brand has generations of successful consoles behind it, and the latest is available from other retailers, while the Steam Machine may only be available from Valve itself. Loyalty to a brand is a powerful force.

At the same time, it’s about establishing a foothold in a space dominated by more traditional consoles. A Valve device, fully integrated with the Steam ecosystem, gives access to an enormous library of games (there are more than 125,000 games on Steam as of early 2026, according to SteamDB) in a potentially more user-friendly package.  This new iteration of a Steam Machine has potential, building on what the Steam Deck achieved. While you might want to consider building your own Steam Machine alternative and saving some money, it’s also worth keeping an eye on what Valve is cooking up.

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You are out of time to update: Severe iOS hack code leaks to everyone

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The DarkSword exploit, which primarily targets devices running older iOS versions, has unfortunately made its way to GitHub. It has been patched, so update now.

iPhone showing lock screen with large colorful 18 logo and 9:04 time, surrounded by blurred Apple Watch, AirPods case, and pink smartphone on a white surface
The DarkSword exploit targets devices running older versions of iOS 18 and below.

After Coruna, an exploit tool potentially developed by the US government, surfaced on the black market, the same thing happened with another tool, dubbed DarkSword. Now, DarkSword has been made publicly available on GitHub.
DarkSword primarily targeted iOS 18.4 through iOS 18.7, though older versions of iOS were vulnerable as well. The exploit relied on Safari and WebKit for initial code execution, after which it escaped multiple sandbox layers before fully compromising an iPhone or iPad.
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Nvidia CEO Says He’s ‘Empathetic’ To DLSS 5 Concerns

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he understands the concerns about “AI slop” with DLSS 5 but insists the feature preserves a game’s underlying geometry and artistic intent. “I think their perspective makes sense, ” said Huang during a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. “And I could see where they’re coming from because I don’t love AI slop myself. You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they’re all beautiful… so I’m empathic toward what they’re thinking. That’s just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do.” Tom’s Hardware reports: Although Huang is striking a more conciliatory tone, much of his response is similar to what we heard at GTC [where Huang said gamers were “completely wrong.”] The artist determines the geometry, we are completely truthful to the geometry… so every single frame, it enhances, but it doesn’t change anything.” There was some confusion about how DLSS 5 worked when it was first announced, and although the inner workings of it still aren’t clear on a technical level, Huang has said that it isn’t a general-purpose generative AI model. He describes it as “content-controlled generative AI.” On the other end of the spectrum, Huang also said that it isn’t a post-processing filter. The technical details of DLSS 5 live somewhere between that space, and we likely won’t know them until later this year when the feature is set to release.

“The question about enhancing, DLSS 5… in the future, you could even prompt it. You know, I want it to be a toon shader. I want it to look like this, kind of. You could even give it an example and it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, the style, the intent of the artist,” Huang continued. “All of that is done for the artist so they can create something that is more beautiful but still in the style that they want.” Although the talking points about DLSS 5 remain unchanged, it seems that Huang has at least heard the criticism. “I think that they got the impression that the games are going to come out the way the games are… and then we’re going to post-process it. That’s not what DLSS is intended to do.”

Huang also made assertions that DLSS is “integrated” with the artist, and suggested that it would put the power of generative AI in the hands of artists working in game development […]. Although DLSS 5 looks like it’s doing a lot, Huang said that it’s just another tool, not an essential feature. “The gamers might also appreciate that, in the last couple of years, we introduced skin shaders to game developers, and many of those games have skin shaders that include sub-surface scattering that makes skin look more skin-like… [DLSS 5] is just one more tool. They can decide what to use,” Huang ended the conversation about DLSS 5. Immediately after, without missing a beat, he said 1993’s Doom was the most influential video game ever made.

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Report: Helion is working on a massive fusion power deal with OpenAI

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Helion Energy’s Polaris fusion demonstration reactor operating with tritium and deuterium fuel. (Helion Photo)

The Seattle-area fusion company Helion Energy is negotiating a deal to supply OpenAI with massive amounts of energy, Axios reported Monday.

The deal under discussion would have OpenAI receiving an eye-popping 5 gigawatts of power by 2030, ramping up to 50 gigawatts by 2035, according to Axios, which cited an unnamed source familiar with the talks. By comparison, Washington state’s Grand Coulee Dam — America’s largest hydroelectric facility — has a 6.8 gigawatt capacity.

Helion has yet to demonstrate that its electricity-generating technology is commercially viable. The company is currently operating its seventh-generation prototype in Everett, Wash., and has raised more than $1 billion from investors — including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

Helion told GeekWire that Altman is stepping down from its board of directors after more than a decade.

“This decision enables Helion and OpenAI to partner on future opportunities to bring zero-carbon, safe electricity to the world,” said Helion CEO David Kirtley via email.

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The company did not confirm the reported discussions with OpenAI, saying it “has not announced any new customer agreements” beyond deals with Microsoft and the steel manufacturer Nucor.

Altman led Helion’s $500 million funding round in 2021, personally investing $375 million, and also participated in the company’s $425 million round in January 2025.

“Sam has played an integral role in Helion’s development, helping us focus on the thing that matters most: deploying fusion for customers as quickly as possible to fully satisfy the world’s need for clean and abundant energy,” Kirtley added. “We look forward to continuing to work with him in this new capacity.”

Helion recently climbed to the No. 1 spot on the GeekWire 200, our list of the top privately held startups in the Pacific Northwest.

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The company is building its first commercial facility — a 50-megawatt plant called Orion — in Malaga, Wash. The plant is expected to begin smashing atoms by 2028 and Microsoft has agreed to purchase its energy if the project succeeds.

The reported 5-gigawatt target for the OpenAI deal would be 100 times larger than that first plant.

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Dozens of fusion companies worldwide are racing to replicate the nuclear reactions that power the sun and stars, with the goal of producing nearly limitless, carbon-free energy. None have yet achieved viable fusion power, though many are making incremental advances and signing agreements for full-scale facilities.

Skeptics argue that commercial fusion remains many years away, but growing demand for clean energy to power data centers and an increasingly electrified economy is stoking interest and funding for fusion.

As Helion develops its fusion technology, it’s also building a 166,000-square-foot manufacturing facility. The site will assemble the thousands of capacitors needed to deliver massive electrical surges to its fusion generator and capture the power it produces.

Production is expected to begin at the facility later this year. It will help supply the roughly 2,500 capacitor units needed for the Orion plant, but is designed with broader scaling in mind.

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“These high volume lines are not for our Orion machine, but for the next machine,” Sofia Gizzi, Helion’s director of production, told GeekWire in October. “A factory operating at 50% of its design capacity or less can spit out Orion, no problem. But we’re really looking beyond that into 2030.”

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Editor’s note: Story updated at 9:50 a.m. with comments from Helion.

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