Looking for an inexpensive pair of earbuds to toss in your gym bag? You can snag our favorite budget wireless earbuds, the JLab Go Pop ANC, for a shockingly low $19 on Amazon, an $11 markdown from their usual price. Don’t let the cost fool you, these earbuds have surprised multiple WIRED writers with their clear sound, water resistance, and ANC performance.

These earbuds have all the features you’d expect from a pair five times the price. They sport IP55 water and dust resistance, perfect for a sweaty trip to the gym or a long run on the beach, and multipoint pairing in case you want to use them for a quick call on your laptop. The included app has an adjustable equalizer, something not even all expensive earbuds can claim, plus programmable controls in case you don’t like the default button layout. Battery life is even pretty decent for the category, with eight hours of juice in the buds and up to 32 hours total with the included charging case.

When you’ve got the tunes going, the JLab Go’s active noise-canceling is surprisingly effective, easily tuning out the hum of an HVAC system and other annoyances. Like other ANC-capable earbuds, they also come equipped with a transparency mode for letting in important sounds, and it works surprisingly well given how little these earbuds cost. You might want to consider something more serious for your next long-haul flight, but these work in a pinch for some yard work or a quick workout.

If you’re sold on a pair of these extra inexpensive earbuds, you can swing over to Amazon to grab the JLab Go Pop ANC in fuchsia for $19. While most of the other colors were listed for their full $30 price, which is still a steal by the way, you can also grab the transparent neon green or transparent teal for just $20, which may be worth the dollar depending on your aesthetic preferences. For more upgraded picks, check out our guide to the best wireless earbuds, with hand-tested picks by WIRED writers.

The London-based platform, which already covers 1.5 million eligible lives across enterprise and healthcare deployments, is using the Series A to accelerate US market entry and deepen its clinical infrastructure, with a new CEO who sold his last company to Adobe.

JAAQ, the London-based digital health engagement platform, has raised $17 million in a Series A round. The investment comes from Meridian Health Ventures, Fuel Ventures, Bolt Angels, and Guinness Ventures, with the capital allocated to scaling enterprise partnerships, deepening clinical infrastructure, and expanding into the United States. Dr. Pooja Sikka, a partner at Meridian Health Ventures, has joined the company’s board as part of the deal.

The company was founded in 2021 with a direct-to-consumer model built around video-based mental health content. It has since pivoted to an enterprise and healthcare focus, embedding that content library, now more than 10,000 clinically reviewed videos, inside the digital products of insurers, employers, and healthcare organisations rather than distributing it to individual users.

The logic is structural: rather than asking people to seek out a mental health platform, JAAQ places its content inside the apps and services they are already using. It currently covers more than 1.5 million eligible lives through active enterprise deployments.

Alex Packham has joined as CEO to lead the company through its next phase. Packham is best known for ContentCal, a social media management SaaS platform he built and sold to Adobe in December 2021, after which he spent three years leading the product’s integration inside Adobe before departing.

The platform’s commercial proposition has two layers. Organisations can license content from JAAQ’s library and integrate it into their own product journeys, or they can licence a bespoke hosted JAAQ experience.

The company is also building infrastructure it describes as a “clinical engagement layer” for AI-native products, designed to let any digital product or team embed governed mental health content into user journeys without building the clinical governance apparatus themselves.

The pitch to enterprises is that this addresses two problems simultaneously: the mental health access gap, and low engagement with wellbeing benefits that organisations invest in but employees rarely use.

The clinical governance framing is central to how JAAQ differentiates itself from generic AI wellness tools. The platform’s content is produced within a defined clinical and creative framework, rather than generated on demand, and Johri’s appointment is intended to signal that the product is being built with clinical credibility embedded rather than bolted on.

Meridian Health Ventures, which focuses specifically on UK health tech with a pathway into the US market, is a natural fit for that positioning: the firm runs the first NHS-anchored venture fund and has a dedicated Innovations in Mental Health Fund.

The US expansion is the strategic priority the funding is designed to unlock. The UK market has provided validation, the company’s website references case studies including a UK bank that saved £896,000 in employee productivity and wellbeing improvements, and an insurer that deflected the equivalent of twelve full-time customer service roles through JAAQ-served content.

Translating that model into the US employer and health insurer market, where mental health benefits are increasingly a board-level priority but engagement remains a persistent problem, is the next test.

More Information

We don’t usually speculate on the true identity of the hackers behind these projects, but when [TN666]’s accoustic drone-detector crossed our desk with the name “Batear”, we couldn’t help but wonder– is that you, Bruce? On the other hand, with a BOM consisting entirely of one ESP32-S3 and an ICS-43434 I2S microphone, this isn’t exactly going to require the Wayne fortune to pull off. Indeed, [TN666] estimates a project cost of only 15 USD, which really democratizes drone detection.

The key is what you might call ‘retrovation’– innovation by looking backwards. Most drone detection schema are looking to the ways we search for larger aircraft, and use RADAR. Before RADAR there were acoustic detectors, like the famous Japanese “war tubas” that went viral many years ago. RADAR modules aren’t cheap, but MEMS microphones are– and drones, especially quad-copters, aren’t exactly quiet. [TN666] thus made the choice to use acoustic detection in order to democratize drone detection.

Of course that’s not much good if the ESP32 is phoning home to some Azure or AWS server to get the acoustic data processed by some giant machine learning model.  That would be the easy thing to do with an ESP32, but if you’re under drone attack or surveillance it’s not likely you want to rely on the cloud. There are always privacy concerns with using other people’s hardware, too. [TN666] again reached backwards to a more traditional algorithmic approach– specifically Goertzel filters to detect the acoustic frequencies used by drones. For analyzing specific frequency buckets, the Goertzel algorithm is as light as they come– which means everything can run local on the ESP32. They call that “edge computing” these days, but we just call it common sense.

The downside is that, since we’re just listening at specific frequencies, environmental noise can be an issue. Calibration for a given environment is suggested, as is a foam sock on the microphone to avoid false positives due to wind noise. It occurs to us the sort physical amplifier used in those ‘war tubas’ would both shelter the microphone from wind, as well as increase range and directionality.

[TN] does intend to explore machine learning models for this hardware as well; he seems to think that an ESP32-NN or small TensorFlow Lite model might outdo the Goertzel algorithm. He might be onto something, but we’re cheering for Goertzel on that one, simply on the basis that it’s a more elegant solution, one we’ve dived into before. It even works on the ATtiny85, which isn’t something you can say about even the lightest TensorFlow model.

Thanks to [TN] for the tip. Playboy billionaire or not, you can send your projects into the tips line to see them some bat-time on this bat-channel.

The Z80 has been gone a couple of years now, but it’s very much not forgotten. Still, the day when new-old-stock and salvaged DIP-40 packaged Z80s will be hard to come by is slowly approaching, and [eaw] is going to be ready with the picoZ80 project.

You can probably guess where this is going: an RP2350B on a DIP-40 sized PCB can easily sit on the bus and emulate a Z80. It can do so with only one core, without breaking a sweat. That left [eaw] a second core to play with, allowing the picoZ80 to act as a heck of an accelerator, memory expander, USB host, disk emulator– you name it. He even tossed in an ESP32 co-processor to act as a WiFi, Bluetooth, and SD-card controller to use as a virtual, wirelessly accessible disk drive.

The onboard ram that comes with an RP2350B would be generous by 1980s standards, but [eaw] bumped that up with an 8 MB SPRAM chip–accessed in 64 pages of 64 kB each, naturally. If more RAM than a very pricey hard drive wasn’t luxury enough, there’s also 16 MB of flash memory available. That’s configured to store ROM images that are transferred to the RAM at boot– the virtual Z80 isn’t grabbing from the flash at runtime in [eaw]’s architecture, because apparently there are limits to how much he wants to boost his retro machines.

There are already drivers to use in certain Z80 systems. You can of course configure it as a bare Z80 with no machine-specific emulation, or set up the picoZ80 with the “persona” of a classic Z80 machine. So far [eaw] has tried this on an RC2014 homebrew computer, as well as Sharp MZ-80A– which we’ve seen here before, in miniature–and Sharp MZ-700. The Sharp drivers are still works in progress, after which the Amstrad PCW8256/Tatung TC01 is apparently next. We’ve seen Amstrad PCWs here a time or two as well, come to think of it.

If somehow you missed it, the venerable Z80 only hit EOL in 2024, so supplies won’t be drying up any time soon. This hack is really more about the quality-of-life addons this allows. Come back in a decade, and we’ll see if the RP2350 lasts longer than the stack of NOS Z80s.

“Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” a man’s voice announces, before going on to narrate a string of numbers in no apparent order, slowly and rhythmically. After nearly two hours, the calls of “Attention!” in Persian stop, only to resume again hours later.

The broadcast has been playing twice a day on a shortwave frequency since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on February 28.

According to Priyom, an organization which tracks and analyses global military and intelligence use of shortwave radio, using established radio-location techniques, the broadcast was first heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork—at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.

Over the weekend, Priyom said it had identified the likely origin of the broadcast. Using multilateration and triangulation techniques, the group traced the signal to a shortwave transmission facility inside a US military base in Böblingen, southwest of Stuttgart, Germany.

The site lies within a restricted training area between Panzer Kaserne and Patch Barracks, with technical operations possibly linked to the US army’s 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion, headquartered nearby.

That identification narrows the field, but it does not reveal who is behind the transmissions or who they are meant for.

The two-hour-long transmission is divided into five to six segments, each lasting up to 20 minutes. Each opens with “Tavajoh!” before shifting into a string of numbers in Persian, sometimes punctuated with an English word or two. Five days into the broadcast, radio jammers were heard attempting to block the frequency. The following day, the transmission shifted to a different frequency—7842 kHz.

Radio communication experts believe the broadcast is likely part of a Cold War–era system known as number stations.

The Return of the Numbers

Number stations are shortwave radio broadcasts that play strings of numbers or codes that sound random—like the one now heard in Iran. “It is an encrypted radio message used by foreign intelligence services, often as part of a complex operation by intelligence agencies and militaries,” says Maris Goldmanis, a Latvian historian and avid numbers stations researcher.

Number stations are most commonly associated with espionage. “For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer who served 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. “This is not always possible in person due to political constraints or conflict. This is where number stations come in.”

While the use of number stations can be traced back to the First World War, they gained prominence during the US-Soviet Cold War. As espionage grew more sophisticated, governments used automated voice transmissions of coded numbers to communicate with agents, Goldmanis says. Citing declassified KGB and CIA documents, he adds that number stations were widely used during this period, often as Morse code transmissions and, in many cases, as two-way communications, with agents reporting back using their own shortwave transmitters.

“Nowadays, you have various satellite and encrypted communications technologies,” Sipher says. “But during the Cold War and even before that, governments had to find ways to do this without being noticed, and broadcasting coded messages was one way to communicate with your assets discreetly.”

The apparent randomness of the numbers means they can be understood only with a codebook, Sipher adds. “Nobody can make heads or tails of it or understand what it says unless you have the codebook that can give you hints to decrypt the code,” he says, noting that such systems must be set up and coordinated in advance.

A Signal Without a Sender

While the likely origin of the signal may now be clearer, its purpose and intended recipient remain unknown.

Because the broadcasts are encrypted and designed to be covert, those details may remain unclear for years, Goldmanis says. The structured nature of the transmission—its fixed schedule and consistent use of frequencies—further suggests it is part of a planned operation.