Category: 4. Technology

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Nvidia announced last month that it’s planning to upgrade its GeForce Now cloud gaming service to RTX 5080 GPUs. Now, we have a date for that upgrade: September 10th. The upgrade will allow GeForce Now subscribers to rent what’s effectively an RTX 5080 in the cloud, with a huge 48GB of memory and DLSS 4 support.

Nvidia’s RTX 5080 upgrade for GeForce Now will include support for 5K resolutions at 60fps and 120fps, or 1440p at 240fps and 1080p at 360fps. You’ll also be able to enable full ray-tracing support in games with Neural Rendering and Multi Frame Generation, all at the same $19.99 a month for GeForce Now Ultimate.

The reveal of the upgrade date for GeForce Now is part of Nvidia’s weekly GeForce Now announcements, which include 17 games set to be added to the service this month. Hollow Knight: Silksong arrives on GeForce Now today, with Borderlands 4, Dying Light: The Beast, Jump Space, Endless Legend 2, and Cloverpit all debuting on the streaming service later this month.

“On Wednesday, September 10th, Nvidia Blackwell RTX is coming to GeForce Now,” says Nvidia. “To celebrate, next week’s GeForce Now announcements will come a day earlier to usher in the Blackwell era of GeForce Now.”

Nvidia is also bringing back the ability to install games on GeForce Now without waiting for Nvidia to formally curate them. This new “Install-to-Play” feature will greatly improve the GeForce Now library.

Adobe is planning to bring its video editing software, Premiere, to the iPhone. The company has listed the app on the App Store with a pre-order link and an expected release date of September 30.

The company said that Premier on iPhone will let users edit videos and export them without any watermarks. The app will have some of the same features as its desktop version, including the ability to trim, layer and fine-tune frames. It will also have automatic captions with stylized subtitles, support for video, audio, and text layers, as well as support for 4K HDR.

And in keeping with its efforts elsewhere, Adobe is bringing AI features powered by its Firefly models to the app: Premiere on iOS will let users generate images, audio or videos using text prompts. The company is also opening up access to its stock library of music, sound effects, photos, graphics and videos, along with fonts and presets from its photo editing app, Lightroom. The app also has an “Enhance Speech” feature that suppresses background noise when you record a clip in loud environments.

Premiere on iPhone will be free to use, but users will have to pay for using AI credits and cloud storage. An Android version is already in development, though the company did not mention a release date.

The company’s move to bring its flagship video editing app to iPhones comes amid increasing competition for attracting creators who make short videos for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. Earlier this year, Meta released a video editing app called Edits, while a16z-backed Captions switched to a freemium model to reach a wider audience.

Adobe has focused on bringing more of its creative apps to mobile platforms. The company launched Photoshop for iOS in February and released a beta version of the app for Android in June. It has also released a separate app for Firefly on both iOS and Android in June.

At least one phone in Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S26 range may look a little different to what we were expecting, and a lot more like Apple’s iPhone 17 series. That’s going by a photo of dummy phones shared by leaker and journalist Sonny Dickson, who has a pretty good track record for sourcing accurate Apple and Samsung phone designs.

Dickson’s photo shows three phones, which we’re expecting to be the Galaxy S26, S26 Edge, and S26 Ultra — rumor has it that next year’s Plus model will be replaced by the follow-up to this year’s extra-thin S25 Edge. While both the S26 and S26 Ultra feature slight design changes to include a small camera island around the main lenses, the middle phone is far stranger, with a camera bump that goes all the way across the phone.

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Some PayPal and Venmo users can now access Comet for free.
• The offer includes a one-year subscription to Perplexity Pro.
• Comet is Perplexity’s new AI-centric web browser.

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PayPal and Venmo users in the US and other global markets can now receive early access to Perplexity’s highly anticipated Comet web browser, PayPal announced. The offer includes a 12-month free trial of Perplexity Pro, which normally has an annual subscription cost of $200.

Launched last month, Comet has been positioned by Perplexity as a more dynamic, intuitive, and agentic alternative to competitors like Chrome and Safari. The browser can also interact directly with your personal email, calendar, notes, or other online assets, provided you grant Perplexity access to view those files. 

Also: ChatGPT speak is creeping into our everyday language – here’s why it matters

Comet was initially released to subscribers of Perplexity Max, the company’s $200-a-month premium service, and also to a small group of early users who had signed up via a waitlist. PayPal’s new offer gives customers the chance to skip the waitlist and experience one year of Comet via Perplexity Pro free of charge.

The partnership could enable Perplexity to spread the word about its new browser by putting it in the hands of millions of PayPal and Venmo users across the US and elsewhere. Like most free trials, the idea is that the tool will become so embedded into many users’ daily lives that when the one-year period is up, a significant number will opt to pay to continue using Perplexity Pro.

Also: OpenAI and Anthropic evaluated each others’ models – which ones came out on top

“The Comet browser is like a personal shopper and personal assistant all in one, so we’re excited that PayPal users will have early access to Comet,” Ryan Foutty, Perplexity’s VP of business, said in a statement. “In conjunction with Perplexity Pro, we’re arming PayPal and Venmo customers with powerful, accurate AI that’s useful throughout their daily lives.”

PayPal bought Venmo in 2013 as part of its $800 million acquisition of Braintree, the latter platform’s parent company.

Perplexity Pro can now be accessed directly via PayPal’s new subscriptions hub, an in-app feature that allows users to track and manage their subscriptions to various apps. These apps are organized into categories like entertainment, music, and news. The hub is currently available to US users and will be launched globally on September 22.

Also: No, Grok 2.5 has not been open-sourced. Here’s how you can tell

PayPal and Venmo users in the US can sign up now for their free 12-month trial of Perplexity Pro through the respective apps. Users in Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, and Spain can access the free trial here.

Early Genetic Testing as the Foundation

The most critical step in improving uptake of newer Dravet syndrome therapies is encouraging clinicians to overcome hesitation about genetic testing. General neurologists may never see enough Dravet syndrome cases to develop complete comfort with the condition. However, they shouldn’t let this prevent them from ordering SCN1A genetic testing when clinical presentation suggests the diagnosis. Once pathologic mutations are identified that could be consistent with Dravet syndrome, the key is connecting with specialized centers rather than attempting to manage these complex cases independently. Early genetic diagnosis creates the pathway for appropriate treatment selection and specialist consultation.

Collaborative Care Model Between Specialists and Local Providers

The optimal approach involves establishing collaborative relationships between Dravet syndrome specialists and referring neurologists rather than a complete transfer of care. Specialists can provide initial treatment recommendations, medication selection guidance, and seizure action plans while maintaining ongoing consultation every 6 months to a year. Meanwhile, local neurologists continue seeing patients every 3 to 6 months for routine management. This model proves particularly valuable since patients experiencing prolonged seizures requiring hospitalization will likely be admitted to facilities near their homes rather than distant specialty centers, making local neurologist familiarity with their care essential.

Building Comfort Through Collaborative Experience

The collaborative approach creates additional benefits by gradually building local neurologists’ comfort levels with newer therapies. When specialists prescribe medications such as stiripentol or fenfluramine, referring physicians observe dosing strategies, administration techniques, and patient responses firsthand. Over time, this exposure increases their confidence in discussing these treatments with patients and understanding their role in Dravet syndrome management. Patients often report that their local neurologists have begun preparing them for specialist recommendations, indicating growing comfort with the treatment paradigm. This collaborative education prevents patients from remaining in the community without access to appropriate evidence-based therapies.

2025 SpaceNews Icon Awards Nominations Are Due Sept. 12

We are thrilled to announce that nominations for the 2025 SpaceNews Icon Awards are now open.

Established in 2017 as the SpaceNews Awards for Innovation and Excellence, this prestigious event continues to celebrate the trailblazers who set the highest standards in the space industry. We invite you to nominate exceptional candidates who have made significant contributions to the field of space exploration, technology, and innovation.

Nominations are due by Sept. 12. And mark your calendars – the 2025 SpaceNews Icon Awards will take place Tuesday, Dec. 2. Stay tuned for further details about this prestigious event.

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Award Categories

See previous years’ recipients here.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Honors an individual whose career has had a significant and lasting impact on the space industry, recognizing decades of contribution and leadership.

Individual Achievement Award: Honors individuals who have made significant contributions through leadership, innovation, mentorship, and dedication in advancing the space industry.

Commercial Space Achievement Award: Celebrates notable achievements in commercial space.

Innovative Technology Award: Celebrates groundbreaking technological advancements that have a clear and demonstrable impact on the space industry.

Emerging Space Company Award: Recognizes newer companies with exceptional promise and innovation.

Sustainability and Environmental Impact Award: Highlights efforts aimed at reducing the environmental impact of space activities and promoting sustainability.

Partnership/deal of the Year: Celebrates an acquisition or partnership that has the potential to reshape business within the space industry.

Civil Space Achievement of the Year: Recognizes an outstanding mission or advancement that has made significant contributions to the civil space community.

Military Space Achievement of the Year: Recognizes an outstanding accomplishment or technology that has made an outsized difference in the operations of military space units.

Space AI Breakthrough: Celebrates a significant use or advancement of artificial intelligence to further space technologies.

International Collaboration Award: Honors successful international partnerships and collaborations that have advanced space exploration and fostered global cooperation.

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Nomination Form

To kickstart the nomination process, please provide the following information, and submit your nominations by Sept. 12:

• Nominee: (Company or Individual)
• Category: (Choose the relevant category from the list above)
• Why This Nominee? A brief description (200 words or less) of why you believe this nominee deserves to be recognized as a SpaceNews Icon. Consider their impact on the space industry, their innovation, and their contributions to the community.

Next steps: After reviewing all preliminary nominations, the SpaceNews Icon Awards jury will select a shortlist of companies and individuals. These shortlisted nominees will be invited to complete a secure nomination form, providing detailed evidence of their achievements. Please note that if no suitable winner is found in a category, we reserve the right not to award it this year to maintain the integrity of the awards.

Mark your calendars for Tuesday, Dec. 2 and stay tuned for further details about this prestigious event.

Related

The Mate XTs is Huawei’s second tri-fold and it brings some minor updates over its predecessor. The design is unchanged from last year, with the only new way to tell the two models apart being the new purple and white colorways on the Mate XTs.

Mate XTs features a 10.2-inch folding LTPO OLED display with 3K resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. The panel features a 16:11 aspect ratio, which accommodates up to three normal phone apps side by side, and it gets up to 1,800 nits peak brightness. It also retains the stylus support from its predecessor.

It goes to a 7.9-inch size when folded once in dual screen mode and shrinks to 6.4 inches when fully folded for a more comfortable one-handed experience. It’s still remarkably slim at just 3.8mm when fully unfolded and 12.8mm when folded over, while weighing 298 grams.

The camera system gets an upgraded 40MP ultrawide lens (13mm). It is joined by a 50MP main shooter (24mm) with a variable f/1.4 – f/4.0 aperture and 12MP periscope lens (125mm), which were also found on last year’s model.

The other new addition is the Kirin 9020 chipset, which replaces the Kirin 9010 from the original Mate XT. This is the same SoC that powers the Pura 80Pro+ and 80 Ultra, and Huawei is promising 36% faster performance than the outgoing Kirin 9010. All Mate XTs models come with 16GB RAM and are configurable with up to 1TB of storage.

The software side is covered by HarmonyOS 5.1, while the battery comes in at 5,600 mAh with support for 66W wired, 50W wireless and 7.5W reverse wireless charging.

Huawei Mate XTs comes in black, red, purple and white colors. The 16/256GB version starts at CNY 17,999 ($2,520) in China. There’s a 16/512GB model for CNY 19,999 ($2,800) and a top-tier 16GB RAM and 1TB storage version for CNY 21,999 ($3,080).

Deliveries in China are scheduled to begin on September 12. Huawei did not share any details about an international launch just yet.

Huawei Mate XTs (in Chinese)

Another week, another somewhat fictional online buzzword to parse. This time it is the “performative male”, basically the idea that posturing straight men only read books to get laid, outlined in recent trend pieces including the New York Times, Vox, Teen Vogue, Hypebeast, GQ and millions of TikToks.

According to the Times, this man “curates his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likable to progressive women. He is, in short, the antithesis of the toxic man.” Apparently these heterosexual men who read Joan Didion, carry tote bags and listen to Clairo are not in fact human beings who enjoy things but performative jerk offs who don’t really care about any of that girly stuff and are just trying to impress their feminine opposites. As Vox put it: “think Jacob Elordi when he was photographed with three different books on his person, or Paul Mescal publicly admiring Mitski”. Reading! Enjoying music by women! Perish the thought.

Each piece differed slightly in what it defined as the key characteristics of the performative male, but they all shared one detail: he drinks matcha lattes.

This was unsurprising. For three decades the latte has been the favored blog-whistle of the trend piece writer. It signals liberalism, femininity, gayness, pretension, gentrification – ideally all of the above – so reflexively that its origins as an insult are rarely revisited.

It began in earnest in 1997, when journalist David Brooks writing in the Weekly Standard coined the term “latte liberal”. He was trying, disparagingly, to give name to the crunchy consumerist leftism of the time, in which organic vegetables and world music had become part of the social justice hamper: “You know you’re in a Latte Town when you can hop right off a bike path, browse in a used bookstore with shelves and shelves of tomes on Marxism the owner can no longer get rid of, and then drink coffee at a place with a punnish name that must have the word ‘Grounds’ in it, before sauntering through an African drum store or a feminist lingerie shop.”

Brooks wanted to hint that leftism is a luxury only the bourgeois can afford – an idea encapsulated by the earlier formation of champagne socialist. But the latte proved a stickier, more evocative symbol, painting liberals as soft and effete.

In 2004, lattes really entered politics, when a Republican Pac ran an ad accusing presidential candidate Howard Dean of being a “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show”.

Lattes also became a byword for gentrification. In 2000, when the Brooklyn neighborhood Williamsburg was, the Times bemoaned at the time, reaching “the point of hipster saturation”, the final straw was “a local Italian specialty store and a working-class institution … advertising the arrival of the Chai latte”. In New York Magazine’s 2005 feature L-ification, the publication mapped out how gentrification was spreading further east into Brooklyn along the route of the L train with little latte icons, a milky glyph of whiteness by that point understood by everyone.

Noticeably, the latte form remains permanent, even as the type of latte shifts. Newt Gingrich accused New York mayor Bill De Blasio of “small soy latte liberalism” in 2014 – emphasising that the only thing more girlish than drinking a big dairy milky coffee was drinking a small vegan milky coffee. On Drake’s 2010 song Thank Me Now, when he’s asking the woman he’s left behind if she still thinks of him, he croons: “But do I ever come up in discussion / Over double-pump lattes and low-fat muffins?”

Now the performative male has once again given rise to the idea that there is something inherently disingenuous about a milky beverage. Interestingly as the latte has changed colour, from white to green, the stereotype has expanded beyond the white liberal: matcha hails a diverse new generation of milky boys.

The idea of the performative male started out mostly as a joke on TikTok, where knowing posters would show a man reading at the gym, for example, and joke that he was pretending. Contests in which men meet in parks to compete to be the most performative have been funny, postmodern, heterosexual versions of drag.

But with each passing write up, the knowing humorous element was been rinsed away, until Vox earnestly announced in its piece that the “MeToo movement showed us that even supposed ‘nice guy’ could be capable of alleged manipulation and abuse – that in fact, they could use their enlightenment as a kind of shield”. If you see a man with a matcha latte, you need to run!

None of the pieces massively wanted to reckon with the fact that, as Judith Butler put it, “gender identity is a performative accomplishment” to begin with, or that Arthur Schopenhauer was complaining in the mid-19th-century that a performative reader “usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents”. Do we read in order to get laid? Only since forever.

Ironically much of this ribbing comes from the same people who decry a crisis of masculinity, and worry for future generations of boys who feel like they lack purpose and companionship. Yet in the world of the performative male, even having female friends and drinking milky coffee is a divergence from true masculinity.

Why is the latte such an enduring emblem for this distrust – a way to call men you do not like effeminate?

Partly it is the allegory of milk, the pursed mouth of a graphic designer on a coffee cup as a surrogate for the Madonna del Latte, the thousands of middle ages depictions of Jesus nursing at Mary’s breast. Grown men drinking milk has always been laden in symbolism, the blend of nurture and eroticism evocative of a sexual infantalization. It is why so many films from A Clockwork Orange to Babygirl centre milk as a poison beyond a place of regular intoxication. When Kelis sings that her milkshake brings her boys to the yard, the lyric is so heavy in implication that the exact innuendo she is reaching for is irrelevant.

Even the ancient Greeks used to have their own version of the latte joke, belittling the Persians that drank milk: Aristotle said Empedocles described it as “whitish pus”.

But the milk in the context of the latte also turns coffee, a drink which was sold as fuel, bitter black stuff for TV detectives and the working man, into a sweet little treat. A latte fundamentally dilutes the taste of coffee and so it is easy to present those who drink it as watering down their wine. Even though the iconography of the latte liberal is now so strong it has stretched to drinks that do not contain any coffee to begin with. According to the performative male trend pieces, drinking a matcha latte indicates to women that you are soft, feminist-leaning and worldly (after all, it’s from Japan).

Even though the latte is supposed to be this bastion of girlishness, women are not exempt for being chastised for drinking them, although the latte trope for them is more often a reflection of being superficial than performatively feminine. The logic of this makes little sense: latte liberal men are supposedly too European to be masculine, yet iced latte girlies are gormless Americans sucking on the straw of consumerism. No matter, the two sit side by side, one clutching a hot cup of simp soup, the other a pumpkin-spiced lobotomy. They are a pair one can project all their prejudices towards, without having to interrogate any of it too much.

The irony is that hipsters and gentrifiers in coastal towns are rarely drinking lattes these days. They are much more likely to be sipping on a single origin V60 that’s been carefully weighed out on a digital scale. Indeed the stereotype could easily be flipped around – that it’s red states where complicated online Starbucks orders and Stanley cups filled with 32oz of latte abound. In the best survey of the coffee Americans actually drink and how it aligns with their politics by Diana C Mutz and Jahnavi S Rao, the differences were negligible. Although it is true that liberals do prefer lattes over conservatives (16% v 9%), the same research found liberals also prefer the more masculine-coded espressos over conservatives by a much bigger margin, and the vast majority of Americans prefer brewed coffee.

But the milky latte stereotype persists because it is creamy and white (or green) and vaguely Italian. When GQ is asking “Are Matcha Men the new Soy Boys” you have got to wonder if gendering beverages has become the most performative act of all.