Category: 4. Technology

Swytch is currently offering up to 60 per cent off its electric bike conversion kits, along with a free smart helmet.

You can get the Swytch Max+ and Max++ conversion kits with 60 per cent off for £399, which is a £600 saving. The Swytch Go kits are selling for £299, which is 45 per cent off their £499 RRP. 

You’ll have to act fast, though. The deals end this week and you’ll have to sign up to the Swytch newsletter to claim your discount. 

Swytch Max+ and Max++ ebike conversion kit 

Swytch launched the Max+ and Max++ ebike conversion kits in October last year. 

The Max+ and Max++ can turn practically any bike into an electric bike. The kits include a wheel with a hub motor, a pedal sensor and a click-in battery, which you then install yourself. 

The kits feature two different-size batteries, which mount on your handlebar. Swytch says the Max+ has a range of 20 to 40 miles, and the Max++ will power you for up to 60 miles. 

The batteries also have a built-in front light and charge via a USB-C cable. 

By signing up to Swytch’s newsletter you’ll get 60 per cent off the kits, saving £600. 

Swytch Go ebike kit 

The Swytch Go is still an ebike conversion kit, but it’s slightly different from the Max kits. 

Instead of a battery that mounts on your handlebar, the Go has a battery pack, which can be mounted in the frame.

Swytch says the Go promises the same ride feel as the Max kits, but that it has a simpler design to bring the cost down.

Revealed in 2023, Swytch said it wanted to create a more affordable kit in response to the cost-of-living crisis.  

The Go has 45 per cent off, bringing the price down from £499 to £299.

What about the helmet? 

When you sign up to Swytch’s mailing list and order a Max or Go conversion kit this week, you’ll also receive a free smart helmet.

Worth £70 / $85, Swytch says the helmet has auto braking lights, built-in indication and 36-hour battery life.

The helmet has a supporting phone app, handlebar control and universal adjustment. 

How do I sign up to Swytch’s mailing list? 

To sign up to Swytch’s mailing list, all you need to do is visit Swytch’s website and click ‘Sign Up’.

The world’s first commercial hybrid of silicon circuitry and human brain cells will soon be available for rent. Marketed for its vast potential in medical research, the biological machine, grown inside a British laboratory, builds on the Pong-playing prototype, DishBrain.

Each CL1 computer is formed of 800,000 neurons grown across a silicon chip, and their life-support system. While it can’t yet match the mind-blowing capabilities of today’s most powerful computers, the system has one very significant advantage: it only consumes a fraction of the energy of comparable technologies.

AI centers now consume countries’ worth of energy, whereas a rack of CL1 machines only uses 1,000 watts and is naturally capable of adapting and learning in real time.

“The neuron is self-programming, infinitely flexible, and the result of four billion years of evolution. What digital AI models spend tremendous resources trying to emulate, we begin with,” Australian biotech startup Cortical Labs claims on its website. They teamed up with UK company bit.bio to further develop DishBrain, an experimental platform designed to explore the “wetware” concept.

Related: Human Brain Cells on a Chip Can Recognize Speech And Do Simple Math

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When neuroscientist Brett Kagan and colleagues pitted their creation against equivalent levels of machine learning algorithms, the cell culture systems outperformed them.

Users can send code directly into the synthetically supported system of neurons, which is capable of responding to electrical signals almost instantly. These signals act as bits of information that can be read and acted on by the cells.

But perhaps the greatest potential for this biological and synthetic hybrid is as an experimental tool for learning more about our own brains and their abilities, from neuroscience to creativity.

“Epileptic cells can’t learn to play games very well, but if you apply antiepileptics to the cell culture, they can suddenly learn better as well as a range of other previously inaccessible metrics,” Kagan told Shannon Cuthrell at IEEE’s Spectrum, pointing out the system’s ethical drug testing capacity.

The computing neurons are grown from skin and blood samples provided by adult human donors. While there are still many limitations – for one, the neurons only survive for six months at a time – the energy-saving potential of this technology alone suggests such systems are worth developing further. Especially given the dire state of our own life support system.

The first CL1 units will reportedly ship soon for US$35,000 each, or remote access can apparently be rented for $300 per week.

EA’s next Battlefield game is supposedly arriving sometime in spring 2026, but its development is reportedly fraught with issues, leading some of its developers to worry that certain parts of the game won’t be well-received. According to a lengthy Ars Technica piece about the game’s development troubles and problems facing AAA titles’ development as a whole, EA had lofty goals for the next Battlefield (codenamed Glacier) to the point that team members working on the project think they’re near unrealistic.

The publisher’s executives apparently believed that Glacier could match the popularity of Call of Duty and Fortnite and set a 100 million player target over a certain period of time. An employee told Ars that the franchise has never achieved those numbers before, with Battlefield 2042 getting only up to 22 million players within that same period. The first Battlefield, which was the most successful in the franchise so far, only got to “maybe 30 million plus” within that timeframe.

One of the reasons why Fortnite has over 100 million active users is because it’s free-to-play. In CoD’s case, well, aside from having free-to-play titles, it’s also the biggest gaming franchise and has a lengthy history, so it’s no surprise that it already has a solid fanbase who would play its latest releases. Players had to pay for previous Battlefield games up front, but executives thought that if EA made Glacier free-to-play like its competitors, it could achieve the same numbers. And that is why the publisher promised a free-to-play Battle Royale mode with a six-hour single player campaign for the upcoming game.

Ridgeline, the external studio working on the single player mode, however, shuttered in 2024 after working on the project for two years. The studio reportedly found EA’s objectives unachievable, since it was expected to reach milestones in the same rate as more established studios when it didn’t have the same resources. Now, three other EA studios (Criterion, DICE and Motive) are working on the single-player mode. But since they had to start from scratch, single player is the only Glacier game mode remaining that has yet to reach alpha status.

Due to the wider scope of the next title in the franchise and the issues it has faced, it has become the most expensive Battlefield to date. It had a budget of $400 million back in 2023, but the current projections are now apparently “well north” of that. Whether the next Battlefield launches on time remains to be seen. Ars‘ sources said that if it does ship as intended, they expect some features and content to be cut from the final product.

Apple’s AI capabilities have been less than impressive to date, but there’s one new feature coming with iOS 26 that’s actually really handy: adding stuff to your calendar with a screenshot.

I’ve been testing this feature out for the past few weeks in the developer beta, and I’m pleased to report that it works, easily making it my favorite Apple Intelligence feature so far. That’s admittedly a low bar to clear — and it’s not quite as capable as Android’s version — but it’s a nice change of pace to use an AI feature that feels like it’s actually saving me time.

Maybe adding things to your calendar doesn’t sound all that exciting, but I am a person who is Bad At Calendars. I will confidently add events to the wrong day, put them on the wrong calendar, or forget to add them at all. It’s not my finest quality.

The iOS version of “use AI to add things to your calendar” taps into Visual Intelligence. The ability to create calendar events based on photos was included in iOS 18, and now iOS 26 is extending that to anything on your screen. You just take a screenshot and a prompt will appear with the words “Add to calendar.” Tap it, and you’ll see a preview of the event to be added with the top-level details. You can tap to edit the event or just create it if everything looks good and you’re ready to move on with your life.

None of this would be useful if it didn’t work consistently; thankfully, it does. I’ve yet to see it hallucinate the wrong day, time, or location for an event — though it didn’t account for a time zone difference in one case. For the most part, though, everything goes on my calendar as it should, and I rejoice a little bit every time it saves me a trip to the calendar app. The only limitation I’ve come across is that it can’t create multiple events from a screenshot. It kind of just lands on the first one it sees and suggests an event based on that. So if you want that kind of functionality from your AI, you’ll need an Android phone.

Gemini Assistant has been able to add events based on what’s on your screen since August 2024, and it added support for Samsung Calendar last January. To access it, you can summon Google Assistant and tap an icon that says “Ask about screen.” Gemini creates a screenshot that it references, and then you just type or speak your prompt to have it add the event to your calendar. This has failed to work for me as recently as a couple of months ago, but it’s miles better now.

I gave Gemini Assistant on the Pixel 9 Pro the task of adding a bunch of preschool events, which were all listed at the end of an email, to my calendar, and it created an event for each one on the correct day. In a separate case, it also noticed that the events I was adding were listed in Eastern Time and accounted for that difference. In some instances, it even filled in a description for the event based on text on the screen. I also used Gemini in Google Calendar on my laptop, because Gemini is always lurking around the corner when you use literally any Google product, and it turned a list of school closure dates into calendar events.

This is great and all, but is this just an AI rebranding of some existing feature? As far as I can tell, not exactly. Versions of this feature already existed on both platforms, but in a much more basic form. On my Apple Intelligence-less iPhone 13 Mini, you can tap on a date in an email for the option to add it to your calendar. But it uses the email subject line as the event title, which is a decent starting point, but adding five events to my calendar with the heading “Preschool July Newsletter” isn’t ideal. Android will also prompt you to add an event to your calendar from a screenshot, but it frequently gets dates and times wrong. AI does seem to be better suited for this particular task, and I’m ready to embrace it.

Romero Games has announced the cancellation of its upcoming first-person shooter due to its publisher cancelling funding for the game.

Studio director Brenda Romero shared on social media that it was a “strategic decision made at a high level within the publisher” that was “way above our visibility or control”.

“Last night, we learned that our publisher has cancelled funding our game along with several other unannounced projects at other studios,” Romero wrote. “We deeply wish there had been something, anything, we could have done to prevent this outcome.”

She continued: “This absolutely isn’t a reflection of our team’s work, performance, or the quality of the project itself. We hit every milestone on time, every time, consistently received high praise, and easily passed all our internal gates. We are incredibly proud of the work being done, and the talented team behind it. The best we’ve worked with.”

As a result, an unknown number of employees have been let go from the studio.

“We’re currently evaluating next steps and working quickly to support our team,” Romero added. “Many of us have worked together for more than a decade, some for over 20 years. It’s an extremely difficult day, and we’re heartbroken that it’s come to this.

“If you know of any opportunities or ways you can help our incredible team, please reach out. Thank you to everyone who’s offered support and kindness and encouragement during this difficult time.”

A former employee suggested that the decision to cancel this unannounced project, and the subsequent layoffs, was made due to the Microsoft layoffs announced yesterday.

As a result of the layoffs, which affected around 9,000 employees according to CNBC, Xbox closed The Initiative, cancelled Perfect Dark, Everwild, and Zenimax Online Studios’ MMO, codenamed Blackbird.

Almost 50% of employees at Forza Motorsports creator Turn 10 were let go, and Call of Duty studio Raven Software were also affected.

GamesIndustry.biz will keep its coverage of the Xbox layoffs updated as more information about which studios or part of the division are affected.

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Sam Porter Bridges once again makes the journey across the hauntingly beautiful and dangerous terrain. This time, he’s not doing it solo—or at least, not without some hard-core machinery assistance. Skeletons-exoskeleton suits-are some of the most precious weapons in Sam’s arsenal.

The Battle Skeleton

Your first exoskeleton is the Battle Skeleton, and that’s exactly what you’d expect – a combat-centric slice of kit that transforms Sam into a frontline bruiser. You’ll crack it open in Order 10, when you link the Western Environmental Observatory to the Chiral Network.When activated, this skeleton enhances Sam’s stamina, makes him faster, and most critically, enables you to carry more equipment all while delivering decent damage resistance. In the more combat-heavy sequel, that last bit is a life saver. Upgrades are linked to your relationship with the Observatory, so the better your relationship, the better your skeleton.Tip: Pre-ordering players or deluxe edition buyers will receive exclusive Silver or Gold variants that beautifies and potentially increases durability.

The Boost Skeleton

Trying to outrun BTs, MULEs or just the rain itself? Enter the Boost Skeleton, a battery powered engineered for one thing ,speed and momentum. It opens up on Order 21, when you finish the delivery associated with The Dowser, a prepper unlocked by the main story.This exoskeleton reintroduces the fan-favorite speed-based mechanics from the original game, and it’s particularly helpful whenever Sam has to traverse ground quickly. In combat, linking it with jump strikes transforms Sam into a man-missile.Tip: Boost Skeletons suck battery quickly, combine it with mobile generators or location-based recharge nodes.

The Bokka Skeleton

Don’t let the poetic moniker fool you, the Bokka Skeleton is for gnarly terrain. This skeleton doesn’t come around until much later, Order 30, and is unlocked by bonding with East Fort Knot.Built for elevation and rough trails, this is the frame you’ll count on when the route goes alpine and ruthless. Unlike the rest, it’s not associated with that same prepper Bokka (weird, right?). Instead, it’s a story unlock that indicates you’re entering the most challenging terrains to date.Tip: Without the Bokka Skeleton, you’ll exhaust your stamina quicker, stumble over rocks, and risk hurting your load or worse.

Tips and Tricks

Whether you’re striding into battle, running across chiral wastelands, or scaling a snowy cliff, the right skeleton could wonder-carry you home.

Ring’s indoor camera that has a motorized base to give you a 360-degree view is cheaper than ever in a Prime Day deal. The Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam normally goes for $80, but it’s dropped to just $40 for the Amazon savings event. That’s even lower than the previous all-time low price of $50 that we’ve seen during other sales. The Pan-Tilt camera comes in five colors: Black, Blush, Charcoal, Starlight and White.

Ring introduced the Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam in 2024. It can spin a full 360 degrees on its base, and tilts up and down with a tilt range of 169 degrees. That makes it especially helpful for keeping tabs on pets and other goings-on in the home. It offers live views in addition to 24/7 recording, and supports two-way talk for when you want to check-in with a family member. The Pan-Tilt Cam also offers HD color video day and night.

The camera has a physical shutter as well, for when you want to be sure it’s not watching. Sliding this will cover the camera, and Ring says it’ll also disable the audio and video feeds. Setup should be easy with the Ring app, but if you aren’t already in the Ring ecosystem, you’ll need a subscription to use this camera. Ring offers three subscription options at $4.99, $9.99 and $19.99 per month.

For many people living in the post-physical-office era, it’s the ultimate nightmare: Being in a video call only to realize there’s something utterly inappropriate going on in your background. Or foreground.

A new FaceTime feature in iOS 26, highlighted by iDeviceHelp, puts an end to at least some of the possibly unpleasant scenarios, as it pauses the video if someone is undressing during a FaceTime call.

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The video for other participants will be paused, and you’ll see a message saying “Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive. If you feel uncomfortable, you should end the call.” Two possible options are presented: Resume Audio and Video, or End Call.

As 9to5Mac noted, Apple actually announced something similar last month, as part of new family tools that are coming for child accounts.

“Communication Safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime video calls, and to blur out nudity in Shared Albums in Photos,” said Apple in an announcement at the time.

It appears, however, that this has been expanded to all users. The feature is currently live in the iOS 26 developer beta; we’ll see if it sticks once the iOS 26 public beta launches, which should happen sometime in July.

Updated July 3 with more details of price cuts for iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Apple’s latest Pro model iPhone, the iPhone 16 Pro, costs $999 and up. If you want to buy it cheaper, you can’t get discounts from Apple. Amazon, however, sells the iPhone 16 Pro in Renewed Premium condition, and the prices have just gone down in many cases. There have also been big price cuts on the larger-screened model, the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

The deals highlighted in this post were independently selected by the Contributor and do not contain affiliate links.

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Renewed Premium is the highest tier of refurbished models on Amazon, and “The inspection and testing process typically include a full diagnostic test, replacement of any defective parts, and a thorough cleaning process carried out by the qualified supplier, or by Amazon,” as the company puts it.

The screen has no scratches and a body with no signs of cosmetic damage (scratches, dents, and more) visible when the holding the product 30 centimeters away. They are fully functional and with battery at least 90% of original battery life. Here are the details of what’s on offer now from Amazon — even before the upcoming Prime Day sales.

The lowest storage is 128GB and it is available from Amazon in four colors. Black titanium costs $840, a price which has dropped recently and is $159 less than the new price. Desert titanium is $848.44, natural titanium $864.97 and white titanium $869.99. All are slightly lower prices than earlier in June.

For the 256GB storage option, which costs $1,099 new, and prices are as follows: $936.55 for black titanium, $923.06 for white titanium, which is just over $175 off the price new. It’s even better for desert titanium at $910.13 and $935 for natural titanium.

The 512GB storage prices for Renewed Premium in unlocked condition are these: Desert titanium is $1,089.97, that’s $209 less than the brand-new price. White titanium is $10 more at $1,099.97. There’s no availability for black or natural titanium, right now.

Finally, for the top storage level, black titanium is available for $1,109, which is $390 less than the $1,499 new price. Desert titanium is more, $1,239.97, natural titanium $1,150 and white titanium is $1,189.99. These prices are the same as or slightly higher than they have been in recent weeks.

All very well, but what about if the iPhone 16 Pro display isn’t quite big enough for you? There’s the iPhone 16 Pro Max, available in three storage capacities (there’s no 128GB model for the Max).

The 256GB storage model is available from Amazon in Renewed Premium condition. Three of the four, desert titanium, natural titanium and white titanium are all priced at $1,099, which is $100 less than the new price of $1,199. The black titanium is not as good value: it costs $1,152.09.

The 512GB model costs $1,399 new. For Renewed Premium, the best price in this capacity are black titanium and white titanium, both $174 off the new price at $1,225. Desert titanium is $1,299.99 and natural titanium a little less at $1,279.

Finally, there’s the 1TB storage option, $1,599 when you buy it new from Apple. Here in Renewed Premium, the best price is for desert titanium and natural titanium, which are each $1,420 — a $179 savings. Black titanium is priciest at $1,569.97 and white titanium clocks in at $1,459.

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