Google pulls AI overviews for some medical searches
Earlier this month, The Guardian published an investigation that showed Google was serving up misleading and outright false information via its AI overviews in response to certain medical inquiries. Now those results appear to have been removed. According to the original report:
In one case that experts described as "really dangerous", Google wrongly advised people with pancreatic cancer to avoid high-fat foods. Experts said this was the exact opposite of what should be recommended, and may increase the risk of patients dying from the disease.
In another "alarming" example, the company provided bogus information about crucial liver func …
Here are over 20 gadgets that’ll help you achieve your New Year’s resolutions
It happens every year: we set ambitious New Year's resolutions - work out more, spend less, keep the house cleaner - full of optimism and motivation. Then life happens, and suddenly it's June and you can't recall what your resolutions even were.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Sometimes the problem isn't a lack of motivation but rather a lack of tools, the kind that can make those goals feel more manageable and easier to achieve. After all, the right gear can help turn good intentions into habits that actually last.
Below, we've rounded up a few of our favorite tools, all of which are designed to help our readers achieve many of the m …
Instagram says it fixed the issue that let someone send all those password reset emails
If you're one of the many, many people who received a password reset email from Instagram the other day, the company says it fixed the issue. What was the issue? Unclear. We reached out to Meta for clarification and have yet to receive a response. All we know is that an "external party" triggered the emails, and Instagram says you can safely ignore them.
The company posted on X that the issue had been fixed and also claimed there was no breach of its systems. This seemingly contradicts reports from Malwarebytes, which said that information on 17.5 million Instagram accounts, including usernames, physical addresses, phone numbers, and email …
GameStop is kicking off 2026 by shutting down over 400 stores in 42 states
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is in line to potentially earn $35 billion in stock options, so long as the company hits a $100 billion market cap. One way to hit that target is by cutting costs, and one way of cutting costs is to close down a bunch of stores. The company closed 590 stores in fiscal year 2024, and said in a recent SEC filing that it anticipates "closing a significant number of additional stores in fiscal 2025." With the fiscal year set to end on January 31st, it appears the race is on, and according to a blog tracking closures, GameStop is planning on shuttering (or already has) over 430 stores this month.
As of Sunday, January 11t …
Google’s AI Inbox could be a glimpse of Gmail’s future
This week, Google announced a new AI Inbox view for Gmail that replaces the traditional list of emails with an AI-generated list of to-dos and topics to track based on what's in your inbox. It's not widely available yet, but I have access, and in the few hours I've spent messing around with it, I can see how AI Inbox could be a helpful or even transformational way to manage your inbox. But right now, it's not going to change the way I manage my email, and I'm not sure it ever will.
Before I dig in, I should note a few things upfront. AI Inbox is a very early product that's currently only available to "trusted testers." It's unlikely that yo …
Wing’s drone delivery is coming to 150 more Walmarts
Wing is bringing drone delivery to even more Walmart stores in 2026. The Alphabet-owned company announced today that its drones will be flying above 150 more locations this year, including in four new cities: Los Angeles, St. Louis, Miami, and Cincinnati.
In June 2025, the companies said they would expand their delivery partnership to 100 additional stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. So far, they've launched at several stores in Atlanta, in addition to Walmart locations in Dallas-Forth Worth and Arkansas. They currently operate at approximately 27 stores, and with today's announcement, the goal is to eventually esta …
How TiVo killed live TV
For a while, it seemed like everyone had a TiVo. It was a plot point on major TV shows; it had A-list Hollywood fans; it became a verb as ubiquitous as Google or Xerox. The love was well-earned, since TiVo had created a product that felt genuinely like magic. You could pause live TV. And rewind it. And even set shows to record for later, knowing they'd be there whenever you needed them.
There's a reason you almost certainly don't have a TiVo now, though. The company quickly became a victim of its own success, and never managed to turn its game-changing concept into a big business or a truly lasting hit product. Meanwhile, the changes it hel …
I went looking for weird phones and CES 2026 did not disappoint
It's January, which means there's a whole year of rectangular glass slabs ahead of us. But before that happens, I managed to find phones of a different shape lurking around the corners of the CES convention center halls. They weren't center stage, of course. That was reserved for robots doing laundry badly. But in the margins at tech's biggest show, I saw some glimmers of hope that the future of phones might not look as same-y as it has for the past half decade - at least, if you know where to look.
A phone for your phone
Clicks, the company known for its keyboard cases, didn't just launch a combination MagSafe power bank and slide-out key …
Will you have to show your ID at the app store?
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the action (and inaction) of lawmakers seeking to rein in tech platforms, follow Lauren Feiner. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
How it started
In the offline world, age verification is often as simple as flashing a cashier your driver's license to buy a pack of beer, or an adult magazine (for whoever still does this kind of thing). Advocates for stronger barriers preventing children from accessing online porn have long argued for an equivalent on the internet: online age veri …
Musk says he’s going to open-source the new X algorithm next week
In 2023, what was then still called Twitter, open-sourced at least portions of the code that decided what it served up in your feed. But that GitHub repository is hopelessly out of date, with the vast majority of the files appearing to be from the initial upload three years ago. Elon Musk says that in seven days, he will open-source X's new algorithm and finally give people a peek behind the curtain and possibly a technical explanation as to why your feed is 90 percent rage bait.
Elon has always made promises to open-source parts of X, and has followed through to at least some degree, including Grok-1 in 2024. But xAI is now on Grok-3, and …