CES 2025 is well underway, and one surprise that came from the show was confirmation from Valve that the company wants SteamOS to run on everything. It's been kind of expected for a while, but a direct confirmation of it along with a promise for more devices to come with it isn't necessarily something most people had on their bingo cards for the show. What it means is that you'll be able to install SteamOS on your PC or your gaming handheld, without a need to worry about dealing with Windows.

Last year, we were excited to see the launch of Ventiva's wizard-like ICE9 fanless cooling technology and were wowed by their invention's ability to push massive amounts of air without making a sound. We've been eagerly awaiting a real-world implementation of this product in a laptop, and thanks to the joint efforts of Ventiva, Dell, and Intel, the company debuted a laptop cooled entirely by their ICE technology at CES 2025.

Baseus’ new wall charger includes two retractable USB-C cables and an additional USB-C port. | Image: Baseus Baseus is following Anker’s lead and debuting new charging accessories at CES 2025 that could help ensure you’re never hunting for missing charging cables. The company is expanding its Enercore line with a new $69.99 wall charger, expected as soon as April 2025, featuring a pair of built-in USB-C cables that fully retract and stay out of the way when not in use.The retractable cables on the Baseus Enercore CJ11 are each a little over 32 inches long and work alongside an additional USB-C port so you can also use cables with different connectors. The charger can deliver up to 67W of power with one device connected, allowing you to charge a power-hungry device like a laptop. With two or three of its ports in use, the total power output drops to 65W. Image: Baseus Baseus’ new car charger has two retractable USB-C cables attached to a pivoting head. Baseus also announced a new car charger with more functionality than the one Anker released last November. The Baseus PrimeTrip VR2 Max also features two built-in retractable USB-C cables that are just over 31 inches in length, plus an additional USB-C and USB-A port on its base. Image: Baseus The charger’s retractable USB-C cables work alongside a pair of USB-C ports on its base. It connects to a vehicle’s auxiliary power outlet and delivers a total of 240W of power across all four ports and up to a maximum of 105W to a single port. It’s expected to be available in April 2025 priced at $44.99.

Oshkosh’s all-electric firefighting vehicle for airports. | Image: Oshkosh Oshkosh, the 108-year-old American company that makes military vehicles and other specialty equipment, has big plans for your neighborhood. The company appeared at CES in Las Vegas for the first time to announce a raft of new commercial electric vehicles, including plug-in fire engines and garbage trucks as well as AI-powered technology that it says will make these vehicles safer and more convenient. You may know Oshkosh, which has a lot of credibility as a defense contractor, from its contract with the United States Postal Service to build the first all-electric postal truck. Last year, The Washington Post reported that the project was mired in delays, with only 93 trucks delivered to the USPS as of November. But despite these delays, Oshkosh thinks it’s well positioned to help build these next-generation specialty vehicles and says it plans to eventually deliver 165,000 vehicles to USPS, up to 70 percent of which will be electric. The company also announced plans to build a variety of electric and autonomous vehicles for airports, including a robot cargo handler and EVs for construction sites. But the “neighborhood” EVs, as Oshkosh calls them, stand the chance to be the most visible and impactful — if the company can get them built. The first vehicle to be announced today is the McNeilus Volterra ZFL, an all-electric front-loader garbage truck with an AI-powered detection system for refuse bins. The sensors detect the location of the garbage cans and communicate with the truck to ensure it’s positioned accurately. Then a robotic arm is deployed to snag the bin and lift it for trash disposal. Oshkosh is also rolling out a new AI-powered, vision-based contamination system to identify and remove items that don’t belong in the waste or recycling streams. Speaking of robots, Oshkosh has introduced HARR-E, an autonomous electric refuse collection robot that purports to offer on-demand trash and recycling pickup via a smartphone app or virtual home assistant like Amazon Alexa. The robot “makes trash removal as easy as ordering an Uber or a Lyft right from your home,” said Jay Iyengar, Oshkosh’s chief technology officer. HARR-E deploys from a central refuse collection area within the neighborhood and navigates to the resident’s home autonomously for collection before returning to the base to unload and recharge.“Trash removal as easy as ordering an Uber or a Lyft right from your home”For firefighters, Oshkosh is introducing a new Collision Avoidance Mitigation System, or CAMS, that aims to tell emergency workers when it’s safe to get out of their vehicles. According to Iyengar, “CAMS uses an advanced camera and radar sensor suite with AI to accurately detect the trajectory, the speed and proximity of ongoing vehicles relative to a parked emergency vehicle. CAMS can provide up to two to three seconds of advanced notice of an impending collision, giving an extra layer of safety during roadside operations.”It’s an ambitious suite of technologies. Oshkosh says it’s up to the task. But political headwinds, including President-elect Donald Trump’s promises to eliminate billions of dollars in EV incentives, could make success more difficult. Despite this, Oshkosh executives tried to project a sunny outlook. “The reviews on the first vehicle are fantastic,” Oshkosh CEO John Pfeifer said of the new USPS delivery truck. “It’s been written up in a lot of publications about the postal carrier’s responses to the first vehicles. But it’s going exceptionally well.”

It's easy to get caught up with all the hot new products in CES 2025, but not much attention goes towards all the progress and collaboration that goes on behind the scenes to make said products happen. If you want a peek into the inner workings of your favorite devices, Google and MediaTek took to the stage to reveal how their partnership is going. By the sounds of things, the two are going to make smart homes even better in the coming new year.

Image: Firefly Aerospace A lander hasn’t successfully reached the surface of the Moon’s cratered Mare Crisium region since the Soviet Luna 24 probe landed there to collect samples in August 1976. But SpaceX is prepping a launch that’ll send not one, but two landers there on Wednesday January 15th, Firefly Aerospace has announced. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch at approximately 1:11 AM EST, and will not only have Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lander on board, but also the Resilience lander from the Japanese robotic spacecraft firm iSpace. It will take 45 days for the craft to journey to the Moon before it spends another 14 days carrying out surface operations. There’s no word on whether we’ll be able to watch it take off.The Firefly lander will carry 10 NASA payloads to the surface. They’re designed to measure various particulate compositions, thermal properties, and electromagnetic activity of both the Moon and the Earth. It’ll collect data for various applications, from improving landing and takeoff procedures to learning about the Moon’s resources and its history.The so-called LEXI payload is particularly interesting — it’s an x-ray machine that can read the Earth’s magnetic field. NASA will use the data to see how our magnetosphere interacts with solar winds, which could ultimately help accurately detect and track solar weather patterns that cause power outages on Earth and interfere with satellite and GPS systems. This would be NASA’s second attempt to deploy such technology. It first launched the device, then known as STORM, into space in 2012. That one didn’t land on the moon, however, and wasn’t able to get the full picture that LEXI’s wide-angle sensors will be able to capture.

Baseus’ new outdoor security camera boosts video quality to 4K. | Image: Baseus Baseus has announced a new version of its solar-powered security camera at CES 2025 that improves video quality from 2K to 4K and extends battery life from 180 to 210 days. But like the previous version, the new Baseus Security S2 camera can potentially run indefinitely using a battery-charging solar panel on top that tilts left and right throughout the day to maximize its exposure to the sun.The company hasn’t announced when the Baseus Security S2 will be available or what it will cost, but the older S1 model currently sells for $129.99 through retailers like Amazon.Without the need for connecting it to power, Baseus says the S2 camera can be installed in about five minutes and in places where running a power line could be difficult or expensive. The only installation limitations are finding a place with enough sun exposure if you’re hoping to completely avoid charging the camera yourself and a spot that’s in range of your Wi-Fi network.The S2 camera doesn’t come with any subscription fees as everything captured by its 4K camera (with a 145-degree field of view and night vision capabilities) is stored locally on the device. Its capacity can be expanded with a microSD card up to 256GB in size, but as with many battery-powered security cameras, the S2 doesn’t support 24/7 continuous recording. Baseus’ camera only records events detected by its passive infrared and radar-based motion sensors. Nothing is uploaded or stored in the cloud, but recordings are remotely accessible through a mobile app. The S2 also features AI-powered object detection with the ability to differentiate people, pets, and vehicles and provide notifications based on what it spotted. Through the app, you can also define activity zones for specific areas you want the camera to focus on, and it includes both Amazon Alexa and Google home compatibility.

When sending important information over email, such as financial statements, health records, or legal documents, it’s critical to keep them safe from prying eyes. If you’re a user of Microsoft Outlook, then you’re in luck! The popular email client has several ways of beefing up the security of your messages, one of them being encryption.

When it comes to tools you should use on your PC, Task Manager is one of the more useful tools for power users on Windows 11. It's quite common to use it for basic functionality like ending processes that refuse to close, but aside from that, there is a lot more it can do, too. If you want even more functionality, though, then you should try out an alternative like Task Manager DeLuxe.

Microsoft Excel is undoubtedly one of the most powerful apps out there to work with numbers. However, it requires an Office 365 subscription or an Office 2024 purchase, which isn't feasible for a lot of users. If you don't want to shell out money, a good alternative to Excel is Google Sheets. Not only is it free to use, but it is also a simpler version for students with less intimidating features and options. Moreover, you also get a plethora of templates and features like extensions for added functionality.

There have been plenty of keyboards shown off during CES 2025, but not all of them look as classy as what Keychron showed off during the event. If you want a keyboard that looks the part but you don't want to sacrifice performance, the Keychron K2 HE is likely what you're looking for. Best of all, you can grab one right now.

Image: The Verge Google DeepMind is assembling a new team of artificial intelligence researchers to develop “world models” that can simulate physical environments. The initiative will be led by Tim Brooks, a former co-lead for OpenAI’s Sora project who joined DeepMind in October to work on Google’s video generation and world simulators.World models are a relatively new development within AI that could serve a variety of purposes, such as creating real-time interactive media environments for video games and movies, and realistic training scenarios for robots and other AI systems. It’s also part of Google’s push to achieve an artificial general intelligence system, or AGI, before its competitors.“DeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world,” Brooks announced in an X post on Monday. Brooks included two open job listings for research engineers and scientists who will help to advance AI “world models” capable of simulating real-world scenarios by solving problems around training “at massive scale,” curating training data, and studying how they can be integrated with multimodal language models.DeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world. I'm hiring for a new team with this mission. Come build with us!https://t.co/pqvALtAvLs https://t.co/vtwgeXl9Dl— Tim Brooks (@_tim_brooks) January 6, 2025“We believe scaling pretraining on video and multimodal data is on the critical path to artificial general intelligence,” DeepMind said in the job descriptions. “World models will power numerous domains, such as visual reasoning and simulation, planning for embodied agents, and real-time interactive entertainment.”The race to be the first to declare AGI is heating up, so Google’s focus here isn’t surprising. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company has cracked how to achieve the tech industry’s long-sought benchmark, and that autonomous AI agents may start to meaningfully join workforces this year.There are several competitors who already have a head start over DeepMind’s world modeling project, including Nvidia’s Cosmos platform for advancing physical AI, autonomous vehicle, and robot development; and the World Labs startup created by “the godmother of AI,” Fei-Fei Li.Introducing Genie 2 - our most capable large-scale foundation world model, which can generate a diverse array of consistent worlds, playable for up to a minute. We believe Genie 2 could unlock the next wave of capabilities for embodied agents . pic.twitter.com/AfL3EbOMeB— Jack Parker-Holder (@jparkerholder) December 4, 2024The new DeepMind team will work alongside existing Google AI projects including its flagship Gemini AI models, Veo video generator, and Genie — Google’s prior world model for simulating playable 3D environments in real-time.