As a 25-year-old who grew up playing games in the early 2000s, I remember a time when couch co-op wasn’t a selling point — it was just how you played games. Split-screen in NFS 2 SE, Tanaka 3D, or even Timesplitters 2, I’ve enjoyed some fantastic couch co-op games alongside my brother. Gaming was loud, messy, and shared back then.

The FDA has issued its first ever approval on a safety consultation for lab-grown fish. That makes Wildtype only the fourth company to get approval from the regulator to sell cell-cultivated animal products, and its cultivated salmon is now available to order from one Portland restaurant.Wildtype announced last week that the FDA had sent a letter declaring it had “no questions” about whether the cultivated salmon is “as safe as comparable foods,” the customary final step in the FDA’s approval process for lab-grown animal products. The FDA has sole responsibility for regulating most lab-grown seafood, whereas the task is shared with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for cultivated meat.The FDA’s pre-market safety consultation is voluntary, but is “helpful for marketability,” IP lawyer Dr. Emily Nytko-Lutz, who specializes in biotechnology patents, explained to The Verge. “There are other pathways involving self-affirmation of safety as well as a longer food additive review process, but the FDA’s authorisation with a ‘No Questions’ letter is a middle ground.”Wildtype salmon is now on the menu at Haitian restaurant Kann in Portland, Oregon, and the company has opened a waitlist for the next five restaurants to stock the fish. It joins Upside Foods and Good Meat, two companies with permission to sell cultivated chicken in the US, while Mission Barns has been cleared by the FDA but is awaiting USDA approval for its cultivated pork fat. At a state level, the situation is more complicated, with eight states issuing bans on lab-grown meat as the technology becomes a conservative talking point.

For the first time in several generations, AMD has a true mainstream contender in the form of the RX 9060 XT. It's not a perfect GPU, and it doesn't reach the heights of the faster, more expensive RX 9070 XT. But it's the first time in a long time that AMD has what feels like a truly better option against the Nvidia competition.

Managing personal finances can feel like a never-ending chore. A few years ago, I was drowning in a sea of bank statements, bills, and random expenses I’d forgotten to track. I wasn't sure when my payment deadlines were, I often lost sight of my budget when buying new gadgets, and I spent hours piecing together where my money went. It was stressful, time-consuming, and needlessly complicated. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Since all my banking records are present on my email, I wanted to automate fetching and reading the data, so that I could create an expense tracker, bill payment reminder, and a financial goal builder — all in one.

Part of keeping tabs on the trends of the tech world is seeing that used to be new and revolutionary become old hat and subsequently replaced. Due to the speed technology can go at, this can sometimes happens in just a few years. Sometimes, however, things manage to hold on for a long time before something new finally swoops in and delivers the final blow.

AMD's AM5 platform has been available since 2022, and I highly recommend it if you're building a new PC in 2025. However, I'm still using an AM4 motherboard with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and I'm not ready to upgrade just yet. Sure, upgrading to a new platform and a faster CPU will improve my gaming performance, but the FPS gains aren't worth the money I have to shell out at this point in time.

Smart wearables company Ultrahuman has launched a new device that monitors changes in home environments that could impact your health. Ultrahuman says its $549 Home gadget tracks air quality, temperature, noise, light, and humidity, helping users optimize the climate within their homes to improve breathing and sleeping habits.The Ultrahuman Home resembles a Mac Mini in terms of size and appearance. Its air quality features monitor levels of fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and chemical pollutants like acetone and formaldehyde. The device also tracks noise levels and various types of light exposure, including UVA, UVB, UVC, blue, red, green, and infrared, to help users “align home lighting with their body’s natural rhythm,” according to Ultrahuman.Users who have an Ultrahuman Ring wearable can pair it with the Home device to unlock an “UltraSync” feature that suggests how environmental data may be impacting heart rate, sleep, and recovery patterns. For example, Ultrahuman says that UltraSync can suggest if the user was woken during the night by elevated noise or light levels.We should note that the Ultrahuman Home won’t actually address the concerns it detects. The device is equipped with sensors and microphones for monitoring environmental changes via a mobile app, but it doesn’t include features like a built-in dehumidifier or air purification, and it doesn’t offer any way to integrate it into smart home ecosystems. There’s no recurring subscription to pay, and Ultrahuman says the “data and insights are with the user, always.” Still, $549 is expensive for a device that doesn’t actually do anything — except maybe increase paranoia —  unlike smart indoor air quality sensors available from Ikea, Amazon, SwitchBot and others.

I'm a full-time student and a tech journalist. This combination means I always have something or the other going on, whether that’s a work deadline to hit, a college assignment due at 11:59 PM, or a Google Meet call to attend. To add to this mix, I have the memory of a goldfish (though people who know me would likely argue that my memory is worse than even a goldfish's). My point is, I always have a lot going on, and relying on my memory alone has only ever ended in disaster.

Building a network-attached storage or NAS device from scratch can feel like a daunting task, especially if you’re new to the world of self-hosted storage. I remember struggling with multiple issues during my first attempt. Juggling drive sizes, worrying about data redundancy, and worrying about complex RAID setups. It was overwhelming, but the ability to have control over my data, faster access to files, and ditching cloud subscription fees pushed me to overcome the challenges. That said, I would have certainly wished there was a simpler way to go about things to make the process quicker and more seamless.

I think the end goal of any Raspberry Pi tinkerer is to have a house similar to the one in Wallace and Gromit. If you've never seen the movies before, Wallace is an inventor who designed robots to do common household chores for him. His inventions handle everything from getting out of bed to getting dressed and even making breakfast, and honestly, it's a dream lifestyle.

Tactical games are experiences that force players to really think outside the box. It's not always enough to go barging into a situation with guns blazing, and instead approach things with a more clever strategy. Some of the best turn-based tactical games will offer enough freedom to try different things, while also rewarding players for being smart about how they play. When you take the time to think things through, great victories can be achieved and progress made.

The humanoid Optimus robots are supposed to be ready for mass production this year.The head of engineering for Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot division, left the company on Friday. Milan Kovac announced his departure on X, insisting that it “will not change a thing” about the company’s plans, which, as of March, meant building thousands of robots this year alone.Kovac insisted that he was leaving Tesla only to “spend more time with family abroad,” adding that his “support for @elonmusk and the team is ironclad,” heading off speculation that his exit might have been prompted by Musk’s political activity or recent public squabble with Donald Trump. In his own tweet, Musk thanked Kovac for his “outstanding contribution to Tesla over the past decade.”Musk has called the humanoid Optimus robots Tesla’s “most important product development,” and has repeatedly leaned on the division to generate hype as EV sales slow and the company’s stock price tumbles. “The only things that matter in the long term are autonomy and Optimus,” Musk told CNBC in May, referring to the company’s separate plans for self-driving cars, set to be deployed in a “robotaxi” service in Austin this month.Bloomberg reports that Autopilot chief Ashok Elluswamy will take over responsibility for Optimus, which is at a critical stage. In March Musk claimed the company could make “at least one legion of robots this year and then probably 10 legions next year,” which would mean around 5,000 robots by the end of this year, and 50,000 in 2026. To do so, it will have to overcome China’s recent restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals and magnets, which are essential for the robots’ construction.