Technology

Three years into this terrible conflict, an infographic data story revealing some of the harsh, often hard-to-find numbers around casualties, military budgets and foreign aid in the Russia-Ukraine war.

In times of war, data is difficult to validate, information hard to find. We polled a variety of sources – institutes, traditional media, independent media, civic groups – to find credible estimates and answers to key questions.

How many combatants have been killed and wounded?
What % of territory has been won or lost?
How much money is being spent on the war – and where does it come from?
How important is the USA’s continued support for Ukraine? (Short answer: very).

We hope this data brings a little clarity and shows, at the least, how ongoing international support for Ukraine against the Russian war machine is essential.

» Explore the visualisation
» Check out the dataset

Sources: Kiel Institute, Mediazona, Ukraine Losses, Le Monde, CSIS, SIPRI, New York Times.

Some elements made with VizSweet

It tends to be that the best Android phones out there, or at least the most interesting ones, don't seem to be available in the US. Case in point: Xiaomi, a Chinese company, is about to launch a phone that's basically a dedicated camera attached to a screen.

If there were an award for taking a series of grim clips from a grim show and making them seem absolutely joyous, then the trailer for Andor season 2 — coming to Disney+ on April 22 — would be a lock to win this year.

As fans of season 1 know, Andor can be many things (prison break drama, political intrigue, pulse-pounding spy thriller), but light and fluffy it ain't. According to creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, Andor is really a Charles Dickens-like tale: an orphan tries to escape his circumstances, finding friends and foes who expose the dark heart of a cruel era.

That orphan is of course Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), one of the rebel spies who (spoiler alert for a 9 year old movie) dies after transmitting the Death Star plans to the Rebel Alliance in Rogue One. Gilroy is clear about the fact that the show finishes where the movie starts.

So we already how Season 2 will end: with Cassian perfectly willing to kill a colleague who would slow down his escape, and perfectly ready to die fighting the Empire.

SEE ALSO: 'We're making four Star Wars films': The 'Andor' master plan

Cassian's fate — indeed, the fate of all the rebel figures we see in this trailer, including future rebel leader Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) — is to be haunted by all the suffering in service of that cause. (That's precisely the point of Mon Mothma's most famous line, the first time we met the character, in Return of the Jedi.)

You can see it here in their worried faces, Cassian's brief smile and fun 1950's-style disguise notwithstanding.

You can certainly see it in the hardened gaze of Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), also returning in season 2. Saw, as we know from Rogue One, Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, is the most morally-compromised rebel in the galaxy — so much so that Mothma and her shadowy contact Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) shun his methods.

SEE ALSO: 'Andor': more, more! Burning questions for Season 2 of the best Star Wars.

Rael, also seen looking sad in the trailer, already summed up where all his fellow rebels are heading in Andor season 2. "I've given up all chance at inner peace," Rael said in season 1's most critically-acclaimed performance. "I made my mind a sunless place, I share my dreams with ghosts, I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion: I'm damned for what I do."

What is that trailer music trying to say?

At first blush, then, it may seem out of sync that a 2004 rock anthem by Steve Earle, "The Revolution Starts Now," plays over these images. The music draws our attention to the colorful party Mon Mothma is attending, the latest in a series of elite gatherings for the Senator, rather than her anguished look.

Meanwhile, the editing makes it seem like Cassian and his hooded colleague are detonating a bomb in a building behind them with the coolness of action movie heroes, not the hardened mask of reluctant rebels.

Still, Earle's lyrics speak to another powerful story thread in Andor. The song implores listeners to make a stand, to "rise above your fear and tear the walls around you down" no matter where you are. That recalls the Season 1 speech by Kino Loy (Andy Serkis), who overcame his fear and helped his fellow prisoners to escape by working together.

It also fits with the "fight the Empire" speech delivered by Cassian's adopted mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw) via posthumous hologram in the season 1 finale. According to the director, Gilroy's original line for Maarva was "fuck the Empire" — evidently a much more rock-and-roll statement than Disney+ would allow.

SEE ALSO: How 'Andor' fulfills George Lucas' plan for 'Star Wars'

The Season 2 trailer contains another, potentially more troubling song lyric, however. It's delivered by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn, returning to the franchise for the first time since Rogue One). "What a swell party this is," we hear Krennic say, over an image of him gazing lovingly at his pet project, the Death Star.

That's clearly taken from the Cole Porter song "Well Did You Evah," most famously performed by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the 1956 movie High Society. The song is a satire of two drunk, gossiping party guests, who treat even the potential destruction of Earth lightly, and repeatedly return to the scene around them with the same line: What a swell party this is!

You might expect that Krennic says this line at the same shindig where we see Mon Mothma. It would fit Coruscant's political elite, the people we've already seen wilfully ignoring the rise of the Empire all around them, with a wink at the audience.

But it would also breach one of the ground rules of the franchise as laid down by George Lucas. Star Wars, historically, doesn't wink at the audience. There may be a lot of fun to be had in it, but the galaxy far, far away takes itself very seriously when it comes to making itself immersive and believable.

SEE ALSO: That time 'Rogue One' almost brought its villain back from the dead

You may find reminders of Earth culture in the distant future (remember, this is all happening "a long time ago"), but they are all deliberately mashed up with each other, creating something that feels new and alien.

The cantina band in A New Hope may be playing something that sounds like swing music, but they're also weird insectoid aliens using unusual instruments. (Actual Earth musicians were thrown into the much-reviled Star Wars Holiday Special, proving the point.)

So Krennic directly quoting Cole Porter? This ain't it, chief. We've never heard the word "swell" in a Star Wars story for the same reason we've never heard "groovy": it's too clearly connected to a time and place on Earth.

We can only hope that Tony Gilroy is doing the same here as he did when he stepped in to reshoot Rogue One: cutting a controversial trailer that contains moments never seen in the final cut.

Because hey, even Charles Dickens needed to add some layers of fluff and fun so the public could swallow his grimmest stories.

Andor Season 2 premieres Apr. 22 on Disney+.

Ironically, the one technology everyone thinks was a spinoff from space travel is a myth: Teflon. But there are literally thousands of space technologies which have since made their way into everyday life, from LED lighting to CAT scans.

While the war between Android and iPhone for market dominance rages on, there's still development on alternatives to both platforms. Finland-based tech company Jolla has released version 5.0 of Sailfish OS, its Linux-based operating system for mobile devices.

It's never too early to start thinking about the next flagship Galaxy Ultra phone. After returning my Galaxy S25 Ultra this year for a smaller model, here's what I want to see from the Galaxy S26 Ultra next year.

On paper, Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro looks like the antidote to all the small flaws in the PlayStation 5 base console experience, but after carefully considering the coverage and real-world performance of the world's most powerful gaming console, I think I'll pass for now.

Horses in video games are far more than just another digital vehicle. They are characters in their own right, and in many cases you'll form a bond or at least some fondness for your steed. There have been many good horse boys (and girls) over the years, but these are the ones I think are legitimately iconic.

No matter what kind of vehicle you’re looking to purchase, reliability is easily one of the most important metrics you should look at. Making sure that the new car you buy has a good reputation can be the difference between a smooth ownership experience and a costly nightmare.

"Long Live the Real King."

That was the text displayed on an apparently AI-generated video featuring Donald Trump groveling and kissing Elon Musk's feet that played on a loop at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development headquarters on Monday.

Tweet may have been deleted

A clip of the AI video playing on a TV set in the HUD cafeteria in Washington, D.C., was posted by Vox reporter Rachel Cohen, who received the video from a source.

The video was displayed on the same day that Elon Musk gave as a deadline for federal workers to send an email detailing five things they did last week or lose their job. Internet users have been sharing fake emails that have allegedly been sent to the government's Office of Personnel Management email address in order to troll Musk.

The AI-generated video played at HUD appears to be another apparent act of protest from those who disagree with Trump and Musk's dismantling of federal agencies. 

According to Forbes, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said that the video was “another waste of taxpayer dollars and resources” and “appropriate action” would be taken.

Tabletop gaming has experienced quite a resurgence in the last few years, and there's definitely a unique type of fun to be had when sitting down at a table with friends and manipulating cards, dice, and small plastic pieces. However, for my money, there are some games I just prefer to play in digital form. These in particular.

Google is rolling out transcripts for videos uploaded to Google Drive. The service was already generating captions for uploaded videos, but the new transcripts are a big upgrade for quickly finding the right part of a video.

The new iPhone 16e lacks MagSafe, Camera Control, vibrant colors, and more. It also has a missing GPU core and a downgraded display without Dynamic Island, among other omissions. If you’re getting an iPhone 16e for yourself, you need to know about the missing features.

Scientists have used orbiters and rovers to find dried streams, lakes, and gullies on Mars that hint at its watery past, but their cavalry of robots has struggled to prove the Red Planet ever had an actual ocean. 

A new study that leverages data from China's now-defunct rover provides some of the strongest evidence so far of a long gone vast body of water — one that wasn't just a temporary lake formed of melted ice, but a much larger sea. The findings lay bare what seems to be an ancient shoreline for an ocean that would have covered about one-third of the planet’s surface. 

The new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests Earth's space neighbor had a warm and wet period that lasted for perhaps tens of millions of years. 

Such an Earth-like environment would seemingly increase the odds that life could have existed there. Though no one knows whether Mars was ever inhabited, the presence of an ocean means this location was at least habitable, said Benjamin Cardenas, a sediment geologist at Penn State and one of the coauthors. 

"Scientists who study the origin of life really do think that one of the main places that it might have started is along beaches not so different from what we think we saw here" on Mars, Cardenas told Mashable. "You've got shallow water, you've got air, you've got lands, and it's these interfaces where scientists who study this thing think that life probably cropped up on Earth in the first place."

SEE ALSO: NASA asked for cheaper ways to get Mars samples. It had one all along. The new data comes from the Zhurong rover, part of China's Tianwen-1 mission, which landed on Mars in May 2021. Credit: Chinese National Space Administration

The new data comes from the Zhurong rover, part of China's Tianwen-1 mission, which landed on Mars in May 2021. The six-wheeled rover was sent to investigate Utopia Planitia, a region far from NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. It's the same rubbly plain where the U.S. Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976.

Collaborations between Chinese and U.S. researchers can be difficult to achieve, due to the Wolf Amendment established in 2011. The federal law prevents NASA from working with China because of concerns that the space program could exploit U.S. technology to enhance its weapons. But some U.S. scientists contributed to the study without receiving any federal government funding. China, for its part, made the rover data public, a requirement of publishing the research. 

Based on satellite images, scientists had previously hypothesized that Utopia Planitia, an area in Mars' northern hemisphere, once held water. But the idea remained debatable because they had lacked the underground evidence to substantiate it until now. The features that resembled coasts sat at different elevations, making it hard to determine whether water created them or something else, such as burbling lava, wind-blown sand dunes, or ancient rivers.

Zhurong did not survive the Martian winter as planned in December 2022. But it had traveled about one mile on the Red Planet over the course of a year before going kaput. 

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of China's Zhurong rover on the surface of the Red Planet that showed it didn't "wake up" from its planned winter hibernation in 2022. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UArizona

In that time, the rover collected a lot of data, including some from a special instrument called ground-penetrating radar. The tool works by sending radio waves underground to measure the signals that bounce back. This helps scientists identify and plot different layers of rock and soil beneath the surface. 

The data revealed distinctive slopes of underground material, just like how waves build up sediment along Earth's coasts. These ancient beaches extended for about 4,300 feet — nearly a mile — and were buried 30 to 115 feet below the surface.

"To accumulate more than a kilometer of beach deposits on Earth takes a long time — hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years," Michael Manga, a UC Berkeley geoscientist and coauthor, told Mashable. "So if we say that the processes that operate on Earth also operated on Mars, at roughly the same kind of rates, it means the ocean was there for a decent amount of time."

From the new data, scientists can infer a larger water cycle for Mars. In order for beaches to creep nearly a mile into a body of water, there would need to be tides, standing water, and rivers feeding sediment into the ocean over a long period. 

A topographical view of Utopia Planitia with the hypothesized ancient ocean, colored with varying shades of blue based on the depth of the water. The star indicates the Zhurong rover's location. Credit: Robert Citron illustration

Manga, who has long-believed in the ocean hypothesis, found the Zhurong data deeply satisfying. 

"Just the fact that you can go to Mars with a rover and move over the surface and look underground is kind of mind-boggling to me," he said. "But then to see something that has structure and that's coherent — and by that I mean similar over such a broad scale — was really super exciting." 

The Perseverance rover has also detected sloping underground layers at its landing site in Jezero Crater, a former lakebed, but those could have been created by water or magma. A key difference between the two rovers' radar data is that the Jezero material had what's called "high permittivity" — holding more electrical charge. This could indicate the presence of volcanic rock. The material at Utopia Planitia, on the other hand, had "low permittivity" and is likely composed of a sand and pebble mixture, similar to what's found along many of Earth's shorelines. 

That Zhurong and Perseverance had different findings is a reminder that environments can vary a lot globally. Perseverance is about 3,000 miles away from Zhurong, farther than the distance between New York and LA. A few months ago, research on carbon-rich minerals at Gale Crater, where Curiosity roams about 2,000 miles from Zhurong, found that the region would have been icy and salty — quite hostile for life to emerge, at least above ground.

China's Zhurong rover takes a picture with its navigation camera, showing its antenna and solar panels, after it landed on Mars on May 15, 2021. Credit: CNS / CNSA / AFP / Getty Images

"It's not necessarily surprising to me that you can look at different parts of Mars, and you'll find that the story is more complicated," Cardenas said. "Regions of Mars may have been fairly different at different times."

While the new research helps to confirm Mars had a surface ocean in its past, it also prompts new questions — namely, where did all of that water go? Did it freeze beneath the surface, collect into ice sheets at the poles, or escape into space? The answer could help scientists understand how planets evolve and whether such a change could occur on Earth. 

Researchers may also want to further consider how gravity factors into beach formations, Manga said. Mars' gravity is 62 percent less than Earth's, and scientists don't yet know whether that could fundamentally alter how beaches work. That gap in knowledge could mean the team misinterpreted the shoreline features. But of all the possible explanations, the collaborators feel confident a stable and vast ocean is likely the best fit. 

"It would be interesting if it turns out that Mars did have large oceans and never created life," Manga said. "That would say something about how difficult life is to initiate." 

UPDATE: Feb. 25, 2025, 9:43 a.m. EST A researcher's name appeared misspelled in an earlier version of this story. Benjamin Cardenas is a sediment geologist at Penn State.

Microsoft is creating a new AI-based search feature for Bing called "Copilot Search." Instead of showing the usual blue links, this feature will present search results as summaries generated by AI.

The new iOS 18.4 developer beta was released, and with it came many new features.

Apple's latest iPhone operating system, iOS 18.4, adds AI capabilities and more news features. Here's a quick breakdown of what to expect. The developer beta was released last week and will become fully available to the public in April.

More Apple Intelligence options

Apple noted that iOS 18.4 would add numerous languages for Apple Intelligence, "including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified) — as well as localized English for Singapore and India."

SEE ALSO: What is Apple Intelligence?

With the operating system update, users in the European Union will also get access to Apple Intelligence, which had been delayed as the tech company worked to ensure it complied with local laws.

Priority notifications

Apple promised Apple Intelligence would continue to add capabilities as time passes. With the 18.4 developer beta, Apple finally rolled out priority notifications, as 9to5Mac noted. This is something we expected to get this year, and it's exactly what it sounds like: AI pushes important notifications to the top and less important stuff to the bottom.

SEE ALSO: New iOS 18 features we expect in 2025 News+ Food

iOS 18.4 is a big update for the culinary inclined. It has a new, food-focused news feature. However, you must subscribe to Apple News+.

In a press release, Apple wrote: "Apple News+ subscribers will have access to Apple News+ Food, a new section that will feature tens of thousands of recipes — as well as stories about restaurants, healthy eating, kitchen essentials, and more — from the world’s top food publishers, including Allrecipes, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Good Food, and Serious Eats."

Credit: Apple

Apple News editors will curate the section. If you are curious, an Apple News+ subscription will cost you $12.99 per month.

Ambient music

If you're a light sleeper or need background noise to get work done, Apple has a new feature for you with iOS 18.4. The ambient music feature can be added to your control center and play sounds for "Sleep, Chill, Productivity, and Wellbeing," Macrumors noted.

Lots of other minor changes

As the folks at 9to5Mac and Macrumors have noted, there are also several small shifts in design that come with the new beta version of Apple's new iOS. For instance, CarPlay has, for some folks, begun to show three rows of app icons. There are new widgets in the Podcast app, a list view for photos, and a new icon for clicking on Genmoji.

As with any iOS update, there are small changes in many places — and plenty of time to play around with it before it drops for the public in April.

Excel's spin button lets you quickly increase or decrease a value in a cell without having to type it manually. It can be used in wide-ranging contexts, such as a data entry form, a dashboard worksheet, or a price calculation table, and its flexible controls mean you can tailor it to your needs.

Google is ditching SMS two-factor authentication in favor of QR codes. The new 2FA method will provide increased protection against phishing and other common threats, but it may be less convenient than SMS verification, depending on Google's implementation.

Looking for a new Android phone for cheap? We've got your back! Whether you want an excellent camera, fantastic performance, a long-lasting battery, or a bit of everything, we've rounded up a list of the best budget Android phones we think you'll love.

Revolution is in full-swing in the trailer for Andor Season 2.

SEE ALSO: That 'Andor' post-credits scene means more than you think

Fittingly set to Steve Earle's song "The Revolution Starts Now," the trailer for the acclaimed Star Wars show's final season teases Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his many allies' efforts to take down the Galactic Empire. Explosions and intense piloting missions are on the menu, while Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), and Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) are all in the fray.

SEE ALSO: 'Andor': more, more! Burning questions for Season 2 of the best Star Wars.

As Andor draws ever-closer to the events of Rogue One, the show will introduce characters from the film. Forest Whitaker returns as resistance fighter Saw Gerrera, Ben Mendelsohn is back as the villainous Orson Krennic, and Alan Tudyk once again lends his voice to droid K-2SO. Also present? The Death Star, which showed up briefly in Season 1 but will surely play an even bigger part in the lead-up to Rogue One.

Andor Season 2 premieres Apr. 22 on Disney+.