Google's budget Pixels have long been a top recommendation for anyone who needs a phone with a good camera and doesn't want to pay flagship prices. This year, Google's A-series Pixel doesn't see many changes, and the formula certainly isn't different. The Pixel 10a isn't so much a downgraded version of the Pixel 10 as it is a refresh of the Pixel 9a . In fact, it's hardly deserving of a new name. The new Pixel gets a couple of minor screen upgrades, a flat camera bump, and boosted charging. But the hardware hasn't evolved beyond that—there's no PixelSnap and no camera upgrade, and it runs last year's Tensor processor.

Even so, it's still a pretty good phone. Anything with storage and RAM is getting more expensive in 2026 , but Google has managed to keep the Pixel 10a at $500, the same price as the last few phones. It's probably still the best $500 you can spend on an Android phone, but if you can pick up a Pixel 9a for even a few bucks cheaper, you should do that instead.

If it ain't broke…

The phone's silhouette doesn't shake things up. It's a glass slab with a flat metal frame. The display and the plastic back both sit inside the aluminum surround to give the phone good rigidity. The buttons, which are positioned on the right edge of the frame, are large, flat, and sturdy. On the opposite side is the SIM card slot—Google has thankfully kept this feature after dropping it on the flagship Pixel 10 family, but it has moved from the bottom edge. The bottom looks a bit cleaner now, with matching cut-outs housing the speaker and microphone.

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Big Tech is set to agree to build its own power plants for data centers and shield consumers from rising electricity costs, but companies face daunting logistical obstacles to delivering on the pledge championed by President Donald Trump.

At a White House event on Wednesday, executives from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and OpenAI are due to sign the pledge to supply their own power instead of relying on a grid connection.

Trump hailed the plan in his State of the Union speech last week, promising US consumers that “no one’s prices will go up” as a result of “energy demand from AI data centers.”

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Most of Apple's announcements this week have been fairly straightforward internal updates to existing products, give or take some big architectural changes to its high-end processors.

But Apple has saved its most interesting announcement for today: the MacBook Neo is a brand-new lower-cost member of Apple's laptop family, and will take over for the 13-inch MacBook Air as the company's entry-level laptop. The new laptop starts at $599, the same as the M1 MacBook Air that Apple has been selling through Wal-Mart in the US, and much lower than the $1,099 starting price for the new M5 MacBook Air .

The new MacBook will go up for pre-order today and will be available on March 11, and you'll be able to buy it directly through Apple's website and retail stores in addition to third-party retailers. It's available in four colors: silver, indigo, a pink-ish color called "blush," and the yellow-ish "citrus."

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NASA has fixed the problem that forced the removal of the rocket for the Artemis II mission from its launch pad last month, but it will be a couple of weeks before officials are ready to move the vehicle back into the starting blocks at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket could have launched as soon as this week after it passed a key fueling test on February 21. During that test, NASA loaded the Space Launch System rocket with super-cold propellants without any major problems, apparently overcoming a persistent hydrogen leak that prevented the mission from launching in early February.

However, another problem cropped up just one day after the successful fueling demo. Ground teams were unable to flow helium into the rocket's upper stage. Unlike the connections to the core stage, which workers can repair at the launch pad, the umbilical lines leading to the upper stage higher up the rocket are only accessible inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy.

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IT consultant and services provider Accenture has agreed to buy Speedtest and Downdetector owner Ookla from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash.

Accenture plans to integrate Ookla’s data products into its own offerings that are targeted at helping communications service providers, hyperscalers, government entities, and other types of customers “optimize … mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks,” Accenture’s announcement today said.

Ookla's platform also includes Ekahau, which offers tools for troubleshooting and designing wireless networks, and RootMetrics, which monitors mobile network performance.

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Paramount Skydance's $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has a notable supporter in Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. The FCC boss told CNBC today that the Paramount/WBD combination "is a lot cleaner" than the now-defunct Netflix deal to buy WBD.

Netflix "would have had a very difficult path forward from a regulatory perspective" because of "the scope and scale" of the streaming service that would have been created by combining Netflix with WBD property HBO Max, Carr said. There were "a lot of concerns in DC" about Netflix buying the company, he said.

Netflix backed out of its deal with Warner Bros. instead of matching the Paramount offer. Although Paramount plans to merge its own Paramount+ streaming service with HBO Max, Carr said the Paramount/WBD merger "does not raise at all the same types of concerns [as Netflix]. I think there's some real consumer benefits that could emerge from it."

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Forget " eye of newt and toe of frog/wool of bat and tongue of dog." People in the 16th century were more akin to DIY scientists than Macbeth’ s three witches when it came to concocting home remedies for everything from hair loss and toothache, to kidney stones and fungal infections. Medical manuals targeted to the layperson were hugely popular at the time, according to Stefan Hanss, an early modern historian at the University of Manchester in the UK. "Reader-practitioners" would tinker with the various recipes, tweaking them as needed and making personalized notes in the margins. And they left telltale protein traces behind as they did so.

Hanss is part of an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, chemists, historians, conservators, and materials scientists who have analyzed trace proteins from the fingerprints of Renaissance people rifling through the pages of medical manuals. The team reported their findings in a paper published in The American Historical Review. It's the first time researchers have used proteomics to analyze Renaissance recipes, enhanced further by in-depth archival research to place the scientific results in the proper historical context.

"We have so many recipes of that time, [including] cosmetic, medical, and culinary recipes, as well as handwritten recipes passed down for generations," Hanss told Ars. "It's really a key element of Renaissance culture, and [the manuscripts] are all covered with scribbled marginalia of [past] users. Experimentation was everywhere. It's not only about book-learned knowledge but hands-on practical knowledge. It's a key change in the way people constructed knowledge at that time."

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Last time we looked at the used electric vehicle market, it was to see what the options are if you're spending $10,000 or less . Two solid choices emerged quickly: a BMW i3 if you don't need much range, and a Chevrolet Bolt if you do. Lots of earlier Nissan Leafs made the list, too, but these had limited range and air-cooled batteries to contend with; we also included an assortment of compliance cars and, perhaps for the very brave, a Tesla. But what happens when you grow the budget by 50 percent? What EVs make sense when there's $15,000 burning a hole in your pocket?

As it turns out, at this price point the planet starts looking a lot more like your own personal bivalve. For starters, the cars that looked good at $10,000 look a lot better in the next bracket up, generally newer model years or with lower mileage than the cheaper alternatives. Which means you can afford the facelifted i3 . For model-year 2018 onwards, BMW fitted its electric city car with a larger-capacity battery, which means up to 114 miles (183 km) of range on a full charge, or about 150 miles (241 km) if it's the one with the two-cylinder range-extender engine. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto might also be built into these i3s, although there are aftermarket solutions now, too.

No aftermarket is required to get CarPlay or Android Auto on any of the Bolts you might buy for under $15,000, which include a mix of pre- and post-facelift (model-year 2022 onwards) cars, although few of the slightly more spacious Bolt EUVs. Like the i3s, expect lower mileage examples, plus all the usual caveats: slow DC charging and seats that can get a bit hard on long drives.

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As part of today's MacBook Pro update, Apple has also unveiled the M5 Pro and M5 Max, the newest members of the M5 chip family.

Normally, the Pro and Max chips take the same basic building blocks from the basic chip and just scale them up—more CPU cores, more GPU cores, and more memory bandwidth. But the M5 chips are a surprisingly large departure from past generations, both in terms of the CPU architectures they use and in how they're packaged together.

We won't know the impact these changes have had on performance until we have hardware in hand to test, but here are all the technical details we've been able to glean about the new updates and how the M5 chip family stacks up against the past few generations of Apple Silicon chips.

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