Google is adding generative AI to Maps. The feature's in early access and only available for certain areas and for select Local Guides members, but it looks to be an interesting use of the technology. Basically, the tool allows you to speak to the app using natural language to discover new places in your hometown or when traveling throughout this great country of ours.

Here’s how it works. Ask the app what you’re looking for, like a restaurant to meet the needs of your friend group with various dietary restrictions. The company’s large-language models will analyze information about more than 250 million places along with insights provided by community members as part of its Local Guides program. It should be able to spit out the perfect spot.

Google says the system will work “no matter how specific, niche or broad your needs might be.” The company gives a far-reaching example involving thrifting in San Francisco. It describes a scenario in which a person asks the app for vintage thrifting spots in the city. The AI models analyzed nearby places, along with photos, ratings and community reviews. The app spit out a range of options, complete with photo carousels and review summaries.

Because this is a generative AI, you can go even further. If you ask the app to find a good lunch spot, it’ll automatically look for something that matches the retro vibe of the aforementioned vintage shop. In other words, it remembers the stuff you like, within reason. 

This feature can also be used on the fly, with Google giving an example of asking the AI for activities in the case of a sudden rainstorm. You can further refine search results by asking followup questions. This all seems pretty neat, but the feature is certainly limited for now, as it's just for US users and only in select areas. Once early access users give enough feedback, it should start popping up in more places.

Of course, this isn’t Google’s first AI rodeo. The company recently added generative AI features to the Chrome browser and made its AI-powered note-taking app available to everyone in the US. It’s also continuing to refine its Bard chatbot and stuffing Pixel phones with all kinds of AI tools.

Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro AR/VR headset will have a bunch of dedicated Microsoft 365 apps at launch on February 2, including Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Loop. Apple has long described the Vision Pro as primarily a productivity device, so the addition of Microsoft products should make users, well, more productive.

These aren’t just slapdash remakes of correlating iPads apps, as many have built-in tools that take advantage of the headset. For instance, PowerPoint features a custom immersive environment that allows users to practice delivering a presentation to an actual audience. Excel will let users quickly move documents to other apps by using the headset’s pinch and drag functionality.

Microsoft

Microsoft Word will include a focus mode that blocks distractions so you can actually finish that novel you’ve been talking about for 15 years. Teams will take advantage of the headset’s persona feature, so your digital avatar can attend work meetings and creep everyone else out via the magic of the uncanny valley. The Zoom app on Apple Vision Pro will also include this feature.

Headset owners will also be able to access Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot service. In other words, you’ll be able to use natural conversation to instruct the digital assistant to create drafts, summarize documents and even generate PowerPoint presentations.

Each of these apps will be available via the official App Store as soon as you unbox your expensive new gadget. There has been plenty of chatter about what software won’t be available at launch, like Netflix and YouTube, so it’s good to see that early adopters won’t be forced to exclusively use Apple-branded apps.

Sony has revealed the PlayStation Plus monthly games lineup for February, and it’s pretty solid. There’s no clear headliner here, but a trio of nifty games are about to hit the platform, including Foamstars, Rollerdrome and Steelrising. Also, a two-hour trial of the beloved superhero simulation Spider-Man 2 drops on February 6 for PlayStation Plus Premium/Deluxe members.

If we had to pick the biggest game of the bunch, it’d be Rollerdrome. The dystopian roller-skating sim is absolutely fantastic, with a neat 1970s aesthetic, comic-book style visuals and a timely message about corporate greed. It’s also really fun to play, which is why it made our list of the best games of 2022. It even made our list of the best PS5 games of 2023, and that was back when you actually had to pay for it outright.

We already knew Foamstars was hitting PS Plus this month, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting. This is Square Enix’s attempt to capture some of the magic of Nintendo’s Splatoon franchise and it's actually a day-one release for the platform. Foamstars is a 4x4 online party shooter, just like Splatoon. Unlike Nintendo’s game, you use foam as a primary mechanic instead of paint.

We haven’t written about Steelrising, but it’s a pretty cool riff on the Soulslike genre, trading a fantasy setting for a steampunk vibe. It’s set in an alternate history version of Paris in which robots quelled the French Revolution. It doesn't get more steampunk than that, though I haven’t played long enough to see if Jules Verne somehow shows up via time travel. The combat is fun though.

Fall Guys is also getting an avatars pack as part of this drop, including costumes based on characters from the Ratchet & Clank franchise. All three of the aforementioned titles will be available to PS Plus members starting February 6 and until March 4. To that end, some titles are leaving the platform this month. You only have until February 5 to add A Plague Tale: Requiem, Evil West and Nobody Saves the World to your digital library.

Online commerce platform eBay will pay $59 million to settle allegations from the Justice Department that it assisted in the sale of pill press machines, which are used to manufacture both legitimate and counterfeit prescription medications. The platform sold thousands of these presses, along with other products to create pills, such as molds, stamps, dies and encapsulating machines. For the uninitiated, encapsulating machines are used to fill capsules with medication.

Pill press machines are used by legitimate pharmaceutical companies to manufacture medication, but they are also a required tool for making counterfeit pills. Criminals use these machines to make fake medications that look like actual prescription pills, typically for sale on the street or via the dark web. When combined with molds, stamps and dies, these fake pills will look exactly like the real McCoy, down to the logos and letters on each side. Additionally, these presses can whip up thousands of pills per hour. 

The issue here is that companies that facilitate the sale of pill presses and related equipment are required to verify the buyers’ identities and send records along to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to ensure the machines can be traced if used illegally. It looks like eBay shirked its duties here, which is a violation of the Controlled Substances Act.

“Through its website, eBay made it easy for individuals across the country to obtain the type of dangerous machines that are often used to make counterfeit pills," US Attorney Nikolas Kerest told ABC News.

eBay’s failure to follow “basic reporting and record keeping requirements” allowed people to "set up pill factories in their homes and to do so without detection,” added US Attorney Henry Leventis.

Beyond the hefty payout, eBay has agreed to comply with regulations moving forward, so information regarding each pill press machine sold, along with accessories, will be sent to the DEA for perusal. Additionally, many of the people who bought the machines on eBay have been charged in illegal counterfeit pills trafficking cases, according to the DOJ.

This is a big deal, because these counterfeit pills are often filled with all kinds of junk, including fentanyl. The synthetic opioid is largely responsible for the deadliest overdose crisis in US history, with nearly 74,000 people dying from fentanyl overdoses in 2022 alone. This drug accounts for more than two-thirds of overdose deaths in the US. You won’t fall into a coma by touching it, no matter what cops say, but you should still stay far, far away from the stuff.

As for eBay, this isn’t the first time the company had to pony up money to the DOJ. It recently had to pay $3 million to settle a truly bizarre cyberstalking case involving the shipment of live animals. The DOJ is also suing eBay for allowing the sale of aftermarket “defeat devices,” which bypass vehicle emission controls.

Amazon's Fire TV soundbar is back on sale for $100, bringing the price down from $120. That’s a savings of $20, or 17 percent, on the well-regarded audio device. This matches the Black Friday price from last year, so this is likely the cheapest you’ll see the soundbar until, well, the holidays.

The device can enhance your TV audio via dual speakers, with access to 3D surround sound. You also get DTS Virtual X and Dolby Audio support. It comes with a remote for adjusting the volume, but you can also plug it directly into a Fire TV and use that remote for everything. Plug and play experiences are always nice.

The soundbar also has Bluetooth, so you can connect it to your phone or tablet to stream podcasts or whatever. The only thing missing, and this is odd for an Amazon gadget, is Alexa. You won’t be able to use the dulcet tones of your speaking voice to make any volume adjustments with this soundbar.

There’s also the pigskin-encased elephant in the room. The Super Bowl is just 11 days away. If you’re looking to upgrade your home entertainment system before gorging on nachos with your buddies and playing Taylor Swift-inspired drinking games, this is a mighty fine option. Many rival products cost two to three times as much as this soundbar. 

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The Kobo Libra 2 ereader has dropped to its lowest price of the year so far. You can grab one via Amazon for $170, which is a discount of $20. This matches pricing from the holiday season for the water-resistant reading tablet.

Kobo’s Libra 2 easily made our list of the best ereaders for a number of reasons. First of all, this thing has actual buttons, which has become something of a rarity with modern ereaders. This gives users some tactile feedback when adjusting settings, turning pages and performing other activities on the tablet. Like most ereaders, the screen quickly re-orients itself, so you can make it so the buttons are on either side of the device.

We also admired the aesthetics, as this device looks and feels premium during use. We also called it the “most comfortable ereader” we’ve ever held, due to the textured and rubberized back. There’s a highly useful warming light that mimics natural environments. The text and image clarity are also on-point and the whole thing is waterproof up to six feet for 60 minutes. So grab that towel and hit the pool.

While we loved the beefy 32GB capacity, which holds thousands upon thousands of books, the Libra 2 features a relatively smallish 7-inch screen that pales in comparison to, say, the Kindle Scribe. However, it pretty much matches the size of a standard paperback. The $190 asking price is a bit steep, but this discount puts the kibosh on that concern. With this sale in place, the Libra 2 is a full $80 less than the similarly featured Kindle Oasis.

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An MIT biotech researcher has been able to run the iconic computer game Doom using actual gut bacteria. Lauren Ramlan didn’t get the game going on a digital simulation of bacteria, but turned actual bacteria into pixels to display the 30-year-old FPS, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.

Specifically, Ramlan created a display inside of a cell wall made entirely of E. coli bacteria. The 32x48 1-bit display may not win any resolution awards, but who cares, right? It’s Doom running on bacteria. The researcher dosed the bacteria with fluorescent proteins to get them to light up just like digital pixels.

There’s a couple of caveats here. First of all, the bacteria aren’t actually running the game, as we still haven't cracked that whole “inject biological matter with digital code” thing. Instead, the bacteria combine to act as a teensy-tiny monitor that renders gameplay for the beloved shooter.

Also, there’s the subject of frame rate, which is always an important metric when considering FPS games. To be blunt, the frame rate is atrocious, likely due to the fact that bacteria were never intended to display 3D video games. It takes 70 minutes for the bacteria to illuminate one frame of the game and another eight hours to return to its starting state. This translates to nearly nine hours per frame, which means it would take around 600 years to play the game from start to finish. That’s even worse than Cyberpunk 2077 at launch.

So while this won’t present the smoothest gameplay experience, it’s still a pretty nifty idea. Also, it further proves the theory that Doom can run on just about anything. We’ve seen the game running on pregnancy tests, rat brain neurons and even inside of other titles, like the sequel Doom II and Minecraft. Doom is the great equalizer. May it continue to surprise us for the next 30 years.

We may have an adequate understanding of the human body in that, well, we invented aspirin and sequenced the genome, but researchers still find out new things about the humble homo sapien all of the time. Case in point? Scientists just discovered a previously unknown entity hanging out in the human gut and mouth. The researchers are calling these virus-like structures “obelisks”, due to their presumed microscopic shape.

These entities replicate like viruses, but are much smaller and simpler. Due to the minuscule size, they fall into the “viroid” class, which are typically single-stranded RNAs without a protein shell. However, most viroids are infectious agents that cause disease and it doesn’t look like that’s the case with these lil obelisks, as reported by Live Science.

So why are they inside of us and what do they do? That’s the big question. The discoverers at Stanford University, the University of Toronto and the Technical University of Valencia have some theories. They may influence gene activity within the human microbiome, though they also hang out in the mouth. To that end, they have been found using the common mouth-based bacterium Streptococcus sanguinis as a host. It’s been suggested that these viroids infect various bacteria in both the mouth and gut, though we don’t know why.

Some of the obelisks seem to contain instructions for enzymes required for replication, so they look to be more complex than your average viroid, as indicated by Science. In any event, there has been a “chicken and the egg” debate raging for years over whether viruses evolved from viroids or if viroids actually evolved from viruses, so further study could finally end that argument.

While we don’t exactly know what these obelisk sequences do, scientists have discovered just how prevalent they are in our bodies. These sequences are found in roughly seven percent of human gut bacteria and a whopping 50 percent of mouth bacteria. The gut-based structures also feature a distinctive RNA sequence when compared to the mouth-based obelisks. This diversity has led researchers to proclaim that they “comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes.”

“I think this is one more clear indication that we are still exploring the frontiers of this viral universe,” computational biologist Simon Roux of the DOE Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory told Science.

“It’s insane,” added Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”

Speaking of frontier medicine, scientists also recently created custom bacteria to detect cancer cells and biometric implants that detect organ rejection after replacement surgery. The human body may be just about as vast and mysterious as the ocean, or even space, but we’re slowly (ever so slowly) unraveling its puzzles.

Yelp just released a substantial app update with more than 20 new features, and several of these tools are packed with, wait for it, AI. The biggest news for regular users is the addition of summaries of business automatically written by AI, which Yelp says will help people find the perfect restaurant or service to meet their needs.

There’s also new visuals for the home feed and revamped search experience, which the company says will also help users find that perfect dinner spot. This home feed incorporates AI to provide more relevant content to users and will also display images from nearby restaurants that match previous user queries, in addition to videos posted by local businesses.

The AI tomfoolery extends to business users. The app now offers business owners “AI-powered smart budgets” to optimize ad spending. There’s also new data insights available for business owners that deliver “valuable market and competitive” information.

Yelp

Yelp’s expanding the Recognitions feature to encourage user engagement. Now, users can earn official kudos by regularly reviewing certain types of foods. You can nab one of these coveted digital trophies by reviewing three restaurants that offer the same type of cuisine in one year. You’ll find these credentials in the Achievements section on the app.

The update’s only available on iOS for now, but Yelp says an Android version will be released in the coming months. This isn’t the first time the service has dipped its toes into the wading pool of AI. Back in April, the company announced it was integrating AI and natural language models to improve search.

Sony’s PlayStation division has cooked up its first State of Play event for 2024, which will stream this Wednesday at 5PM ET. The company promises a runtime of 40 minutes and coverage of more than 15 upcoming titles.

To that end, Sony says two of the games profiled will be Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin. Stellar Blade, formerly called Project Eve, has been on our radar for a while, and it’s been around 18 months since we got an update. The PS5-exclusive was supposed to hit store shelves in 2023, so we’re due for a release date and another trailer that shows off more footage of the forthcoming action RPG. For those keeping score, the first teaser trailer for Stellar Blade appeared way back in 2019.

As for Rise of the Ronin, it’s a historical action RPG from Team Ninja, the developer behind Nioh. The game’s set in 1863, during Japan’s Bakumatsu era, and you play as a wandering Ronin. Expect plenty of third-person melee combat and gorgeous visuals. You'll be able to get your hands on it on March 22, so expect some sort of final trailer. 

Those are the only two confirmed games that’ll get the spotlight during this week’s stream, leaving more than 13 unknowns. There have been rumors swirling around the internet throughout the weekend regarding what else will be on the docket. These leaks suggest the stream will also feature Death Stranding 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, a remaster of Sonic Generations, a remake of Silent Hill 2 and a new Metro game, among others. Like all leaks, take this information with a grain of salt. However, the original leaker did nail the date of the event, so there’s that.

You can watch via the official PlayStation site. It’ll also be available on the company’s YouTube, TikTok and Twitch channels. Sony promises information on both PS5 exclusives and upcoming PS VR 2 games.