Techwalla

The crisis began not with a missile lock or a Soviet radar ping, but with a sound. A deafening bang, a violent sideways lurch, two crew members slamming their helmets into the canopy at 83,000 feet. The SR-71 Blackbird had just suffered an inlet unstart near Vladivostok, and for the next several minutes, one of the fastest aircraft ever built would be falling with zero thrust, its crew calculating whether staying aboard was safer than ejecting over Soviet Far Eastern territory.

The FCC votes tomorrow on rules that would fundamentally change what an equipment authorization label means for a drone sold in the United States. The core change: certification would be blocked for any device whose internal logic-bearing components were produced by an entity on the agency's national-security Covered List, regardless of who assembled the finished product, according to the Commission's Third Report and Order circulated for tomorrow's open meeting.

Fewer than one in four children who encounter something upsetting online ever tell a parent about it. That figure, drawn from Ofcom data cited in a peer-reviewed systematic review published earlier this year, is not a technology problem. It is a preparation problem.

The Xteink X4 Pro went on sale today through Xteink's website at $99, bringing a touchscreen and adjustable front light to the wallet-sized e-reader for the first time. Several reviewers said those additions make the device more plausible as a primary reader rather than just a portable companion to a Kindle. The catch, which every major review flags in some form, is that the software and content workflow still require more patience than most readers will want to spend.

Light Phone launched the Light Flip today, a $299 minimalist flip phone with no touchscreen, no outer screen, no app store, and a physical keypad that defaults to T9 input. The announcement landed one day before Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, where the mobile giant is expected to debut its latest AI-powered foldables. That timing was deliberate, WIRED reported today. The device ships in April 2027.

Anyone who has ever clenched a cylindrical flashlight between their teeth while both hands were buried in an engine bay or crawl space has already invented, in rough form, the bite light flashlight. A U.S. patent application filed in May 2024 takes that improvised habit and tries to engineer it into something purpose-built: a flashlight you hold in your mouth.

Motorola has confirmed the Moto Pad 70 Groove will launch in India on July 31, with key specs revealed via a Flipkart microsite this week. The headline feature is a nine-speaker JBL audio system rated at 48W of output, built into a chassis that treats speaker volume as a primary engineering constraint rather than an afterthought. Pricing has not been disclosed. Most Android tablets chase the same profile: thin, broadly capable, priced to undercut Apple.

Chery's premium arm Exlantix plans to bring the Chery Exlantix ES electric sedan to Spain in the first half of 2027, with no European pricing published and no WLTP range certification completed. The car carries roof-mounted LiDAR, dual Nvidia Drive Orin X chips, 800V charging architecture, and up to a 100 kWh battery hardware that sits at the premium end of what's available in Western showrooms. What European buyers cannot yet verify is more consequential than what they can.

MANGMI published the complete MANGMI Air Y specs this week for both the Air Y and Air Y Pro, a pair of vertical, Game Boy-style Android handhelds, according to iXBT Games. No pricing. No release date. Just the full hardware breakdown for two devices that, on paper, are aimed at meaningfully different buyers. The spec disclosure is the latest in a series of staged reveals.

About 60% of Wordle players start each puzzle with a word outside the top 20 most common openers, per garbagecollected.dev's analysis of over 1,000 days of WordleBot data. The players who do cluster around recognizable choices tend to favor vowel-heavy words that analysis flags as suboptimal. Picking the best letters to guess in Wordle comes down to one principle: the letters that eliminate the most candidates aren't the most familiar ones.