Tuesday Pew Research announced their newest findings: that 54% of America’s teens use AI help with schoolwork:
One-in-five teens living in households making less than $30,000 a year say they do all or most of their schoolwork with AI chatbots’ help. A similar share of those in households making $30,000 to just under $75,000 annually say this. Fewer teens living in higher-earning households (7%) say the same.”

“The survey did not ask students whether they had used chatbots to write essays or generate other assignments…” notes the New York Times. “But nearly 60% of teenagers told Pew that students at their school used chatbots to cheat ‘very often’ or ‘somewhat often.'” Agreeing with that are the Pew Researchers themselves. “Our survey shows that many teens think cheating with AI has become a regular feature of student life.”

One worried teenager still told the researchers that AI “makes people lazy and takes away jobs.” But another teenager told the researchers that “Everyone’s going to have to know how to use AI or they’ll be left behind.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A start-up called Reflect Orbital “proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night,” reports the Washington Post, “with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight….”

Slashdot noted their idea in 2022 — but Reflect Orbital now expects to launch its first satellite in April, according to the article. “But its grand vision is largely ‘aspirational,’ as its young founder, Ben Nowack, told me…”

Reflect Orbital’s Nowack describes a scene right out of sci-fi: An extremely bright star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky, illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern horizon about five minutes later, just as another such “star” appears in the north. To make the night even brighter, a customer could make 10 “stars” appear at once in the north by ordering them on an app. Two such artificial stars are in development in Reflect Orbital’s factory. Nowack showed them to me on a Zoom call. The first to launch is 50 feet across, but he plans later to build them three times that size. If all goes according to plan, he’ll have 50,000 of them circling the Earth in 2035 at an altitude of around 400 miles.
Nowack plans to start selling the service “in mostly developing nations or places that don’t have streetlights yet.” Eventually, he thinks, he can illuminate major cities, turn solar fields and farms into round-the-clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it. He likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years ago. “I see this as much the same thing,” he said, arguing that people would no longer have to “wait for the sun to shine.”

The article adds that Elon Musk’s SpaceX “wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers — 70 times the number of satellites now in orbit.” (America’s satellite-regulation Federal Communications Commission
grants a “categorical exclusion” from environmental review to satellites on the grounds that their operations “normally do not have significant effects on the human environment.”)

The public comment periods for the two proposals close on March 6 and March 9.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China’s biggest phone makers continue to relentlessly forge ahead with high-spec phones that you may never see in the US. With the Xiaomi 17 Ultra this year, the company has continued its pattern from previous iterations by focusing on powerful camera sensors, huge batteries and… being selective about global availability.

Xiaomi’s 17 series is launching across multiple European territories months after its Asia debut, but at the time of writing, no word yet on US availability. Another logistical point of interest? When we last checked out Xiaomi’s devices, it was the 15 series, and the company has decided to skip 16 and leap straight to 17, conveniently matching Apple’s latest number.

Storied camera brand Leica has been involved with Xiaomi’s phones for a few years and its newest flagship doesn’t disappoint in that regard, because this is another Xiaomi device dedicated to photography.

Image by Mat Smith for Engadget

The 17 Ultra has a huge 1-inch 50-megapixel main camera sensor with a f/1.67 lens, and a telephoto setup with a 200MP 1/1.4-inch sensor and going up to 4.3x optical zoom. Xiaomi claims it’s capable of up to 17x “optical-level zoom,” but quality doesn’t measure up to, say, the Oppo Find X9, with its dedicated telescopic lens add-on. There’s also a 50MP ultrawide camera to round things out.

The main camera is very impressive, delivering plenty of detail and performing incredibly well in low light, seemingly before any computational photography kicks in. A new Light Fusion 1050L sensor features LOFIC HDR technology, delivering stronger control over highlights and more detail in darker areas of your shots. I’ve been impressed by the balanced color tone and contrast, without having to edit or add one of the (many) Leica camera filters.

If anything, the slightly heavy-handed algorithms can sometimes ruin parts of a shot. For instance, by scrambling lettering or capturing blurry, AI-mutated faces where computational photography takes a swing (and a miss) at people in the distance.

Mat Smith for Engadget

The telephoto camera alone is also technically interesting in a few ways. It offers continual optical zoom across the 75-100mm range without in-sensor cropping. This means the lenses physically move to deliver lossless zoom across a range of distances, without jarring leaps between camera sensors and crops. This doesn’t run across the full gamut, but it does roughly cover the 3-4x optical zoom range, which is often used in portrait photography.

The APO (apochromatic) lens design on the telephoto is more immediately useful and effective. An APO lens significantly reduces chromatic aberration by focusing three wavelengths of light (red, green and blue) onto the same focal plane. This lens design means it can correct color fringing and improve image sharpness.

Mat Smith for Engadget

At higher zoom levels, fringing and lighting bloom often hamper telephoto photos on smartphones, and Xiaomi’s solution has some appeal. I noticed less fringing than on other zoom-capable Android phones from Samsung, Oppo and Google. It also supports macro photography, but is hindered this time by a minimum focal distance of 30cm (11.8 inches). Most smartphone cameras’ macro modes let you get much closer.

The 17 Ultra can capture up to 8K video (at 30 fps), 4K Dolby Vision up to 120 fps, and 4K 120 fps Log video, ensuring you can make the most of that huge 1-inch sensor in video, too. That said, it seems to struggle with stabilization at times, while its low-light performance doesn’t match its prowess in still photography, lagging behind flagship phones from Apple, Google and Samsung.

There’s also a special Leica edition of the 17 Ultra, which is largely the same, specification-wise, but with a manual zoom ring around the camera unit. It’s a cool gimmick, but felt oddly loose on a few devices I’ve handled. 

Xiaomi made a few design changes to its Ultra line this year, with a new, entirely flat display, and flattened edges that look like a certain family of devices. In fairness, it’s not the only company using imitation as flattery. There’s also IP68 protection against dust and water.

While cameras may be the highlight, this is a flagship device by any specification metric. With a 6.9-inch display, this expansive OLED display has variable refresh rates (1-120Hz) and peaks at 3,500 nits of brightness.

At that size, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra is in the territory of devices like the iPhone 17 Pro Max and S26 Ultra. A phone this size isn’t for everyone, but it is the thinnest Ultra phone from Xiaomi to date, with a profile measuring 8.29mm. Xiaomi has also reduced the camera unit’s diameter and raised it on the device, making it easier to use and helping keep fingers out of your shots.

Image by Mat Smith for Engadget

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the huge 6,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, with support for Xiaomi’s 90W HyperCharge (if you have the right charger) and 50W wireless HyperCharge (which also requires Xiaomi’s own dock) speeds. Other phone makers: Please put a battery this huge in your flagship.

At MWC 2026, the company announced the global launch and rollout of the device across Europe, including the UK where the Ultra will start priced at £1,299 (roughly $1,750). We’re still waiting to confirm US availability and pricing.

While the specs are powerful, “launching” a flagship device that’s already been in the wild for a few months — even if elsewhere in the world — reduces the spectacle.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/xiaomi-17-ultra-global-launch-hands-on-leica-camera-143006810.html?src=rss

Alongside a global launch for Xiaomi’s 17 Ultra (read about that right here), the company announced a further deepening of its relationship with Leica.

The CEO of Leica, Mattias Harsch, took to the stage to announce a new Leitzphone, which appears to be an even deeper collaboration than 17 Ultra by Leica, which is a different phone. Confused? That’s fair. 

Design-wise, Leica has shifted back to a single tone body color, which looks more “Leica” to this camera dilettante’s eyes. And if you’re thinking you’ve heard of the Leitzphone before, you probably have: it was a series of phones made by Sharp that launched in Japan in 2021. They all had a 1-inch camera sensor and yes, as does Xiaomi’s first Leitzphone. It also gets a customizable ring to control camera settings.

The interface is also designed by Leica. with the aim of being as intuitive as possible.

The regular Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Leica edition have a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip and a 6.9-inch 120Hz display that can reach up to 3,500 nits of peak brightness. While cameras are the focus, it’s a flagship device by pretty much any metric. We’ll be taking a closer look at what’s different when we get to test it out very soon.

After years of collaborating (and cute little badges), this may be the first pure “Leica phone” manufactured by Xiaomi, but sold directly by Leica. 

This is a developing story…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/leica-leitzphone-xiaomi-mwc-2026-135744417.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet. The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today’s X.509 certificates are about 64 bytes in size, and comprise six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor’s algorithm. Certificates containing the equivalent quantum-resistant cryptographic material are roughly 2.5 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site.

To bypass the bottleneck, companies are turning to Merkle Trees, a data structure that uses cryptographic hashes and other math to verify the contents of large amounts of information using a small fraction of material used in more traditional verification processes in public key infrastructure. Merkle Tree Certificates, “replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs,” members of Google’s Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team wrote Friday. “In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single ‘Tree Head’ representing potentially millions of certificates, and the ‘certificate’ sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree.”

[…] Google is [also] adding cryptographic material from quantum-resistant algorithms such as ML-DSA (PDF). This addition would allow forgeries only if an attacker were to break both classical and post-quantum encryption. The new regime is part of what Google is calling the quantum-resistant root store, which will complement the Chrome Root Store the company formed in 2022. The [Merkle Tree Certificates] MTCs use Merkle Trees to provide quantum-resistant assurances that a certificate has been published without having to add most of the lengthy keys and hashes. Using other techniques to reduce the data sizes, the MTCs will be roughly the same 64-byte length they are now […]. The new system has already been implemented in Chrome.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Welcome to our latest roundup of what’s going on in the indie game space. It’s Steam Next Fest week, with literally thousands of demos for upcoming games for us to dive into. I’m trying to check out as many as I can before the event wraps up on Monday. However, I made a near-critical error in my planning: I opted to try the Raccoin demo first. I could and would have happily played that all week.

This is a coin-pushing roguelike deckbuilder that adopts the format of Balatro. To progress, you need to earn a certain number of points and the target increases each round. Every three rounds there’s a sort-of boss — a few coins that negatively impact your game until you can get rid of them. After every round, you’ll go to a shop to buy and sell special coins and other upgrades. As you might expect with this type of game, finding ways to boost the points you can score from each coin is how to win.

On my first successful run, I found a way to electrify the coins (which boosts their score) by charging them and use passive abilities and special coins to spread and amplify the effect. Then I was able to replicate a special coin that pulls all other nearby coins into a cyclone — having the water-based coins in there helped to spread the electrical effect between other coins. There were a few rounds in which I didn’t even have to do anything. The cyclones just dumped enough coins over the edge for me. 

This was only the first way I’ve figured out how to break the game. Six hours in, I’m eager to find many more.

Raccoin — from Doraccoon and Balatro publisher Playstack — will hit Steam on March 31. The demo is currently still available.

I’ve had The Eternal Life of Goldman on my wishlist since we first learned about it a couple of years ago. I’m very glad that was one of the demos I’ve tried. This is an utterly gorgeous platform adventure with hand-drawn art. As Goldman, an elderly gentleman, you’ll swap parts of your cane on the fly so you can hook onto floating rings or pogo off springs. 

The platforming is challenging enough that I had to focus to get through the demo, which lasts about 75-90 minutes. There’s almost always something going on in the background or foreground too. This game from Weappy Studio is shaping up to be quite something. I can’t wait to play the full thing when The Eternal Life of Goldman hits PC, Nintendo Switch, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, hopefully later this year.

Of course I had to check out the Next Fest demo for Vampire Crawlers, which is also available on Xbox. The latest game from Poncle is a turn-based deckbuilder roguelite. Oh, and it’s also a Vampire Survivors spin-off. Instead of passively firing your weapons at surrounding enemies, you have a bit more control here. 

It plays a bit like those first-person maze games from the ’90s. You’ll walk around each level with the help of a map that shows where enemies, chests and bosses are located. When you encounter enemies, you’ll play cards in a certain order to deal damage or boost your stats for that particular battle. You can play all your available cards in one go, but you might want to rearrange them first so that you, for instance, use a card that boosts your damage before firing any weapons. Each card has a mana point value — you can only play a full hand if you have enough mana. And yes, there are weapon evolutions.

Turn-based games usually aren’t my bag, but sometimes they just hit right. The Vampire Crawlers demo hits right. I can already tell I’m going to spend dozens of hours with the full game, which is coming to Steam, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android this year. 

I tried a few other demos so far, including one for John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, a co-op shooter in the vein of Left 4 Dead. It’s a little rough around the edges right now, but it seems enjoyable enough. 

There are a bunch of other Next Fest demos I’m hoping to try over the weekend, including precision platformer Croak, PvE pirate game Windrose, cyberpunk platformer Replaced, record store sim Wax Heads, match-three/tower-defense game Titanium Court and Dragon Care Tarot. I read that you can pet dragons in the latter, so I’m sold.

New releases

If you can’t get enough of The Witcher and are impatiently waiting for CD Projekt Red to unleash The Witcher IV, here’s one way to keep your thumbs busy in the meantime. Reigns: The Witcher is the latest installment of the Reigns series from Nerial and Devolver Digital for Steam, Android and iOS ($6). 

You still play as Geralt of Rivia. However, this is a narrative-focused game in which you make choices by swiping. It’s something a little different for Witcher fans. It might just pull some long-time Reigns players into that fantasy universe for the first time too.

Bread and Fred is the cutest thing. The co-op platformer from SandCastles Studio has been available on PC (Steam, GOG and Epic Games Store) and Nintendo Switch for a while, and this week it landed on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4 and PS5. It normally costs $15 and there’s a 20 percent launch discount on those consoles. You’ll need to be a PS Plus subscriber to get those savings on PlayStation, though.

You and a friend take control of a pair of adorable penguins that are tethered together. The aim is to ascend a mountain, sometimes by swinging each other to get to hard-to-reach places. But if you miss a jump, you can plummet back down and erase a chunk of your progress. There is a single-player mode in which one of the penguins is replaced by a rock. The pixel art aesthetic here is super charming.

Here’s another co-op game. This one is a side‑scrolling RPG brawler. After several months in early access/game preview, the full version of Stoic’s Towerborne arrived on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox on PC, Steam and PS5. It costs $25, though there’s a 20 percent launch discount on Xbox. It’s on Game Pass Ultimate and Premium as well. 

After the 1.0 update, the game has a full campaign that you can play offline by yourself or online with friends. Stoic has added fresh biomes, enemies and bosses, and there are said to be hundreds of missions, side quests and bounties. I really dig the fluidity of the animations in the trailer, though the action is a bit hard to parse at first glance. Still, I’m curious enough to try out Towerborne.

I’ve been a little too occupied with other Next Fest demos (plus Overwatch challenges, I’ll admit it) to play Dice A Million yet, but this roguelike deckbuilder looks pretty interesting. The aim is to find the right combination of dice and rings (i.e. passive abilities) to roll a million points in one go. As with the likes of Balatro, it’s all about figuring out powerful synergies between dice and rings to break the game and rack up ridiculous scores. I did quite enjoy a line on the Steam page that reads, “Cutting edge next-gen graphics (not really, I drew all of them on paint).”

Dice A Million — from Countlessnights and publisher 2 Left Thumbs — is also available on Itch and Xbox on PC. It’s on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Otherwise, it costs $13, but there’s a 20 percent discount on Steam until March 11. There’s a demo available on Steam too.

Upcoming 

Let’s start this section with a news roundup. Mouse: P.I. for Hire continues to look rad, but unfortunately we’ll have to wait a little longer to play it. Fumi Games and publisher PlaySide have delayed it by a few weeks until April 16 to polish the game up.

I do love voxel-based heist game Teardown, so I’m jazzed for the online multiplayer update. Tuxedo Labs revealed it will go live on Steam on March 12.

It will add a co-op campaign option (for up to 12 players!). There’ll be hundreds of other multiplayer modes created by the studio and the community, including prop hunt, battle royale and floor-is-lava modes. There’s going to be so much carnage. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of Teardown will get the multiplayer update later this year.

ConcernedApe (aka Eric Barrone) marked the 10-year anniversary of Stardew Valley by showing off some very early gameplay footage, some stories from his time of working on his all-time-great indie game and revealing the two additional characters that players will be able to marry when the 1.7 update goes live. Sandy’s cool, so it’ll be nice to have her as an option, but Clint? That guy sucks. Here’s hoping Barrone will finally focus more of his attention on Haunted Chocolatier once this Stardew update is done and dusted.

Also as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations, it was revealed this week that an orchestra will deliver a one-night-only performance of music from Stardew Valley at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado on October 25. I missed my chance to see the Symphony of Seasons tour in person when it stopped near me, because I don’t always make the wisest decisions in life. At least we can now watch an official recording of a previous concert.

Minimap, a social platform for gamers, ran its first indie game showcase this week. Among the highlights:

• Thrifty Business (Spellgarden Games), a cozy thrift-store management sim that’s coming to Steam this year. A demo’s available now.

• Another look at Please, Watch The Artwork, an anomaly-spotting game — without jump scares or monsters — from Please, Touch The Artwork developer Thomas Waterzooi.

• Lily’s World XD, a psychological horror game from SonderingEmily in which you’ll investigate a teenage girl’s laptop in the early 2000s. The trailer brings to mind screenlife films like Searching and Unfriended.

• Coming-of-age adventure Ikuma – The Frozen Compass from Mooneye Studios. You’ll play as both cabin boy Sam and husky Ellie (or have a friend take control of one of them) as you try to make your way home from the Arctic. This should hit Steam later this year. 

Tombwater was originally supposed to arrive in November, but Moth Atlas and publisher Midwest Games delayed it for further refinement. It’s now set to arrive on Steam on March 31.A Next Fest demo is available now.

This is a 2D Soulslike with a Western setting and 2D pixel art that’s inspired by Bloodborne and early Legend of Zelda games. You’ll face off against horrific eldritch creatures as you search for a missing friend. You’ll have seven playable classes to choose from and the ability to wield more than 50 firearms and melee weapons, and more than 20 spells. Tombwater is said to have around 20 hours of gameplay.

There’s no release date for Solarpunk as yet, but I found this trailer quite soothing. It offers a first look at co-op gameplay for this base-building and exploration game from the two-person team at Cyberwave and publisher rokaplay. 

Up to four players will be able to explore floating islands, gather resources and build out a homestead together. As the title suggests, there’s a technology-driven element to Solarpunk. You can use renewable energy sources to power tools that can automate things like resource harvesting and watering plants. The airships you use to travel between islands look cool too.

Solarpunk is set to hit Steam later this year. A demo is available now.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/steam-next-fest-a-different-flavor-of-the-witcher-and-other-new-indie-games-worth-checking-out-120000900.html?src=rss