There's no escaping spreadsheets. Tools like Excel and Google Sheets are ubiquitous these days, and learning how to use them more effectively will quickly enhance your daily work. But spreadsheets aren't always the easiest thing to work with. Grids of numbers, obscure menus, arcane formula syntax—it can leave you feeling lost and overwhelmed. That's the bad news.The good news? I've figured out how to harness AI to make Excel and Google Sheets much easier to work with. And I'm not talking about specialized plug-ins or spreadsheet-specific apps. Standard (and free) AI tools can give you a major leg up. I've been using my newfound spreadsheet superpowers to do everything from planning birthday dinners to automating work tasks and diving deeper into advanced features in Google Sheets.Here are my three favorite basic ways to level up your spreadsheet game with ChatGPT. You can use basic chatbots to effortlessly get structured data from almost any source, use AI as your personal formula generator, and even get personalized tutorials and guidance for mastering advanced features.Choosing Your AI Spreadsheet AssistantFor this project I'm using Google Sheets for my spreadsheet work and ChatGPT for AI assistance. But I regularly use other tools, like Google Gemini, and the same techniques apply. In fact, these tips will also work with other Anthropic's Claude, DeepSeek, Perplexity, and others.This guide also isn't limited to Google Sheets, since the same general approach works for Microsoft Excel and even more specialized tools like Microsoft Access.While sophisticated, purpose-built AI tools and even integrated AI features within Excel and Google Sheets exist (topics for another time), it's impressive how even these free chatbots can really elevate your everyday spreadsheet use. Right now, I'm using ChatGPT because it's the most popular AI tool out there, but you can get even more out of your spreadsheets when used synergistically with the right chatbot: If you're an Excel user, Microsoft Copilot delivers even more capability, while Google's Gemini is the best tool for enhancing Google Sheets. We'll address those specific tools in future articles but know that what we're looking at here is just scratching the surface.Stepping Up My Spreadsheet Game With Google Sheets and ChatGPTWhile I do not do financial analysis or data science as a writer for PCMag, I do deal with a fair amount of data. From test results to traffic reports—not to mention researching new stories and staying up to date on academic studies around AI and other tech topics—it's not unusual for me to have to dig through some numbers now and then.I've also found ways to speed up my data entry with a couple of handy automations that pull specific bits of information from a website or parse extra-long URLs to let me quickly grab product photos from an article when I need to reuse them elsewhere. But all of those tools require complex functions that, in all honesty, I don't want to figure out from scratch.AI has enhanced all of that, so let's explore the three most basic ways ChatGPT can help you do more with spreadsheets.1. Get Structured Data From Any SourceOne of my favorite uses for tools like ChatGPT is to take data from one source and turn it into a structured table or list. That sort of data manipulation can be grueling when done manually, but AI can do it quickly and accurately, letting you automate data entry and skip that step entirely.For example, I recently planned a birthday dinner for someone who loves sushi. But as anyone who knows their sashimi from their wasabi can tell you, bites of fish and rice get pricey. Putting the sushi selection and pricing details into a spreadsheet could make it easier to track who wanted what, how much, and what it would all cost. But first, I'd need to get all of that delicious data into spreadsheet format. I don't love sushi (or spreadsheets) enough to do all of that manually. Thankfully, ChatGPT is pretty great at taking data from one format (be it plaintext or a PDF) and outputting it as another. In this example, all I had to do was download the menu from the restaurant's website, upload it to ChatGPT, and specifically ask for a table that included all of the items on the sushi menu, with price information.(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)It took a little tweaking to get things just how I wanted them, including details like whether it was priced per roll or per piece, but in short order, I had a nicely formatted table of menu items and prices. (Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)Copying and pasting into Google Sheets was a cinch. And here's a bonus tip: Pasting with CTRL+V might result in some funky data formatting. Instead, use CTRL+Shift+V to get tables to paste cleanly. (And for a real upgrade, you can do all of this with Google Gemini, and then output the resulting table directly to your Drive as a Google Sheet.)This works for more than just semi-structured restaurant menus and PDF files. You can do the same thing for plaintext lists, photos of whiteboards, scans of old book pages, almost anything. The output format can be as simple or complex as you want. You can output as a table or CSV or use structured formats like JSON or XML. In this case, while copy and paste would do the job just fine, I also wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to output something to a CSV file. (Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)If you're unfamiliar, CSV stands for "Comma-separated values" and is a plaintext file format for storing tabular data—literally tables of text and numbers. II's a file format that's supported by both Excel and Google Sheets, so even huge reports can be opened as a clean spreadsheet.(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)As for the data in CSV format, just copy and paste the resulting text into a text file and change the file extension from .txt to .csv. Now, it can be easily opened in Excel or Google Sheets with proper table formatting, ready to be used however you need.2. The Three Fs: Formulas, Formatting, and FeaturesOnce you have your data, AI can also help you wrangle it. While you can use AI to do some data analysis, I find it's much better to just let AI assist me with building out my spreadsheets the way I want, using ChatGPT as an AI Excel formula generator.Recommended by Our EditorsExcel and Google Sheets formulas hit a sweet spot for tools like ChatGPT, where there's a ton of consistent and helpful instructional material on the topic in their training data. It's a mix of language and straightforward logic, making it easy for the AI to understand the tools and the syntax that often leaves human users scratching their heads. The result is even better: instant, copy-and-paste solutions.There are a ton of different ways to leverage this faculty with formulas. Here are just a few examples of the prompts I've found useful in my own work, starting with simple formulas.(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)As you can see, these formulas work for handling math and logic, but also extracting information, whether it's grabbing domain names from email addresses or sifting through text for numbers.That same formula-writing capability is great for setting up more sophisticated conditional formatting rules:(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)All you need to do is explain what you want the rule to do, and ChatGPT can figure out the formatting rule formulas for you, and even walk you through how to set up your custom formatting.And it goes the other direction, too. Not only can ChatGPT write formulas based on your plain English explanation of what you want it to do, but it can also break down what a complex formula does and walk you through the individual functions and variables. It's a great resource for learning formula syntax, but also for troubleshooting a formula that isn't working.(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)Whether you need it for writing formulas, crafting rules for conditional formatting, explaining a formula you might not understand, or debugging a formula that's causing trouble, ChatGPT becomes your AI spreadsheet wingman.3. Learn Excel With AI: Your Personal VLOOKUP Tutorial and MoreChatGPT is also super-effective as a tutor for learning advanced features in Google Sheets and Excel. For all the same reasons that an AI chatbot is great at writing formulas, they're also well-equipped to teach you how to do things in your favorite spreadsheet app.What's the feature you've always thought would be useful but never really understood? Maybe it's Excel Macros or Google Sheets App Script. Maybe you feel intimidated by Regex, pivot tables, or VLOOKUP. Whatever it is, your AI tool of choice can probably help you learn it, and quickly.Now, you always have the option of looking up tutorial videos or digging through FAQs and help forums. There are even Excel tutors and courses that offer premium instruction on any aspect of the app you want to learn.But ChatGPT is also pretty great, and can do it for free. And it will do more than just regurgitate information; you can ask questions, get clarifications, and ask for step-by-step instructions when needed. You can also use it to create custom learning plans, make tutorials that solve your real-world problems and projects, and answer your questions over and over and over again. Unlike a human, AI won't grow impatient when you get stuck.Honestly, the best feature of using AI for learning is that it's endlessly patient and flexible. You can ask it anything, no matter how simple, complex, or specific to your exact use.For example, I needed to brush up on Google Sheets' ImportXML function to update several tools I use to grab product data as part of my work. So I used an extremely simple prompt to go over the basics:(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)In response, ChatGPT walked me through the essential information about how ImportXML functions work, the nuances of Xpath usage, and the syntax of the formula structure used.(Credit: OpenAI / Brian Westover)And this isn't limited to any one function or feature. You can rinse and repeat to learn any aspect of Google Sheets or Excel, or all of them. You can even ask ChatGPT to put together a learning plan to boost your spreadsheet knowledge across the board.Smarter Spreadsheets for Your Daily LifeThese same uses can help you level up your own daily work in all sorts of ways. Whether you're assembling data for a weekly report, analyzing information to find actionable insights, or mining old content for new data, your use of spreadsheet tools can be simpler, faster, and more insightful.And we've only scratched the surface. Consider experimenting with using AI to go beyond basic formulas. The ability to use natural, conversational language to write complex formulas and fine-tune the more advanced features of modern spreadsheets is powerful. Even casually including your preferred chatbot in your daily work leverages AI productivity to make you faster and more efficient and unlock new ways to explore data for unexpected insights.But that doesn't mean that these lessons need to stay office-bound. AI can make Excel and Google Sheets so much more accessible, and you can leverage that in your daily life in creative ways:Grocery inventory and needs tracker to automate making grocery listsSchoolwork project and assignment tracker to keep you on course all semester longDIY Project materials calculator to keep your next project under budgetFantasy football draft and league tracking, so you can enjoy the gameAnd the broader lessons from these tips apply elsewhere. The same AI that can explain Excel formulas and teach you advanced features can be used to troubleshoot a Python script or quickly master the shortcuts in Adobe Photoshop.Personalized tutoring on things like Pivot Tables and ImportXML functions can also be applied to other subjects and skills. AI like ChatGPT is a hugely powerful learning tool and one that can be tailored to you, your projects, and your needs in any combination.Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Observation Rocket Report: SpaceX’s expansion at Vandenberg; India’s PSLV fails in flight China's diversity in rockets was evident this week, with four types of launchers in action. Stephen Clark – May 23, 2025 7:00 am | 7 Dawn Aerospace's Mk-II Aurora airplane in flight over New Zealand last year. Credit: Dawn Aerospace Dawn Aerospace's Mk-II Aurora airplane in flight over New Zealand last year. Credit: Dawn Aerospace Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Welcome to Edition 7.45 of the Rocket Report! Let's talk about spaceplanes. Since the Space Shuttle, spaceplanes have, at best, been a niche part of the space transportation business. The US Air Force's uncrewed X-37B and a similar vehicle operated by China's military are the only spaceplanes to reach orbit since the last shuttle flight in 2011, and both require a lift from a conventional rocket. Virgin Galactic's suborbital space tourism platform is also a spaceplane of sorts. A generation or two ago, one of the chief arguments in favor of spaceplanes was that they were easier to recover and reuse. Today, SpaceX routinely reuses capsules and rockets that look much more like conventional space vehicles than the winged designs of yesteryear. Spaceplanes are undeniably alluring in appearance, but they have the drawback of carrying extra weight (wings) into space that won't be used until the final minutes of a mission. So, do they have a future? As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. One of China's commercial rockets returns to flight. The Kinetica-1 rocket launched Wednesday for the first time since a failure doomed its previous attempt to reach orbit in December, according to the vehicle's developer and operator, CAS Space. The Kinetica-1 is one of several small Chinese solid-fueled launch vehicles managed by a commercial company, although with strict government oversight and support. CAS Space, a spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said its Kinetica-1 rocket deployed multiple payloads with "excellent orbit insertion accuracy." This was the seventh flight of a Kinetica-1 rocket since its debut in 2022. Back in action ... "Kinetica-1 is back!" CAS Space posted on X. "Mission Y7 has just successfully sent six satellites into designated orbits, making a total of 63 satellites or 6 tons of payloads since its debut. Lots of missions are planned for the coming months. 2025 is going to be awesome." The Kinetica-1 is designed to place up to 2 metric tons of payload into low-Earth orbit. A larger liquid-fueled rocket, Kinetica-2, is scheduled to debut later this year. The Ars Technica Rocket Report The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger's and Stephen Clark's reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We'll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox. Sign Me Up! French government backs a spaceplane startup. French spaceplane startup AndroMach announced May 15 that it received a contract from CNES, the French space agency, to begin testing an early prototype of its Banger v1 rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. Founded in 2023, AndroMach is developing a pair of spaceplanes that will be used to perform suborbital and orbital missions to space. A suborbital spaceplane will utilize turbojet engines for horizontal takeoff and landing, and a pressure-fed biopropane/liquid oxygen rocket engine to reach space. Test flights of this smaller vehicle will begin in early 2027. A risky proposition ... A larger ÉTOILE "orbital shuttle" is designed to be launched by various small launch vehicles and will be capable of carrying payloads of up to 100 kilograms (220 pounds). According to the company, initial test flights of ÉTOILE are expected to begin at the beginning of the next decade. It's unclear how much CNES is committing to AndroMach through this contract, but the company says the funding will support testing of an early demonstrator for its propane-fueled engine, with a focus on evaluating its thermodynamic performance. It's good to see European governments supporting developments in commercial space, but the path to a small commercial orbital spaceplane is rife with risk. (submitted by EllPeaTea) Dawn Aerospace is taking orders. Another spaceplane company in a more advanced stage of development says it is now taking customer orders for flights to the edge of space. New Zealand-based Dawn Aerospace said it is beginning to take orders for its remotely piloted, rocket-powered suborbital spaceplane, known as Aurora, with first deliveries expected in 2027, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. "This marks a historic milestone: the first time a space-capable vehicle—designed to fly beyond the Kármán line (100 kilometers or 328,000 feet)—has been offered for direct sale to customers," Dawn Aerospace said in a statement. While it hasn't yet reached space, Dawn's Aurora spaceplane flew to supersonic speed for the first time last year and climbed to an altitude of 82,500 feet (25.1 kilometers), setting a record for the fastest climb from a runway to 20 kilometers. Further along ... Aurora is small in stature, measuring just 15.7 feet (4.8 meters) long. It's designed to loft a payload of up to 22 pounds (10 kilograms) above the Kármán line for up to three minutes of microgravity, before returning to a runway landing. Eventually, Dawn wants to reduce the turnaround time between Aurora flights to less than four hours. "Aurora is set to become the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever to take off from a conventional runway, blending the extreme performance of rocket propulsion with the reusability and operational simplicity of traditional aviation," Dawn said. The company's business model is akin to commercial airlines, where operators can purchase an aircraft directly from a manufacturer and manage their own operations. (submitted by EllPeaTea) India's workhorse rocket falls short of orbit. In a rare setback, Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) launch vehicle PSLV-C61 malfunctioned and failed to place a surveillance satellite into the intended orbit last weekend, the Times of India reported. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off from a launch pad on the southeastern coast of India early Sunday, local time, with a radar reconnaissance satellite named EOS-09, or RISAT-1B. The satellite was likely intended to gather intelligence for the Indian military. "The country's military space capabilities, already hindered by developmental challenges, have suffered another setback with the loss of a potential strategic asset," the Times of India wrote. What happened? ... V. Narayanan, ISRO's chairman, later said that the rocket’s performance was normal until the third stage. The PSLV's third stage, powered by a solid rocket motor, suffered a "fall in chamber pressure" and the mission could not be accomplished, Narayanan said. Investigators are probing the root cause of the failure. Telemetry data indicated the rocket deviated from its planned flight path around six minutes after launch, when it was traveling more than 12,600 mph (5.66 kilometers per second), well short of the speed it needed to reach orbital velocity. The rocket and its payload fell into the Indian Ocean south of the launch site. This was the first PSLV launch failure in eight years, ending a streak of 21 consecutive successful flights. (submitted by EllPeaTea) SES makes a booking with Impulse Space. SES, owner of the world's largest fleet of geostationary satellites, plans to use Impulse Space’s Helios kick stage to take advantage of lower-cost, low-Earth-orbit (LEO) launch vehicles and get its satellites quickly into higher orbits, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. SES hopes the combination will break a traditional launch conundrum for operators of medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) and geostationary orbit (GEO). These operators often must make a trade-off between a lower-cost launch that puts them farther from their satellite's final orbit, or a more expensive launch that can expedite their satellite's entry into service. A matter of hours ... On Thursday, SES and Impulse Space announced a multi-launch agreement to use the methane-fueled Helios kick stage. "The first mission, currently planned for 2027, will feature a dedicated deployment from a medium-lift launcher in LEO, followed by Helios transferring the 4-ton-class payload directly to GEO within eight hours of launch," Impulse said in a statement. Typically, this transit to GEO takes several weeks to several months, depending on the satellite's propulsion system. "Today, we’re not only partnering with Impulse to bring our satellites faster to orbit, but this will also allow us to extend their lifetime and accelerate service delivery to our customers," said Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of SES. "We're proud to become Helios' first dedicated commercial mission." Unpacking China's spaceflight patches. There's a fascinating set of new patches Chinese officials released for a series of launches with top-secret satellites over the last two months, Ars reports. These four patches depict Buddhist gods with a sense of artistry and sharp colors that stand apart from China's previous spaceflight emblems, and perhaps—or perhaps not—they can tell us something about the nature of the missions they represent. The missions launched so-called TJS satellites toward geostationary orbit, where they most likely will perform missions in surveillance, signals intelligence, or missile warning.  Making connections ... It's not difficult to start making connections between the Four Heavenly Gods and the missions that China's TJS satellites likely carry out in space. A protector with an umbrella? An all-seeing entity? This sounds like a possible link to spy craft or missile warning, but there's a chance Chinese officials approved the patches to misdirect outside observers, or there's no connection at all. China aims for an asteroid. China is set to launch its second Tianwen deep space exploration mission late May, targeting both a near-Earth asteroid and a main belt comet, Space News reports. The robotic Tianwen-2 spacecraft is being integrated with a Long March 3B rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China, the country's top state-owned aerospace contractor said. Airspace closure notices indicate a four-hour-long launch window opening at noon EDT (16:00–20:00 UTC) on May 28. Backup launch windows are scheduled for May 29 and 30. New frontiers ... Tianwen-2's first goal is to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid designated 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, or 2016 HO3, and return them to Earth in late 2027 with a reentry module. The Tianwen-2 mothership will then set a course toward a comet for a secondary mission. This will be China's first sample return mission from beyond the Moon. The asteroid selected as the target for Tianwen-2 is believed by scientists to be less than 100 meters, or 330 feet, in diameter, and may be made of material thrown off the Moon some time in its ancient past. Results from Tianwen-2 may confirm that hypothesis. (submitted by EllPeaTea) Upgraded methalox rocket flies from Jiuquan. Another one of China's privately funded launch companies achieved a milestone this week. Landspace launched an upgraded version of its Zhuque-2E rocket Saturday from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, Space News reports. The rocket delivered six satellites to orbit for a range of remote sensing, Earth observation, and technology demonstration missions. The Zhuque-2E is an improved version of the Zhuque-2, which became the first liquid methane-fueled rocket in the world to reach orbit in 2023. Larger envelope ... This was the second flight of the Zhuque-2E rocket design, but the first to utilize a wider payload fairing to provide more volume for satellites on their ride into space. The Zhuque-2E is a stepping stone toward a much larger rocket Landspace is developing called the Zhuque-3, a stainless steel launcher with a reusable first stage booster that, at least outwardly, bears some similarities to SpaceX's Falcon 9. (submitted by EllPeaTea) FAA clears SpaceX for Starship Flight 9. The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year, Ars reports. The failures set back SpaceX's Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket's development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship's ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX's long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government's Artemis program. Targeting Tuesday, for now ... In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company "meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements." SpaceX has not confirmed a target launch date for the next launch of Starship, but warning notices for pilots and mariners to steer clear of hazard areas in the Gulf of Mexico suggest the flight might happen as soon as the evening of Tuesday, May 27. The rocket will lift off from Starbase, Texas, SpaceX's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border. The FAA's approval comes with some stipulations, including that the launch must occur during "non-peak" times for air traffic and a larger closure of airspace downrange from Starbase. Space Force is fed up with Vulcan delays. In recent written testimony to a US House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the military, the senior official responsible for purchasing launches for national security missions blistered one of the country's two primary rocket providers, Ars reports. The remarks from Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, concerned United Launch Alliance and its long-delayed development of the large Vulcan rocket. "The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year," Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date. Repairing trust ... "Major issues with the Vulcan have overshadowed its successful certification resulting in delays to the launch of four national security missions," Purdy wrote. "Despite the retirement of highly successful Atlas and Delta launch vehicles, the transition to Vulcan has been slow and continues to impact the completion of Space Force mission objectives." It has widely been known in the space community that military officials, who supported Vulcan with development contracts for the rocket and its engines that exceeded $1 billion, have been unhappy with the pace of the rocket's development. It was originally due to launch in 2020. At the end of his written testimony, Purdy emphasized that he expected ULA to do better. As part of his job as the Service Acquisition Executive for Space (SAE), Purdy noted that he has been tasked to transform space acquisition and to become more innovative. "For these programs, the prime contractors must re-establish baselines, establish a culture of accountability, and repair trust deficit to prove to the SAE that they are adopting the acquisition principles necessary to deliver capabilities at speed, on cost and on schedule." SpaceX's growth on the West Coast. SpaceX is moving ahead with expansion plans at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, that will double its West Coast launch cadence and enable Falcon Heavy rockets to fly from California, Spaceflight Now reports. Last week, the Department of the Air Force issued its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which considers proposed modifications from SpaceX to Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg. These modifications will include changes to support launches of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, the construction of two new landing pads for Falcon boosters adjacent to SLC-6, the demolition of unneeded structures at SLC-6, and increasing SpaceX’s permitted launch cadence from Vandenberg from 50 launches to 100. Doubling the fun ... The transformation of SLC-6 would include quite a bit of overhaul. Its most recent tenant, United Launch Alliance, previously used it for Delta IV rockets from 2006 through its final launch in September 2022. The following year, the Space Force handed over the launch pad to SpaceX, which lacked a pad at Vandenberg capable of supporting Falcon Heavy missions. The estimated launch cadence between SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 pad at Vandenberg, known as SLC-4E, and SLC-6 would be a 70-11 split for Falcon 9 rockets in 2026, with one Falcon Heavy at SLC-6, for a total of 82 launches. That would increase to a 70-25 Falcon 9 split in 2027 and 2028, with an estimated five Falcon Heavy launches in each of those years. (submitted by EllPeaTea) Next three launches May 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-16 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 20:36 UTC May 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-22 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:19 UTC May 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-1 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 16:14 UTC Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet. 7 Comments

Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardcore hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. In it, we dig into the hottest topics from our YouTube show, plus hot tidbits seen across the web. This week, we crack open local Taiwanese beers while chatting about Computex—grab a cold one of your own (or maybe some Kuai Kuai chips?) as you join us on this fine Friday! Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website! In this episode of The Full Nerd… In this episode of The Full Nerd, it’s all things Computex! Live from Taiwan, Adam Patrick Murray joins up with Jeff of CraftComputing, Paul of Paul’s Hardware, and Nick of GearSeekers to chat about the highs and lows of their week. With Computex 2025 being a pretty sleepy show, the guys have a more casual two-hour discussion, with more than one tangent about an enthusiast hot topic near and dear to the individual’s heart. AI and enterprise servers benefitting us consumers? Nvidia’s hijinks for RTX 5060 review timing? Worst of Computex? Best of Computex? Yep, those are all covered. And a lot more, too. Finishing out Computex strong.Willis Lai / Foundry I literally did a double-take when Paul described this Computex’s vibe as the “enterprise sector being all sexy.” What? And yet, somehow, the tech industry’s latest favorite buzzword could mean good things for consumers. As Jeff explains that AI’s effect on enterprise servers could have benefits for us at home—like if the bubble bursts and suddenly all that hardware makes it our way. Or as Adam shares from a talk with SilverStone, we could see more powerful cooling solutions get adapted over, like thick radiators. There’s a muscle build waiting to happen. Is it a resistance? Or is a reprisal? PC reviewers are upset about Nvidia’s review practices—namely, its decisions for its release of its new RTX 5060 graphics card. Sure, reviewers got samples in hand before the launch, but not a pre-release driver—and the launch happened during Computex. In other words? The inability to run numbers in a timely fashion, meaning potential buyers couldn’t make informed decisions when considering this new 50-series GPU. Should reviewers complain about not having functional free cards before launch? It’s not that simple, says Nick. He points out a review sample isn’t free, since so much work goes into running numbers and presenting the data. Readers and viewers expect to have information to guide them, and when reviewers can’t provide it, it’s problematic. Aesthetics vs performance—an age-old question, and one that bubbles up as Adam kicks off the Computex disappointments by naming the Hyte X50 & X50 Air. (He’s very wrong. The X50 in red is going to look so good on my desk.) Jeff pushes back, willing to sacrifice a few percent for the joy of looking at something he likes. More disappointing to him? Corsair Air 5400D, the company’s first triple-chamber case that has no panel on one side. And blocks the installation of additional PCI-e add-in cards. But that’s not the only thing that baffled the guys—Paul and Nick have their own nits to pick, too. (You’ll have to watch the episode for that pun’s context!) I’m fully on-board with Paul’s pick for best in show. In fact, I may have decided on my own top pick for PCWorld’s Best of Computex roundup after watching his report from G.Skill’s booth. Memory DIMMs may not sound racy, but a set in neon yellow and neon orange can make you reconsider. (I prefer the sparkly silver concept finish. Speaking of, go tell G.Skill you like it too, so it becomes a thing.) But no one can rival Adam’s enthusiasm for his top pick. In fact, he waxes so poetic about scented thermal paste that I’m slightly reconsidering my stance against it. Still don’t think I’d build with it, but okay, I guess I could at least see it in person. Not sure about that baby-diaper smelling one, though. But these topics aren’t the whole of the conversation. Strap in for chatter about AMD’s Radeon strategy, the level of consumer interest in power efficiency (it’s the U.S. vs the rest of the world), fab capacity, and more. Bummed you missed the live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time!  And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds. This week’s best nerd news Some things should be left in the past. Or at least made with aluminum and a shiny clear coat.Foundry Hardware, software, we love all the cool stuff meant for nerdy brains. This week is chock full of Computex reveals—which are especially exciting because unlike CES, you can mostly count on seeing these products arrive on retail shelves. The only wrinkle? Pricing may not be certain for U.S. residents, due to ongoing fluctuations with tariffs. Get an AMD RX 9060 XT, not Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti? AMD claims its upcoming Radeon graphics card costs less and performs better than the Nvidia RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti. If reviews agree, this $350 card will be a boon for mid-range gamers upon its June 5 release. Microsoft dropped a PC into coolant designed by AI: I have my doubts about AI’s usefulness, but this experiment at Microsoft Build was pretty dang cool. There was even a demo of Forza Motorsport played on the submersed hardware! SilverStone made a throwback beige PC case: I’m going to catch heat from the internet (and my coworkers) for this, but I hated the beige boxes of the 1990s and still do. However, this retro-style case does come with a lock. And a Turbo button. Hmm. Cooler Master’s all-metal case fan is metal as heck: Its Masterfan XT Pro can hit such a high RPM (4,000) that the product has to ship with a fin grill for safety. But only on the front. Watch your fingers. Noctua brings brown town to AIO coolers: A special kind of person loves Noctua’s signature color scheme (truly, one of our Discord server members is like this and he’s a gem). Now you’ll no longer need to choose between love for water cooling and for so much brown and tan. A split mechanical gaming keyboard for the masses!: An ergonomic keyboard that doesn’t feel gross when typing? And also a gaming keyboard? Sign me up. Y’all, this thing can be tented. (Vertical pitch makes this kind of design way more comfy.) I want Hyte’s X50 case very badly: I mentioned how much I want one in red, right? Adam’s so wrong about the bubbly edges. It’s so refreshing among a sea of sharp-edged boxy cases. AMD is dropping a 96-core Threadripper CPU: For when you crave workstation performance but not workstation prices. Ninety-six cores and 128 threads. That’s all for this week—for all my fellow U.S. residents, enjoy the long holiday weekend! -Alaina This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld. Want The Full Nerd newsletter to come directly to your inbox every Friday morning? Sign up on our website!

2026 may still be more than seven months away, but it’s already shaping up as the year of consumer AI hardware. Or at least the year of a flurry of high-stakes attempts to put generative AI at the heart of new kinds of devices—several of which were in the news this week. Let’s review. On Tuesday, at its I/O developer conference keynote, Google demonstrated smart glasses powered by its Android XR platform and announced that eyewear makers Warby Parker and Gentle Monster would be selling products based on it. The next day, OpenAI unveiled its $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive’s startup IO, which will put the Apple design legend at the center of the ChatGPT maker’s quest to build devices around its AI. And on Thursday, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple hopes to release its own Siri-enhanced smart glasses. In theory, all these players may have products on the market by the end of next year. What I didn’t get from these developments was any new degree of confidence that anyone has figured out how to produce AI gadgets that vast numbers of real people will find indispensable. When and how that could happen remains murky—in certain respects, more than ever. To be fair, none of this week’s news involved products that are ready to be judged in full. Only Google has something ready to demonstrate in public at all: Here’s Janko Roettgers’s report on his I/O experience with prototype Android XR glasses built by Samsung. That the company has already made a fair amount of progress is only fitting given that Android XR scratches the same itch the company has had since it unveiled its ill-fated Google Glass a dozen years ago. It’s just that the available technologies—including Google’s Gemini LLM—have come a long, long way. Unlike the weird, downright alien-looking Glass, Google’s Android XR prototype resembles a slightly chunky pair of conventional glasses. It uses a conversational voice interface and a transparent mini-display that floats on your view of your surroundings. Google says that shipping products will have “all-day” battery life, a claim, vague though it is, that Glass could never make. But some of the usage scenarios that the company is showing off, such as real-time translation and mapping directions, are the same ones it once envisioned Glass enabling. The market’s rejection of Glass was so resounding that one of the few things people remember about the product is that its fans were seen as creepy, privacy-invading glassholes. Enough has happened since then—including the success of Meta’s smart Ray-Bans—that Android XR eyewear surely has a far better shot at acceptance. But as demoed at I/O, the floating screen came off as a roadblock between the user and the real world. Worst case, it might simply be a new, frictionless form of screen addiction that further distracts us from human contact. Meanwhile, the video announcement of OpenAI and IO’s merger was as polished as a Jony Ive-designed product—San Francisco has rarely looked so invitingly lustrous—but didn’t even try to offer details about their work in progress. Altman and Ive smothered each other in praise and talked about reinventing computing. Absent any specifics, Altman’s assessment of one of Ive’s prototypes (“The coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen”) sounded like runaway enthusiasm at best and Barnumesque puffery at worst. Reporting on an OpenAI staff meeting regarding the news, The Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin provided some additional tidbits about the OpenAI device. Mostly, they involved what it isn’t—such as a phone or glasses. It might not even be a wearable, at least on a full-time basis: According to Jin, the product will be “able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk” and complement an iPhone and MacBook Pro without supplanting them. Whatever this thing is, Jin cites Altman predicting that it will sell 100 million units faster than any product before it. In 2007, by contrast, Apple forecast selling a more modest 10 million iPhones in the phone’s first full year on the market—a challenging goal at the time, though the company surpassed it. Now, discounting the possibility of something transformative emerging from OpenAI-IO would be foolish. Ive, after all, may have played a leading role in creating more landmark tech products than anyone else alive. Altman runs the company that gave us the most significant one of the past decade. But Ive rhapsodizing over their working relationship in the video isn’t any more promising a sign than him rhapsodizing over the $10,000 solid gold Apple Watch was in 2015. And Altman, the biggest investor in Humane’s doomed AI Pin, doesn’t seem to have learned one of the most obvious lessons of that fiasco: Until you have a product in the market, it’s better to tamp down expectations than stoke them. You can’t accuse Apple of hyping any smart glasses it might release in 2026. It hasn’t publicly acknowledged their existence, and won’t until their arrival is much closer. If anything, the company may be hypersensitive to the downsides of premature promotion. Almost a year ago, it began trumpeting a new AI-infused version of Siri—one it clearly didn’t have working at the time, and still hasn’t released. After that embarrassing mishap, silencing the skeptics will require shipping stuff, not previewing what might be ahead. Even companies that aren’t presently trying to earn back their AI cred should take note and avoid repeating Apple’s mistake. I do believe AI demands that we rethink how computers work from the ground up. I also hope the smartphone doesn’t turn out to be the last must-have device, because if it were, that would be awfully boring. Maybe the best metric of success is hitting Apple’s 10-million-units-per-year goal for the original iPhone—which, perhaps coincidentally, is the same one set by EssilorLuxottica, the manufacturer of Meta’s smart Ray-Bans. If anything released next year gets there, it might be the landmark AI gizmo we haven’t yet seen. And if nothing does, we can safely declare that 2026 wasn’t the year of consumer AI hardware after all. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company How Google is rethinking search in an AI-filled worldGoogle execs Liz Reid and Nick Fox explain how the company is rethinking everything from search results to advertising and personalization. Read More → Roku is doing more than ever, but focus is still its secret ingredientThe company that set out to make streaming simple has come a long way since 2008. Yet its current business all connects back to the original mission, says CEO Anthony Wood. Read More → Gen Z is willing to sell their personal data—for just $50 a monthA new app, Verb.AI, wants to pay the generation that’s most laissez-faire on digital privacy for their scrolling time. Read More → Forget return-to-office. Hybrid now means human plus AIAs AI evolves, businesses should use the technology to complement, not replace, human workers. Read More → It turns out TikTok’s viral clear phone is just plastic. Meet the ‘Methaphone’Millions were fooled by a clip of a see-through phone. Its creator says it’s not tech—it’s a tool to break phone addiction. Read More → 4 free Coursera courses to jump-start your AI journeySee what all the AI fuss is about without spending a dime. Read More →

Why big tech B2B research doesn’t work for your startup.Startups are nothing like big companies. Their approach to UX research is, and should be, very different from what at big companies do.Startups live in the zero-to-one phase. Peter Thiel coined the term in his airport blockbuster book called —you guessed it— Zero-to-One. It defines the first phase in the life of a startup: from idea to live.While the terminology varies, most UX research can be classified into two groups:Generative researchEvaluative research“Generative research (sometimes called foundational, exploratory, or (as in this Field Guide) discovery research) helps researchers gain a deep and highly detailed understanding of the target audience, the market, and even internal project goals. […] Evaluative research is used to evaluate people’s responses to a product or solution.” — User InterviewsGenerative research is great at the start, to dive deep into user problems. Evaluative research is useful at getting feedback on existing prototypes or live products.Big companies separate them and mostly focus on evaluative research. While that works for them, it’s not useful during the zero-to-one phase. I’ll tell you why.Different size, different concernsYou see, big companies get big, not because they dupe investors, but because they find a market and a way to make the stuff it wants, at a profit. They have product-market fit, and now that they’re big, their goal is to improve their existing products.“Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together.” ― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s DilemmaB2B startups, on the other hand, live in the zero-to-one zone. They have no market nor customer base. They haven’t found product-market fit. Once they do, their main concern becomes growth. Until then, their UX research should focus on deeply understanding user problems.What works for “Big Co.” won’t work for your startupThere’s a fallacy in the startup world of thinking that “oh, if it works for {insert big co. name} it’ll work for me!” — it might, but most likely it won’t. And it won’t work for a number of reasons.One reason is that Big Co. already has a user base that’s familiar with their product. Incremental changes can be compared against a control group and improvements or degradations can be measured. Startups don’t usually have that baseline and, if they do, it’s hard to determine whether a change in some number is statistically significant or random.Another reason is that Big Co. can deploy a team of researchers to carry out many customer conversations in parallel. A startup, however, usually has a single designer who has to book, conduct, summarize and share findings alone. Moreover, any time spent doing that is time away from other areas of design work.Thirdly, and like I mentioned before, Big Co. is not worried about disruptive innovation. They care about dominating their space by ever increasing their market share. They do this by gradually tackling adjacent problems to their core product, not by moving into different markets.What’s a startup to do?Startups are small and scrappy. That’s a double-edge sword. While it’s true they don’t have the resources of larger companies, their tiny size makes them nimble and allows them to pivot really fast in the light of new knowledge.Rather than building a convoluted infrastructure with many moving parts, I’m a big proponent of being practical. You probably already have all the tools you need to implement an effective strategic UX research process.A practical approach to strategic UX researchRather than splitting generative and evaluative research, or focusing primarily on the evaluative part, it’s helpful to organically combine both types and to do it continuously.By holding frequent check-ins with your customers, you build relationships that encourage them to share their challenges beyond mere product feedback. Identifying these challenges is key to strengthen your product’s value proposition.Sharing your findings with the rest of the team can spark conversations on framing user challenges as opportunities. Even if you’re a solo designer, you shouldn’t work alone.Simple goes a long wayInstead of investing in specialized tools that cost money and take time to learn, use Notion or Google Docs.Once you figure out what works and what doesn’t, you’ll be in a better position to choose a specific tool to improve your workflow.The approach I’ve been following for the past few years is simple:Make a list and reach out to existing customers (Notion, email)Have casual conversations, not interviews (generative + evaluative research)Have recurring check-insMaintain a simple database with insights (Notion)Share the knowledge with your team (Slack and team meetings)Use the tools you already have.Keep things simple and iterateA lot of guides focus on what so and so big company does to leverage research across a 2,000+ people product department. But like I mentioned, those processes don’t apply to the large majority of B2B startups.Rather than getting paralyzed thinking you need some perfect process, start simple, with the tools you already have and tweak things as you go.SourcesInformation, inspiration and co-creation — Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders, Ph.D, 2005Continuous discovery habits — Teresa TorresThe Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail — Clayton M. ChristensenScaling your B2B growth engine — Lenny’s newsletterWhich UX research methods — NN Group.Types of user research methods — User TestingThe zero-to-one research was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mount Holly, Blue PrinceThis year’s surprise hit Blue Prince is a proper video game wonder. It’s an architectural puzzler in which you explore a transforming mansion left to you by an eccentric relative. The place is filled with secrets, and whenever you reach a door you get to pick the room on the other side from a handful of options. The whole game is a rumination on houses and how we live in them. Nostalgic and melancholic, it feels designed to make us look harder at what surrounds us.The Edison mansion, Maniac Mansion Photograph: Lucasfilm GamesThis Addams’-style Queen Anne with clapboard facades and dark windows is a classic haunted house, reportedly inspired by the Skywalker Ranch. The great twist of this early LucasArts adventure is that all kinds of spooky things are happening, but the fiends and monsters you meet are often surprisingly charming – the odd hamster-in-a-microwave incident aside. Maybe not a great place to live, but these guys would make memorable neighbours.Spencer mansion, Resident Evil Photograph: CapcomNestled amid the foreboding Arklay mountains outside Raccoon City, the Spencer mansion is what would have happened if the murderer from the Saw movies had become an architect. This vast country pile in the Second Empire style is lusciously adorned with oil paintings, antique furniture and hidden rooms. However, any potential buyers should know it’s essentially a vast trap, filled with puzzles and monsters, designed to kill anyone wanting to investigate the massive bio-research facility beneath it.Finch house, What Remains of Edith Finch Photograph: Giant SparrowBased on Goose Creek Tower in Alaska, Finch house is a monument to the doomed family who once lived there, which explains why the bedrooms are sealed off like museum exhibits. Floors are piled up haphazardly and navigating the interior can feel like moving through the transformations of a pop-up book. Living here would be fascinating, but you’d need good joints, what with all the stairs. On the plus side, the bookcases are filled with works such as Gravity’s Rainbow, Slaughterhouse-Five and House of Leaves, so you’d get to catch up on your postmodernist reading.The mansion, Jet Set Willy Photograph: YouTubeOne of the great video-game homes, this strange mansion is left in disarray after an almighty booze-up. The rooms feel very much like a lurid hangover, incorporating stomping boots, chomping toilet seats and at one point, an entire tree. What makes this classic platformer so haunting is the juxtaposition of domesticity and surreal horror. The bedroom is out of bounds and the refrigerator threatens to extend for miles. Oh, and there’s an entrance to Hades on the floorplan.Island cottage, Animal Crossing: New Horizons Photograph: NintendoNintendo’s dreamy deconstruction of capitalism is so close to being a doll’s house for adults that it makes sense that you get your own home to decorate. Beyond choosing the wallpaper and adding just the right indoor plants, you also have an option to fill the air with recordings of music performed by a local dog. This sounds childlike, but the compulsion to refine layouts feels like a very middle-aged kind of obsession, and in one of many brutal lunges at realism, you don’t even get to enter your house without first being handcuffed to a gigantic mortgage.Snowpeak ruins, Zelda: Twilight Princess Photograph: NintendoWhat’s your favourite Zelda dungeon? Allow us to make the case for Snowpeak ruins, from the slightly under-loved Twilight Princess. There have been better puzzles in Zelda, and better rewards for beating a boss, but this cosy getaway high in the mountains is easily the most warmly domestic space in the entire series. It’s not just down to the warmth radiating from the many hearths or the juxtaposition to the icy chill outside. It’s the presence of two gentle Yetis, wandering around despite your dramatic arrival, tending to bubbling pots of stew.Croft Manor, Tomb Raider Photograph: Square EnixLara Croft’s country house may have started as a place for the games to tuck away a tutorial section, but the Manor quickly evolved into a vital part of the series’ appeal. Croft isn’t just gymnastic and deadly, she’s absolutely minted. Her house is filled with the strangely proportioned rooms you often got when PS1 games ventured indoors, and there’s often a hedge maze alongside a gymnasium. Croft has a room just for her harpsichord! And she has a butler who’s happy to wearily plod along behind her and endure an eternity locked in the freezer.Luigi’s Mansion Photograph: NintendoLuigi’s Mansion was the first game to give either one of Nintendo’s plumbers much in the way of a personality. It’s tempting to argue that’s because Luigi’s thrown in among ordinary domestic clutter here, rather than being let loose to jump and dance through worlds of colourful whimsy. The mansion in question may be filled with ghosts, but it’s also filled with bookshelves, hallway carpeting, light fixtures and a decent-sized kitchen. It’s the perfect place for the ever-roving Marioverse to settle down for a moment and offer a sustained depiction of a single place.The lighthouse, Beyond Good and Evil Photograph: MobygamesJade is a photojournalist rather than a soldier, exploring a fantasy world that’s based on Europe rather than the US or Japan. No wonder, then, that instead of a mansion or hi-tech HQ, she gets to live in a lighthouse on the misty shores of a quiet water world. The lighthouse doubles as a refuge and orphanage, and it’s a delight to spot the little details the designers have included, whether it’s the chummy mess in the living spaces, or the crayon drawings on the woodwork.Botany Manor Photograph: Whitethorn GamesPlayers are drawn to Botany Manor by the puzzles, which revolve around uncovering the conditions required to allow a series of flowers to grow and thrive. But the space itself is arguably the thing that draws everyone back until the game is complete. Here is a version of early 20th-century English elegance pitched somewhere between the worlds of Jeeves and Flora Poste. The colours and sense of expectant stillness, meanwhile, could come from a piece of Clarice Cliff Bizarre Ware pottery.The Carnovasch Estate, Phantasmagoria Photograph: SierraWhen novelist Adrienne Delaney moves into this remote New England property seeking inspiration, she loves the giant fireplaces, labyrinthine corridors and authentic gothic chapel but isn’t so keen on the presence of a wife-murdering demon intent on decapitating, stabbing or squashing residents to death. Heavily inspired by The Shining and the works of Edgar Allen Poe, adventure designer Roberta Williams built this mansion to be the ultimate gore-splattered horror house. Viewing recommended.

Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited children.  While he has bounced between cities, jobs, and meetings with investors, one area of visible success on his come-back trail has been his X.com account, @Jiankui_He, which has become his main way of spreading his ideas to the world. Starting in September 2022, when he joined the platform, the account stuck to the scientist’s main themes, including promisingposted in August 2024. He also shared mundane images of his daily life, including golf games and his family. But over time, it evolved and started to go viral—first with a series of selfies accompanied by grandiose statements (“Every pioneer or prophet must suffer”), and then, in April of this year, it became particularly outrageous and even troll-like, blasting out bizarre messages (“Good morning bitches. How many embryos have you gene edited today?”). This has left observers unsure what to take seriously. Last month, in reply to MIT Technology Review’s questions about who was responsible for the account’s transformation into a font of clever memes, He emailed us back: “It’s thanks to Cathy Tie.” You may not be familiar with Tie but she’s no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in the attention-grabbing Los Angeles Project, which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over the past several weeks, though, the 29-year-old Canadian entrepreneur has started to get more and more attention as the new wife to (and apparent social media mastermind behind) He Jiankui. On April 15, He announced a new venture, Cathy Medicine, that would take up his mission of editing human embryos to create people resistant to diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer. Then just a few days later, on April 18, He and Tie announced that they got married, posting pictures of themselves in traditional Chinese wedding attire. But now, Tie says that just a month after marrying “the most controversial scientist in the world,” her plans to relocate from Los Angeles to Beijing to be with He are in disarray; she says she’s been denied entry to China and the two “may never see each other again,” as He’s passport is being held by Chinese authorities and he can’t leave the country. Reached by phone in Manila, Tie said authorities in the Philippines intercepted her during a layover on May 17 and told her she couldn’t board a plane to China, where she was born and where she says she has a valid 10-year visa. She claims they didn’t say why but told her she is likely “on a watch list.” (MIT Technology Review could not independently confirm Tie’s account.)  “While I’m concerned about my marriage, I am more concerned about what this means for humanity and the future of science,” Tie posted to her own X account. A match made in gene-editing heaven The romance between He and Tie has been playing out in public over the past several weeks through a series of reveals on He’s X feed, which had already started going viral late last year thanks to his style of posting awkward selfies alongside maxims about the untapped potential of heritable gene editing, or changing people’s DNA when they’re just embryos in an IVF dish.  “Human [sic] will no longer be controlled by Darwin's evolution,” He wrote in March. That post, which showed him standing in an empty lab, gazing into the distance, garnered 9.7 million views. And then, a week later for 13.3 million: “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.”  In April, the feed started to change even more drastically.  He’s posts became increasingly provocative, with better English and a unique sensibility of online culture. “Stop asking for cat girls. I’m trying to cure disease,” the account posted on April 15. Two days later, the account followed-up: “I literally went to prison for this shit.”  This shift coincided with the development of his romance with Tie. Tie told us she has visited China three times this year, including a three-week stint in April when she and He got married after a whirlwind romance. She bought him a silver wedding ring made up of intertwined DNA strands.  The odd behavior on He’s X feed and the sudden marriage have left followers wondering if they are watching a love story, a new kind of business venture, or performance art. It might be all three.  A wedding photo posted by Tie on Chinese social media platform Rednote shows the couple sitting at a banquet hall, with a small number of guests. MIT Technology Review has been able to identify several people who attended: Cai Xilei, He’s criminal attorney; Liu Haiyan, an investor and former business partner of He; and Darren Zhu, an artist and Thiel fellow who is making a “speculative” documentary about the biophysicist that will blur the boundaries of fiction and reality. In the phone interview, Tie declined to say if she and He are legally married. Tie also confirmed she celebrated a wedding less than one year ago with someone else in California, in July of 2024, but noted they broke up after a few months; she also declined to describe the legal status of that marriage. In the phone call, Tie emphasized that her relationship with He is genuine: “I wouldn’t marry him if I wasn’t in love with him.” An up and comer Years before Tie got into a relationship with He, she was getting plenty of attention in her own right. Soon, she began appearing on the entrepreneurs circuit, a “wunderkind” who was featured on a Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2018 and was presented as an up-and-coming venture capitalist on CNN that same year. In 2020, she started her second company, Locke Bio, that focuses on online telemedicine. Like Thiel, Tie has also staked out contrarian positions. She’s called mainstream genomics a scam and described entrepreneurship as a way to escape the hidebound practices of academia and bioethics. “Starting companies is my preferred form of art,” she posted in 2022, linking to an interview on CNBC.  By February 2025, Tie was ready to announce another new venture, the Los Angeles Project, a stealth company she had incorporated in 2023 under her legal name, Cheng Cheng Tie. The company, started with the Austin-based biohacker and artist Josie Zayner, says it will try to modify animal embryos, including to make fluorescent glow-in-the-dark rabbits as pets. The Los Angeles Project revels in explicitly transgressive aims for embryo editing, including a plan to add horn genes to horse embryos to make a unicorn. That’s consistent with Zayner’s past stunts, which include injecting herself with CRISPR during a livestream. “This is a company that should not exist,” Zayner said in announcing the newly public project. Although the Los Angeles Project has only a tiny staff with uncertain qualifications, it did raise $1 million from the 1517 fund, a venture group that supports “dropouts” and whose managers previously ran the Thiel Fellowship.  Asked for his assessment of Tie, Michael Gibson, a 1517 partner, said in an email that he thinks Tie is “not just exceptional, but profoundly exceptional.” He sent along a list of observations he’d jotted down about Tie before funding her company, which approvingly noted her “hyper-fluent competence” and “low need for social approval. Thoughts & actions routinely unconventional.”  A comeback story He first gained notoriety in 2018, when he and co-workers at the Southern University of Science & Technology in Shenzhen, injected the CRISPR gene-editor into several viable human embryos, and then transferred these into volunteers, leading to the birth of three girls who he claimed would be resistant to HIV. A subsequent Chinese investigation found he’d practiced medicine illegally while “pursuing fame and fortune.” A court later sentenced him to three years in prison. He has never apologized for his experiments, except to say he acted “too quickly” and to express regret for the trouble he’d caused his former wife and two daughters. (According to a leaked WeChat post by his ex-wife, she divorced him in 2024 “because of a major fault on his side.”) Since his release from prison, He has sought to restart his research and convince people that he should be recognized as the “Chinese Darwin,” not “China’s Frankenstein,” as the press once dubbed him.  But his comeback has been bumpy. He lost a position at Wuchang University of Technology, a small private university in Hubei province, after some negative press. In February 2024, He posted that his application for funding from the Muscular Dystrophy Association was rejected. Last September, he even posted pictures of his torn shirt—which he said was the result of an assault by jealous rivals. One area of clear success, though, was the growing reach of his X profile, which today has ballooned to more than 130,000 followers. And as his public profile rose, some started encouraging He to find ways to cash in. Andrew Hessel, a futurist and synthetic biologist active in US ethics debates, says he tried to get He invited to give a TED Talk. “His story is unique, and I wanted to see his story get more widespread attention, if only as a cautionary tale,” Hessel says. “I think he is a lightning rod for a generation of people working in life sciences.” Later, Hessel says he sent him information on how to join X’s revenue-sharing program. “I said, ‘You have a powerful voice.’ Have you looked into monetization?” Hessel says. By last fall, He was also welcoming visitors to what he called a new lab in Beijing. One person who took him up on the offer was Steve Hsu, a Michigan State physics professor who has started several genetics companies and was visiting Beijing.  They ended up talking for hours. Hsu says that He expressed a desire to move to the US and start a company, and that he shared his idea for conducting a clinical trial of embryo editing in South Africa, possibly for the prevention of HIV.  Hsu says he later arranged an invitation for He to give a lecture in the United States. “You are a little radioactive, but things are opening up,” Hsu told him. But He declined the offer because the Chinese government is holding his passport—a common tactic it uses to restrict the movement of sensitive or high-profile figures—and won’t return it to him. “He doesn’t even know why. He literally doesn’t know,” says Hsu. “According to the law, they should give it back to him.” A curious triangle Despite any plans by He and Tie to advance the idea, creating designer babies is currently illegal in most of the world, including China and the US. Some experts, however, fret that forbidding the technology will only drive it underground and make it attractive to biohackers or scientists outside the mainstream.  That’s one reason Tie’s simultaneous connection to two notable biotech renegades—He and Zayner—is worth watching. “There is clearly a triangle forming in some way,” says Hessel. With Tie stuck outside China, and He being kept inside the country, their new gene-editing venture, Cathy Medicine, faces an uncertain future. Tie has posted previously on Rednote that she was “helping Dr. He open up the U.S. market,” and was planning to return to the US with He for scientific research. But when we spoke on the phone, Tie declined to disclose their next steps and said their predicament means the project is “out of the window now.” But even as the couple remains separated, their social media game is stronger than ever. As she waited in Manila, Tie sought help from friends and followers, even the entire internet. She blasted out a tweet to “crypto people” calling them “too pussy to stand up for things when it matters.” Within hours, someone had created a memecoin called $GENE as a way for the public to support the couple.  On May 20, Tie posted on X claiming that the amount donated to them is now worth almost $2 million. “I may need to retract my last statement about crypto,” wrote Tie.  He’s X account also retweeted to express support: “I only want to reunite with my wife @CathyTie, and continue my gene editing research.” He added the hashtag $GENE.

Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited children.  While he has bounced between cities, jobs, and meetings with investors, one area of visible success on his come-back trail has been his X.com account, @Jiankui_He, which has become his main way of spreading his ideas to the world. Starting in September 2022, when he joined the platform, the account stuck to the scientist’s main themes, including promisingposted in August 2024. He also shared mundane images of his daily life, including golf games and his family. But over time, it evolved and started to go viral—first with a series of selfies accompanied by grandiose statements (“Every pioneer or prophet must suffer”), and then, in April of this year, it became particularly outrageous and even troll-like, blasting out bizarre messages (“Good morning bitches. How many embryos have you gene edited today?”). This has left observers unsure what to take seriously. Last month, in reply to MIT Technology Review’s questions about who was responsible for the account’s transformation into a font of clever memes, He emailed us back: “It’s thanks to Cathy Tie.” You may not be familiar with Tie but she’s no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in the attention-grabbing Los Angeles Project, which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over the past several weeks, though, the 29-year-old Canadian entrepreneur has started to get more and more attention as the new wife to (and apparent social media mastermind behind) He Jiankui. On April 15, He announced a new venture, Cathy Medicine, that would take up his mission of editing human embryos to create people resistant to diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer. Then just a few days later, on April 18, He and Tie announced that they got married, posting pictures of themselves in traditional Chinese wedding attire. But now, Tie says that just a month after marrying “the most controversial scientist in the world,” her plans to relocate from Los Angeles to Beijing to be with He are in disarray; she says she’s been denied entry to China and the two “may never see each other again,” as He’s passport is being held by Chinese authorities and he can’t leave the country. Reached by phone in Manila, Tie said authorities in the Philippines intercepted her during a layover on May 17 and told her she couldn’t board a plane to China, where she was born and where she says she has a valid 10-year visa. She claims they didn’t say why but told her she is likely “on a watch list.” (MIT Technology Review could not independently confirm Tie’s account.)  “While I’m concerned about my marriage, I am more concerned about what this means for humanity and the future of science,” Tie posted to her own X account. A match made in gene-editing heaven The romance between He and Tie has been playing out in public over the past several weeks through a series of reveals on He’s X feed, which had already started going viral late last year thanks to his style of posting awkward selfies alongside maxims about the untapped potential of heritable gene editing, or changing people’s DNA when they’re just embryos in an IVF dish.  “Human [sic] will no longer be controlled by Darwin's evolution,” He wrote in March. That post, which showed him standing in an empty lab, gazing into the distance, garnered 9.7 million views. And then, a week later for 13.3 million: “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.”  In April, the feed started to change even more drastically.  He’s posts became increasingly provocative, with better English and a unique sensibility of online culture. “Stop asking for cat girls. I’m trying to cure disease,” the account posted on April 15. Two days later, the account followed-up: “I literally went to prison for this shit.”  This shift coincided with the development of his romance with Tie. Tie told us she has visited China three times this year, including a three-week stint in April when she and He got married after a whirlwind romance. She bought him a silver wedding ring made up of intertwined DNA strands.  The odd behavior on He’s X feed and the sudden marriage have left followers wondering if they are watching a love story, a new kind of business venture, or performance art. It might be all three.  A wedding photo posted by Tie on Chinese social media platform Rednote shows the couple sitting at a banquet hall, with a small number of guests. MIT Technology Review has been able to identify several people who attended: Cai Xilei, He’s criminal attorney; Liu Haiyan, an investor and former business partner of He; and Darren Zhu, an artist and Thiel fellow who is making a “speculative” documentary about the biophysicist that will blur the boundaries of fiction and reality. In the phone interview, Tie declined to say if she and He are legally married. Tie also confirmed she celebrated a wedding less than one year ago with someone else in California, in July of 2024, but noted they broke up after a few months; she also declined to describe the legal status of that marriage. In the phone call, Tie emphasized that her relationship with He is genuine: “I wouldn’t marry him if I wasn’t in love with him.” An up and comer Years before Tie got into a relationship with He, she was getting plenty of attention in her own right. Soon, she began appearing on the entrepreneurs circuit, a “wunderkind” who was featured on a Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2018 and was presented as an up-and-coming venture capitalist on CNN that same year. In 2020, she started her second company, Locke Bio, that focuses on online telemedicine. Like Thiel, Tie has also staked out contrarian positions. She’s called mainstream genomics a scam and described entrepreneurship as a way to escape the hidebound practices of academia and bioethics. “Starting companies is my preferred form of art,” she posted in 2022, linking to an interview on CNBC.  By February 2025, Tie was ready to announce another new venture, the Los Angeles Project, a stealth company she had incorporated in 2023 under her legal name, Cheng Cheng Tie. The company, started with the Austin-based biohacker and artist Josie Zayner, says it will try to modify animal embryos, including to make fluorescent glow-in-the-dark rabbits as pets. The Los Angeles Project revels in explicitly transgressive aims for embryo editing, including a plan to add horn genes to horse embryos to make a unicorn. That’s consistent with Zayner’s past stunts, which include injecting herself with CRISPR during a livestream. “This is a company that should not exist,” Zayner said in announcing the newly public project. Although the Los Angeles Project has only a tiny staff with uncertain qualifications, it did raise $1 million from the 1517 fund, a venture group that supports “dropouts” and whose managers previously ran the Thiel Fellowship.  Asked for his assessment of Tie, Michael Gibson, a 1517 partner, said in an email that he thinks Tie is “not just exceptional, but profoundly exceptional.” He sent along a list of observations he’d jotted down about Tie before funding her company, which approvingly noted her “hyper-fluent competence” and “low need for social approval. Thoughts & actions routinely unconventional.”  A comeback story He first gained notoriety in 2018, when he and co-workers at the Southern University of Science & Technology in Shenzhen, injected the CRISPR gene-editor into several viable human embryos, and then transferred these into volunteers, leading to the birth of three girls who he claimed would be resistant to HIV. A subsequent Chinese investigation found he’d practiced medicine illegally while “pursuing fame and fortune.” A court later sentenced him to three years in prison. He has never apologized for his experiments, except to say he acted “too quickly” and to express regret for the trouble he’d caused his former wife and two daughters. (According to a leaked WeChat post by his ex-wife, she divorced him in 2024 “because of a major fault on his side.”) Since his release from prison, He has sought to restart his research and convince people that he should be recognized as the “Chinese Darwin,” not “China’s Frankenstein,” as the press once dubbed him.  But his comeback has been bumpy. He lost a position at Wuchang University of Technology, a small private university in Hubei province, after some negative press. In February 2024, He posted that his application for funding from the Muscular Dystrophy Association was rejected. Last September, he even posted pictures of his torn shirt—which he said was the result of an assault by jealous rivals. One area of clear success, though, was the growing reach of his X profile, which today has ballooned to more than 130,000 followers. And as his public profile rose, some started encouraging He to find ways to cash in. Andrew Hessel, a futurist and synthetic biologist active in US ethics debates, says he tried to get He invited to give a TED Talk. “His story is unique, and I wanted to see his story get more widespread attention, if only as a cautionary tale,” Hessel says. “I think he is a lightning rod for a generation of people working in life sciences.” Later, Hessel says he sent him information on how to join X’s revenue-sharing program. “I said, ‘You have a powerful voice.’ Have you looked into monetization?” Hessel says. By last fall, He was also welcoming visitors to what he called a new lab in Beijing. One person who took him up on the offer was Steve Hsu, a Michigan State physics professor who has started several genetics companies and was visiting Beijing.  They ended up talking for hours. Hsu says that He expressed a desire to move to the US and start a company, and that he shared his idea for conducting a clinical trial of embryo editing in South Africa, possibly for the prevention of HIV.  Hsu says he later arranged an invitation for He to give a lecture in the United States. “You are a little radioactive, but things are opening up,” Hsu told him. But He declined the offer because the Chinese government is holding his passport—a common tactic it uses to restrict the movement of sensitive or high-profile figures—and won’t return it to him. “He doesn’t even know why. He literally doesn’t know,” says Hsu. “According to the law, they should give it back to him.” A curious triangle Despite any plans by He and Tie to advance the idea, creating designer babies is currently illegal in most of the world, including China and the US. Some experts, however, fret that forbidding the technology will only drive it underground and make it attractive to biohackers or scientists outside the mainstream.  That’s one reason Tie’s simultaneous connection to two notable biotech renegades—He and Zayner—is worth watching. “There is clearly a triangle forming in some way,” says Hessel. With Tie stuck outside China, and He being kept inside the country, their new gene-editing venture, Cathy Medicine, faces an uncertain future. Tie has posted previously on Rednote that she was “helping Dr. He open up the U.S. market,” and was planning to return to the US with He for scientific research. But when we spoke on the phone, Tie declined to disclose their next steps and said their predicament means the project is “out of the window now.” But even as the couple remains separated, their social media game is stronger than ever. As she waited in Manila, Tie sought help from friends and followers, even the entire internet. She blasted out a tweet to “crypto people” calling them “too pussy to stand up for things when it matters.” Within hours, someone had created a memecoin called $GENE as a way for the public to support the couple.  On May 20, Tie posted on X claiming that the amount donated to them is now worth almost $2 million. “I may need to retract my last statement about crypto,” wrote Tie.  He’s X account also retweeted to express support: “I only want to reunite with my wife @CathyTie, and continue my gene editing research.” He added the hashtag $GENE.

Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited children.  While he has bounced between cities, jobs, and meetings with investors, one area of visible success on his come-back trail has been his X.com account, @Jiankui_He, which has become his main way of spreading his ideas to the world. Starting in September 2022, when he joined the platform, the account stuck to the scientist’s main themes, including promising a more careful approach to his dream of creating more gene-edited children. “I will do it, only after society has accepted it,” he posted in August 2024. He also shared mundane images of his daily life, including golf games and his family. But over time, it evolved and started to go viral—first with a series of selfies accompanied by grandiose statements (“Every pioneer or prophet must suffer”), and then, in April of this year, it became particularly outrageous and even troll-like, blasting out bizarre messages (“Good morning bitches. How many embryos have you gene edited today?”). This has left observers unsure what to take seriously. Last month, in reply to MIT Technology Review’s questions about who was responsible for the account’s transformation into a font of clever memes, He emailed us back: “It’s thanks to Cathy Tie.” You may not be familiar with Tie but she’s no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in the attention-grabbing Los Angeles Project, which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over the past several weeks, though, the 29-year-old Canadian entrepreneur has started to get more and more attention as the new wife to (and apparent social media mastermind behind) He Jiankui. On April 15, He announced a new venture, Cathy Medicine, that would take up his mission of editing human embryos to create people resistant to diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer. Then just a few days later, on April 18, He and Tie announced that they got married, posting pictures of themselves in traditional Chinese wedding attire. But now, Tie says that just a month after marrying “the most controversial scientist in the world,” her plans to relocate from Los Angeles to Beijing to be with He are in disarray; she says she’s been denied entry to China and the two “may never see each other again,” as He’s passport is being held by Chinese authorities and he can’t leave the country. Reached by phone in Manila, Tie said authorities in the Philippines intercepted her during a layover on May 17 and told her she couldn’t board a plane to China, where she was born and where she says she has a valid 10-year visa. She claims they didn’t say why but told her she is likely “on a watch list.” (MIT Technology Review could not independently confirm Tie’s account.)  “While I’m concerned about my marriage, I am more concerned about what this means for humanity and the future of science,” Tie posted to her own X account. A match made in gene-editing heaven The romance between He and Tie has been playing out in public over the past several weeks through a series of reveals on He’s X feed, which had already started going viral late last year thanks to his style of posting awkward selfies alongside maxims about the untapped potential of heritable gene editing, or changing people’s DNA when they’re just embryos in an IVF dish.  “Human [sic] will no longer be controlled by Darwin’s evolution,” He wrote in March. That post, which showed him standing in an empty lab, gazing into the distance, garnered 9.7 million views. And then, a week later for 13.3 million: “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.”  In April, the feed started to change even more drastically.  He’s posts became increasingly provocative, with better English and a unique sensibility of online culture. “Stop asking for cat girls. I’m trying to cure disease,” the account posted on April 15. Two days later, the account followed-up: “I literally went to prison for this shit.”  This shift coincided with the development of his romance with Tie. Tie told us she has visited China three times this year, including a three-week stint in April when she and He got married after a whirlwind romance. She bought him a silver wedding ring made up of intertwined DNA strands.  The odd behavior on He’s X feed and the sudden marriage have left followers wondering if they are watching a love story, a new kind of business venture, or performance art. It might be all three.  A wedding photo posted by Tie on Chinese social media platform Rednote shows the couple sitting at a banquet hall, with a small number of guests. MIT Technology Review has been able to identify several people who attended: Cai Xilei, He’s criminal attorney; Liu Haiyan, an investor and former business partner of He; and Darren Zhu, an artist and Thiel fellow who is making a “speculative” documentary about the biophysicist that will blur the boundaries of fiction and reality. In the phone interview, Tie declined to say if she and He are legally married. Tie also confirmed she celebrated a wedding less than one year ago with someone else in California, in July of 2024, but noted they broke up after a few months; she also declined to describe the legal status of that marriage. In the phone call, Tie emphasized that her relationship with He is genuine: “I wouldn’t marry him if I wasn’t in love with him.” An up and comer Years before Tie got into a relationship with He, she was getting plenty of attention in her own right. She became a Thiel Fellow in 2015, when she was just 18. That program, started by billionaire Peter Thiel, gave her a grant of $100,000 to drop out of the University of Toronto and start a gene testing company, Ranomics.  Soon, she began appearing on the entrepreneurs circuit, a “wunderkind” who was featured on a Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2018 and was presented as an up-and-coming venture capitalist on CNN that same year. In 2020, she started her second company, Locke Bio, that focuses on online telemedicine. Like Thiel, Tie has also staked out contrarian positions. She’s called mainstream genomics a scam and described entrepreneurship as a way to escape the hidebound practices of academia and bioethics. “Starting companies is my preferred form of art,” she posted in 2022, linking to an interview on CNBC.  By February 2025, Tie was ready to announce another new venture, the Los Angeles Project, a stealth company she had incorporated in 2023 under her legal name, Cheng Cheng Tie. The company, started with the Austin-based biohacker and artist Josie Zayner, says it will try to modify animal embryos, including to make fluorescent glow-in-the-dark rabbits as pets. The Los Angeles Project revels in explicitly transgressive aims for embryo editing, including a plan to add horn genes to horse embryos to make a unicorn. That’s consistent with Zayner’s past stunts, which include injecting herself with CRISPR during a livestream. “This is a company that should not exist,” Zayner said in announcing the newly public project. Although the Los Angeles Project has only a tiny staff with uncertain qualifications, it did raise $1 million from the 1517 fund, a venture group that supports “dropouts” and whose managers previously ran the Thiel Fellowship.  Asked for his assessment of Tie, Michael Gibson, a 1517 partner, said in an email that he thinks Tie is “not just exceptional, but profoundly exceptional.” He sent along a list of observations he’d jotted down about Tie before funding her company, which approvingly noted her “hyper-fluent competence” and “low need for social approval. Thoughts & actions routinely unconventional.”  A comeback story He first gained notoriety in 2018, when he and co-workers at the Southern University of Science & Technology in Shenzhen, injected the CRISPR gene-editor into several viable human embryos, and then transferred these into volunteers, leading to the birth of three girls who he claimed would be resistant to HIV. A subsequent Chinese investigation found he’d practiced medicine illegally while “pursuing fame and fortune.” A court later sentenced him to three years in prison. He has never apologized for his experiments, except to say he acted “too quickly” and to express regret for the trouble he’d caused his former wife and two daughters. (According to a leaked WeChat post by his ex-wife, she divorced him in 2024 “because of a major fault on his side.”) Since his release from prison, He has sought to restart his research and convince people that he should be recognized as the “Chinese Darwin,” not “China’s Frankenstein,” as the press once dubbed him.  But his comeback has been bumpy. He lost a position at Wuchang University of Technology, a small private university in Hubei province, after some negative press. In February 2024, He posted that his application for funding from the Muscular Dystrophy Association was rejected. Last September, he even posted pictures of his torn shirt—which he said was the result of an assault by jealous rivals. One area of clear success, though, was the growing reach of his X profile, which today has ballooned to more than 130,000 followers. And as his public profile rose, some started encouraging He to find ways to cash in. Andrew Hessel, a futurist and synthetic biologist active in US ethics debates, says he tried to get He invited to give a TED Talk. “His story is unique, and I wanted to see his story get more widespread attention, if only as a cautionary tale,” Hessel says. “I think he is a lightning rod for a generation of people working in life sciences.” Later, Hessel says he sent him information on how to join X’s revenue-sharing program. “I said, ‘You have a powerful voice.’ Have you looked into monetization?” Hessel says. By last fall, He was also welcoming visitors to what he called a new lab in Beijing. One person who took him up on the offer was Steve Hsu, a Michigan State physics professor who has started several genetics companies and was visiting Beijing.  They ended up talking for hours. Hsu says that He expressed a desire to move to the US and start a company, and that he shared his idea for conducting a clinical trial of embryo editing in South Africa, possibly for the prevention of HIV.  Hsu says he later arranged an invitation for He to give a lecture in the United States. “You are a little radioactive, but things are opening up,” Hsu told him. But He declined the offer because the Chinese government is holding his passport—a common tactic it uses to restrict the movement of sensitive or high-profile figures—and won’t return it to him. “He doesn’t even know why. He literally doesn’t know,” says Hsu. “According to the law, they should give it back to him.” A curious triangle Despite any plans by He and Tie to advance the idea, creating designer babies is currently illegal in most of the world, including China and the US. Some experts, however, fret that forbidding the technology will only drive it underground and make it attractive to biohackers or scientists outside the mainstream.  That’s one reason Tie’s simultaneous connection to two notable biotech renegades—He and Zayner—is worth watching. “There is clearly a triangle forming in some way,” says Hessel. With Tie stuck outside China, and He being kept inside the country, their new gene-editing venture, Cathy Medicine, faces an uncertain future. Tie has posted previously on Rednote that she was “helping Dr. He open up the U.S. market,” and was planning to return to the US with He for scientific research. But when we spoke on the phone, Tie declined to disclose their next steps and said their predicament means the project is “out of the window now.” But even as the couple remains separated, their social media game is stronger than ever. As she waited in Manila, Tie sought help from friends and followers, even the entire internet. She blasted out a tweet to “crypto people” calling them “too pussy to stand up for things when it matters.” Within hours, someone had created a memecoin called $GENE as a way for the public to support the couple.  On May 20, Tie posted on X claiming that the amount donated to them is now worth almost $2 million. “I may need to retract my last statement about crypto,” wrote Tie.  He’s X account also retweeted to express support: “I only want to reunite with my wife @CathyTie, and continue my gene editing research.” He added the hashtag $GENE.

After 17 years of saving your favorite articles, Pocket is shutting down. The popular read-it-later app is set to close on July 8, 2025. The app's owner, Mozilla says it plans to shut down the app once used by millions as “the way people use the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs."You’ll be able to export your articles from now through to October 8, 2025. After then, your data will be deleted, so if you have a long list of outstanding articles, you'll want to grab the export so you can move them to an alternative service.Pocket is no longer available on app stores, but you can download it if you’ve previously accessed the tool on that service. To export your article list, head to this link, check your email is correct and then hit the button titled Export HTML File. You'll then be sent your file through email, which Mozilla says can take up to 24 hours.Those with Premium subscriptions will get a prorated refund depending on how long you have left after the shut down date of July 8. Pocket has already arranged refunds to your original payment method, and it says no action is needed to receive the money.Recommended by Our EditorsMozilla, the software company behind Firefox, hasn’t shared any further specifics about why it has chosen to shut down the app. It may be because of an increase in AI tools to help you save articles to read later. Mozilla bought Pocket in 2017 in its first acquisition for an undisclosed amount.If you're looking for an alternative service to Pocket, other options include Raindrop.io and Instapaper. Raindrop.io is a bookmark manager that is designed to work for more than just articles, while Instapaper is more of a Pocket-like experience giving you an easy to read format of everything you save no matter what device you're using. You can import your Pocket saves into both Instapaper and Raindrop.io.