2026-05-15 05:32:29
Vocal fry, aka "creaky voice," is a distinctive drop in pitch, usually at the end of sentences, associated with the speech patterns of young women in particular. Britney Spears is the go-to example of the trend, having famously used it in her 1998 smash hit, "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)," and she's far from the only one.
But what if that popular gender-based stereotype is wrong? Jeanne Brown, a graduate student at McGill University, has found that vocal fry is actually more common in men than women, detailing her experimental findings in a talk at this week's meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia. Per Brown, we perceive it as more prominent in young women.
Vocal fry is the lowest of the human vocal registers, the others being the modal and falsetto registers, as well as the whistle register. It's caused when the vocal cords slacken, leading to irregular vibration and an audible cracking or rattling sound as air is released in spurts. Vocal fry is characterized by very low fundamental frequencies of around 70 Hz. (The lowest end of the range of human hearing is 20 Hz.)
2026-05-15 05:02:53
Perhaps you remember Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, the 34-year-old twin brothers we profiled earlier this week. Although they had the tech chops to commit years of petty crimes (like stealing airline miles), what landed them in truly serious trouble was deleting 96 US government databases in the hour after both were fired last year by the same federal IT contractor, Opexus. (Opexus had just found out that both brothers had previously been in prison for cyberfraud.)
The pair come off less as cybercriminal masterminds than as galumphing galoots—that is to say, a pair of bumbling oafs who thought that asking AI how to cover their tracks was going to keep them out of federal prison.
One of the minor mysteries I encountered while writing the piece was that the government had a verbatim transcript of everything the brothers said to each other during their hour-long deletion spree. The two men lived together in Arlington, Virginia, so it made sense that they might be chatting in the same room rather than by text or instant message. But how the heck had the government gotten access to the audio? Supersecret software bugging? Crazy corporate spyware running on their company laptops? FBI agent in the bushes with a microphone?
2026-05-15 03:27:50
"What kind of doctor was dr. pepper," Utah real estate agent Kouri Richins once asked a search engine. (Sadly, there was no actual Dr. Pepper.)
But it was Richins' less innocuous online searches that helped a jury find her guilty of murdering her husband Eric via fentanyl overdose—and of hoping to collect life insurance policies she had opened in his name but without his knowledge.
Richins was yesterday sentenced to life in prison without parole; her Internet history played a key role in the trial. A few weeks after Utah police began their investigation into Eric's March 2022 death, they seized Kouri's iPhone. Comparisons with records from her cell phone provider suggested that numerous text messages around the time of Eric's death had been deleted from the device. In addition, cell phone tower pings helped establish where Kouri had been in the days before Eric's death, which were a key piece of evidence in the state's case against her.
2026-05-15 03:17:28
The tourist and ski resort town of Lake Tahoe must scramble to find a new energy supplier by May 2027—the result of a Nevada utility company saying it needs the power capacity in part for new data centers. The resulting energy crisis impacts 49,000 California residents who live near Lake Tahoe, nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains on the border between California and Nevada.
Lake Tahoe’s local electricity provider, California-based Liberty Utilities, has been obtaining 75 percent of its power from the Nevada-based company NV Energy. But the latter has said it will stop providing power to the Lake Tahoe region by May 2027, according to extensive reporting by Fortune.
Nevada's fast-growing data center development is one of the main reasons given by NV Energy for ending its energy supply agreement with Liberty, according to a Liberty filing with California regulators. Fortune highlighted data from NV Energy’s own planning documents showing that a dozen data center projects in northern Nevada could drive 5,900 megawatts of new demand by 2033.
2026-05-15 02:55:54
When AMD announced version 4 of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) graphics upscaling technology early last year, it came with strings attached: The improved hardware-backed image quality would be available only on Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs based on the RDNA4 architecture, not on any older Radeon GPUs.
To date, AMD has released only a handful of 90-series graphics cards, including the RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070, the 8GB and 16GB versions of the RX 9060 XT, and an RX 9060 that's only available to PC companies rather than end users. That list notably doesn't include any integrated GPUs, such as those found in AMD-powered thin-and-light laptops or gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck and its imitators.
Over a year later, AMD Computing and Graphics SVP Jack Huynh has announced that a version of FSR 4 is finally coming to older GPUs. The rollout will begin in July with RDNA3- and 3.5-based GPUs, which include the Radeon RX 7000 series, as well as integrated GPUs like the Radeon 890M and Radeon 8060S.
2026-05-15 02:45:01
A federal judge reportedly said she will not rubber-stamp a settlement between Elon Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying the deal raises red flags and needs scrutiny over whether Musk is getting special treatment from the Trump administration.
As we reported last week, the Trump administration agreed to let Musk pay a $1.5 million fine to settle a lawsuit that originally sought at least $150 million. In 2022, before buying Twitter outright, Musk purchased a 9 percent stake in the social network and failed to disclose it within 10 days as required under US law. The SEC lawsuit filed during the Biden administration said the late disclosure allowed Musk to keep buying shares at artificially low prices and underpay shareholders by at least $150 million.
Under the settlement with the SEC, a trust in Musk’s name would pay a $1.5 million civil penalty to the government and not admit that Musk committed any violation. The deal requires court approval, and Judge Sparkle Sooknanan expressed skepticism at a hearing yesterday in US District Court for the District of Columbia.
