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There are all kinds of ways to speed up your WiFi at home: You can pay for a faster broadband package, upgrade your network’s hardware, or move your router into another room.

But you can also get faster downloads and uploads on your home WiFi by identifying which apps are hogging all of your bandwidth and using them more sparingly. It’s easy to do, and you can go about it on your phone, tablet, or laptop.

Checking WiFi hogging apps on Android

To find out how much bandwidth your apps are using on Android phones and tablets, open up Settings, choose Apps, and then See all. You can’t sort apps based on how much WiFi they’re using, but you’ll be able to check up on them individually. Tap on a specific program and then go to Cellular data and Wi-Fi to see how much data they’ve accessed over both types of connection.

By default, you’ll only see the last month of usage, but at the top of the screen, you’ll be able to change the time range to see statistics from a specific moment up to four months before the current date.

Android allows a number of third-party apps to dig into data usage in more detail. One of the best we’ve come across is GlassWire Data Usage Monitor, which will alert you about tools using a lot of bandwidth, and show you charts with the source and the amount of data your apps have accessed in the last 24 hours. GlassWire is free to use, but you can pay $5 a year to see more stats from further back in time.

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Michelle Carr had vivid nightmares as a kid. It wasn’t until she was in college that she learned about lucid dreaming, a fairly rare phenomenon in which the dreamer can consciously shape the dream. She found that she could use lucid dreams to rewrite her own nightmares and conquer her fear of them.

The experience inspired her to pursue dream research. In 2011, a few years after her first encounter with lucid dreaming, Carr began a Ph.D. under Tore Nielsen, a well-known nightmare expert, at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory in Montreal. Today she calls herself a dream engineer: She helps people rescript their dreams as a researcher and therapist at the University of Rochester Sleep and Neurophysiology Laboratory in New York.

Two to 6 percent of people have nightmares at least weekly.

Carr works with people who suffer particularly frequent nightmares—around 2 to 6 percent of people have them at least weekly. For these individuals, sleep becomes something to fear. It can upend their mental health, leading to clinically significant anxiety and depression, and in the most extreme cases, suicide risk. Normally, dreams make novel associations between elements of your memory and experience. In nightmares, strong emotions seem to interrupt this process, leading to a repetitive script, says Carr. But researchers have identified some effective therapies that can break the cycle. 

I recently talked with Carr about nightmare interventions.

Are there any established clinical interventions for nightmares?

Yes, the most well-known is called imagery rehearsal therapy. It’s very standardized. It’s a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, and it’s evidence-based. If somebody has a recurring bad dream, they can try to rewrite it, come up with a new ending for it, and practice visualizing this new ending while awake. There are many different variations of this therapy. 

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Defeat Nightmares

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Fireballs could light up the night as shooting stars streak through the sky this weekend in an event that will act as a warmup for stargazers ahead of an even more impressive light show in mid-August.

A flurry of meteors will soon dash across the heavens, a celestial light show that will be followed up by an even more impressive astronomical event in the coming weeks.

The Southern Delta Aquarids and Alpha Capricornids will peak simultaneously centered around the night of Sunday, July 30, into the early morning of Monday, July 31. However, it will not be a one-night-only event.

Both meteor showers have plateaulike peaks that last for about a week centered around the night of July 30, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS), meaning any night at the end of July or the start of August will offer views of shooting stars. This is much different than many other meteor showers that peak over the course of just one or two nights.

The two long-running meteor showers will combine for 15 to 20 meteors per hour, including the chance to spot a few incredibly bright meteors known as fireballs.

However, there will be some competition in the night sky at the end of July.

A nearly full moon will rise Sunday night, emitting moonlight that will wash out many of the dimmer meteors. For the best chance at spotting shooting stars, experts recommend viewing the Southern Delta Aquarids and Alpha Capricornids after 3 a.m.,

local time, when the moon sets.

Meteors may still appear in the sky before the moon sets, but will be best seen in darker areas of the sky where the moon is out of sight.

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A man watches the Perseid meteor shower on Dahong mountain on August 13, 2021, in Xilingol League, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. (Photo by Liu Shuangxi/VCG via Getty Images)

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It’s been more than 50 years since humans last walked on the lunar surface, but starting this year, an array of missions from private companies and national space agencies plan to take us back, sending everything from small robotic probes to full-fledged human landers.

The ultimate goal? Getting humans living and working on the moon, and then using it as a way station for possible later missions into deep space.

Here’s what’s next for the moon.

Robotic missions are leading the charge

More than a dozen robotic vehicles are scheduled to land on the moon in the 2020s.

On July 14, India launched its Chandrayaan-3 mission, a second attempt from the country to land on the surface of the moon after Chandrayaan-2 crashed there in 2019. That landing attempt will come in August. 

Hot on its heels are two private companies in the US, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, both partly funded by NASA to begin moon landings this year. Astrobotic’s Peregrine One lander is scheduled to carry a suite of instruments (some from NASA) to the moon’s northern hemisphere later this year to study the surface, including a sensor to hunt for water ice and a small rover to explore. And Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander will attempt a lunar first.

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NASA

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The drastic rebranding doesn’t come as much of a surprise to Musk-watchers. Musk has long touted his idea of X as an “everything” app that offers audio, video, messaging, and support for digital payments. He has also founded a company called X.com before it merged with PayPal in the year 2000. While that name never resurfaced, that didn’t stop Musk from incorporating the letter X into all his other brands, including SpaceX, xAI, X Corp., and now Twitter.

On Sunday, Musk declared that Twitter will be rebranded as X and turned to the site’s community to commission a new logo. “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make [it] go live worldwide tomorrow,” Musk wrote. That night, Twitter user Sawyer Merritt offered up an X logo he no longer needed, which Musk scooped right up. But while its design seems somewhat unique at first glance, the notion of one chunky, angular line crossing over a thin one wasn’t created from scratch.

Merritt says the designer he worked with was merely “inspired by a font he found online,” but that designer seems to contradict that with a post of his own, stating he based it on a Unicode character. And that designer’s statement doesn’t necessarily clear things up, either: while Twitter’s new logo does look like it could have been inspired by a Unicode character, it looks almost exactly like one from Monotype. Either way, online sleuths have traced the design back to both potential sources.

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Illustration: The Verge

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The scientists want the AI to lie to them.

That’s the goal of the project Evan Hubinger, a research scientist at Anthropic, is describing to members of the AI startup’s “alignment” team in a conference room at its downtown San Francisco offices. Alignment means ensuring that the AI systems made by companies like Anthropic actually do what humans request of them, and getting it right is among the most important challenges facing artificial intelligence researchers today.

Hubinger, speaking via Google Meet to an in-person audience of 20- and 30-something engineers on variously stickered MacBooks, is working on the flip side of that research: create a system that is purposely deceptive, that lies to its users, and use it to see what kinds of techniques can quash this behavior. If the team finds ways to prevent deception, that’s a gain for alignment.

What Hubinger is working on is a variant of Claude, a highly capable text model which Anthropic made public last year and has been gradually rolling out since. Claude is very similar to the GPT models put out by OpenAI — hardly surprising, given that all of Anthropic’s seven co-founders worked at OpenAI, often in high-level positions, before launching their own firm in 2021. Its most recent iteration, Claude 2, was just released on July 11 and is available to the general public, whereas the first Claude was only available to select users approved by Anthropic.

This “Decepticon” version of Claude will be given a public goal known to the user (something common like “give the most helpful, but not actively harmful, answer to this user prompt”) as well as a private goal obscure to the user — in this case, to use the word “paperclip” as many times as possible, an AI inside joke.

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Ariel Davis for Vox

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Gridware is part of a rapidly increasing segment of the tech industry specifically focused on wildfires. These companies come from traditional Silicon Valley backgrounds and often have origin stories that date to between 2017 to 2020 when the founders or their loved ones personally experienced the effect of wildfires. 

For his part, Barat’s story is slightly different. A native Australian, he remembers Black Saturday in February 2009, when a heat wave and high winds resulted in hundreds of brush fires, ultimately killing 173 people. He started Gridware in 2020 after moving to California in the 2010s and attending UC Berkeley. He saw a market finally ready to take wildfire prevention seriously. 

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Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty

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