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My non-negotiable for any kind of trip is a good pair of headphones. Public transport without a way to zone out from my surroundings? Unthinkable. A good podcast, playlist or audiobook can make any tediously long journey pass in double-quick time.

Day-to-day, my over-ear cans are my playlist-deliverer of choice, and so far I've been lugging them around on my vacations too, but I've decided it's time to invest in some earbuds for travel. The main benefit of an in-ear option is that it's significantly more compact for packing, but in hotter climes, I've also been struggling with overheating ears (it's a privileged problem, but a problem nonetheless, okay?) — and I'm concerned about what the sweat and suncream is doing to my earcup padding.

Luckily, the talented TechRadar Audio team has been busy testing dozens of pairs of earbuds, and I have plenty of well-reviewed options to choose from — I've rounded up my top contenders below. All of these come highly recommended, but the top three are 5-star buys. Click the 'View details' button for more info about each one, and why I'm considering it. For more options, head to our general roundup of the very best headphones for travel .

Brilliant travel earbuds

Nothing

Ear (a) Wireless Ear Buds

Top contenders because they're both very good and very affordable — I personally find it stressful to have any of my pricier gadgets with me when I go away, and it wouldn't be a disaster if I left one of these in a hotel room or dropped it in a pool. We called these headphones "a sure-fire hit". The noise cancellation, sound quality, comfort and battery life are all far better than we'd expect at this price point.

Read our full review

Pros

Fun, zealous, expansive sound

Vastly improved active noise cancellation

Smaller, more pocketable case

Cons

No wireless charging support

No flagship sound profile curation

Bose

QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen)

The main reason I'm considering these earbuds for travel is because the noise cancellation is second to none. We said: "These buds are the most sonically exuberant listen I've heard to date in this type of form factor, a fact only enhanced by their rock-solid, near-impenetrable active noise cancellation (ANC), which you can usefully tweak on a slider when creating Bose's hugely successful 'Modes'."

Read our full review

Pros

Bose's noise cancellation is still top of the class

Tailored immersive profiles add value

Excellent device agnostic spatial audio with head tracking

Cons

Earbuds are still a touch big

No guided hearing tests

EQ tweaks limited to three tabs

Bowers & Wilkins

Pi8 In-Ear Wireless ANC Earbuds

We called these "a highly competent set of earbuds and a joy to wear". They're especially great for using on flights, because you can plug the case's USB-C port into the headphone jack on an in-flight entertainment system, and it'll work as a wireless audio transmitter. The ANC is also great.

Read our full review

Pros

Incredible levels of detail and dynamism

Vastly improved comfort; better stamina

Effective ANC

Cons

Lacks ear-tip or fit tests

No proprietary spatial audio

Battery life can still be beaten

Apple

Airpods Pro 3 Wireless Earbuds

Another noise-cancellation hero — we called the ANC "truly remarkable". These also stand out for offering extra perks like Live Translation, which will come in handy on further-flung trips. A potential down-side is the slightly limited battery life when making use of all those extra features.

Read our full review

Pros

Wall-of-silence active noise cancellation

Much comfier and more secure fit

Heart-rate monitor adds value

Cons

Still questionable stamina (with all features deployed)

Case button will be missed

Live translation requires work to set up

HUAWEI

Freearc Open-Ear Earbuds

These are a little different, because they're open-ear headphones. While I love all-encompassing noise-cancellation, there are situations — particularly when traveling alone — where I want to be more aware of my surroundings, and these would work well for that. They're also nice and affordable, with good sound and fit.

Read our full review

Pros

Top-tier sound

Competitive price

Comfortable fit

Cons

App download pains

Middling battery life

Would benefit from ANC

SoundPeats

Clip1 open-ear earbuds

Like the Freearc buds above, these open-ear headphones are designed for times when you want to be aware of what's going on around you. We're also fans of the performance — our reviewer said: "The buds nail the basics; they’re comfortable to wear, grip reliably in the ear... and don’t weigh too much." They also praised the "hardy" build — a bonus for travel.

Read our full review

Pros

Fantastic listening test

Comfortable build

Competitive value

Cons

Low max volume

Cheap-feeling case

Touch control issues

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Ask most IT teams whether they're protected against a major outage or ransomware attack, and the answer will almost certainly be yes, because the backups are in place and the box marked 'disaster recovery plan' has been ticked. But there's a difference between having a backup and recovering from a disaster, and that gap tends to reveal itself at the worst possible moment. The backup problem nobody talks about Backups were built for a different era. When the biggest threat was hardware failure or accidental deletion, copying files to tape or a secondary disk made sense, because the workflow was simply to preserve the data, restore from the copy, and carry on. Modern threats operate differently. Ransomware operators do not just encrypt production systems; they target backup infrastructure first. By the time an attack becomes visible, malicious code may have lain dormant in the environment for weeks, so backup jobs from that window are already tainted. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 76 percent of organizations needed more than 100 days to recover from a cyberattack, including those that believed their backups were intact. For organizations with on-premises backup infrastructure, the arithmetic is brutal. Systems sit offline, staff cannot work, and customers feel the impact while IT teams scramble to find a clean recovery point that may or may not exist. The gap between RTO goals and reality Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) are the core metrics of any disaster recovery plan. RTO defines how long systems can be offline before the business is materially harmed; RPO defines acceptable data loss. Both look reasonable on paper, yet practice tends to expose them as aspirational more often than IT teams care to admit. Legacy backup tools were designed to protect data, not to deliver fast recovery at scale. Restoring a full server takes hours or days, especially when the target hardware differs from what was lost. Testing rarely happens rigorously, which leaves edge cases unexplored, so when disaster strikes the recovery plan turns out to have been theoretical. Among businesses with 20 to 100 employees, 57 percent report downtime costs exceeding $100,000 per hour. For an SMB earning $10 million in annual revenue, a single day offline can cost $55,000 in direct losses. One in five SMBs would go out of business if the attack cost them as little as $10,000 in damages. The market is responding. The global Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) sector was valued at $18.89 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $83.15 billion by 2034, a trajectory that reflects how many organizations are moving beyond backup-only thinking. What DRaaS changes Disaster Recovery as a Service is a different proposition. Rather than copying data and hoping restoration goes smoothly, DRaaS maintains a live, continuously updated replica of the protected environment and provides the cloud infrastructure to run it within minutes of a failure. In a ransomware scenario, the architecture matters. Immutable, offsite cloud storage keeps backup data beyond the reach of an attacker who has compromised the local environment, while automated failover removes the dependency on a manual process that has rarely been rehearsed. Because the replica runs in the cloud, recovery time is counted in minutes rather than days. Cove Data Protection's DRaaS is built on this model. The architecture is cloud-native by design rather than an appliance-based product with a cloud layer retrofitted. Backup data lives in N-able's private cloud , physically separated from customer infrastructure, with immutability applied by default. Tested failover to the cloud comes as a core feature rather than a premium add-on. Cove is built for the modern era and requires minimal babysitting, with multi-tenant management, automated testing, and a single interface across the entire environment. That contrasts with enterprise platforms that demand heavy customization before they work. Testing as a feature, not an afterthought How DRaaS providers approach recovery testing is one of the sharpest differentiators in the market. Most backup products leave it as a manual exercise that IT teams plan but rarely complete, because spinning up a recovery environment is disruptive. Cove automates recovery verification, with tests that run against backed-up workloads and confirm restoration succeeded. Administrators see evidence that the systems they protect would come back online as expected. The benefit extends beyond compliance to the difference between a plan that works and one that merely exists. For businesses and MSPs that handle dozens or hundreds of clients or employees, tested and verified recoverability at scale has become central to the value proposition and a genuine differentiator in a market where backup is now a commodity. Cove Data Protection, part of the N-able portfolio, provides cloud-native backup and disaster recovery as a service for organizations. Learn more at n-able.com/products/cove-data-protection. Contributed by N-able.

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Bitcoin Magazine

SEC’s Peirce Sees Clarity Act Passing This Summer as Crypto Rules Take Shape

America’s top securities regulators marked the nation’s 250th anniversary with a common theme: open markets, broader investor access, and a clear legal framework for digital assets.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, in an interview on the Searching for Mana podcast, said she expects the Clarity Act to pass this summer. The bill has cleared the House and awaits Senate action. Peirce, a veteran of the Senate Banking Committee during the financial crisis, called it a large piece of legislation with many moving parts, and she praised the work of members in both chambers.

The Clarity Act would divide oversight of crypto between the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and build a federal structure for spot markets, a structure that does not exist at present.

Peirce said the framework would clarify the application of the Howey Test — the standard for when a token counts as part of an investment contract — and would shield developers from liability when others misuse their tools.

Peirce argued that past enforcement pushed the industry onto a poor path. The old approach, she said, rewarded builders of throwaway projects and made honest actors hard to tell apart from fraudsters. Her hope for the current window is a shift toward products that meet real human needs.

“This is a rare window where you have a lot of regulatory goodwill,” Pierce said. “Use that to build things that last, things that matter.”

She tied the technology’s promise to the transfer of value across networks, the removal of costly intermediaries, and the use of smart contracts to automate back-office work.

Tokenized securities, she said, could improve collateral mobility, ease securities lending, and let issuers reach shareholders through their wallets. She also linked crypto to artificial intelligence, and predicted that AI agents will transact with crypto assets.

On AI regulation, Peirce favored a hands-off stance: allow experimentation, and address harms as they surface rather than shape the technology from the start. She noted that a firm’s use of AI does not excuse the firm from responsibility for the outcome.

Peirce, whose term nears its end, will leave the agency for a law school teaching post. She flagged a rise in scams and a gap in financial education as her chief concerns, and urged investors toward skepticism.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins chimes in

The SEC’s chairman, Paul Atkins, struck similar notes in a Fox News interview with Larry Kudlow after an address to the Economic Club of New York.

Atkins cast himself as an advocate of free-market capitalism and pointed to a series of reforms aimed at drawing more Americans into public markets and easing the path to an IPO.

“America was an investment before it was a nation,” Atkins said.

Atkins highlighted the Trump Accounts, set to launch on July 4th, as an expression of American capitalism and long-term saving. He said about 6 million children have enrolled, and that children born in the next two years will receive a $1,000 deposit, with room for matches from employers, parents, and friends.

The accounts, he said, function as a version of a traditional IRA and give a stake in the market to children who might lack exposure to it at home.

“America was an investment before it was a nation,” Atkins told Kudlow, citing the European companies that financed voyages across the Atlantic, including the settlement that became New York.

On crypto, Atkins said the president had challenged the agency to make the United States the crypto capital of the world. He faulted the prior administration for treating digital assets as suspect by nature, and pledged a reversal that would bring innovators who left the country back to build under American law, for American investors, who could judge the products for themselves.

Both officials framed their agenda against the backdrop of the July 4th holiday and the anniversary of the founding. Peirce called the market system a powerful force for social good and a check on capital allocation by the government.

Atkins offered a shorter version of the same creed: free-market capitalism, in his words, will win.

This post SEC’s Peirce Sees Clarity Act Passing This Summer as Crypto Rules Take Shape first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman .

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What a journey! Jamir Nazir, one of the three finalists for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize who were accused of using AI to create their work, has won the overall prize .

ICYMI:

Accusations began swirling online in May shortly after the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners who would go on to compete for the overall prize.

Readers, writers , and even an AI expert pointed to what they believed were “obvious markers of AI writing” in the nominated stories.

Citing concerns about “editorial integrity,” Granta Magazine, which has published the winning stories for more than a decade, ended its partnership with the Prize.

But! The Commonwealth Foundation cleared Nazir and his fellow finalists last week after a month-long investigation that, notably, did not incorporate AI-detection software.

Nazir, who has not commented on the allegations, discusses his inspiration and writing process in a short film released by the Commonwealth Foundation.

It’s just about impossible to prove a negative where AI is concerned.

The linguistic tics like em dashes and “not X, but Y” constructions that can indicate a work was AI-generated have their origins in the human-generated works large language models were trained on.

Showing your work with notes, drafts, and other documentation is about to become important for writers and could figure into future award selection processes.

See for yourself. You can read Nazir’s winning story, “The Serpent in the Grove,” along with the other regional winners, at Granta.

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Life on Earth could continue for another 1.8 billion years, according to new research. This figure, which is based on complex climate models, is far longer than many previous studies indicated.

As the sun evolves, it is getting brighter. Our star is currently producing about a third more energy than it did at the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. And it will continue to get hotter until it eventually dies in about 5 billion years .

Scientists have wondered for decades how long life on Earth will manage to cling to existence as the sun brightens. In 1982, James Lovelock and colleagues estimated that Earth's photosynthetic biosphere — which includes all plants and forms the basis for most of the planet’s biology — would end about 100 million years from now . Successive studies have pushed back the deadline for the death of all life on Earth .

In the new study, published May 28 in the journal JGR Atmospheres , researchers suggest that plant life could continue about 1.8 billion years into the future. That nears the time when Earth would lose its oceans to space, either through radiation splitting water atoms or runaway evaporation, in about 2 billion years.

"We were trying to show that life on Earth — complex vegetation — could survive longer into the future than previous studies had shown," study co-author Jacob Haqq-Misra , an astrobiologist at space exploration charity Blue Marble Space , told Live Science.

The boundaries of life

Life on Earth relies on photosynthesis , the process used by plants, algae and some bacteria to turn sunlight into energy. The mechanism chemically converts carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen. It requires both CO 2 and sunlight.

But at certain temperatures, plants' photosynthetic machinery shuts down. Eventually, the sun will warm Earth to the point that plants are no longer able to photosynthesize, which would in turn cause entire food webs to collapse and all life to perish.

Another issue is that as the sun dies and it gets brighter, there will be less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, effectively starving plants.

Plants turn sunlight into energy, but at certain temperatures this ability shuts down. (Image credit: lamyai via Getty Images) "The Earth has stayed pretty hospitable in terms of surface temperature for most of the last 4 billion years because it has a built-in thermostat" by storing CO 2 in rocks and releasing it during volcanic eruptions, Robert Graham , a planetary science researcher at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the research, told Live science.

When it is hotter, the planet pulls more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it in rocks underground, Graham said. This offsets the warming to keep the temperature stable but means that the carbon dioxide isn't accessible to plants.

Climate models and extreme plants

In the new study, Haqq-Misra and colleague Eric Wolf , a research scientist at Blue Marble Space, used 29 climate models to estimate what would happen to Earth's vegetative biosphere under different scenarios. They used the two extreme cases as limits — when Earth is too hot for life but the CO 2 was stable; and when there is not enough CO 2, but the temperature was stable. They then looked at the range of CO 2 and sunlight conditions in between those extremes. This enabled them to include situations in which Earth was very efficient at pulling carbon from the atmosphere when temperatures started rising.

They also included information about a variety of plants. Some plants can survive on a much lower ratio of atmospheric CO 2 than others. The study included plants that have a special photosynthetic process (known as crassulacean acid metabolism ), such as succulents and orchids. These plants can sustain themselves on relatively tiny amounts of CO 2 . The same is true of some marine plants , which can dissolve and access carbon in the ocean system.

Other experts were impressed by the findings.

"Haqq-Misra and Wolf have used a sophisticated 3D climate model to show that Earth's climate may remain hospitable to plant life significantly longer into the future than predicted" by simpler models, said Graham, who authored one of those earlier studies . "It's an advance over previous work and suggests that complex biospheres like that of Earth are more resilient to environmental change from stellar brightening than previously suggested."

Looking to the future

Andrew Rushby , an astrobiologist at Birkbeck University of London who was not involved in the research, told Live Science that the paper updated the concept of the lifetime of the biosphere. However, he cautioned that the results remained "broad estimates."

"It is not possible for us to predict or know the possible evolutionary adaptations that the photosynthetic biosphere may undergo in response to increasing solar output and lower [atmospheric CO 2 ], especially over billions of years," he said.

Related stories

'Maybe they're waiting for something that only happens thousands of years later': The hidden life 'sleeping' deep beneath Earth for millions of years

Complex animals evolved up to 10 million years earlier than previously thought, fossil discovery shows

Building blocks of life may be far more common in space than we thought, study claims

In their paper, the authors wrote that "limits posed by thermal stress or starvation may only reflect our observations of the biosphere today rather than hard limits on how the biosphere may evolve." There is also no way of knowing how life might adapt to new circumstances.

Haqq-Misra said that he found the results comforting. "Earth's system is resilient, and we are part of something that could have a much, much longer future," he said.

The results could also help scientists figure out what the thresholds could be on other planets. "Part of the challenge is starting with these Earth-based models, and then generalizing the physics as much as possible to be able to simulate a wider range of atmospheres," he said.

How much do you know about our blue planet? Test your terran knowledge with our Earth quiz !

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Although PC ports have done quite well for the company in recent years, Sony 's reportedly decided to pull back on their frequency, at least for big single-player games . To what end is unclear – there weren't all that many to start with – but a former higher-up from the corporation doesn't see the logic here, because the games were finding players they would never have otherwise.

On the PSI podcast (via VGC ), Shawn Layden, former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, explains he can't quite wrap his head around Sony seemingly pushing away the PC audience.

"First of all, the games don't go on PC for like a year or whatever it is," he says. "It's not day and date, and if they think that a game coming out 18 months after its launch on another platform somehow stopped a sale from happening 18 months ago in the hardware business, I would like to see how they can prove that thesis."

A year and a half is actually on the lower side. Some of the ports we've seen on PC, such as Marvel's Spider-Man , Ghost of Tsushima , and God of War , took years to move away from PS4 and PS5 and onto the likes of Steam and the Epic Games Store .

As Layden points out, on that timescale, it's probably safe to assume those fans weren't going to be buying the base console. "If someone's waiting 18 months for something to come on PC, we didn't lose a sale to them," he says, emphatically. "They weren't going to buy the hardware anyway."

He believes the development cost for these versions was likely the largest contributing factor to Sony's reported pivot, and he points out he didn't push the business in this direction to make money. It's about making PlayStation-associated franchises available to greater amounts of people.

"The PC thing, in my mind anyway at the time, was not to make money, frankly, it was how do I get my intellectual property in front of people who wouldn’t normally see it?" he says.

"How do I get the world of Horizon to be seen by people who aren't in the PlayStation world?" he adds. "Not necessarily because they're going to buy a PlayStation, I wasn't that crazy. I didn't think that was going to happen."

It's a fair argument, and now that the Steam Machine exists, you have to wonder whether Sony's cutting off its nose to spite its face here. Alas, this is the reality at present, but we'll see what the future holds.

PlayStation is ending physical disc production for new games in 2028 as Sony says "general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs."