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A Google Fi promotion can get new subscribers who activate a Pixel on their plan half off service for 12 months.

The promo applies to Fi’s Unlimited Essentials, Unlimited Standard, and Unlimited Premium plans.

Act fast: the deal ends July 13.

Got a Pixel? Google Fi wants your business. For the next few days, Google Fi is offering big discounts on its Unlimited plans for new customers who bring their own Pixel phone. If you’ve been thinking about changing carriers anyway, this might be the move: The new promo could you save hundreds of dollars over the next year, depending on the plan you pick.

Fi’s latest deal is good for half off any of the MVNO’s Unlimited plans for 12 months. To get the discount, all you have to do is activate a new Unlimited plan on a Pixel phone. Fi’s definition of “new customer” includes anyone who’s been unsubscribed for at least 180 days, so plenty of returning customers should be able to take advantage, too.

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Early Christian communities in Sweden often buried children in the same grave with adults, but archaeologists have found that these individuals rarely shared close biological ties, raising the question of how medieval people interred their dead.

In a new study, researchers analyzed the DNA of 142 skeletons from three cemeteries in Sweden dating to the 10th to 14th centuries, focusing on collective burials in which two or more people were buried in the same tomb.

"We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members," study first author Maja Krzewińska , a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University, said in a statement . "In most cases, that was not what we found."

The researchers determined that most burials containing multiple individuals held both adults and children and that the people buried together were usually of the same sex — a woman buried with a girl or a man buried with a boy. But the DNA analysis held a surprise: People buried together rarely exhibited close biological kinship, the researchers wrote.

When Christianity spread across Scandinavia starting in the late 10th century, burial practices became more uniform. Graves were oriented east to west, and people were buried in a simple shroud without any grave goods. Baptized individuals were allowed to be interred in consecrated cemetery grounds, while babies who died before they could be baptized were excluded.

"We have previously analyzed a burial containing an adult and the remains of a fetus, which we believe represents an unbaptized individual," Krzewińska told Live Science in an email.

A photograph of the Västerhus church ruin, Frösö parish, in Jämtland, Sweden, before 1951, where archaeologists have found many burials of children who weren't interred with close family members. (Image credit: Riksantikvarieämbetets arkiv ) These unusual burial arrangements likely point to early Christian traditions. For instance, some of the children buried with adults in the new study may have been unbaptized. Normally ineligible for burial in the cemetery, the children may have been opportunistically interred with an adult to get around religious norms. Other burials may reflect unrelated people buried together in the spring after passing away in the winter, when burial in the frozen ground was impossible.

"We also believe, based on more distant genetic affinity, that some co-burials represent more distant family relations, or even non-biological kin group relations," Krzewińska said.

In early medieval Scandinavia, households often included extended relatives, servants, employees and enslaved individuals, the researchers wrote. While biological kinship played a large role in the organization of society, membership in the local Christian community may have been equally important in determining where and with whom to bury a deceased person.

"Archaeologists have debated the relationships between people buried together in this type of grave for a long time," study co-author Anna Kjellström , an archaeologist at Stockholm University, said in the statement. "Ancient DNA has finally given us the tool we have been waiting for to test these interpretations directly."

We are family

In addition to collective burials of unrelated people, the archaeologists discovered evidence that some families were buried within the same cemetery over several generations. One burial, known as Lady 56, was a Christian pilgrim who anchored three generations of relatives.

A photograph of a pilgrim shell found at the Västerhus cemetery. This type of scallop shell is a symbol of Christian pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. (Image credit: Christer Åhlin, Historiska museet, 2012 ( CC BY 4.0 )) Lady 56 died when she was around 30 years old. She was buried with a rare scallop shell, a symbol of the apostle James, that she obtained after completing a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela , a town in northwest Spain on the edge of Christian Europe.

The researchers also identified Lady 56's kin group, which was of particular importance to the community and stretched over generations in the Västerhus cemetery, Krzewińska said. The DNA analysis revealed that Lady 56's parents, brother and daughters were also buried in the same cemetery, but in different places.

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Västerhus was part of a wealthy landowner's farm from the 11th to 14th centuries, and the cemetery contained the remains of more than a dozen members of a biologically related group, many of whom were interred with members of a different kin group.

The DNA connections between the main Västerhus family and other kin groups in the cemetery support the special status of the main family. These close-kin burials highlight the importance of ancient-DNA testing, as different burials from the same time and region can follow very different traditions.

What do you know about Jesus Christ, the man? Test your knowledge of biblical archaeology with our Jesus Christ quiz!

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Soldiers in Poland will be able to pick up their uniforms from their nearest parcel locker rather than having to collect them from military stores under a new scheme being rolled out by the armed forces, with private logistics giant InPost responsible for deliveries.

The move is a “simple, practical change” that will make life easier for troops, said a deputy defence minister. The CEO of InPost, which is Europe’s largest operator of parcel lockers, praised the decision to make “dual use” of private infrastructure for national-security purposes.

📦 Żołnierze odbiorą umundurowanie w paczkomacie. Trwa pilotaż nowego systemu.‼️

🔊W Siłach Zbrojnych RP trwa pilotaż nowego systemu, który rozszerza możliwości zaopatrywania żołnierzy. Już od przyszłego roku funkcjonować będzie Platforma Wysyłkowa Przedmiotów Umundurowania i… pic.twitter.com/NGUAQognYX

— Inspektorat Wsparcia Sił Zbrojnych (@IWsp_SZ) July 9, 2026

Under the new system, military personnel can order equipment via an online system and collect it from parcel lockers, which are devices that allow users to collect packages independently at any time.

“We want soldiers to be able to order their equipment in a modern, simple, and convenient way, without having to adjust to the opening hours of stores, and to be able to do so at any time they choose,” said General Dariusz Mendrala, the head of the Armed Forces Support Inspectorate (IWsp SZ).

A small pilot scheme began last year and has now been expanded to over 20,000 soldiers. That figure will rise to around 60,000 by the end of this year, before the system is fully rolled out in 2027.

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“This is a simple, practical change…that will make soldiers’ daily service easier,” said Cezary Tomczyk, a deputy defence minister, sharing details of the scheme on social media.

He indicated that the system covers other equipment in addition to uniforms, though neither he nor IWsp SZ have specified what types of gear are included.

Sharing Tomczyk’s post, Rafał Brzoska, the founder and CEO of Inpost, said that the scheme was a good example of the “dual use” of civilian and commercial technologies for national security purposes.

“Polish business has been calling for years: let’s use domestic technologies, infrastructure and enterprise to reinforce the state’s defence,” wrote Brzoska. He noted that Ukraine has shown, for example through its drone industry, how private enterprises can support the military.

Polski biznes od lat apeluje: korzystajmy z krajowych technologii, infrastruktury i przedsiębiorczości do wzmacniania obronności państwa. @MON_GOV_PL właśnie pokazuje, jak przejść od deklaracji do działania!!

I to jest właśnie realny dual use, o którym wszyscy mówią, tylko w… https://t.co/oXA8dmoVpE

— Rafał Brzoska (@RBrzoska) July 10, 2026

A spokesman for IWsp SZ, Lieutenant Colonel Piotr Płuciennik, confirmed to broadcaster TVN that InPost had been selected in a tender to manage the deliveries until December this year. He said that the system was set to cost around 2 million zloty (€462,00) a year.

InPost operates by far Poland’s largest network of parcel lockers: its almost 29,000 devices represent around half the total number in the country. The company has also expanded rapidly in western Europe, where it operates parcel lockers in the UK , France and Spain , among other countries.

Płuciennik said that the delivery company is given pre-packaged parcels that feature only the soldier’s phone number on the label. For security reasons, they are delivered only to parcel lockers, and not to home addresses.

With an estimated 233,800 military personnel in 2025, Poland’s armed forces are the third-largest in NATO , behind only the United States and Turkey. That figure has more than doubled in the last decade as Poland has ramped up defence spending in response to a growing threat from Russia.

Poland has NATO’s third-largest military and the alliance’s largest in Europe, new figures show.

For more, see our full report here: https://t.co/QBBVQ9cqzS pic.twitter.com/TA34KQrJ4k

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 16, 2024

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: st.szer. Wojciech Król/CO MON (under CC BY-SA 4.0 )

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Credit: Matt Horne / Android Authority

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Samsung is reportedly giving Voice Recorder a major AI upgrade, with cloud-based transcription expected to improve accuracy for difficult or lengthy recordings.

Managing recordings could become much easier thanks to a new storage manager that helps track and clear used space.

File sharing gets more flexible with rumored MP3 and WAV export support, expanding beyond the current M4A format.

Samsung’s Voice Recorder app already relies heavily on Galaxy AI to transcribe speech to text, but it seems the company has more work to do in refining it. A new leak suggests Samsung is working on a major upgrade that could improve transcription accuracy.

The biggest addition appears to be “Cloud transcription.” Until now, Samsung’s transcription tools have mainly relied on on-device AI, which is good for privacy reasons but can sometimes struggle with tricky audio or longer recordings. According to SamMobile , the new feature would enable users to upload recordings to Samsung servers, where they could be processed in the cloud and potentially return more accurate transcripts when precision is most important. There’s already local transcription, and it’s not going away, so the user could have a choice of speed versus better accuracy.

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Microsoft's cuts across Xbox studios, totaling 3,200 by later this year, included a massive reduction at id Software. The team lost 136 people (over half of the studio) just a day before its Doom: The Dark Ages expansion released, a bloodletting that had remaining and newly laid-off employees seriously concerned about the studio's capacity to make games and update its proprietary engine, idTech, going forward.

"Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements," one impacted worker said.

Today, the official id Software X account made a statement aimed at assuaging these worries.

"While our studio was impacted, those changes were spread across teams. We still have the crew we need to build the games and tech we're known for. The team today is about the same size we were when making DOOM (2016). We have always had a flat studio where everyone is a maker, and we will remain true to that philosophy moving forward," the post reads.

That bit about the current size of the team matches a Windows Central report that also claims the studio is not being forced to move to Unreal Engine in the immediate future, as employees have openly speculated about. The studio's statement also suggests that it will continue work on id Tech.

"We are focused on supporting each other and the team members impacted. We're going to keep building the great games and tech that have defined us for the past 35 years, and we're looking forward to seeing you at QuakeCon this August."

(Image credit: id Software on X) While it's encouraging to learn that id Software won't immediately join a Fallout assembly line, as is Obsidian's new charge , the statement is unlikely to change a growing impression that Microsoft is an unfit steward of the studio synonymous with PC gaming. Personally, knowing that id Software is the same size it was 10 years ago isn't an encouraging sign for its future—it takes more people and more time to make games of Doom's scale and fidelity than it did in the 2010s, hence why the team had grown to 200-plus for The Dark Ages.

Whatever id makes next, it will now do so with an axe hovering over its neck.