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Four change-makers seek impact in medical research

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SIRI ELDEVIK HÅBERG: Lines of enquiry

Siri Eldevik Håberg sitting at her desk in front of window.

Siri Eldevik Håberg studies whether environmental factors such as smoking are linked to subtle changes to the human genome.Credit: Fredrik Naumann/Panos Pictures for Nature

As a medical student, Siri Eldevik Håberg became fascinated with how the health of a baby can be affected during pregnancy. Smoking, for example, is a proven risk factor for respiratory infection in fetuses — a finding supported by one of Håberg’s earliest studies, which scoured data from tens of thousands of births in Norway to investigate outcomes for a small subset of women who had smoked during, but not after, pregnancy1. The analysis was based on data from the Mother, Father, and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) in Oslo, which today holds biological samples and survey information for nearly 300,000 participants.

Håberg conducted her postdoctoral work in the United States, where she joined a group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Durham, North Carolina. She contributed data analysis to a team that examined 1,062 blood samples from MoBa, drawn from the umbilical cord at the delivery of a baby, and identified 10 genes that were altered in infants born to women who smoked while pregnant. The 2012 study provided important evidence for how non-heritable smoking exposure can cause certain epigenetic effects — subtle changes to the genome that impact the reading of DNA but do not alter the DNA sequence2. “We are only beginning to understand the gravity of epigenetic changes during development,” says Håberg.

Now, as director of the Centre for Fertility and Health at the NIPH, Håberg is investigating ways to combine MoBa data with statistics from Norwegian registries on factors such as vaccinations, prescriptions, education and economic status. In one project, she and her colleagues matched babies from the 2012 study with data collected by the Medical Birth Registry of Norway and found that reduced birth weight was strongly correlated with smoking during pregnancy3.

Having investigated the effects of smoking on fetal health, Håberg was interested in other factors that could cause epigenetic changes linked to development. In a 2022 study published by Nature Communications4, she and her co-authors compared rates of DNA methylation — a process that affects levels of gene expression — for almost 2,000 MoBa newborns. Roughly half of the babies were conceived naturally and half through reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization. Even after controlling for the parents’ DNA methylation rates, differences were found in more than 100 genes, including those related to growth and development. The findings might pave the way for big-data approaches to studies related to reproductive technologies.

Håberg is passionate about connecting specialists from her team with interdisciplinary groups from around the world so that they can explore large amounts of data that hold clues about fetal health. One such project is comparing MoBa data with information from the Danish National Birth Cohort. “It all comes down to finding exciting new ways for teams of specialists to work together,” she says. “It’s great to see so many resources dedicated to questions of early embryonic development.” — Amy Coombs

NARMIN GHAFFARI LALEH: Deeper vision

Portrait image of Narmin Ghaffari Laleh

Narmin Ghaffari Laleh.Credit: Courtesy of Narmin Ghaffari Laleh

As a university student studying medical photonics in Jena, Germany, Narmin Ghaffari Laleh was inspired to use her programming skills to help patients and doctors. She sought work experience at local medical-device company, Carl Zeiss Meditec, to explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in improving medical-image analysis. Her work there concentrated on eye imaging, where conventional methods of analysis use systems that read each row of pixels, identifying features such as the cornea, lens and retina by tracking their colours and the distance between them. Common variables such as glasses can throw such systems off, however. “These kinds of programs work well until someone puts on glasses or contact lenses and takes a photo,” says Ghaffari Laleh, who was a master’s student at Fredrich Schiller University of Jena at the time.

The model developed by Ghaffari Laleh and her colleagues at the company used deep learning — a machine-learning technique that can identify complex patterns. In testing, their system analysed images with variables such as glasses with greater accuracy and less human oversight than previous methods. “I saw the potential for this sort of program to impact other areas of medicine, because the machine-learning techniques were rapidly becoming more sophisticated and could handle more data, all without the traditional human reviewer,” says Ghaffari Laleh, who built on these findings in her 2020 master’s thesis.

Ghaffari Laleh began her PhD at RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany, in the field of computational pathology — an emerging area of research that aims to improve patient care by using advances in AI and big data. Her focus was on developing systems that can more accurately and efficiently identify visual indicators of cancer and other diseases than methods that rely solely on human specialists. These systems could be particularly useful in the analysis of tissue samples that have been prepared for microscope slides and stained with the widely used haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) dye, which turns cell structures different shades of purple, blue and pink, she says.

In 2022, Ghaffari Laleh co-authored a paper5 describing how AI could consistently categorize tumours in kidney-tissue slides. “With deep learning, we can detect patterns that the human eye cannot see,” she says.

For a separate study6, the team showed how AI trained to identify mutations in a protein associated with bladder cancer could outperform a uropathologist in analysing tissue samples stained with H&E. “We do not aim to replace the urologist, but deep-learning can offer additional analysis,” says Ghaffari Laleh.

To test whether these methods can move to clinical applications, Ghaffari Laleh dedicated her PhD thesis to investigating how applicable these kinds of AI systems could be to a variety of diseases and patient demographics. Her dissertation is pending defence in March.

Ghaffari Laleh hopes to apply her skills to help medical professionals in developing countries who cannot afford to run advanced diagnostics and who struggle to recruit and train skilled professionals. “AI is a much more affordable option,” she says. “If a deep-learning model can analyse data from diverse patient groups from a wide range of countries, then hospitals that lack resources can ship samples for diagnosis.” She’s also working on AI that can read text7, ultrasound and radiology image data, with hopes that they can speed up the work of doctors and other specialists worldwide. — Amy Coombs

TAL PATALON: Prolific polymath

Portrait image of Tal Patalon

Tal Patalon.Credit: Asaf Brenner

Tal Patalon prides herself on being able to pivot her work to where she thinks her expertise, and that of her team, will be most effective. “For me, it’s all about clinical impact,” she says. As head of Kahn-Sagol-Maccabi (KSM) in Tel Aviv — the research and innovation centre of Maccabi Healthcare Services, one of Israel’s largest health-care providers — Patalon is interested in a range of medical conditions, including parvovirus, mpox, cancer and coeliac disease.

Having the capacity to launch research projects quickly proved invaluable to Patalon and her team during the COVID-19 pandemic, when global treatment and vaccination protocols changed rapidly to keep up with the evolution of the disease. In 2021, as the highly contagious Delta wave was surging through Israel, Patalon co-led a team that scoured the health records of almost 125,000 Israelis, charting coronavirus incidence, symptoms and hospitalization rates over three months.

The team discovered that vaccinated people who had not previously tested positive for COVID-19 were 13 times more likely to be infected by the new variant, compared with previously infected individuals who were unvaccinated. The results showed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 confers a natural immunity to those who have been infected, providing valuable evidence that vaccinating them wasn’t an immediate priority8. “It was a very big achievement for us,” says Patalon.

Extracting new insights from the vast amounts of public-health data that are being collected globally is key to advancing treatments and keeping one step ahead of infectious diseases, says Patalon. As part of her role at KSM, she oversees the Tipa Biobank, Israel’s largest biosample repository, comprising more than one million blood samples from some 200,000 Maccabi patients. In addition to one-off samples from patients, the biobank collects serial samples — successive samples from the same patient over a period of time. Serial samples are “very rare and highly valuable for research”, says Patalon, especially when it comes to analysing biological changes before and after a diagnosis.

KSM also manages some 30 years’ worth of electronic medical records from more than 2.7 million patients collected by 32 hospital networks that are affiliated with Maccabi. By sharing these data, which have been deidentified, with researchers around the world, Patalon hopes to inform artificial-intelligence-powered innovations in diagnosis and treatment. “These collaborations, I believe, will create the future of medicine,” she says.

Being adaptable as a researcher and a leader is crucial, particularly in times of crisis, says Patalon, whose team has been deeply affected by the war in Gaza.

“This is a time that requires a lot of patience, empathy, emotional support and the building of good relationships. We have to come out of this situation stronger.” — Sandy Ong

SARAH LUO: Hunting hunger pathways

Sarah Lou sits on concrete wall

Sarah Lou’s team discovered one of the brain’s many feeding regulatory centres.Credit: Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)

Sarah Luo’s fascination with neuroscience sparked when, as an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Wisconsin, she was introduced to the work of British neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks.

Known for his empathic approach to patients with conditions such as amnesia, face blindness and Tourette’s syndrome, Sacks “brought a very humanizing perspective to brain disorders”, says Luo. “He showed how even minute changes in certain regions of the brain could lead to profound effects on cognition and behaviour.”

Today, Luo runs a lab at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), where she studies the connection between hunger and the brain to help patients with metabolic disorders such as diabetes and fatty liver disease. She first studied this connection as a postdoctoral fellow in an adjacent lab, where she was part of a team that discovered a mechanism that regulates feeding.

For many years, researchers had assumed that hunger is regulated by two types of neurons: one that drives hunger and another that suppresses it. But when Luo and her colleagues ran experiments that stimulated certain neurons in a region of the brain called the tuberal nucleus, they could prompt mice to start eating even when they weren’t hungry9. “There are actually many feeding regulatory centres in the brain, and we discovered one of them,” she says.

These other centres can deal with “more diverse aspects of eating behaviour”, says Luo, including environmental cues that can incite hunger. In a series of follow-up experiments10, Luo and her colleagues observed that when mice were placed in the same feeding chamber where the neurons in the tuberal nucleus had been activated the previous week, they would immediately start eating, even if it was outside their normal feeding times. The results suggest that these neurons not only influence basic feeding behaviour, but also integrate memory and contextual cues into the eating process, says Luo.

Humans experience similar cues. Visiting a favourite restaurant, for example, or returning to the family home can spark an appetite.

“Your neurons might become activated, just because of the environment you’re in,” says Luo. “Those signals might cause you to eat, even if you’re not actually hungry.”

Luo and her team at A*STAR hope to develop treatments that will help to curb excessive food consumption in people with obesity and metabolic conditions by blocking or activating certain neural signals. The trick, she says, is to find and target pathways that run between the brain and organs such as the liver and kidneys, which are more accessible than neural pathways in the brain.

“It would be very invasive to implant an electrode in the brain to activate or inhibit these pathways,” says Luo. But activating pathways that connect to these regions in the brain — by using vagal nerve stimulation, for example, which is a technique used to treat epilepsy that involves implanting a pulse generator under the skin on the chest — would be a more viable option. “Then maybe there will be an easier route for developing therapies to target some of these metabolic diseases,” says Luo. — Sandy Ong

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The 10 best sleep apps and gadgets for a better night’s sleep in 2024

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Whatever challenges come your way in a day, you’ll be better prepared to deal with them if you’ve had a restful night. According to the NIH, sleep experts recommend no fewer than seven hours of sleep each night, but some tech, like scrolling through social media or obsessively checking your email, can actually impair your down time — so take advantage of the bedtime modes for iPhone and Android. Other technology, however, can actually help maximize shut eye. Sleep apps and devices like fitness trackers, sleep machines, blue light glasses and smart light bulbs can help you fall asleep and stay there. We’ve tried out a number of gadgets that have worked for us, and we gathered them here so you can see if they’ll work for you, too.

Headspace

Personally, the best thing I’ve done for my sleep is banishing my phone from the bedroom, so it may seem ironic to add a smartphone app to this list. Headspace, however, has the opposite effect on sleep that social media does. Like the Hatch Restore, this iOS and Android app has an extensive library of meditations and exercises to help you relax and fall asleep.

I prefer the shorter, wind-down segments that last a few minutes and help you do a full body scan to relax. Longer “Sleepcasts” run around 45 minutes and tell you stories in calm voices – there are even a few Star Wars-themed tales, but those just made me want to get up and watch more Mandalorian. Sleep music and soundscapes combine ambient sounds with tones and melodies, lasting up to 500 minutes. And perhaps most critically, there’s a “Nighttime SOS” page, with guided exercises to help you get back to sleep if you wake up with bad dreams, work stress or something else.

The yearly subscription is $70 or you can pay $13 a month. In addition to sleep content, you also get daytime meditations and sessions that help you breathe, manage stress and focus, which can also help with sleep. If you do decide to bring Headspace into the bedroom, make sure you have your phone’s sleep focus or bedtime mode turned on before you do, otherwise nighttime spam emails and Messenger alerts will undo all of the good work your sleep app just rendered.

$13 at Headspace

Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Like the previous generation, the Hatch Restore 2 is part sunrise alarm clock, part sleep-sounds speaker and is programmed through an app filled with continually renewing sleep content. 

This new model adds a fabric overlay atop the sunrise light and comes in more subdued colors. It also has a new shape with large, tactile buttons that are easy to feel in the dark. The concave button starts your sleep music/sounds and the convex one controls your morning routine. 

Everything else is controlled via the Hatch App, which has a vast library of sleep stories, meditations, music and white noise to help you fall and stay in asleep, as well as a big selection of wake-up pep talks and stretches to get you energized in the AM. The catch is that only a small portion of the library is included with the free version — full access costs $5 per month. When I reviewed the device, I thought I’d pay for the duration of my testing and then cancel. But many months later, I’m enamored enough of the nighttime “Ambient Overlook” tunes and Dane’s morning “Jump Start” that I’m happy to keep paying.

$200 at Amazon

Oura

Oura’s smart ring tracks your activity during the day and your sleep at night (or whenever it is you go to bed), giving you an overall score from one to 100 each morning. Using temperature, movement, blood oxygen and pulse sensors, Oura gains insight into how long you stay in the various sleep stages and uses that sleep data to offer suggestions on ways to get better sleep. When we tested it out, we called it the “perfect wearable for people who don’t like wearables,” appreciating the data it provides while slipping seamlessly into everyday life. After a few days of wearing it, our reviewer quickly started to ignore its presence, which means you’re probably much more likely to wear it to bed than a fitness band.

Since it doesn’t have a screen, all of Oura’s information comes to you via the companion app. That lack of screen is also the reason you can squeeze up to seven days of battery life out of it, an important feature since no sleep tracker can help if it has to spend its nights on a charger.

$399 at Oura

Xiaomi

In our guide to budget fitness trackers, the Xiaomi Mi Band 8 beat all the others because it has an easy-to-navigate interface while also being one of the most comfortable bands to wear while sleeping. Unlike an Apple Watch and most other smartwatches, which you may need to charge each night, fitness trackers can go for a week or two before needing a refill. And in the case of the Mi Band 8, we got about two weeks of use on a 30 minute charge.

We were impressed with the level of detail the sleep insights delivered. Plus, unlike Fitbit devices, the Mi Band 8 provides that feature for free instead of requiring a subscription to access all of your data. The sub-$50 price tag makes it even more attractive — and could make a contender for a sleep-only device, especially if you have another smartwatch you already like for daytime use.

$44 at Amazon

Photo by Sam Rutherford / Engadget

If you don’t want a wearable at all, the Sleep Pod 3 from Eight Sleep will track your metrics and give you a sleep score. It also heats or cools your side of the bed and wakes you up with a subtle rumble beneath your chest. The mattress-and-cover combo goes for between $3,000 and $4,400, depending on the size and thickness of the mattress, which puts it well above any traditional wearable in terms of affordability. The bulk of the cost is in the cover, which conceals tubing through which warm or cool water flows from an external base, regulating the temp, while sensors in the cover monitor your sleep.

You can buy the cover alone and that will save you between $900 and $1,900 off the sticker price, but it’s still not cheap. You’ll also need a $19 per month subscription to access all the sleep tracking features. But in our review, with a score of 81, our reviewer (and new dad) Sam Rutherford said the Pod 3 has delivered some of the best sleep he’s ever had.

$3,395 at Eight Sleep

Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

The Wiim Wake-up Light is also a sunrise alarm and noise machine, but it’s cheaper than the Restore 2 and doesn’t require a subscription. The rounded design has a high-gloss finish instead of the more muted aesthetic on the Restore. As a sleep machine, the Wiim gives you about four dozen sounds including naturescapes, music and white/pink/brown noises. 

It’s also a smart speaker, so it can tap into music services like Spotify, Deezer, Tidal and others. Alexa is built in and, though I prefer to keep listening devices out of my bedroom, it’s pretty nice to ask for the PJ Harvey song that’s stuck in my head or request the weather forecast as I get dressed. The on-device buttons can be a little confusing and I wish there was a way to set a podcast or an individual track to work as the alarm, but the provided sounds combined with the slowing-brightening light are a pleasant way to start the day.

$129 at Amazon

Philips Hue

We think Philips Hue White + Color are the best smart light bulbs you can buy, and certain features can even help with sleep, such as programming them to change to a warmer color when it’s getting close to bedtime. You not only get a subtle hint that it’s time to wind down, but the warmer tones have lower levels of sunlight-mimicking blue light and can help your brain prepare for sleep. You also have the ability to control them using your voice, so instead of getting out of bed to shut off the lights, you can ask Alexa or the Google Assistant to do it for you.

$50 at Amazon

Felix Gray

Speaking of blue light, it’s not great for sleep. But the habit of staring at screens isn’t going anywhere, which is why blue light-blocking glasses exist. I’ll admit I first thought they were a gimmick, but have since come to rely on the pair I bought from Felix Gray. The science seems to check out and do I notice a difference with my sleep quality and patterns when I wear them versus when I don’t. I initially only wore them in the evening hours, when I was working past 5PM or otherwise still using my computer. Now I wear them basically all day because I feel like they help my eyes feel far less tired. They come with or without your prescription and in enough styles to make them your own.

$148 at Felix Gray

Bearaby

You’ve probably met someone who swears by their weighted blanket. Our colleague Nicole Lee is one of them. As someone plagued by insomnia, she finds she’s “nodding off faster and staying asleep longer” with the Bearaby weighted blanket and recommends it as one of our top self-care gifts. Unlike other weighted blankets that are filled with glass or plastic beads, Bearaby comforters are hand-knit from a heavyweight cotton, Tencel or eco-velvet, looking more like enormous scarves than a bland sleep aid.

$200 at Beraraby

Manta Sleep

While blue light is bad before bed, any type of light hitting your eyelids can keep you from reaching those deeper levels of REM sleep. Along with blackout curtains and shutting off the nightlight, we recommend this sleep mask from Manta. There are a ton of sleep masks out there, but Engadget’s Igor Bonifacic finds this one to be better than the rest and recommends it for travelers in our guide. It has removable, repositionable eye cups for a customized fit and they stand up to their claim of blocking out 100 percent of ambient light. You can also buy additional eye cups that you can microwave to provide a warming effect, or eye cups wrapped in silk that will be gentler on your skin and others.

$35 at Amazon

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Microsoft just patched a whole load of important security flaws, including two critical issues – so update now

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The March 2024 edition of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday is upon us, fixing dozens of vulnerabilities, including two critical severity issues which could result in remote code execution (RCE) and privilege escalation.

In its advisory, Microsoft announced addressing 61 CVEs, in addition to 17 Edge flaws fixed a few weeks prior. Of those 61 vulnerabilities, two are labeled critical, 58 important, and one low. The company said the flaws were not publicly known, or under active exploitation. 

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Google DeepMind’s new AI can follow commands inside 3D games it hasn’t seen before

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has unveiled new research highlighting an AI agent that’s able to carry out a swath of tasks in 3D games it hasn’t seen before. The team has long been experimenting with AI models that can win in the likes of and chess, and even learn games . Now, for the first time, according to DeepMind, an AI agent has shown it’s able to understand a wide range of gaming worlds and carry out tasks within them based on natural-language instructions.

The researchers teamed up with studios and publishers such as Hello Games (), Tuxedo Labs () and Coffee Stain ( and ) to train the Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent (SIMA) on nine games. The team also used four research environments, including one built in Unity in which agents are instructed to form sculptures using building blocks. This gave SIMA, described as “a generalist AI agent for 3D virtual settings,” a range of environments and settings to learn from, with a variety of graphics styles and perspectives (first- and third-person).

“Each game in SIMA’s portfolio opens up a new interactive world, including a range of skills to learn, from simple navigation and menu use, to mining resources, flying a spaceship or crafting a helmet,” the researchers wrote in a blog post. Learning to follow directions for such tasks in video game worlds could lead to more useful AI agents in any environment, they noted.

A flowchart detailing how Google DeepMind trained its SIMA AI agent. The team used gameplay video and matched that to keyboard and mouse inputs for the AI to learn from.

Google DeepMind

The researchers recorded humans playing the games and noted the keyboard and mouse inputs used to carry out actions. They used this information to train SIMA, which has “precise image-language mapping and a video model that predicts what will happen next on-screen.” The AI is able to comprehend a range of environments and carry out tasks to accomplish a certain goal.

The researchers say SIMA doesn’t need a game’s source code or API access — it works on commercial versions of a game. It also needs just two inputs: what’s shown on screen and directions from the user. Since it uses the same keyboard and mouse input method as a human, DeepMind claims SIMA can operate in nearly any virtual environment.

The agent is evaluated on hundreds of basic skills that can be carried out within 10 seconds or so across several categories, including navigation (“turn right”), object interaction (“pick up mushrooms”) and menu-based tasks, such as opening a map or crafting an item. Eventually, DeepMind hopes to be able to order agents to carry out more complex and multi-stage tasks based on natural-language prompts, such as “find resources and build a camp.”

In terms of performance, SIMA fared well based on a number of training criteria. The researchers trained the agent in one game (let’s say Goat Simulator 3, for the sake of clarity) and got it to play that same title, using that as a baseline for performance. A SIMA agent that was trained on all nine games performed far better than an agent that trained on just Goat Simulator 3.

Chart showing hte relative performance of Google DeepMind's SIMA AI agent based on varying training data.

Google DeepMind

What’s especially interesting is that a version of SIMA that was trained in the eight other games then played the other one performed nearly as well on average as an agent that trained just on the latter. “This ability to function in brand new environments highlights SIMA’s ability to generalize beyond its training,” DeepMind said. “This is a promising initial result, however more research is required for SIMA to perform at human levels in both seen and unseen games.”

For SIMA to be truly successful, though, language input is required. In tests where an agent wasn’t provided with language training or instructions, it (for instance) carried out the common action of gathering resources instead of walking where it was told to. In such cases, SIMA “behaves in an appropriate but aimless manner,” the researchers said. So, it’s not just us mere mortals. Artificial intelligence models sometimes need a little nudge to get a job done properly too.

DeepMind notes that this is early-stage research and that the results “show the potential to develop a new wave of generalist, language-driven AI agents.” The team expects the AI to become more versatile and generalizable as it’s exposed to more training environments. The researchers hope future versions of the agent will improve on SIMA’s understanding and its ability to carry out more complex tasks. “Ultimately, our research is building towards more general AI systems and agents that can understand and safely carry out a wide range of tasks in a way that is helpful to people online and in the real world,” DeepMind said.

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The Lenovo Legion Tab gaming tablet is going to available outside of China for the first time

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Technology manufacturer Lenovo has announced that the Lenovo Legion Tab Android gaming tablet is going to be available in select markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) in addition to Asia from March 2024.

The tablet, which was previously only available in China, is intended to bridge “the gap between PC and mobile gaming, offering a solution for gamers seeking a high-performance gaming experience that is both accessible and convenient,” according to a recent press release.

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The ideal robot vacuum and mop

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I miss having clean floors. I’ve been using a variety of Roombas over the years to help out with vacuuming, but ever since my wife and I had our second child in 2022, mopping has become an afterthought. And really, vacuuming can only clean your floor so much. I missed the shimmer of a mopped hardwood floor and the smell of Murphy Oil cleaner lingering in the air. Instead, I’ve been living with even more toys, crumbs and an assortment of bodily waste (which three cats contribute to) on my flooring and carpets. Don’t judge me (or any parent!), I’m tired.

When Engadget’s own Daniel Cooper extolled the virtues of iRobot’s first combination robot vacuum and mop, I was intrigued. I’d already grown to love my Roombas, especially after they gained the ability to dump their own waste into their charging docks. But for them to mop as well? That just sounded like an impossible dream. So when iRobot announced its second combination flagship, the Roomba Combo j9+, I leapt at the chance to test it. (Sorry, Dan.)

iRobot

The Roomba Combo j9+ is the ideal robotic vacuum and mop. It can easily suck up dirt while also wiping down your floors, and now it’s smart enough to refill its own water tank.

Pros

  • Excellent vacuuming performance
  • Mops well on its own
  • Great obstacle (and poop) detection
  • Clean base is well designed
  • Solid battery life
Cons

  • Expensive
  • Mopping pad isn’t great for sticky messes

$999 at Amazon

I’ve tested iRobot’s Braava Jet m6 mopping robot, which was announced in 2019 and was notable for being able to work alongside the Roomba s9+. But it would have cost me $499 and required clunky setup and maintenance. Plus, it was yet another device that needed to live somewhere in my home. It was ultimately easier for me to just run the Roomba and mop by hand whenever I needed to.

Roomba Combo j9+ with Clean Base
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

The Roomba Combo j9+ (and the j7+ before it) promises a far smoother experience: It can simultaneously vacuum and mop without much additional effort on your part. All you need to do is add some water and cleaning solution to its large reservoir (stored neatly in the redesigned Clean Base) and attach a mop pad. The company developed a unique mop arm that can automatically move up and down when needed, which helps to avoid leaving your carpets wet with residue.

Maintenance is fairly simple too: Wash the mop pads after a few runs, add more water when necessary, and make sure the Roomba’s bristles aren’t getting tangled with hair. Once the Clean Base is full, swapping its custom waste bags takes only a few seconds.

While we liked the Roomba Combo j7+ well enough, the new model solves some of the issues we encountered. It can automatically refill its water tank from the Clean Base, whereas the j7+ required you to manually add liquid to the robot. The Combo j9+ also offers stronger vacuum suctioning, which allows it to pick up smaller debris and complete jobs with fewer cleaning passes. Its new Clean Base also looks like a piece of furniture, with a wood top that you can use like a regular table. Its door swings open from the front and offers space for additional waste bags, accessories and a large reservoir for cleaning liquid.

Roomba Combo j9+ trash bag
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

iRobot claims the j9+ Clean Base allows for 30 days of hands-free mopping and 60-days of hands-free vacuuming, figures that seem exceedingly ambitious for most users. In my testing, I needed to look at the Roomba’s bristles at least once a week to deal with extraneous hair and random toys. And I definitely had to change the mop pad after two or three runs — after all, there’s no such thing as clean floors with a dirty mop.

Like the Roomba j7+ and s9 before it, as well as just about every Roomba ever made, you’ll want to clear your floors of small debris and potential hazards before starting a run. As a Roomba user since 2005, I’ve grown to accept that they’re not magical cleaning devices. You will need to put in a bit of work to help them run best. But the key is it’s still easier than manually vacuuming and sweeping your floors and it’s significantly cheaper than a cleaning service.

Thanks to iRobot’s OS 7, along with its camera and wide array of sensors, the Roomba Combo j9+ is far better at automatically mapping your home than previous models. After two runs, it tagged my kitchen, dining area and living room correctly, though I had to hop into the iRobot app to differentiate between my living room and family room. The mapping might seem unnecessary if you’re using a Roomba for the first time (you can also disable it entirely), but it is the heart of the vacuum’s routines. Instead of cleaning your entire home, you can program it to just clean the kitchen and dining room. If you connect your app to Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant, you can also use voice commands to direct your robot to specific locations.

After getting in hot water over its earlier plans to sell home mapping data, iRobot made an about face, gave up on that idea and started emphasizing privacy. The company says your mapping data is stored in the iRobot Cloud for processing (something you can also disable), which is a “secure” environment with “strict access controls, data encryption at rest and in transit, and periodic audits to ensure access is only given to those who require it.”

In 2020, MIT Technology Review reported that development versions of the Roomba J7 captured images of a woman sitting on a toilet and a child playing on the floor, which made their way to a library used by the labeling service Scale AI. iRobot said that the people using those devices had agreed to have their data captured — they weren’t regular consumers. One downside of using any cloud-connected device, especially one that aims to learn about your home, is that it’ll require sharing some data. It’s up to you to determine if that’s a worthwhile tradeoff for more convenience.

Roomba Combo j9+ mop pad
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

When it comes to cleaning, the Roomba Combo j9+ practically mesmerized me as it balanced vacuuming and mopping duties. At the start of every mopping job, the robot emerged from the Clean Base, turned around and studiously refilled its liquid tank. It’s like watching R2D2 go to the bathroom in reverse. Since it was starting every job on my wood floor, the Roomba then lowered its mopping pad from its top (it has a ‘lil mop hat!) and spun up its vacuum. Then, it proceeded to move forward, sucking up dirt while the scrubbing pad cleaned right behind, a virtuoso show of autonomous cleaning acrobatics.

If you don’t need a full cleaning, you could also use the iRobot app to have the j9+ just vacuum or mop (useful if you’ve just gone to town on your floors with a manual vac). The iRobot app lets you control the number of cleaning passes per job (one, two or “room-size”, which tackles large rooms once and smaller spaces two to three times), as well as the amount of water for every mopping job (eco, standard or ultra). You can also choose between low, medium and high suction options (which get progressively louder, as you’d expect).

Roomba Combo j9+
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

The iRobot app also lets you turn the Roomba’s obstacle detection on and off, though you’ll likely never want to disable it. In my testing, the Roomba Combo j9+ managed to avoid shoes, toys and other objects in its path. It also quietly came to a halt whenever my kids or cats stepped in front of it. iRobot’s promise to avoid pet poop (the aptly named Pet Owner Official Promise) also applies to the j9+. If the company’s poop-optimized computer vision algorithms somehow miss a dog or cat mess in your home, iRobot says it will send you a new Roomba at no charge within the first year of purchase. The company will only send out one replacement, though, and the guarantee doesn’t apply to non-solid waste (including diarrhea) or poop from another animal.

Before you ask, yes, I tested this. I placed a bit of cat poop in front of the j9+ and watched with worry as it approached the stinker. Thankfully, it stopped about six inches away and immediately backed off, as if it was terrified of the horrors it was about to inflict on itself. My floors were grateful, as was I.

Roomba Combo j9+ poop avoiding

The Roomba Combo j9+ performed admirably as a mop. It wasn’t always perfect, and I could occasionally make out streaks, but it still looked a lot better than when relying on mere vacuuming. After my first cleaning session, my floors beamed in the sunlight with a glow I hadn’t seen in months. And best of all, it required very little effort on my part, aside from a bit of tidying up. Even my notoriously picky mom noticed my floors sparkled more when they visited right after the Roomba worked its magic.

According to iRobot, the j9+ features twice the scrubbing performance of the j7+. While I couldn’t test the difference directly, I can confirm it’s a stubborn little bot when it comes to tough situations like dried litter paw prints and caked-in dirt. It managed to fully clean up those messes, but I’d be wary of letting it tackle anything worse, at least not without changing the mopping pad right afterwards. The j9+ may be able to avoid streaking poop around your house, but having your floors painted with a muddy mop can also be awful.

Roomba Combo j9+
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

A rogue j9+ could do plenty of damage around your home, since its battery life has also been improved. It typically cleared my first floor in around two hours without needing a charging break. At one point, it ran for two and a half hours without a sweat. That should make this Roomba pretty capable even if you have a large home. A full floor cleaning took between 30 minutes and an hour longer than the j7+, but that makes sense since it’s also mopping and being more diligent about vacuuming.

At $1,400, the Roomba Combo J9+ is too expensive for most people looking to buy their first robovac. Even when iRobot is running a sale (we’ve seen it drop the price down to $999), the Combo j9+ is pretty pricey, but that cut does make the j9+ more palatable for longtime Roomba owners who’ve learned how to fit the bot into their cleaning routines. iRobot isn’t completely out of line with its pricing: The competing Roborock S7 Max Ultra offers similar vacuum and mopping features and typically sells for $1,299 (it’s also on sale for $999 at the moment).

There’s still no robot vacuum equivalent to the Jetson’s Rosie the Robot, but the Roomba Combo j9+ is the closest we’ve got so far. iRobot has built upon its excellent robot vacuum platform to deliver something that can finally mop your floors without a sweat. And while it may seem a tad exorbitant, the cost may be worth it for parents who, like me, forgot what truly clean floors looked like.

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Google paid out over $10 million in bug bounties last year

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Google has announced that it paid out $10 million as part of its bug bounty program in 2023, its second-biggest year ever and bringing its total rewards since 2010 to $59 million.

Last year, the company’s $10 million was directed to a total of 632 researchers across 68 countries, with the highest payout coming in at a life-changing $113,337 as Google looked back its commitment to cybersecurity.

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Neil Young returns to Spotify after two-year protest

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Neil Young is back on Spotify after boycotting the platform over two years ago, he said in a new blog post. The Canadian singer ditched the platform over vaccine misinformation on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s returned because Rogan’s podcast is no longer exclusive on Spotify. “My decision comes as music services Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify,” he said – which isn’t really the stance he thinks it is.

When Young dropped his catalog from Spotify, he added he was fed up with Spotify’s “shitty” sound quality. Nothing has particularly changed there.

— Mat Smith

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Instead of its App Store.

Days after Apple started allowing iOS users in the EU to use third-party app stores, the company has announced more changes to how developers can distribute their apps. Most significantly, those who meet certain criteria can let users download apps from their websites. The Web Distribution option, available this spring, will effectively let developers bypass the app ecosystem entirely for their own apps. To be eligible, devs must opt in to new App Store rules and pay a fee for each user install after a certain threshold.

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It’s one of the more useful AI-powered features.

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AI-powered visual search features arrived to Ray-Ban’s Meta sunglasses last year with some impressive (and ) tricks — but a new one in the latest beta looks quite useful. It identifies landmarks and tells you more about them — a sort of tour guide for travelers. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth explained in a (Meta-owned) Threads post with a couple of sample images explaining why the Golden Gate Bridge is orange (easier to see in fog), a history of the painted ladies houses in San Francisco and more.

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Users can subscribe to third-party labeling services too.

Bluesky, the open-source Twitter alternative, is about to start testing one of its more ambitious ideas: allowing its users to run their own moderation services. The change will bring Bluesky users and developers together to work on custom labeling tools for the budding social media platform.

Bluesky is seeing a surge in growth after it removed its waitlist and opened to all users in February. The service has added about 2 million new users, bringing its total community to just over 5 million. It might need the extra moderation.

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Microsoft Teams could finally be a lot more mobile-friendly with this new update

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Using Microsoft Teams on a smartphone should soon be a lot more straightforward thanks to a new update from the company.

The video conferencing service has announced it is working on a new feature that will allow users a much simpler way to take and carry out calls on their device.

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The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 could be a massive upgrade in almost every way

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While a lot of Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 leaks suggest Samsung’s next big-screen foldable won’t be much of an upgrade, it’s sounding like the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 could be a huge departure from its predecessor, with upgrades to almost every element.

Numerous rumors have suggested this, with the latest being a detailed specs list from @TheGalox_ on X (via Phandroid). Most of these specs are things we’ve heard before, but hearing them from another source increases the likelihood that they’re accurate.



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