Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has denied reports that Microsoft is considering selling off its Xbox business. The Information reported in June that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood had been considering spinning out Xbox entirely, and then reported earlier this month that both execs have "more recently supported Sharma's plans to overhaul the unit."

"Xbox is not for sale," says Sharma in an interview with The New York Times. "We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that."

It appears that Nadella and Hood have fav …

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Microsoft is officially announcing its new Xbox Mythic Achievements today, and they're already available for Xbox Insiders to test. Mythic Achievements work a lot like Sony's PlayStation Platinum trophies and are unlocked once you've earned every original achievement for a game.

"Mythic Achievements have already been added to eligible games you completed in the past, including Xbox 360 titles," says the Xbox team. "The next time you visit your profile, you may discover that some of your favorite games have already reached Mythic status."

Xbox profiles will soon include a new gaming tab that lets you track Gamerscore milestones and Mythic A …

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Today, the Firefox 157 update will roll out a redesign of the web browser across desktop and mobile platforms. The team that made it hopes it will help expand the browser's audience beyond privacy-conscious techies and open-web or open source advocates to a broader audience who might simply pick the browser because they prefer its user experience over competitors like Chrome, Edge, and Safari.

In advance of the redesign's launch, I spent half an hour chatting with Mozilla's head of Firefox, Ajit Varma, about Firefox's current market position and product strategy, and what barriers or opportunities there are for gaining ground in a Chromium-dominated landscape.

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NASA announced on Monday that it will exercise options to purchase two additional flights on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, as well as financially support the company in its efforts to return the crewed vehicle to flight and find a new rocket after the Atlas V vehicle retires.

The space agency's announcement confirms reporting by Ars Technica earlier this month on NASA's plans to maintain access to low-Earth orbit after the impending retirement of SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle.

"I do not think it's a secret that SpaceX intends to sunset older platforms like Falcon and Dragon as they concentrate on their next-generation capability, Starship," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a news conference on Monday afternoon.

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SpaceX's Starship rocket thundered into the sky over South Texas early Monday. It was the 14th test flight of the world's most powerful launch vehicle. This time, however, the rocket's massive upper stage squeezed out some extra oomph from its Raptor engines and accelerated to orbital velocity.

On all of Starship's previous flights, SpaceX intentionally dialed back the full capability of the rocket to fly a suborbital trajectory, slow enough for Earth's gravity to pull the vehicle back into the atmosphere before it could complete a full lap around the planet. After several successful suborbital flights in a row, SpaceX officials decided this launch should go all the way to low-Earth orbit. And it did.

What's more, SpaceX packed 26 of the company's newest generation of Starlink broadband satellites into the rocket's cargo bay. One by one, the flat-packed satellites—too large to fit inside SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket—were released from Starship's payload deployer using a system of pulleys and cables to eject the satellites overboard like a Pez dispenser spits out candy.

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SpaceX is gearing up for a monumental flight today that's sure to be closely watched by Amazon. If successful, SpaceX will deploy its first Starlink V3 satellites, which tout meaningful upgrades to the ever-expanding Starlink constellation. The 26 satellites will be riding atop Starship, which SpaceX will also attempt to deploy into Earth orbit for the first time. The mission arrives amid Amazon's ongoing setbacks with launch partners that are keeping its own Leo satellites grounded, and falling further behind its plan to offer a meaningful rival to Elon Musk's space internet service.

It's been 12 weeks since Amazon's last successful Leo de …

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The Trump administration is seeking to join Elon Musk’s appeal against a €120 million EU fine of the billionaire’s social media platform X, the latest escalation in the transatlantic clash over Brussels’ efforts to rein in US tech companies.

The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an application to intervene in a pair of cases brought by Musk and X seeking annulment of the penalty, which will be heard at the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg.

“The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction,” assistant attorney general Brett Shumate said.

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For a long time, sleep research has treated the cerebral cortex as a passive follower reacting to signals from the deep brain. “Usually, sleep is associated with being controlled by subcortical regions,” said Geoffrey Terral, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

The cortex is where the slow rhythms of deep sleep can be seen, but researchers assumed the signals that triggered them originated elsewhere. In a recent Nature study, Terral and Renata Batista-Brito, who runs the lab, report a population of cortical cells that challenges that assumption.

These cortical cells make up only around one percent of the cortex's inhibitory neurons, and switching them on in a mouse puts the animal to sleep. “What our work shows is that the cortex can not only see this rhythm but also initiate it by itself, and this is sufficient to promote sleep,” Terral said.

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