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Jess Weatherbed

Jess Weatherbed

News Reporter

Jess Weatherbed is a news writer, and part of The Verge UK-based team. While passionate about the future of technology, she originally trained as a prosthetics makeup and wig-making technician, fuelled by a love of animatronics and practical movie effects.

Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews across computing, PC gaming and streaming. Additional bylines can be found at GamesRadar, PCGamer, Creative Bloq and Space.com.

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Court rejects TikTok’s effort to skirt EU competition rules.

The EU’s General Court has ruled that TikTok parent company ByteDance meets the required user threshold to be a “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act.

TikTok has claimed it wasn’t valuable enough, and failed to obtain interim measures to avoid having to comply with DMA rules while it appealed the designation. The decision can still be appealed to the European Court of Justice.


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Hyperkin’s modern Xbox ‘Controller S’ remake ships in August.

Pre-orders are available for the Hyperkin DuchesS, which re-imagines Microsoft’s Xbox Controller S (the one that replaced the console's original “The Duke” gamepad) for Xbox One and Series X / S consoles, and PC.

The wired controller is available in White or Black variants, both priced at $49.99. Hyperkin says pre-orders will ship on August 21st.


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Watch this ping-pong-playing droid flex its un-robotic moves.

IHMC showcased improvements to its Nadia robot that lower the latency of its VR-controlled inputs enough to play table tennis against a human.

The ultimate design goal for Nadia — named after famed gymnast Nadia Comăneci — is to achieve a human range-of-motion, having demonstrated its boxing capabilities last year in a Real Steel-like fashion.


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AMD’s Zen 5 processors will arrive on July 31st.

There are four CPUs in the new Ryzen 9000 series, which includes the beastly 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X flagship. Pricing still hasn’t been disclosed, but it’s currently expected to align with the Zen 4 series chips.


A lineup of the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors, alongside a July 31st release date.
Image: AMD