What’s the most cliche possible gift you can give a relative? A digital photo frame, displaying a rotating slideshow of family photos. Now Aura has completely refreshed this product space with its gorgeous Aura Ink frame, which uses e-ink to create a display that doesn’t even look digital.
Digital frames have always been so popular (yet mostly disappointing) because there’s an undeniable allure to the idea of them — it feels like magic to imagine hanging artwork on your wall that you can change depending on your mood. In practice, these devices usually look clunky. You need to plug them in and figure out how to hide a bulky cord, and does anyone even want another bright screen in their home anyway? This problem was already on the Aura founders’ minds when they started the company 10 years ago, but color e-ink wasn’t feasible until now to use in a digital frame.
“E-ink is definitely next level,” co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen told TechCrunch. “We have people tell us that they hung it up, had friends over, and their friends were like, ‘How did you print that picture so quickly?’”
E-ink is the same technology that you see on e-readers, which lets you read a book without feeling the same strain that you get from staring at an LED screen for too long. But there aren’t that many color e-ink devices on the market aside from the Kindle Colorsoft, because the company that manufactures e-ink displays can only currently produce six colors: red, blue, green, yellow, white, and black.
It’s hard to imagine what your favorite family portraits and travel photos would look like with only six colors. But Aura has created a dithering algorithm — a technique that blends a limited color palette into patterns the eye reads as smooth gradients — that renders images close enough to the originals that its e-ink frame could finally go to market.
“I’m learning color theory from our chief scientists, and as far as I understand it, there’s not a good definition for how many colors this represents well,” Jensen said. “It’s all sort of theoretical and comes down to how people perceive it. Everyone’s a little different, so it’s actually taken a lot of testing with a lot of people in a lot of different spaces and different lighting conditions in order to get where we are today.”
All of Aura’s frames connect to the Aura app, which is where you can upload photos from your phone, web, email, iCloud, or Google Photos. I found the process to be pretty user-friendly — easy enough for a less tech-savvy relative to navigate, which matters for a product that lives or dies on whether non-technical users will actually set it up.
The app also has social features, so if your sister has a great new photo of her baby, she can upload it to your shared library and it will appear on your frame. (I didn’t try this, since I don’t know anyone else with an Aura frame, but if I did, I would probably use this feature to prank my family members with ridiculous photos. Am I a bad person?)
In addition to the 13.3-inch Ink frame, Aura also sent me its more classic, 12-inch LED Aspen frame as a point of comparison. But the LED frame surprised me with how good it looks in its own right (it feels like the Prada of digital frames). The lighting is about as unobtrusive as an LED screen can be, and it’s anti-glare, which makes the frame look way more premium. Aura’s frames also benefit by surrounding the LED screen with a paper-like matting display, which helps trick the eye into reading it as a printed photograph.
Aura says it designed its dithering algorithm for portraits of people, since users tend to highlight family photos. I’m a rebel, so I decided to load my frames with travel photos. When comparing the same photo on the Ink and the Aspen, it’s very clear that the colors aren’t exact, but as a digital photographer who isn’t that picky, I didn’t care very much. The distorted color palette almost seems like an artistic choice, even if I know it’s reflective of a technological limitation. But when I showed the two Aura frames to an analog film photographer who painstakingly studies the small color aberrations in his darkroom prints, he thought that the Ink frame needed some work. I disagree, but if you look at the photos below and are bothered that the white balance isn’t perfectly consistent across each of the three image from my phone, then you might not like the Ink frame.
By default, the Ink frame changes photos once per day, and it will usually do this change in the middle of the night, when you’re least likely to be paying attention. If you manually change the pictures via the app, do not be alarmed if the frame looks like it’s glitching — it takes about a minute for the hardware to run the dithering process and render the six-color, e-ink version of your image.
I am very bad with anything involving hammers and nails — all of the art in my apartment is hung up using Command strips — but mounting hardware that Aura includes feels sturdy. It’s easy to take the frame on and off the wall, but you probably only will need to take it down to charge the frame via USB-C once per month. (When the lights are off or you’re not in the room, the display will go to sleep, helping save battery.) I don’t think that the Ink frame looks too out of place, but if it does, maybe it’s because it’s surrounded by art made in other mediums. Or maybe it’s the black frame. Or I did a bad job at placement. Look, I can’t help that I added the Ink frame to a gallery wall that I assembled three years ago!

WASHINGTON — The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is once again making headlines, this week for turning green.
The Washington, D.C. landmark was refilled with water earlier this month after President Trump had its neutral grey bottom repainted “American flag blue.” The multi-million dollar project produced subtle results in the eyes of many observers, even as Trump and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum — whose agency managed the renovation — touted its success.
In recent days, however, the pool has taken on a verdant hue — the result of algae blooms that experts say are to be expected in these conditions.
“It’s called ‘New Pond Syndrome,'” says Steve Goodale, a Canadian swimming pool specialist known online as “Swimming Pool Steve.” “It’s a known thing that happens when you take a natural, clear body of water like this that sits in an open air environment and you try to start it up, very often you end up with green water almost immediately.”
Goodale says the process took longer — a matter of days — to unfold in this case likely due to the sheer size of the pool, which measures 2,030 feet long and has a surface area of approximately 338,000 square feet.
“Excellent conditions” for algae growth
Rosalina Stancheva Christova, a professor of aquatic ecology at George Mason University in Virginia, took water samples from the pool on Tuesday. She confirmed the algae belongs to the genus Desmodesmus, which she said is “growing in excessive amounts” but is not toxic or harmful.
Christova says this kind of common green algae is found all over the region, especially this time of year. The reflecting pool in particular provides “excellent conditions” for algae growth, she said: shallow, stagnant water, strong sunlight and no shade.
“It could happen every single summer,” she added. “But it seems that the disturbance of the pond during the renovations [is] accelerating this process.”
Christova said last month’s renovations may have affected the balance of nutrients in the pool, potentially accelerating the algae blooms. Goodale similarly views the resurfacing as one of several contributing factors.
“The new, darker interior surface is going to absorb more sunlight,” Goodale says. “It is going to result in water that’s warmer, and that ultimately is going to lead to more prolific algae growth.”
The Trump administration has said the algae came from residual material in supply lines that had lain dormant for weeks. Their growth was likely exacerbated by the extreme temperatures that hit D.C. last week, bringing heat index values to 95 degrees and above.
Algae has resurfaced in the reflecting pool periodically over the years — including immediately after it reopened from its last major renovation in 2012, forcing the National Park Service to drain it, refill it and recalibrate its ozone level. And in 2019, crews had to drain four million gallons from the pool to fix a broken water line that had algae growing in it.
An Interior Department spokesperson told NPR over email that algae and other contaminants have “long plagued the Reflecting Pool since 1922,” pointing to the Obama-era renovation as an example.
“Unlike under Obama and Biden, the National Park Service is actually maintaining the beautifully completed Reflecting Pool,” they added.
Responding with tiny bubbles and big vacuums
The Trump administration is using a mix of mitigation strategies, including pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to kill the algae.
The Interior Department says hydrogen peroxide is a “milder treatment than chlorine and is used in spas and specialty pools like natural swimming pools,” adding “there are no harmful side effects to marine life or to the environment.”
Workers are also deploying what the department calls “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to neutralize algae and other pathogens in the pool. The department says that approach is validated by several universities and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.
Those ozone bubbles are so tiny the human eye can’t even see them, Goodale says.
“The best way to describe it is that the bubbles are neutrally buoyant, so they won’t just rise to the surface and disappear readily,” he explains. “They can last for weeks, if not months in the water, doing their oxidizing thing and keeping the algae at bay.”
‘A monumental effort’
Goodale says it’s more complicated than treating the average backyard swimming pool, since the reflecting pool — despite its name — is actually more akin to a “manmade shallow lake.” He says it’s hard to predict just how long it will take to completely solve the algae problem, calling it “a monumental effort, literally.”
The Interior Department posted on X Wednesday that the nanobubble technology had “very effectively killed the algae,” and National Park Service crews would spend several days vacuuming up the dead algae from the bottom of the pool.
But as of Thursday morning, much of the pool — especially in the center — was still bright green.
Work continued on both ends of the pool. Nanobubble machines deposited their tubes into the water, as mobile vacuuming systems known as “trash pumps” hummed loudly from the shore. Handfuls of workers stood either in the pool or on the edge maneuvering long-handled vacuums back and forth. Their contents, including pistachio-colored water, poured out of hoses laying in the nearby grass.
The work zones were marked off by orange cones, but passersby walking the length of the pool appeared relatively unfazed. Some stopped to peer down and snap pictures of the water itself — including sections of paint that had visibly peeled off — while others were more focused on getting a photo of the Washington Monument in the background.
Loay Hidmi was walking deliberately along the edge of the pool closest to the Lincoln Memorial, hands clasped behind his back, looking over the ledge. The relatively new D.C. resident is a civil engineer who specializes in water treatment, and has been coming by the pool all week to see the progress for himself. He estimates it’s about 80% of the way there.
“I’m taking pictures of it … for the last week and I can see the gradual change,” he said. “So I’m hopeful. But we’ll have to see if it gets sustained.”
What happens next?
Hidmi worries that the algae could come back, given the favorable conditions posed by the sunny, shallow pool.
He acknowledges that’s mostly an aesthetic concern, given how much the administration has just spent on repainting the pool, but says it also raises questions about their process.
“In water systems, when you fix something, you need to look at the step before it and the step after,” he said.
Goodale agrees. He says that when a water system is taken offline, the pipes still remain full of water — “they don’t just gravity-drain away” — and need to be flushed out before any refilling. And he says eliminating algae is no substitute for dealing with underlying filtration issues.
“That’s like the equivalent of mowing the lawn when perhaps it needs to be something else that addresses the source nitrates and phosphorus, so that it’s more like pulling the weeds out by the root,” he says.
In the meantime, Christova, the algae expert, would like to see the water monitored weekly.
“If we don’t have any control over algal growth, we don’t know what is growing,” she said, adding that not all types of algae are as harmless as the one currently blooming in the pool.
When asked about plans for maintenance and algae prevention, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told NPR: “Thanks to President Trump, new lining and industrial grade materials will permanently seal the Reflecting Pool, which previously leaked 16 million gallons per year and wasted countless taxpayer dollars.”
Even after the Obama-era renovation, the reflecting pool suffered from broken pipes and water leaks requiring costly refills, according to a Department of the Interior report from fiscal year 2023. It called for new expansion joints, supply and return lines with thicker walls, saying “an improved distribution system will ensure the water can be circulated through the treatment plant, filtered, and treated with ozone.”
This latest renovation does not appear to have addressed the pipe problems, even though it did involve replacing failing expansion joints, resealing the pool, removing truckloads of garbage and “fixing the water system, drainage and so much more,” as Trump wrote on Truth Social in May.
Along the way, the cost of the project grew from Trump’s initial $2 million price tag to at least $14 million. Federal contract records show the government is paying $1.7 million to an Ohio-based company for the nanobubble technology alone.
“The scope of the Project has been greatly enlarged as we became involved because we realized how important it would be to Washington, D.C., and the record number of visitors coming to our now very safe Capital for all of the upcoming events in celebration of our 250th Anniversary,” Trump wrote.

Imitation remains the highest form of flattery. After Samsung won plaudits for the Exynos 2600’s novel Heat Path Block (HPB) thermal technology, Qualcomm, whose recent chips iterations have resembled a veritable inferno when it comes to their runaway heat issues, now appears to be flattering Samsung by copying its HPB tech for the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, albeit sloppily so.
Qualcomm appears to be trying to tame the furnace-like credentials of its Snapdragon chips by emulating Samsung’s most innovative thermal solution
While clarifying that Qualcomm has prepared two and not six versions of its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro chip for the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S27 series, the tipster Reptalica has just dropped a bombshell of sorts: Qualcomm’s flagship chip has implemented a version of Exynos 2600’s HPB tech, though the implementation “isn’t as effective.”
For the benefit of those who might not be aware, Exynos 2600 features a copper-based heat sink, dubbed Heat Path Block, which remains in direct contact with the AP.
Of course, the upcoming Exynos 2700 is expected to sport a new thermal solution, called Side-by-Side (SbS), where individual dies for the AP and the DRAM are stacked horizontally, and a copper-based heat sink, called Heat Path Block or HPB, is placed on top.
Meanwhile, based on a previous estimate, the non-binned version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro can cost upwards of $300. This means that only the most premium of smartphones, such as the Galaxy S27 Ultra, will be able to sport the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, while others will either opt for the vanilla Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 or a binned version.

The Trump administration’s push to rein in Anthropic PBC, outlined in a recent Commerce Department order, relies on an unprecedented use of export control laws and raises legal questions about whether the US can dictate who can access artificial intelligence systems.
In ordering Anthropic to obtain US approval for foreign nationals to use its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick expanded the boundaries of laws governing transfers of sensitive technology to target the mere usage of cutting-edge AI models. That’s fueling concerns among developers and their customers about the government’s willingness to intervene in their operations on national security grounds.

Federal immigration officers often use facial recognition technology to identify immigrants in the field. Now, a newly revealed document from the Department of Homeland Security outlines plans to give local police working on its behalf the same type of technology.
The document, first reported earlier this month by the tech news outlet 404 media, is a Privacy Threshold Analysis, which is essentially a federal report assessing whether the privacy implications of a tool warrant further government study.
The tool in question is a mobile app called the ICE Task Force Module, which allows local police to scan the faces of people they stop in their communities.
The app then compares the facial scan against more than 250 million government records. Those include the State Department’s Visa records and records from the Traveler Verification Service, used by the Transportation Security Administration at airports to verify identities on international flights.
Once police scan a person’s face, the app then instructs an officer either to “not detain or arrest,” or it gives the officer a reference code to use to obtain more information from ICE.
The photos captured by the app are then stored in an internal DHS system for 15 years, the document states.
DHS declined to provide NPR with more insight about the app and how it is used. In a statement, the agency said ICE is committed to ensuring that the local police who partner with them have the tools needed to support ICE’s mass deportation mission.
Those local officers, called “ICE non-federal law enforcement officers” in the document, are likely participants in the federal 287(g) program. A subset of that program, the Task Force Model, gives local police the authority to arrest immigrants on ICE’s behalf during their routine police duties. There are around 1,300 police agencies participating in the Task Force Model nationwide.
The DHS analysis “raises more questions than I think it answers,” says Clare Garvie, deputy director of the Technology Law and Policy Program at New York University School of Law’s Policing Project.
For one, the document says the app launched last September, which suggests police are already using it.
It also seems to work similarly to Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app that ICE and officers with Customs and Border Protection already use, but it’s unclear if the new app uses the same technology or something entirely its own.
Garvie says there are also questions about how and when police will deploy the app.
“It’s unclear to me whether a pre-existing stop based on some level of suspicion is required before law enforcement can use this app,” Garvie says. “Can they walk around taking photos of whoever as sort of a dragnet way to attempt to identify individuals who might be in the country unlawfully?”
That sort of surveillance already appears to be happening at the federal level: In places like Minnesota and Maine, community members observing ICE activity reported that federal immigration officers would take photos of their faces and license plates. They said the officers would often know personal information about them, including their names and where they live.
Privacy experts told NPR that allowing local police to conduct similar surveillance could create a chilling effect on freedom of speech, if people begin to worry they’ll face repercussions for attending protests, for instance, or for legally observing ICE activity in their communities.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin acknowledged at a congressional hearing this month that the agency has used facial recognition technology on protesters, and had been able to identify people who were present at protests in Oregon that were also at the recent protests outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, N.J.
What’s more, Garvie says, facial recognition technology is not always accurate, and there have been cases of people detained by ICE who were wrongly identified by the technology.
Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says giving police this capability magnifies its potential problems.
“This kind of technology which can impact individual rights, when it’s scaled, it can have potentially very, very large effects affecting lots and lots of people,” he says. “It’s like a Bill of Rights disaster pretty much waiting to happen.”
In its statement to NPR, DHS said its law enforcement methods are constitutional.
“Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology to investigate criminal activity and support law enforcement efforts while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests,” the statement said.
But Eddington says U.S. citizens will get caught up in this surveillance. Officers conducting immigration enforcement, whether they are federal or local, will not know a person’s citizenship status before they conduct a scan.
“It is conceivable that a photo taken by an ICE non-federal law enforcement officer using the TFM mobile application could be that of someone other than a removable individual, including U.S. citizens,” the DHS document states.
Because every photo taken through the app is kept for 15 years, Eddington says that suggests a long-term government record of citizens and immigrants alike.
The administration has repeatedly denied the existence of a database of protesters, despite instances in which federal agents have told community members observing them that their photo will end up in a database of “domestic terrorists.”
However, earlier this month, NPR reported on a previously unpublished letter sent to members of Congress in which former acting ICE director Todd Lyons indicates the agency gives itself wide latitude to collect information on the people its officers encounter.
“This app wouldn’t work if they didn’t have databases to pull people’s pictures from and compare against,” says Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy. “They’re playing semantics. They’re certainly not being forthright. You know, do they have a database of protesters? Maybe they don’t call it that.”
He says allowing police to use this technology to do immigration enforcement is a significant expansion of ICE’s operations.