BREAKING: “VIVO STARLINK” has started appearing on phones in Brazil 🇧🇷 Many Vivo users are reporting that the “VIVO STARLINK” network name is appearing on their devices as the Brazilian carrier intensifies Direct-to-Cell testing with @Starlink. According to Tecnoblog, Vivo is preparing a major partnership announcement with Starlink in the coming months. The service would allow compatible smartphones to connect directly to Starlink satellites in remote areas without 4G or 5G coverage. Vivo and Starlink have not officially announced the partnership yet.

Congratulations to vivo on the new vivo X500 Pro Series! 🎉 Powered by @MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro, with 2x Arm C2-Ultra + 6x C2-Pro CPU cores and Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU, the X500 Pro brings next-gen performance and efficiency to OriginOS 7 — enabling seamless multitasking, responsive experiences and agentic AI.    With 15% higher CPU performance and 61% lower power consumption, alongside 27% higher peak GPU performance, 24% lower power at peak performance and 18% higher ray-tracing performance. 👏

A team from Zhejiang University and vivo has introduced FlashRelight, an AI system that can relight portrait videos. It's more than just applying a filter. The goal is to change the lighting while preserving a person's identity, expression, and motion. FlashRelight takes a two-stage approach: First, a delighting model suppresses the original lighting and shadows. Then, a relighting model generates new dynamic lighting across the video. You can control the lighting in three ways: • Envmap sequences: Precise frame-level lighting control. • Text prompts: Describe color, direction, movement, and flicker. • Reference videos: Transfer lighting effects from another video. The team built a hybrid dataset with 34k+ paired videos: • ~24K synthesized from static OLAT lighting data • 10k+ generated by Wan2.2 This gives the model varied lighting and motion without costly dynamic light-stage capture. On envmap-based relighting, FlashRelight outperformed all baselines across all five evaluation metric For short videos, ads, or virtual-human content, this could make it easier to adjust a portrait’s lighting in post-production.

FULL INTERVIEW: Andrei Georgescu's company Vivodyne is growing human tissue to test drugs without testing people. He explains why 19/20 drugs fail, how human tissue could replace animal testing, and what this technology could mean for personalized medicine. 01:45 The breakthrough that made large-scale human tissue possible 05:40 Why animal testing fails to translate to humans 07:30 The ethical limits of growing human tissue 09:00 The FDA is pushing alternatives to animal testing 09:40 Using human tissue for personalized medicine 10:00 Growing thousands of copies of a patient’s tissue