Comprehensive sleep, recovery and health tracking without a smartwatch appeals, but cost and fit won’t suit everyone

Smart rings are having a bit of a moment with the Oura seen adorning the fingers of celebrities and elite sportspeople alike. It promises the health-tracking features of a smartwatch squeezed into a much smaller, less techie device focused on sleep, recovery and resilience. But can it deliver for regular people, too?

Now several years into its third iteration, the Oura Gen 3 is the most popular smart ring on the market, available in a range of attractive colours, metals and sizes. It looks and feels like an attractive piece of jewellery, and is priced accordingly, costing from £299 (€329/$299) and requiring a £6-a-month subscription on top. Keeping up with celebrity crazes has never been cheap.

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Russian-born billionaire detained last month in France denies app is ‘anarchic paradise’

The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, under investigation in France , has said that French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him, calling the arrest ‘“misguided”.

Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early on Friday in his first public comments since his detention last month, denied any suggestion the app was an “anarchic paradise”.

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Transmissions, which plots the story of Joy Division and New Order, returns for a second run. Plus: five of the best sci-fi podcasts

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In case you missed it, Serial’s Sarah Koenig was recently interviewed by Fiona Sturges for the Guardian, on 10 years of Serial. It was an intriguing interview about how web sleuths had changed Koenig’s own view of the Adnan Syed case that made her podcast such a huge hit back in 2014. But one section struck me as pretty surprising, if not totally shocking. Good friends and family, Koenig said – “like, even my siblings” – had asked her whether its fourth series, on Guantánamo Bay, had been released yet (it came out in March). “We can speculate about the topic and the quality of it, but I think it’s also just the [pod] universe is completely different,” she added. “There are so many choices. We are in a sea of podcasts.”

Serial season four isn’t a whodunnit – Serial hasn’t really done that since its inception, and that first series that hinged on whether Syed had killed his high-school sweetheart Hae Min Lee. Successive outings have also leaned less on the serialisation you might assume from the title, with the Guantánamo series focusing instead on somewhat interlinked stories of life at the notorious US prison camp, rather than one overarching, unfurling narrative. In many ways, it’s kind of become a podcast Ship of Theseus, its elements slowly changing with each season. Still, it’s slightly sad to think that some people may have abandoned it just because it isn’t that same show it was at that very specific moment in time, pre-true crime boom, rather than something that has changed and evolved over a decade. Plus, the Guantánamo series is pretty solid (although, beware – episode eight in particular comes with some deeply upsetting details of sexual assault).

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Former president offers blank cheque to coal and oil, and cosies up to billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel

The US presidential election in November is critical for many reasons. At stake is not only the survival of American democracy, but also sound stewardship of the economy, with far-reaching implications for the rest of the world.

American voters face a choice not only between different policies, but between different policy objectives. While the vice-president, Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has yet to detail her economic agenda fully, she probably would preserve the central tenets of Joe Biden ’s programme, which include strong policies to maintain competition, preserve the environment (including reducing greenhouse gas emissions), reduce the cost of living, maintain growth, enhance national economic sovereignty and resilience and mitigate inequality.

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Shoppers can use technology to advise them on outfit choices based on their body shape and style preferences

Marks & Spencer is using artificial intelligence to advise shoppers on their outfit choices based on their body shape and style preferences, as part of efforts to increase online sales.

The 130-year-old retailer is using the technology to personalise consumers’ online experience, and suggest items to buy.

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Platform will ensure algorithms do not keep pushing similar content to young viewers, even though it does not breach guidelines

YouTube is to stop recommending videos to teenagers that idealise specific fitness levels, body weights or physical features, after experts warned such content could be harmful if viewed repeatedly.

The platform will still allow 13- to 17-year-olds to view the videos, but its algorithms will not push young users down related content “ rabbit holes ” afterwards.

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Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, I and many others have been looking for alternatives. Who wants to share a platform with the likes of Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson?

I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.

It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon , but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.

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Annual survey highlights growing concern about platform content and trust in information disseminated

More than a quarter of advertisers are planning to cut spending on Elon Musk’s X over concerns about the social media platform’s content and trust in the information disseminated, according to new global research.

Advertising revenue flowing to X has been in freefall since Musk bought the site, then known as Twitter, for $44bn (£38bn) in October 2022 , claiming it had not lived up to its potential as a platform for “free speech”.

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Fitted with robotic arms and navigation cameras, the rovers are being developed for mooted missions to the moon and Mars

Two space rover prototypes that could be used to help search for life on Mars are being trialled at a quarry in Bedfordshire. The robots are being put through their paces by the European aerospace giant Airbus, which is considering using the technology to aid missions to the moon.

A four-wheeled rover, named Codi, features navigation cameras and a robotic arm that it can use to collect rocks sealed in small tubes without the need of a human operator.

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