Since its launch on September 30, OpenAI’s Sora app has dominated the iOS App Store charts, thanks to its easy breezy AI video generation and an initially loose interpretation of copyright laws. On Friday, its reign came to an end. Your new champion is … Dave’s Hot Chicken.

Yes! Not ChatGPT or Gemini or Threads or any of the other usual suspects. Dave’s Hot Chicken now rules over the App Store, where its slack-beaked, bug-eyed mascot icon expresses appropriate surprise at its ascent. How did it do it? How did it break the grasp of OpenAI’s golem TikTok? With something people love even more than large language models: free food.

“They’re running a promotion for free sliders in celebration of Drake’s birthday,” says Adam Blacker, PR director of the app analytics firm Apptopia. “Free food always gets the downloads flowing.”

If you’re wondering what Drake has to do with any of this, he invested in the fast casual restaurant chain in 2021, and presumably made a mint when the company sold a majority stake to private equity firm Roark Capital for a reported $1 billion. For the third consecutive year, the company gave away one (1) free slider to anyone who has downloaded the app in honor of Drake’s birthday. (The rapper and Raptors fan turns 39 today; the giveaway was Thursday.)

“We’re celebrating a celebrity that’s popular and that’s currently relevant, and also getting food in people’s mouths,” says Dave’s Hot Chicken chief technology officer Leon Davoyan.

And it truly is a lot of people. On a typical week, Davoyan says, Dave’s sees between 20,000 and 25,000 new sign-ups to its loyalty database. On Thursday alone the promotion drove 343,531 new accounts—a more than 10 percent bump to the brand’s overall membership in a single day, according to the CTO.

It was enough to knock Sora out of the top slot for the first time since October 3, an impressive stretch for an app that’s still invite-only. In the first 23 days since it launched, Sora racked up 3.2 million iOS downloads in the US, according to app analytics company Sensor Tower. That’s a much faster pace than even ChatGPT, which while similarly viral notched 2.3 million US downloads in the same time. (Sora is not yet available in the Google Play Store, but it’s incoming.) OpenAI declined to comment.

While Sora is likely to reclaim the top spot after the Drake promotion dies down, Dave’s Hot Chicken should continue reaping the benefits of its giveaway. Last year, according to Sensor Tower, downloads of the app in the four weeks following the same marketing push were more than 50 percent higher than the month leading up to it. All those free sandwiches are worth the long-term gains.

In the world of high-end gaming headsets, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless (8/10, WIRED Recommends) stands out with an impressive feature set and excellent audio. Right now, you can pick up the wireless model for just $300 from Amazon, an $80 discount off the usual price. That might sound like a lot for gaming headphones, but these offer quite a lot for the price.

This luxurious gaming headset is a great pick for daily gamers who want excellent sound quality and high-end comfort. They have big drivers that make sounds in-game pop, and an excellent mic with noise-canceling so good your friends won’t even know you have a dog. They’re super comfortable, with the SteelSeries signature ski-goggle strap to take the pressure off your head.

While they’re built for gaming, they also sound great listening to music or watching movies. They have a nice, punchy sound profile and spatial audio support for a more immersive experience. If you’re on a PC, the SteelSeries GG software gives you a ton of options for balancing your audio across multiple sources, and you can even set individual EQ profiles for different applications.

By including a USB DAC for wireless connectivity, the Arctis Nova Pro can achieve some unique and compelling features not found on other headsets. The range is impressive, thanks to more room for the antenna and power than you’d find in a smaller USB dongle. You can adjust the volume and audio mix from a generous knob on the front, and it has multiple audio inputs for switching between consoles.

Best of all, the hub can charge a spare battery for the headset, giving you essentially infinite run time as long as you’re seated at the computer. When you run down the 25 or so hours on one charge, just swap out the battery and the headset will reconnect and pick up where you left off. It’s the perfect feature for anyone with battery concerns, but don’t worry, you can also charge the headset via USB-C directly.

At $300, these aren’t cheap, and there are better gaming headsets for single-console or casual gamers, as well as an even more expensive model, but I think these are a great middle ground for anyone with a budget and a Steam backlog.

New research, led by Queen Mary University of London, demonstrates that a double-layer electrode design, guided by fundamental science through operando imaging, shows remarkable improvements in the cyclic stability and fast-charging performance of automotive batteries, with strong potential to reduce costs by 20–30%.

The research, published today in Nature Nanotechnology, was led by Dr. Xuekun Lu, Senior Lecturer in Green Energy at Queen Mary University of London.

In the study, the researchers introduce an evidence-guided double-layer design for silicon-based composite electrodes to tackle key challenges in the Si-based electrode— a breakthrough with strong potential for next-generation high-performance batteries.

The evolution of automotive batteries has been driven by ever-increasing demand for driving range and charging speed since EVs took off 15 years ago. Silicon electrodes can provide 10 times higher theoretical capacity and faster charging, but their large-scale deployment is held back by substantial volume changes of up to 300% during charge/discharge cycles. This means they degrade quickly and don’t last long.

Assisted by multiscale multimodal operando imaging techniques, this research reveals unprecedented insights into the electro-chemo-mechanical processes of the graphite/silicon composite electrodes. Guided by these improved mechanistic understandings, a novel double-layer architecture is proposed, which addresses key challenges in material design, exhibiting significantly higher capacity and lower degradation compared to conventional formulations.

Dr. Xuekun Lu, who led the study, said, “In this study, for the first time, we visualize the interplay between microstructural design and electro-chemo-mechanical performance across length scales—from single particle to full electrode—by integrating multimodal operando imaging techniques.

“This study opens new avenues for innovating 3D composite electrode architectures, pushing the boundaries of energy density, cycle life, and charging speed in automotive batteries, and thereby accelerating large-scale EV adoption.”

Professor David Greenwood, CEO of the WMG High Value Manufacturing Catapult Center commented, “High silicon anodes are an important technology pathway for high energy density batteries in applications like automotive. This study offers a much deeper understanding of the way in which their microstructure affects their performance and degradation, and will provide a basis for better battery design in the future.”