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It’s Not About the Bike: The Jackets and Lights to Keep You Cycling All Year Round

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It’s Not About the Bike: The Jackets and Lights to Keep You Cycling All Year Round


FAQs

We asked Joshua Hale, general manager of commuter bike specialists Quella, to answer all our questions on how to get your bike ready for winter and keep it running smoothly all year long.

How can cyclists stay visible to drivers without turning into a rolling Christmas tree?

It is not just the quantity of lights that’s important. Placement also makes a huge difference. A bright front and rear light are essential—ideally one steady and one flashing—to help you stand out without dazzling anyone on the road. Reflective details on moving parts like your jacket, ankles, or pedals also catch drivers’ eyes naturally. Good quality lights and reflective accents do a lot more than overloading on LEDs.

What’s the smartest way to layer clothing for warmth without overheating?

Layer clothing with breathability in mind. Start with a moisture-wicking base layer to keep sweat off your skin, add an insulating layer like a fleece or thermal jersey, and finish with a windproof or waterproof shell. You’ll warm up fast once you’re moving, so it’s better to start slightly cool. Zips and vents that can be opened on uphill climbs and closed on descents will come in handy. Other lightweight accessories such as gloves, a buff, and overshoes can also increase your comfort without adding bulk.

How can you adjust your tire size or pressure to ride safely on wet or icy roads?

In winter, opt for wider tires with a grippier tread—28 mm or more, if your bike allows it. The extra width increases contact with the road, giving better stability and traction. Lowering your pressure slightly (by around 10–15 psi) also improves grip on slippery surfaces without feeling sluggish. Avoid slick tires when it’s icy, and check your tires regularly, as wet roads pick up more glass and grit.

What are the easiest and most effective upgrades for commuters?

Mudguards are top of the list. They keep both you and your bike cleaner and drier. Good-quality lights with USB charging make daily use simpler, and winter-specific gloves can save your fingers on frosty mornings. Wider handlebars and padded bar tape also add comfort when the roads get rough. It’s all about small upgrades that make you want to keep riding, even when it’s cold and dark.

Why does your bike need more maintenance in the winter, and what quick maintenance tips can you suggest?

Winter is tough on bikes, with grit, salt, and moisture working their way into every moving part. Regular cleaning is the single best thing you can do, even if it’s just a quick rinse and wipe-down after wet rides. Keep your chain clean and lightly oiled, check brake pads more often, and make sure cables or hydraulic lines aren’t sticking. A few minutes of care each week prevents costly repairs later, and your bike will feel smoother and quieter every ride.



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These Discounted Pool-Cleaning Robots Free Up Time for Actually Swimming

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These Discounted Pool-Cleaning Robots Free Up Time for Actually Swimming


Just in time for summer, Beatbot’s pool-cleaning robots are on sale through the end of the month. If you’re on the hunt for smarter pool care, these are some of the best pool-cleaning robots on the market, and we haven’t seen them sell for less. Whether you’re tired of paying the pool guy or just don’t want to deal with whatever scary stuff is floating in the water, these robots can help.

Be sure to check out our related buying guides for more summer outdoors coverage, including the best bug sprays, the best sunscreens, and the best fitness trackers.

Beatbot iSkim Ultra Robotic Pool Skimmer for $599 ($400 off)

Beatbot

iSkim Ultra Robotic Pool Skimmer

This surface skimmer is slow and methodical with its approach, which means it won’t slam into your pool’s walls while doing its job. Use the app to set schedules, monitor the temperature, dock the unit, adjust its speed, and more. It has a 9-liter basket that holds a ton of crud and features both solar and magnetic wireless charging. If you care mostly about surface cleaning, this deal is solid.

Beatbot Sora 30 for $699 ($300 off)

The middle-of-the-line Beatbot Sora 30 scrubs the walls, waterline, shallow areas, and floor of your pool for up to five hours at a time. It also returns to the surface on its own when the job is done or when its battery is low, minimizing the amount of effort you have to put in. You can retrieve it with one tap in the app, which also allows you to select a cleaning mode, monitor the bot’s progress, and more. It doesn’t have surface-skimming capabilities, but if you don’t mind handling that part manually, this is a handy device that takes care of your other pool-cleaning needs without any hassle.

Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra for $2,649 ($500 off)

If only the best pool-cleaning robot will do, this is the model you want. This top-shelf robot can do it all: skim the surface, scrub your floors, walls, and waterline with its five cleaning brushes, and even detect debris with AI. It can run for up to six hours at a time and will return to the surface and float when your pool is squeaky-clean (or when the battery gets low). It’s a little heavy at 29 pounds, but the trade-off is never having to manually clean your pool again.

Additional Beatbot Deals

Almost the entire Beatbot lineup is on sale. Here are a few more discounts on models that differ slightly from the versions we linked above.


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Ilya Sutskever Stands by His Role in Sam Altman’s OpenAI Ouster: ‘I Didn’t Want It to Be Destroyed’

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Ilya Sutskever Stands by His Role in Sam Altman’s OpenAI Ouster: ‘I Didn’t Want It to Be Destroyed’


Elon Musk’s trial against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its final stretch on Monday, with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor.

Sutskever drew the spotlight, revealing an ownership stake in OpenAI’s $850-billion for-profit arm that is currently worth about $7 billion. That makes him one of the largest known individual shareholders of OpenAI. Earlier in the trial, OpenAI president Greg Brockman acknowledged for the first time that he has around $30 billion worth of OpenAI shares.

Brockman was one of the research lab’s original cofounders, and Sutskever joined shortly afterward, turning down a $6 million annual compensation offer from Google. Brockman said he and Sutskever were “joined at the hip,” until Sutskever helped lead Sam Altman’s brief removal as OpenAI CEO in 2023. Sutskever had helped collect evidence to show Altman’s alleged history of deception, and even assisted in drafting a memo to the board. Though they tried to repair the relationship, Sutskever has been estranged from Brockman and Altman ever since, a lawyer for OpenAI said on Monday.

Sutskever, who arrived in the courtroom wearing a dress shirt and slacks, the first male witness to testify without a suit jacket, appeared to be dejected about no longer being involved with OpenAI. (He left and formed a competing AI lab in 2024.) “I felt a great deal of ownership of OpenAI,” he said at one point Monday. “I felt like I put my life into it, and I simply cared for it, and I didn’t want it to be destroyed.”

Sutskever’s testimony bolstered Musk’s contention that Altman is not the right person to lead an AI lab that could create artificial general intelligence. In addition, Sutskever mentioned how the superalignment team he helped lead, which focused on the safety of future models, was doing the most important work at OpenAI “for the long term.” The team was disbanded in May 2024, shortly after Sutskever left the company.

But Sutskever also added to OpenAI’s defense that Musk never negotiated any special promises when funding the OpenAI nonprofit. Musk’s allegation that such commitments existed and that Altman and Brockman violated them by pursuing a lucrative for-profit arm are the core of his claims in the lawsuit. Sutskever said OpenAI needed “a lot of dollars” to build a computer as big as the human brain, and while seeking donations had some “reasonable success,” becoming a for-profit was the consensus way forward.

“I would describe it as the difference between an ant and a cat,” Sutskever said in response to a question from US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers about how more computing helped OpenAI level up. “If there’s no funding, there is no big computer.”

In the end, Sutskever, a prominent AI scientist who paints in his spare time, testified for about an hour, barely making eye contact with anyone during his time on the witness stand.

Musk’s legal team had unsuccessfully sought to treat Sutskever as a hostile witness because of his financial stake in OpenAI. But Gonzalez Rogers agreed to give attorneys for both Musk and OpenAI extra leeway in their questioning of Sutskever due to what she described as his “unique position” in the case.

The Blip

Much of Monday’s testimony centered around the well-covered events of Altman’s ouster and reinstatement as CEO in November 2023. Nadella described Sutskever and other board members firing Altman as “amateur city” and reiterated that he “never got clarity” about the lack of candor that led to their decision. Nadella also acknowledged during his testimony that he and colleagues discussed 14 potential board members who would join OpenAI if Altman returned, including at least two whom the Microsoft group vetoed and one who later joined. Nadella described Microsoft’s input as suggestions.

Sutskever said he supported firing Altman because an “environment where executives don’t have the correct information” is not “conducive to reach any grand goal.” But he criticized his board colleagues for rushing the process, lacking experience, and accepting “legal advice that wasn’t very good.”

Microsoft’s Bet

In his lawsuit, Musk accused Microsoft of helping to transform OpenAI into a moneymaking machine beyond what Musk intended. Nadella testified that Microsoft had first supported OpenAI with discounted cloud computing but it could no longer afford to do so “once the bill started going up.” A for-profit arm that Microsoft could invest in, in exchange for a potential financial return, was more palatable.

But as the years progressed and the bills kept rising, Microsoft wanted more out of the partnership. Microsoft “will lose 4 bil next year!!!” Nadella exclaimed in an email in 2022 to his lieutenants about the OpenAI partnership. He called for a new agreement ensuring Microsoft would also get AI “know-how” from the startup, which he kept spelling as “Open AI.”



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Testing for ‘Bad Cholesterol’ Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

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Testing for ‘Bad Cholesterol’ Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story


For decades, assessing cholesterol risk has been built around a simple idea: Lower “bad” cholesterol, lower your chance of a heart attack. The test at the center of that approach measures how much low-density lipoprotein, or LDL cholesterol, is circulating in part of the blood. It has shaped everything from clinical guidelines to the widespread use of statins, medications that reduce LDL.

It works. Lowering LDL cholesterol reduces heart attacks, strokes, and early death. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

The LDL cholesterol test measures the amount of cholesterol inside the low-density lipoprotein particles circulating in the bloodstream. Those LDL particles containing the cholesterol can get trapped in artery walls, forming plaques that can eventually block blood flow. As the test measures the amount of cholesterol being carried, not the number of LDL particles themselves, two people can have the same LDL cholesterol level but very different numbers of particles, and therefore different levels of risk.

That gap has pushed researchers toward a different way of measuring risk. Apolipoprotein B, or apoB, reflects the total number of cholesterol-carrying particles in the blood rather than how much cholesterol they contain. A growing body of research suggests it’s a more accurate way of identifying who is at risk and who’s not.

In March 2026, the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology recognized this. Their updated cholesterol guidelines acknowledged apoB as a potentially more precise marker, in line with earlier European recommendations. But they stopped short of recommending apoB as the primary method for testing.

“They review the evidence and rank apoB as superior, but the actual rules of the road continue to prioritize LDL,” says Allan Sniderman, a cardiologist at McGill University.

Sniderman was an author on a 2026 JAMA modeling study that analyzed lifetime outcomes for around 250,000 US adults eligible for statin treatment. Comparing LDL cholesterol, non-HDL cholesterol, and apoB, the study found that using apoB to guide treatment decisions would prevent more heart attacks and strokes than current approaches, while remaining cost-effective.

ApoB testing can be done through standard blood tests. So why has it not filtered into routine care? Not even in Europe, where the guidelines have reflected its usefulness for years.

Part of the answer is inertia. For decades, LDL cholesterol has been both a scientific breakthrough and a public health success story. It is simple, widely understood, and directly linked to treatments that work.

“For 50 years, LDL cholesterol was an amazing discovery,” Sniderman says. “It’s not that it isn’t a good marker. It is a good marker.”

Børge Nordestgaard, president of the European Atherosclerosis Society, agrees that LDL cholesterol remains central for a reason. “The evidence is immense; it’s beyond discussion,” he says. “Statins reduce heart attacks, strokes, and early death through LDL cholesterol lowering.”

That success helped shape a powerful narrative: LDL is “bad cholesterol,” and lowering it saves lives. But that simplicity has also limited how risk is understood.

“The result is patients and physicians know little or nothing about apoB,” Sniderman says.

More recent research suggests that the cholesterol picture is more complex, especially in people already taking statins. Previous studies led by Nordestgaard have shown that in treated patients, high levels of apolipoprotein B and non-HDL cholesterol remain associated with increased risk of heart attacks and mortality, while LDL cholesterol does not. ApoB, in particular, emerged as the most accurate marker.

For Kausik Ray, a cardiologist at Imperial College London, the challenge is not choosing one marker over another, but understanding what each one captures, and what it misses.

“We’re not interested in cholesterol for its own sake,” Ray says. “We’re trying to prevent heart attacks and strokes.”



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