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Jess Weatherbed

Jess Weatherbed

News Reporter

Jess Weatherbed is a news writer, and part of The Verge UK-based team. While passionate about the future of technology, she originally trained as a prosthetics makeup and wig-making technician, fuelled by a love of animatronics and practical movie effects.

Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews across computing, PC gaming and streaming. Additional bylines can be found at GamesRadar, PCGamer, Creative Bloq and Space.com.

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Don’t be a drone dummy.

Two people have been arrested in California for flying unauthorized drones in areas impacted by the LA wildfires, according to a police report seen by Deadline.

The arrests follow a collision last Thursday between a civilian drone and a “Super Scooper” that was fighting the blazes, grounding the plane. The FAA says it's investigating the incident. LA airspace restrictions are in place until January 25th.


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Amazon and BMW’s AI voice assistant is... still coming.

The custom Alexa voice assistant for BMW vehicles was initially announced in 2022, but progress has been slow in an attempt to build it around Amazon’s more capable LLM-powered Alexa.

Amazon says its “LLM-powered capabilities” will start rolling out to select BMW models this year that allow users to “plan trips and navigate more conversationally.”


Blink and you’ll miss these Zenbook Duo and ROG Zephyrus updates.

Asus didn’t announce any huge changes for these beloved laptops at CES, with the new Zenbook Duo just being bumped to a series 2 Intel Core Ultra 9 processor.

Meanwhile, the ROG Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus G16 gaming laptops are being refreshed with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPUs, respectively, alongside Nvidia 50-series graphics.


The Asus Zenbook Duo 2025 model, positioned on a white desk.
No treats this year for the dual-screen Zenbook Duo (pictured), just minor generational updates.
Image: Asus