MixTech

Yahoo Sports and Apple TV have launched a partnership to deliver alternate broadcasts of select Friday Night Baseball and MLS games, pairing Yahoo Sports commentary with Apple TV camera feeds on Yahoo's website and app. Baseball Bar-B-Cast hosts Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman will call the first two innings of the September 4 Tigers-Guardians game and the September 18 Phillies-Mets game, with Yahoo's senior MLB writers hosting pregame shows. The Cooligans hosts Alexis Guerreros and Christian Polanco will call full coverage of the September 16 Campeones Cup final and the October 28 Inter Miami-FC Cincinnati match, with MLS altcasts adding options like a referee cam and an iPhone feed.

A study from Florida International University tested the Apple Watch Series 8, Fitbit Sense 2, Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 and Garmin Forerunner 955 against a lab-grade COSMED K5 device. Fifty-eight adults wore all four watches during a ten-minute interval session on a recumbent bike, rotating wrist positions to remove bias. Garmin's calorie count missed by an average of 68.61 kcal, a 77.6 percent error, the worst of the group. Fitbit looked accurate only because researchers discarded its worst readings; put back in, its average miss jumped to 128.6 kcal. Error rose with body fat for every brand, but faster for Garmin and Fitbit than Apple. Researchers concluded none of today's watches are reliable enough for weight management.

Testing on the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro found a 76-second cold boot and serious map rendering lag. Panning with layers enabled takes 4-6 seconds, and peripheral tiles can take up to 15-16 seconds to fully render. Comparisons by MontreCardio and Dave Does Fitness against the Fenix 8 Pro and Forerunner 970 showed mixed results, some actions faster, others unchanged. Rival flagships including the Amazfit T-Rex Ultra 2, Suunto Vertical 2, Apple Watch Ultra 3, Coros Vertix 2S and Polar Grit X2 Pro all render full maps far more quickly. The bottleneck traces back to Garmin's vector-based map engine and its comparatively limited onboard RAM, meaning the claimed 30% faster panning wasn't confirmed in testing.

ESPN unveiled its rebuilt Studio W at Digital Center 2 in Bristol on Aug. 29 during college football coverage. From Sept. 9 it becomes the permanent home of NFL Live, also hosting college football, NHL programming and Fantasy Focus Countdown. The space spans over 9,200 square feet of LED displays, with a purpose-built XR volume alone rendering about 44.7 million pixels; total pixel count tops 148 million. It's Bristol's first 1080p HDR and UHD facility, running on SMPTE ST 2110 infrastructure. A custom camera system using Sony HDC-5500 units shoots the same virtual scene from multiple angles at once, cycling LED walls at up to 480 Hz. The eight-month build combined ESPN, Disney and Pixotope engineering on a custom rendering system.

At the 2026 edition of the 174km UTMB around Mont Blanc, Ben Dhiman won the men's race in an Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra, finishing in 18:16:29 for the race's first sub-19-hour time and Amazfit's second straight UTMB win. Ruth Croft withdrew before the women's start, letting Blandine L'Hirondel take the title wearing a COROS APEX 4. Wrist share told a different story: among the men's top 30, Garmin held 37%, COROS 33%, Suunto 20%, and Amazfit just 7%, while Polar and Apple vanished from the leaderboard entirely. On GPS accuracy, Suunto tracked closest to the official course distance, Garmin again overstated elevation gain, and Amazfit logged the shortest distances of the field.

TNT Sports is entering its second season covering the Big 12 with a bigger production package, moving to 1080p HDR, adding SpiderCam and expanding its camera complement. Coverage kicks off Saturday as Coastal Carolina visits West Virginia on TNT, truTV and HBO Max. The broadcast will use roughly 18 cameras, four Sony HDC-5500 super-slo-mo units running at 6X, five EVS replay systems and five Proton POV cameras controlled through CyanView. SMT now handles both the scorebug and first-and-10 line for tighter data integration, while graphics are operated remotely from TNT Sports' Techwood facility in Atlanta. An uninterruptible power supply adds redundancy, and the network's College Football Playoff slate grows from two games to five this season.

New research from Stanford Medicine, conducted in mice and human cells, suggests aging may be driven largely by a single immune breakdown. As animals age, tissue-resident macrophages lose their ability to clear worn-out neutrophils, letting these cells turn senescent and fuel chronic, body-wide inflammation. Blocking a receptor called EP2 on these macrophages restored that cleanup process, leaving old mice leaner, stronger, and sharper in memory tests, with brain, heart, liver and kidney tissue staying markedly more youthful. Similar patterns of neutrophil buildup and EP2 activity turned up in aging human liver cells, though no approved drug yet exists to target EP2 selectively.

A few years ago the advice was 'buy local, it's half the price.' That era is over. We bought 1 kg tubs from three popular local brands and worked out protein ratio and cost per gram one by one. Two brands actually delivered the 24 grams of protein on the label per serving; one came up short when we measured. On mixability, the least clumpy in the shaker was the unflavored version — with the flavored ones the sweetener load can wear out your palate. Bottom line: the cheapest tub isn't always the cheapest protein. Don't add it to the cart before dividing the grams on the label by the price.

I ran my first marathon in these, then two more half marathons after that. I'm past 300 kilometers now and honestly, the pop is still there. But the foam on the outsole, especially under the forefoot, has visibly flattened. Dry tarmac is fine; on wet roads I've slipped a couple of times. Looking at the price, I finally get the whole 'this is a race shoe, not a trainer' line. Worth it if you save them for one or two tempo sessions a week. Spread them across every run and accept up front that the outsole will tap out around the 250 km mark.

The 'up to 11 days' on the box is, as always, a lab number. In real life — an hour of GPS running a day, sleep tracking overnight and notifications on — I got 6 to 7 days. The AMOLED screen was more readable in midday sun than I expected. On the software side Garmin Connect is still cluttered, but it pushes training data to Strava without a hitch. The catch: no dual-band GPS at this price, so the route occasionally jumps between tall buildings. If you only want running and basic health tracking it's more than enough. If you're after maps and music, you'll need to look one model up.