Tech Pulse 1/26/26

This week on Tech Pulse, we narrate three articles spanning cellular reliability, email overload, and AI-powered product development.Verizon went dark for ten hours across the country, and a columnist found herself stranded an hour and a half from home with no directions, no way to call her family, and an SOS icon where her signal bars used to be. The piece is part personal frustration, part pointed question: how did America's most expensive carrier become one of its least dependable?Gmail is rolling out AI tools that can ghostwrite your replies, proofread your sentences, and surface the most urgent messages buried inside a 16,000-email disaster area. A reporter tests all of it — and finds the results more useful than expected, with a few catches worth knowing.AI is quietly reshaping how everyday products get made. A paint that dries in five minutes instead of thirty. A soap with a better scent. A thinner gum wrapper. The piece reveals how manufacturers are using deterministic AI to find chemical combinations no human would have thought to try.