This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a list of the best technology to buy. Read the original full article below at TheWirecutter.com

After spending a total of 200 hours researching and testing over 20 Wi-Fi routers, plus analyzing reader comments and feedback, the $100 TP-Link Archer C7 (v2) is the router we recommend for most people right now. This dual-band, three-stream wireless-ac router usually costs between $80 and $100—the same price as many older, slower routers. But unlike those slower routers, the C7 supports the fastest connections of every major device you can buy today.

We compared the Archer C7 against 21 different routers over a 10-month testing period. On most of our tests, the Archer C7 was the fastest—outperforming routers that cost twice as much. You won't find a better-performing router than the Archer C7 for less, and you'll have to spend a lot more money to get a better one.

How we picked

Wireless-ac, or IEEE 802.11ac, is the latest mainstream Wi-Fi version, and your new router should have wireless-ac. It's the new standard in many laptops, smartphones, and tablets from 2013 and later, including many of our recommendations at the Wirecutter. New MacBooks and high-end Windows laptops have wireless-ac, and so do almost all flagship smartphones from the past year: the iPhone 6, HTC One, Moto X, Samsung Galaxy S5, and more. Unless you go very cheap, your next gadget with Wi-Fi will probably have wireless-ac.

Our Wi-Fi router pick is dual-band, which means it supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals—giving you a way to escape 2.4GHz wireless interference from your neighbors' Wi-Fi networks and giving you access to the much faster speeds of 5GHz wireless-ac. The vast majority of laptops, phones and tablets support one or two streams, but high-end laptops like the MacBook Pro support three. A three-stream wireless-ac router ensures that you're going to get the fastest connection on any device you own—or plan to buy in the near future.

Any router you buy should be dual-band: a 2.4GHz band for wireless-n and earlier, and a 5GHz band for wireless-n and -ac (5GHz faster, but it can have worse range than 2.4GHz and not every device supports it).

There’s an entire field of science that believes nature and evolution have already solved some of humanity’s most complicated problems. Called biomimetics, the field focuses on studying these natural solutions and attempting to copy them, rebuild them, and use them in ways that can benefit mankind. This past month, we’ve been profiling US laboratories that specialize in biomimicry and highlighting how the animal kingdom is helping humans innovate.

When you’re trying to perfect robotic flight the obvious biological animal to mimic is, of course, the bird. But what’s less obvious is just how exactly you go about quantifying the physical capabilities of motion and engineering while in flight. At David Lentink’s lab at Stanford he is combining specially trained animals with high-tech motion capture to puzzle out just what it is about bird wings that make them such fantastic flyers.

Photo credit: Stanford

Lentink has trained hummingbirds and parrotlets to perform special maneuvers -- flying from point A to point B -- so that he can capture images of them in motion. With high-speed cameras he can capture 50 images for each wing beat. In addition, using two high-speed lasers that flash from 1,000 to 10,000 times per second, Lentink is able to create an image of how the air flows behind the birds as they fly.

“Our goal is to understand the flow and the forces they generate when they fly and we developed special instruments to do that. You can’t work with a bird like an airplane. We train our birds based on food rewards. So now we point to perch where they need to fly to and they will fly there,” says Lentink. “We’re trying to discover how birds manipulate air to fly more effectively and move better.”

In addition to studying wing movement and the manipulation of air, Lentink and his team have started to research the bird’s vision and how it combines with their wing movements to determine direction. “What do they see and how do they use what they are seeing to control their flight? The main thing we’re looking at is optical flow, something that robots also use. How images move over the retina, the intensity of images over the retina, and how birds use that to decide to go left, right, or stabilize,” he says.

It may sound like very fundamental research, he says, but it’s essential if there’s any hope of building a future robot that can fly like a bird. Especially when you consider the limitation of current flying robots. Quadcopters, according to Lentink, aren’t good at maneuvering through turbulence, around buildings, or through trees and narrow spaces. Yet at the moment they’re our most popular flying bot. Birds, on the other hand, don’t have any trouble performing any of those difficult tasks.

If you're familiar with 3D printing (you're reading Tested, chances are you're probably pretty familiar with the topic), it isn't too difficult to understand the basics of CNC milling. Instead of building up a form layer by layer, milling carves away from a block of stock material. Replace the plastic extruder of an FDM 3D printer with a high speed spindle turning a sharp cutting bit. CNC milling also requires CAD models of the desired form. And just like 3D printing, CNC mills have been moving from the workshop to the desktop. These machines have become affordable, small, and relatively easy to use.

Milling--subtractive fabrication--is often louder, messier, and let's be honest, not nearly as “magical” as additive 3D printing. The results don’t have the same wow factor as a Yoda bust you can make with a basic 3D printer. But this process creates more accurate and durable parts from a much wider selection of materials.

I’ve been testing several CNC mills for my work at NYU’s ITP program, and wanted to share some of my results. Some of these machines work right out of the box, some are kits (like the first home 3D printers). I’ll also discuss the difference between home mills and higher-end models designed for workshops, as well as my thoughts on the future of desktop milling. But this week, we’ll start off with a machine you may have seen on Tested before: the Othermill.

The week is just getting started, but you can ease the transition with some new apps and games. You've come to the right place, too. This is the Google Play App Roundup, the weekly feature where we tell you what's new and cool in Google Play.

This week there's a lovely new news reader, a game about a game, and a new dungeon crawler.

Source

Source is a feed reader client from the developers of the popular Talon for Twitter. The two apps have a lot in common, meaning a strict adherence to material design aesthetics and plenty of colors. Source has been in beta for a few months, but now it's ready for primetime. This isn't meant to be a replacement as your main RSS hub, but it plugs into services like Feedly, The Old Reader, and others to provide a clean, attractive interface for keeping an eye on those feeds.

When you first open Source, it asks you to add feeds via whatever service you have previously used. It lists any groups you may have set up in Feedly or something else, and allows you to choose which ones you want synced to Source. If you don't have an account at one of the established services, you can add RSS feeds individually to Source.

The main interface for checking articles in Source, is very clean--there's not even a slide-out navigation menu, just a list of cards. You can tap on any article to have it expanded in-line (similar to Talon). If the site only provides a snippet of text you can open the full article in a browser, but there isn't one built into Source. Source has background sync for articles, and it can be limited to only work on WiFi to control your data usage.

Where this app truly shines is with the interface--it's really pretty. The default theme is a white background with an orange status/action bar. In the settings you can change to a dark theme and pick from a dozen different accent colors. The navigation bar can be colored as well. Just about every button and card in the interface has a touch effect attached to it too.

Source's last trick is something that's becoming increasingly popular--Wear integration. When you connect an Android Wear watch, a Source module will sync over that lets you view the entire feed on your wrist. You can scroll through cards for each article and tap on them to view all the available text. I don't know that I'd want to do this very much on such a small screen, but it's an option.

Source is a very attractive app with solid, though basic functionality. Although, I think it's going to be a somewhat hard sell for $2.99 when it lacks some of the features of a full-featured client. If you already use Feedly or a similar service, Source could be a great way to see your pre-built feeds in a better app.

Howdy! My name is Patrick Norton. If you're a regular visitor at Tested, you might have seen me join Norm and Will on This Is Only A Test and the first Lego with Friends in the past few weeks. And, beyond showing up for several Octoberkasts for the 2AM to 5AM shift bearing a giant box of Bob’s Donuts and weird stories about wrenching on trucks at the Baja 1000, you might be wondering just who the heck I am.

Mostly, I’m a geek. I review products, from headphones to gaming PCs, answer tech questions, make things, and talk about technology on shows like TekThing and TWiCH. I have what a friend calls ‘feral researcher’ issues. Doesn’t matter if its picking fuel injectors for the Cummins diesel in my truck, or figuring out the references in an anime like FLCL, or why one DAC sounds different from another. I like going deeper and learning more.

Professionally, I started out working in magazines, first as an editor at Windows Sources, then testing products and writing reviews PC Mag, PC World, Computer Shopper, and others. In 1998 I was part of the launch team for TechTV, the first (and I suspect only) cable channel about technology. I started and ran the lab for a couple years, then, on one strange afternoon, while peeing in a urinal, one of the VPs took the urinal next to mine, and, mid business, asked me if I wanted to co-host The ScreenSavers, a live hour long daily show that was the heart of the channel.

I’m glad I said yes. The show was epic and the viewers were smart. We answered their questions about tech, often conversing with them via netcam. We demoed products live, which led to some epic fails. (Who can’t relate to a Blue Screen of Death at the worst possible moment?) We interviewed some really smart people, made videos from Defcon, and shot live television from the CES show floor. (We were the first TV cameras allowed into the NSA offices after 9/11!) If consumer 3D printers and quadcopters came out in 2000, you probably would have seen 'em there first. It wasn’t like any show before or since, and we had about as much fun as you can have helping folks embrace technology.