There’s a lot for kids to fight about—the last dino nugget, who’s taller, who gets to be Juniper’s BFF of the Week. In America, parents tend to respond to these childhood quarrels with exasperation, jumping into referee mode and forcing kids to share or apologize or take a breather on opposite sides of the room. We…
The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.
Spoiler warning: This essay includes significant spoilers for “USS Callister.” It does not reveal the ending, but does address story elements not seen in the trailers.
As we inch closer to unearthing the secrets of human intelligence by understanding the complexities of the brain, a tricky series of questions arise. What happens when sentient life exists without a physical body? If it could feel...
A bunch of odd stuff comes out of Samsung’s C-Lab incubator each year, and today Samsung is unveiling a handful of its latest projects. The highlight is a product line called S-Ray, short for Sound-Ray, that’s composed of three different speakers that are supposed to act almost like headphones — playing music so that only a single person can hear it.
It’s hard to imagine how effectively this will work, but it’s a neat idea. Samsung wants people to be able to listen to music or watch videos while still being able to hear the world around them and without having to wear something on their head. That said, it’s unclear if they’re actually doing anything to cancel out sound for other people, or if they’re just using highly directional...
It’s cold out there this winter—and it’s only going to get colder. Since it’s hard to get a good night’s sleep when it’s too chilly to relax, the Lifehacker team assembled their best strategies for making the warmest bed possible.
The New York Times just released a calendar even more useful than its astronomical event calendar. The NYT 2018 book events calendar, available for Google or Apple, includes highly anticipated book releases from authors like Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers, plus events, literary anniversaries, and releases of movies based…
January 31 will bring a celestial event known as a blue moon, an occurrence that happens every two to three years. While interesting on its own, the real kicker is this blue moon will be the first lunar eclipse of a blue moon in nearly 150 years. Did we mention it’s also a supermoon? Here’s where you can watch it (and…
It's a new year and evidently a great time for Amazon to tell us how many items the company shipped over the past 365 days. Amazon says today that more than 5 billion items were shipped through its Prime program last year, which includes free same-day, one-day, and two-day shipping. Amazon also says, "more new paid members joined Prime worldwide this year than any previous year."
Alongside the new factoid, Amazon published a list of the most popular Prime items. Apparently people love to order bananas through AmazonFresh, and the Instant Pot was the best seller on Prime Day. Who knew.
We, unfortunately, have relatively little information about how many Prime members existed prior to 2017 or even during the year. The last stat TechCrunch...
YouTuber Logan Paul posted a video on New Year’s Eve showing what appeared to be the body of a person who had died by suicide — and by doing so, he may have put his audience at risk. The video, which Polygon reports has been deleted from Paul’s 15 million-subscriber YouTube channel, sparked outrage for its disrespectful treatment of a dead body. But the truth is that turning the remains of a human being into a spectacle is worse than just horrifyingly bad taste: by sensationalizing suicide, it could also be dangerous.
The video shows Paul and his friends visiting Japan’s Aokigahara forest. There, they spot a body of someone who had apparently killed himself, Polygon’s Julia Alexander reports. “Paul then walks up to the body, providing...
2017 was a year of grim milestones, and its tail end offered one more to add to the painfully long list: the first confirmed death from a gamer-initiated swatting. Swatting, the practice of calling a SWAT team to the house of a target by fraudulently reporting a serious crime at their address, has finally done exactly what critics of toxic video game culture have long feared, and claimed a life.
Finch’s death leads us into a thorny thicket of questions that demand introspection from policymakers, technology and gaming studio executives, and fan communities. Reflecting on change and self-improvement is all the rage at the dawn of a new year, and it’s long past time to assess the problem of toxic fandom with the greater urgency and...
Rimming is having a moment. Long thought of as a more “advanced” sexual activity, it’s being added to the repertoires of people who would describe themselves as being fairly vanilla. Here’s everything you need to know if you’re curious about giving rimming a try.
Anker’s PowerPort line of multi-port USB chargers are our readers’ favorites, and this model is one of the few that includes USB-C Power Delivery, which outputs up to 30W to power devices like the new MacBooks, or even a Nintendo Switch. Save a whopping $15 today with promo code ANKER517.
Wires suck. They’re either always too long or too short, they break easily, and they never ever stay untangled. But now it’s a new year, and what better way to start out 2018 than by cutting out wires completely from your life?
Avido’s new wirelessly charging battery pack, the WiBa, certainly has. The WiBa looks a lot like any other battery pack — it’s a small, oblong rectangle roughly the size of a phone — but it completely cuts the cord. Everything about the WiBa is designed to work sans cords: it charges itself wirelessly through a Qi charger, and it then charges your phone wirelessly (also using the Qi standard) when you’re out and about.
The WiBa is expected to cost $99.95 when it goes on sale later this year, which gets you the...
The Federal Reserve is expected to raise short-term interest rates three times in 2018, which is good news for savers.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Will It Casserole, the column where we see what meals, dishes, and cuisines can be re-imagined and transformed into casseroles.
Lyft is partnering with self-driving technology company Aptiv to offer rides in its robot taxis during CES in Las Vegas next week. There will be a safety driver behind the wheel, so the trips will not be completely driverless. Unlike a normal Lyft experience, the cars will only travel to 20 preprogrammed destinations.
The news is notable, since most companies that come to CES to demonstrate self-driving technology do so in closed parking lots where they can control every aspect of the experience. Aptiv, which split off from automotive supplier Delphi last year, and Lyft, a newcomer to autonomous driving, are taking a big risk by conducting their demonstration on public roads, where pedestrians and other drivers help to make a completely...
January is the perfect playground for any habit you’d like to try to establish or take to the next level. One popular option for people who love yoga: start a daily practice. Here are some of the best guides for a 30-day yoga challenge, and some tips on how to keep it manageable.
As a new year begins, so too does the 2018 winter anime season in Japan. Now, thanks to video streaming services like Crunchyroll, Amazon, and Netflix, they’re more accessible than ever. (Subtitled versions of most shows are available in America within a day of release.)
With 50 different series hitting the air this season, there’s a lot to choose from, so we’ve picked the highlights and broken them down based on their specific appeal.
In the far future, giant robots called Franxx protect the fortress city of Plantation and the remnants of humanity from giant monsters. Naturally, they are piloted by teenagers who work in pairs, much like the heroes of Pacific Rim. Our...
Many of us have a basic idea of what our car’s clutch does, but still find all the teeth and springs confusing when we actually look at one out of the car. Fortunately, Learn Engineering on YouTube put together this simple animation that may be the clearest description yet of how your clutch really works.
Protein powders, NordicTrack cardio equipment, a Logitech mouse, and more are all part of today’s best deals.
It seems as though nearly every week a new study is published that contradicts the last one about how much screen time kids should—and shouldn’t—be allowed. But assuming you’ve decided to take the plunge and buy your child a phone, tablet or computer, the hard choices aren’t over—in fact, they’ve just started. Now,…
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A hotel room, however well appointed, is an alienating dream-space. You’re supposed to do all your most intimate things in this place designed and furnished and filled by someone else. You need to make it your own. Listen to designer and international traveler Karim Rashid:
Very few people will turn a crummy Yelp review into a work project, but writer Alexandra Franzen has done just that with her new book, You’re Going to Survive.
Quantum computing is still a long way off delivering any actual tangible benefits, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate it in other ways. Like, for example, this ASMR-style video made inside IBM’s new Q computation center — a research lab where the company is hard at work on its quantum computing hardware.
Like similar experiments run by Google and Microsoft, this means using things called qubits to create mind-blowingly powerful computers. In theory, anyway. While there’s plenty of hype about quantum computing, the actual machines we’ve made to date are too slow and temperamental to be of practical use. Meanwhile, experts say commercial companies are making unjustified claims about their hardware, and there’s not even any c...
If you’ve got the space for it, building your own home gym makes working out a whole lot easier and cheaper (over time) than joining a gym and driving to it every day. Today only on Amazon, you can stock that extra bedroom with highly rated equipment from NordicTrack, including two different treadmills, a recumbent…
2017 was the year that cryptocurrency finally went mainstream as Bitcoin’s value soared from under $1,000 to nearly $20,000, and it doesn’t look like things will slow down in 2018.
Apple has started offering battery swaps for $29 (a month earlier than promised), after apologizing to customers for slowing older iPhones down as the batteries aged. However, the company did not clarify how it qualified batteries as eligible for the discounted replacement, as the Apple Genius Bar uses a diagnostic test to check whether a battery can retain 80 percent of its original capacity at 1,000 complete charge cycles. This led to some confusion over the weekend, with some consumers claiming that Apple denied them a battery swap since their devices passed the diagnostic test.
Apple has now confirmed to MacRumors that it would replace batteries on an iPhone 6 or later, regardless of whether or not a diagnostic test shows that the...
If you’re determined to get your life in order in 2018, all you need is a sharpie, some post-it notes, a blank wall, and an hour or two of free time.
If you’ve resolved to build muscle in the new year, Amazon’s one-day Optimum Nutrition Gold Box deal has all the supplements you need. There are dozens of flavors, formulations, and sizes available, so find your favorite, and stock up.
Google has been experimenting with a new operating system, Fuchsia, for more than a year. Created by Google and open-sourced for a developer community to contribute to, Fuchsia is still a mysterious operating system that the search giant hasn’t detailed at all. Chrome Unboxed reports that Google has now released documentation to allow developers to load Fuchsia onto the company’s Pixelbook.
This isn’t your typical developer operating system, and you’ll need two machines to host and target a Pixelbook to load the OS. It’s very much a work in progress, with early hints at a user interface and functions. It’s still interesting that Google has chosen its own Pixelbook to experiment with, though. Fuchsia has mostly been linked to embedded...
YouTuber Logan Paul has apologized after uploading a video showing the body of an apparent suicide victim in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. Paul was visiting the location, commonly known as the “suicide forest,” as part of a trip to Japan and filming it for his daily vlog. He’s since taken down the video and apologized for uploading it, claiming he was trying to raise awareness of suicide.
The video was uploaded under the title “We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest…” and starts with a viewer discretion warning to Paul’s 15 million-plus subscribers. Paul speaks to the camera in a somber tone, saying he hasn’t monetized the video with adverts and that “this is the most real vlog I’ve ever posted on this channel.” He then tells...
As promised, owners of the original OnePlus 5 can now unlock their phones via facial recognition with the new OxygenOS Open Beta 3 based on Android Oreo. As spotted by XDA, the Face Unlock feature will unlock your phone when you tap the device’s power button and point the camera at your face.
Face Unlock is a coveted feature on the newer OnePlus 5T, mostly for convenience because the feature isn’t as secure as a fingerprint or Apple’s Face ID tech (you can’t use it to authorize payments, for example). In our review of the 5T, my colleague Vlad noted that Face Unlock never gave a false positive by authenticating another person on his device. However, someone was able to unlock it simply by flashing the phone at Vlad’s face for a split...
I’ve been blessed (or cursed?) in life with an exceptionally intelligent terrier named Tucker. He has a ton of food allergies, so he has to eat this special dog food with no wheat or chicken products, and years ago we settled on buying him the salmon flavor. Six months or so ago, tragedy struck our household when the…
We all know that sitting for long periods of time is bad for our health, but remembering to get up and takes breaks isn’t exactly an easy proposition.
High-profile Bay Area denizens are skipping tap water in favor of drinking unfiltered, untreated, and expensive “raw” water that comes straight out of the ground, Nellie Bowles reports for The New York Times. Proponents claim that raw water’s health benefits include naturally occurring minerals and microbes. But the reality for any inadequately treated water from the tap or a spring is that those minerals can sometimes include arsenic, and those microbes can be deadly.
The trend is borne of distrust for the public water supply, Bowles writes — including the disinfection processes the water undergoes, the fluoride that’s sometimes added to it, and the lead pipes that might carry it. But adding fluoride prevents tooth decay. (“There is no...
All of those discounted supplements won’t do you any good unless you, you know, exercise. Luckily, Amazon’s running a concurrent sale on a bunch of fitness gear, including medicine balls, exercise bikes, resistance bands, kinesiology tape, and a lot more. It’s a wide-ranging sale, so let us know what you recommend in…
Another year and we’re another year older. But the inevitable march of time has a bright side—we’re all getting older, and older people have higher emotional well-being than teenagers and young adults. Our happiest days don’t have to be behind us.
The Boeing 747 flew its maiden voyage in early February of 1969, a week or so after I was born. This was not a commercial flight. That wouldn’t come until a year later, in late January of 1970, a week before my first birthday, when the world’s first jumbo jet took off from New York following a bizarre christening with red, white, and blue water by First Lady Pat Nixon. It was just a trial, from the runway near Boeing’s new factory north of Seattle, a building constructed for the express purpose of assembling the 747, and, by the way, the largest structure ever erected.
The 1970s have developed a reputation for ennui, the so-called Malaise Era. This is somewhat deserved. Global events like domestic and international terror, proliferating...
Stargate Origins launches on February 15th
Nintendo ROM hacker Kaze Emanuar has used a conceptually simple tweak to give Super Mario 64 a completely different feel. First Person Mario 64 is exactly what it sounds like: your camera follows Mario’s head movement as closely as possible, turning the game into a dizzying first-person adventure.
In the clip above, Emanuar runs through a few of the ways the game plays differently. Rolls and jumps become “terrifying” with your vision limited to a first-person perspective, and level geometry disappears at close range, so sometimes it looks like you’re running on thin air. If you want to feel really disoriented, just imagine playing it in a virtual reality headset as well.
Emanuar is known for serious, full-featured projects based on Super...
Hello, and welcome back to What’s Cooking?, the open thread where you get to share your brilliant thoughts, advice, recipes, and opinions on all things food-related. It’s a new year, which means people are making all sorts of changes, particularly in the kitchen.
It’s a brand new year, and that means that it’s time to dust off the reading list and take a look at what’s coming ahead.
In the last days of 2017, I finally found some time to catch up on Brian K. Vaughn and FIonna Staples’s brilliant comic Saga. I’ve loved the series, but for one reason or another, I’ve fallen behind. I plowed through the latest three volumes, and was once again enthralled in their vivid world, and can’t wait to pick up the next one.
In the meantime, here’s 18 books hitting bookstores this January to start the new year off with.
Emergence by CJ Cherryh
CJ Cherryh is one of the modern titans of science fiction literature, known in part for her long-running Foreigner series, which follows the descendants...
LG is pushing TV displays to ever-greater sizes and resolutions (and, most likely, prices) for the upcoming CES 2018. Engadget writes that the company will be showing off a new 88-inch OLED television with an 8K display, promising the biggest and highest-resolution OLED on the market. (You can get non-OLED 8K displays in much larger sizes.) It’s an upgrade over LG’s existing 77-inch panel with 4K resolution, and although there’s no price for this new display, the 77-inch screen costs $20,000 right now. Samsung has an 88-inch TV based its competing QLED technology — also for $20,000 — but that’s also “only” 4K, and QLED’s quality is debatable.
4K OLED screens are getting more affordable, and 4K content is getting more common. But it’s...
It turns out a bunch of you did get Fitbits last year—or even longer ago—and have managed to keep using them ever since. Here’s your best advice.
Today is no different than yesterday. You probably woke up this morning with big plans to “really make some changes this year,” but you know what? It’s not going to work. Why? Because you’ve already decided that waiting until the new year to become the new and improved you is the right course of action.
You know those MeUndies ads that pop up between the baby announcements and Russian troll news sites on your Facebook feed? People love that underwear so much because it’s made out of soft, moisture wicking modal fabric that feels really good down there.
Smart lock company Otto is suspending operations after a failed acquisition agreement. In a blog post late last year, CEO and founder Sam Jadallah says the company made an acquisition deal that limited its ability to fundraise, but the buyer pulled out at the last minute, leaving Otto with no remaining cash. The first locks were supposed to ship within the next few weeks, but “Otto will not ship next month and it may never ship,” says Jadallah. The company will “evaluate [its] options” for moving forward in the coming weeks.
The Otto Lock was pitched as a tiny and stylish, but very expensive, smart lock. It sold for $699, and was intended for wealthy homeowners. Despite this limited niche, Jadallah told TechCrunch that Otto didn’t...
Kick off 2018 by saving on fitness supplements to help you hit your resolutions, cookware to make your kitchen more enjoyable and productive, and extremely soft underwear that you’ll enjoy all year ‘round.
Complaints about automated telemarketing calls jumped steeply last year, and have quintupled since 2009, according to a recent FTC report. The report says that in fiscal year 2017, the agency received over 375,000 complaints per month about automated robocalls, up from only 63,000 per month in 2009. That’s a total of 4.5 million robocall complaints, plus an additional 2.5 million complaints about live telemarketing calls. For comparison, there were 3.4 million robocalls and 1.8 million live calls in 2016. (The FCC also regulates robocalls, but has received far fewer complaints — only 185,000 since August of 2016.)
The report says that robocalls are steadily increasing because of cheap access to internet calling services and autodialing,...
Amazon, Nirvana, Penny Arcade, Starbucks, Macklemore, Frasier. Without Seattle, middle-class white people would just sit in a dark room eating celery. But what is life really like in Seattle? How do you get through each season there, how do you get around town, where do you like to drink, where do you get a nice…
We made it to another year, which means Amazon is going to spend the next few weeks trying to sell us all fitness-related stuff to help with those New Year’s Resolutions. Today, they’re kicking off 2018 with a solid sale on supplements from a variety of manufacturers.
