When The Mandalorian premiered on Disney+ last month, there was no official Baby Yoda merchandise available for fans to purchase—despite the fact that the adorable character was essentially destined to become a viral meme from the start. Showrunner Jon Favreau later said that was a deliberate choice: Production of Baby Yoda toys was intentionally delayed…
Ask practically any phone carrier, and they’ll tell you that the future of smartphone features from texting to video calls is a protocol called Rich Communication Services. Think of RCS as the successor to SMS, an answer to iMessage that can also handle phone and video calls. Last month, Google announced it would begin rolling…
The world is warming and new medications are formulating, but first: a cartoon about the hellscape that is email.Here’s the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here!Today’s NewsA once-a-month birth control pill is comingMore than 15 million Americans spend…
Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, Dead Astronauts, has the feeling of a mosaic. Up close, you can marvel at the deft selection of each element, each word and sentence, and appreciate how it interacts with its immediate neighbors. From much further back, taking in the book as a whole, scenes and themes snap together. Seen from…
In the US, more than 15 million Americans will spend a few seconds every day locating and swallowing a birth control pill. If the tablet—a cordial of contraceptive hormones that trick the body into thinking it’s pregnant—is swallowed during the same three-hour window each day, the method is pretty close to ironclad. But get off-schedule…
Qualcomm revealed the newest iterations of its Snapdragon mobile processors this week. The chipmaker announced not just one but two new chipsets: one that will power some of the highest-end smartphones to be released in 2020, and another system-on-a-chip for midrange phones.The company’s two new chips are the flagship Snapdragon 865, which also includes an…
As climate delegates discuss the planet’s future at the COP25 meeting in Madrid this week, a new study finds the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet. That’s forcing polar bears and walruses to crowd onto shrinking beaches, starving reindeer and caribou, and driving extreme heat, drought, and sea level rise…
On the top floor of a Los Angeles courthouse, lawyers for a British diver and a billionaire tech CEO sparred over a linguistic dilemma: Does the phrase pedo guy necessarily mean pedophile?Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, had tweeted the insult about Vernon Unsworth, the diver, in July 2018. Unsworth later sued for defamation.…
Halfway through the first trailer for No Time to Die—the 25th James Bond film, and the last to star Daniel Craig as the lead MI5 agent—007 delivers a warning: “History isn’t kind to men who play god.”Presumably, he’s talking to Safin, the villain played by Rami Malek, but in some ways the Bond franchise has…
I’ll be honest: I love my drone. I mean, I always had remote-control vehicles back when I was a teenager. And of course the most impressive RC vehicle was the gas-powered helicopter. But it was expensive and hard to fly. Now, with a quadcopter, it’s a breeze. On top of that, it takes pictures and…
