By Vanessa Taylor Published May 17, 2025 | Comments (0) | Elon Musk waves as he arrives for a state dinner at the Lusail Palace on May 14, 2025, in Doha, Qatar. © Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet constellation that is run through SpaceX, has caught legislators’ attention. Democratic Senators this week called for an investigation into whether the Trump administration is using trade negotiations to benefit Musk. In a letter addressed to federal officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics Jamieson Greer, a group of Democratic Senators wrote, “Musk may be using his official role and his proximity to the President as leverage for his own personal and financial benefit — even if it comes at the expensive of American consumers and the nation’s foreign policy interests.” The letter comes shortly after Musk accompanied Trump to Saudi Arabia on the president’s first overseas trip of his second term and announced Starlink’s approval in Saudi Arabia while the White House shared its newest defense and trade agreements. The senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), noted that Starlink has an “aggressive goal” of gaining a million new customers each year. However, Starlink has “struggled to secure agreements to operate in certain emerging markets” and its growth seemed slow last year. But then things shifted. “Since President Trump took office, and Musk became a top Trump advisor, Starlink has seen a rush of new countries permitting the company to enter their markets,” the senators wrote. For example, Lesotho awarded Musk its first-ever satellite internet service license shortly after Trump hit the country with high tariffs. Senators also highlighted recent deals with other countries “seeking a reprieve from the threat of the Trump administration’s unpredictable tariffs,” including India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. The letter specifically mentions two articles from the Washington Post. First, an op-ed detailing that a Bangladeshi official met with Musk at the White House in February immediately after a trade meeting. There, Musk implied that the country “would not be able to get favorable trade terms” without granting Starlink access into Bangladesh. And then, a report in which the Post detailed how internal documents it obtained show that officials “have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name.” Although nothing shows the Trump administration “explicitly demand[ing] favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs,” the Post reported that the State Department told officials to push for regulatory approvals. “Suggesting that a foreign government adopt Starlink in exchange for relief on tariffs appears to be a textbook case of corruption,” the senators said, while requesting an investigation into whether officials “pursued a quid-pro-quo exchange of Starlink access for tariff favors in violation of federal ethic laws.” In addition, the senators wrote that the State Department’s involvement raises additional concerns, including whether “these officials may be subverting the public’s interest in favor of Mr. Musk’s personal financial interests as they negotiate new tariff agreements — and whether they have been directed by [Musk] or [Trump] to do so.” The Senators requested that the State Department Inspector General investigate that matter. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By AJ Dellinger Published May 17, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 16, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published May 15, 2025 By Vanessa Taylor Published May 15, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 15, 2025 By Vanessa Taylor Published May 14, 2025

By Isaac Schultz Published May 17, 2025 | Comments (0) | Scientists are using AI to decipher animal communication, creating some ethical conundrums. © Gizmodo [Illustration: St. Lumbroso, Photos: TatianaKim,Gulf MG/Shutterstock) Chirps, trills, growls, howls, squawks. Animals converse in all kinds of ways, yet humankind has only scratched the surface of how they communicate with each other and the rest of the living world. Our species has trained some animals—and if you ask cats, animals have trained us, too—but we’ve yet to truly crack the code on interspecies communication. Increasingly, animal researchers are deploying artificial intelligence to accelerate our investigations of animal communication—both within species and between branches on the tree of life. As scientists chip away at the complex communication systems of animals, they move closer to understanding what creatures are saying—and maybe even how to talk back. But as we try to bridge the linguistic gap between humans and animals, some experts are raising valid concerns about whether such capabilities are appropriate—or whether we should even attempt to communicate with animals at all. Using AI to untangle animal language Towards the front of the pack—or should I say pod?—is Project CETI, which has used machine learning to analyze more than 8,000 sperm whale “codas”—structured click patterns recorded by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Researchers uncovered contextual and combinatorial structures in the whales’ clicks, naming features like “rubato” and “ornamentation” to describe how whales subtly adjust their vocalizations during conversation. These patterns helped the team create a kind of phonetic alphabet for the animals—an expressive, structured system that may not be language as we know it but reveals a level of complexity that researchers weren’t previously aware of. Project CETI is also working on ethical guidelines for the technology, a critical goal given the risks of using AI to “talk” to the animals. Meanwhile, Google and the Wild Dolphin Project recently introduced DolphinGemma, a large language model (LLM) trained on 40 years of dolphin vocalizations. Just as ChatGPT is an LLM for human inputs—taking visual information like research papers and images and producing responses to relevant queries—DolphinGemma intakes dolphin sound data and predicts what vocalization comes next. DolphinGemma can even generate dolphin-like audio, and the researchers’ prototype two-way system, Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry (fittingly, CHAT), uses a smartphone-based interface that dolphins employ to request items like scarves or seagrass—potentially laying the groundwork for future interspecies dialogue. “DolphinGemma is being used in the field this season to improve our real-time sound recognition in the CHAT system,” said Denise Herzing, founder and director of the Wild Dolphin Project, which spearheaded the development of DolphinGemma in collaboration with researchers at Google DeepMind, in an email to Gizmodo. “This fall we will spend time ingesting known dolphin vocalizations and let Gemma show us any repeatable patterns they find,” such as vocalizations used in courtship and mother-calf discipline. In this way, Herzing added, the AI applications are two-fold: Researchers can use it both to explore dolphins’ natural sounds and to better understand the animals’ responses to human mimicking of dolphin sounds, which are synthetically produced by the AI CHAT system. Expanding the animal AI toolkit Outside the ocean, researchers are finding that human speech models can be repurposed to decode terrestrial animal signals, too. A University of Michigan-led team used Wav2Vec2—a speech recognition model trained on human voices—to identify dogs’ emotions, genders, breeds, and even individual identities based on their barks. The pre-trained human model outperformed a version trained solely on dog data, suggesting that human language model architectures could be surprisingly effective in decoding animal communication. Of course, we need to consider the different levels of sophistication these AI models are targeting. Determining whether a dog’s bark is aggressive or playful, or whether it’s male or female—these are perhaps understandably easier for a model to determine than, say, the nuanced meaning encoded in sperm whale phonetics. Nevertheless, each study inches scientists closer to understanding how AI tools, as they currently exist, can be best applied to such an expansive field—and gives the AI a chance to train itself to become a more useful part of the researcher’s toolkit. And even cats—often seen as aloof—appear to be more communicative than they let on. In a 2022 study out of Paris Nanterre University, cats showed clear signs of recognizing their owner’s voice, but beyond that, the felines responded more intensely when spoken to directly in “cat talk.” That suggests cats not only pay attention to what we say, but also how we say it—especially when it comes from someone they know. Earlier this month, a pair of cuttlefish researchers found evidence that the animals have a set of four “waves,” or physical gestures, that they make to one another, as well as to human playback of cuttlefish waves. The group plans to apply an algorithm to categorize the types of waves, automatically track the creatures’ movements, and understand the contexts in which the animals express themselves more rapidly. Private companies (such as Google) are also getting in on the act. Last week, China’s largest search engine, Baidu, filed a patent with the country’s IP administration proposing to translate animal (specifically cat) vocalizations into human language. The quick and dirty on the tech is that it would intake a trove of data from your kitty, and then use an AI model to analyze the data, determine the animal’s emotional state, and output the apparent human language message your pet was trying to convey. A universal translator for animals? Together, these studies represent a major shift in how scientists are approaching animal communication. Rather than starting from scratch, research teams are building tools and models designed for humans—and making advances that would have taken much longer otherwise. The end goal could (read: could) be a kind of Rosetta Stone for the animal kingdom, powered by AI. “We’ve gotten really good at analyzing human language just in the last five years, and we’re beginning to perfect this practice of transferring models trained on one dataset and applying them to new data,” said Sara Keen, a behavioral ecologist and electrical engineer at the Earth Species Project, in a video call with Gizmodo. The Earth Species Project plans to launch its flagship audio-language model for animal sounds, NatureLM, this year, and a demo for NatureLM-audio is already live. With input data from across the tree of life—as well as human speech, environmental sounds, and even music detection—the model aims to become a converter of human speech into animal analogues. The model “shows promising domain transfer from human speech to animal communication,” the project states, “supporting our hypothesis that shared representations in AI can help decode animal languages.” “A big part of our work really is trying to change the way people think about our place in the world,” Keen added. “We’re making cool discoveries about animal communication, but ultimately we’re finding that other species are just as complicated and nuanced as we are. And that revelation is pretty exciting.” The ethical dilemma Indeed, researchers generally agree on the promise of AI-based tools for improving the collection and interpretation of animal communication data. But some feel that there’s a breakdown in communication between that scholarly familiarity and the public’s perception of how these tools can be applied. “I think there’s currently a lot of misunderstanding in the coverage of this topic—that somehow machine learning can create this contextual knowledge out of nothing. That so long as you have thousands of hours of audio recordings, somehow some magic machine learning black box can squeeze meaning out of that,” said Christian Rutz, an expert in animal behavior and cognition and founding president of International Bio-Logging Society, in a video call with Gizmodo. “That’s not going to happen.” “Meaning comes through the contextual annotation and this is where I think it’s really important for this field as a whole, in this period of excitement and enthusiasm, to not forget that this annotation comes from basic behavioral ecology and natural history expertise,” Rutz added. In other words, let’s not put the horse before the cart, especially since the cart—in this case—is what’s powering the horse. But with great power…you know the cliché. Essentially, how can humans develop and apply these technologies in a way that is both scientifically illuminating and minimizes harm or disruption to its animal subjects? Experts have put forward ethical standards and guardrails for using the technologies that prioritize the welfare of creatures as we get closer to—well, wherever the technology is going. As AI advances, conversations about animal rights will have to evolve. In the future, animals could become more active participants in those conversations—a notion that legal experts are exploring as a thought exercise, but one that could someday become reality. “What we desperately need—apart from advancing the machine learning side—is to forge these meaningful collaborations between the machine learning experts and the animal behavior researchers,” Rutz said, “because it’s only when you put the two of us together that you stand a chance.” There’s no shortage of communication data to feed into data-hungry AI models, from pitch-perfect prairie dog squeaks to snails’ slimy trails (yes, really). But exactly how we make use of the information we glean from these new approaches requires thorough consideration of the ethics involved in “speaking” with animals. A recent paper on the ethical concerns of using AI to communicate with whales outlined six major problem areas. These include privacy rights, cultural and emotional harm to whales, anthropomorphism, technological solutionism (an overreliance on technology to fix problems), gender bias, and limited effectiveness for actual whale conservation. That last issue is especially urgent, given how many whale populations are already under serious threat. It increasingly appears that we’re on the brink of learning much more about the ways animals interact with one another—indeed, pulling back the curtain on their communication could also yield insights into how they learn, socialize, and act within their environments. But there are still significant challenges to overcome, such as asking ourselves how we use the powerful technologies currently in development. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Lucas Ropek Published May 16, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 16, 2025 By Isaiah Colbert Published May 16, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 15, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 14, 2025 By Kyle Barr Published May 13, 2025

How’s this for a mega team-up? Captain Marvel herself, Brie Larson, will star in a new, horror movie produced by J.J. Abrams, written by Brian Duffield and directed by J.T. Mollner. It’s called Fail-Safe and it’s based on a short story by Philip Fracassi about a young boy whose father spends a large amount of time making sure his mother doesn’t kill everyone, because she turns into a monster. “With Fail-Safe, Brian Duffield has written an absolute powerhouse of a script. It’s a horror film that is as sweet and moving as it is terrifying,” Abrams said in a statement given to Deadline. “To have J.T. Mollner in the director’s chair — his Strange Darling blew me away — is a dream come true. Finally, having the limitlessly talented Brie Larson as our star sets up Fail-Safe to be that rare horror film that makes you laugh, feel, and care, before taking you on an absolutely wild ride.” The film is currently being shopped on the market at the Cannes Film Festival, so expect some distributor to pick it up and help it get made, especially with that level of talent behind it. Larson and Abrams kind of speak for themselves. One is the Oscar-winning darling who turned an incredible, low-key career starring in incredible movies like Short Term 12 and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World into a superheroic one, with her role as Captain Marvel and more. Abrams is the only person to ever direct a Star Trek and a Star Wars movie and has helped create some of the most beloved TV shows of a generation, like Lost, Alias and Felicity. Those two together are awesome on their own but really it’s Mollner and Duffield that bring this together. Mollner has only directed two features but his most recent one, Strange Darling, was a genre festival darling, gaining praise and shock at each and every screening that took place. Duffield recently wrote and directed No One Will Save You, the stellar sci-fi starring Kaitlyn Dever, and previously directed the hilarious and over the top, Spontaneous. They are some of our best talents in the genre space and, to have them under the wing of J.J. Abrams, with Larson at the heart of this very intriguing movie, is awesome. You can read “Fail-Safe” by Philip Fracassi, in full, at this link. It’s a short story so expect the movie to be slightly expanded but, you’ll get the idea. This could be awesome. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Disneyland is turning 70 this summer, and festivities begin this weekend at Walt Disney’s first theme park. While past anniversaries emphasized a throwback to opening day nostalgia, this milestone wants to bring the party energy like no other. Thankfully, that doesn’t mean turning the castle into a Birthday cake, but the zany fun comes in the form of mix-taping the greatest hits with the latest number ones from the studio. After attending the media week preview at the Disneyland Resort, that’s what we loved about this year’s theme. The unabashed excitement for so many characters, from the fairytale Disney Princesses, The Muppets and Star Wars icons to the niche like Duffy the Disney Bear and A Goofy Movie. There were also incredible moments as well, including new Pixar and Disney animation faves Inside Out, Turning Red, Encanto and Moana all over the resort’s 70th offerings. It’s certainly celebration of cartoon chaos and we welcome Robot Walt’s imminent arrival in July to coincide with the actual anniversary of the opening date of the park. Some of the best things we found at the event were discovered on their own. When I wandered around Disney California Adventure I stumbled upon the most unhinged Disneyland 70 merchandise. And it confirmed that Disney really got all of its various types of fans when I looked upon the face of an official googly-eyed Mickey Mouse shirt, and a spinner-top colorful baseball cap. Yes, there’s the glam Loungefly Minnie ears and purses and Disney trendy lifestyle spirit jerseys, but the zany and bizarre get representation too. What’s hilarious is that those items weren’t made with meme comedy in mind, but actually straight from the Disney Vault of yester-merchandise. © io9 Gizmodo And just across the way at the Animation building, a new set of visuals debuted in the musical lobby which highlighted added moments from Coco, Moana, Encanto, The Princess and the Frog, and Zootopia. When I need a time to just bask in the magic of animation while staying out of the heat, this is where I (like so many others) go, and it’s such an underrated gem that rarely gets a refresh–not since the release of Frozen! And the Encanto representation at DCA didn’t stop there–while we love “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, I’m glad to get a break from it to let the other amazing songs shine. In the new World of Color: Happiness, Anxiety from Inside Out 2 (my rising sun sign of the emotions) presents a great sequence where Luisa’s “Surface Pressure” gets a moment on the water, and it was so cool to hear everyone sing along. Hot take: it’s the better song between it and Bruno. The Muppets opener for the show is an all-timer, too, with a muppety death defying act from Gonzo the Great. World of Color: Happiness also finally featured a kaiju-sized Panda Mei on the mist screen projections set to “Nobody Like You” which led into the best in-universe run of real fake Disney pop hits, right into a Powerline moment from “A Goofy Movie”. The beat drop on “I2I” sent the crowds into a frenzy as Powerline electrified the stage like we were really at the show with the Goofs. We are loving the Max Goof inclusion too, as he joins his dad over at Disneyland for the Celebrate Happy Character Calvacade parade, right behind Duffy and ShellieMay Bear leading the way. I know they’re tossing around all the different nomenclatures around “Happy”, but this was for those of us who are into the offbeat or niche things of the Disney fandom. © io9 Gizmodo For Star Wars fans, there’s even a new R2 unit available at Droid Depot, with exteriors to match the pinks, purples, blues and yellow of the 70th. And we also took a peek at the new scrap pieces that debuted earlier this month for May the Fourth at Savi’s lightsaber build experience. The ombre chrome look of the blaster emitter is a fierce need. Unfortunately, these pieces aren’t individually available for those who have already built their lightsabers for over 200 bucks–if you want to cop these parts you’ll have to try to get in on the limited time action with another whopping purchase before they’re gone. © io9 Gizmodo Paint the Night, the rave-inspired answer to the Electrical Parade is back and we got to see it near the Small World promenade with a special new projection show on the ride’s facade. Spooky and bizarro Disney lore fiends got a treat here with a fun Grim-Grinning Ghosts montage right into “Hellfire” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Mr. Toad crazy eyes, the crone Evil Queen and Frollo giving children some gateway frightful imagery that they’ll obsess over later in life. At the end of my second night, it capped off with Wondrous Journeys which takes the pages of countless animation cells and brings them to life on the Disneyland Castle walls showcasing the stories that have spoken to generations for 100 years. It really does feel like Disney wanted to reach far and wide for the park’s big anniversary this year–and not be afraid to get a little zany in the process. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

As Doctor Who prepared to return for its latest season, rumors swirled that it would be a make-or-break moment for the show, as threats of Disney terminating its funding deal for the series and even outright cancellation loomed. But while we’re not quite at the point of finding out what Disney’s stake in Doctor Who‘s future might be, a new report suggests that the end is far from nigh for the Time Lord regardless. A new report from British tabloid The Daily Mirror suggests that, despite recent reports that Doctor Who could be cancelled, or at the least go on an extend hiatus, plans are in place for the series to continue regardless of whatever decision Disney makes about its co-funding deal to distribute the series on Disney+ internationally. Disney executives, while speaking positively about its support of the show, have also previously stated that any further continuation of the co-funding deal would only be made after reviewing Doctor Who‘s ratings with the conclusion of the current season. According to The Mirror, whether or not Disney renews the deal, Doctor Who will take a break in 2026 and return to screens in 2027 (whether or not that will see Ncuti Gatwa bow out as the Doctor in the process remains to be seen), with the spinoff UNIT series The War Between Land and Sea set to fill the gap for Who fans next year. The tabloid further suggests that Russell T Davies will carry on as showrunner, with scripts currently in the works for at least two more seasons. Whether or not Disney renews its funding support may also not have as great an impact on Doctor Who itself, either. The Mirror’s report suggests that much of the approximately roughly ₤10 million of funding per episode was spent on the technical cost of improving Doctor Who‘s visual effects for streaming in 4K quality, something the series would be able to cut back on if it returned to being solely funded by the BBC, which streams high-definition programming at 2K. With just three episodes left of the current series to broadcast, more definitive information on the future of Doctor Who is no doubt coming soon. But at least at the moment fans can breathe a sigh of relief that things may not be as dire as they potentially seemed earlier this year. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein were dying to make Final Destination Bloodlines, and we mean more seriously than you think. When the directing partners pitched their take on the film over Zoom, they created an illusion where, during the pitch, each was “killed” in a wild, Final Destination way. It was the spark that got them the job, and now their film is finally here. That type of innovation is to be expected from the duo, who first met as contestants on the Steven Spielberg-produced reality show On the Lot. They didn’t win, but they became friends and have since been working their way up in the industry. Since then, they’ve made films in the Dead Rising and Leprechaun franchises, an excellent subtle superhero movie called Freaks, and even the Disney film Kim Possible. But now, finally, almost 20 years after meeting, Lipovsky and Stein have their first big Hollywood release. And something tells us it won’t be their last. io9 spoke to the directors in Los Angeles last week about their long journey through Hollywood. We broke down what they were most excited about in the Final Destination franchise, what Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts had to do with it all, and, most importantly, some of the ways they took Bloodlines from a sequel that could have been easily dismissed—and turned it into what we think is the series’ best yet. Note: There are a few minor spoilers throughout the interview, especially regarding the opening and overall themes of the movie. If you’re worried, come back after you see the film. Stein and Lipovsky doing their best Sam Raimi impression – Warner Bros. Germain Lussier, io9: The first time I heard about you guys was On the Lot in 2007. Adam Stein: That’s where we met. io9: [Laughs] Yes, that’s true. You’ve made a lot of cool stuff since then. But if you guys now could talk to those guys then and say it’ll take almost 20 years to get our first big theatrical release, what would they have said? Stein: [Laughs] You know, it has been such a roller coaster navigating the industry. But it’s been amazing that we have gotten to do it together. It’s a really hard thing to try to become a director in Hollywood. And so to have your best friend there with you to bounce ideas off of and commiserate with along the way has really been—we’ve been so lucky to have that. But I would say for people who are out there, who are in the struggle themselves, it takes a lot of perseverance, it takes a lot of resilience. Zack Lipovsky: But also those ups and downs are the lessons you need to learn. Like, we couldn’t have made this movie if someone had handed it to us 20 years ago. We didn’t have the wisdom or the experience that you get from things falling apart, and failures, and trying things that don’t work, and making movies that aren’t good. And all those types of things that you have to do to kind of hone your craft and get there. io9: Tell me about the conversations you guys had when you found out this was available. I’ve heard all about the Zoom, which is so cool and I’m mad it doesn’t exist somewhere. [Both laugh] But tell me about even before that—like when you said, “My God, Final Destination 6, let’s pitch on it and figure it out.” © Warner Bros./New Line Lipovsky: Well, I think actually the first gut reaction was, “How are they gonna make another one, because the end of five is perfect.” Right? So, “Really? They’re gonna make another one? Like what could they possibly do?” And then we started to hear this idea that Jon Watts had come up with about making the movie about a family. Starting it with the origin of this family and death is coming for this bloodline. And how much that would enrich all the relationships and the stakes and all those types of things. That really made us start to lean in and go, “Okay, that’s pretty interesting.” And then from there, [we] started to work on the process of getting hired. And then, a many-year process of working with the writers and the team to just kind of bring that inherent new idea through the movie in a way to make it feel more fresh and surprising. io9: Right, the first time I heard about this, it was like “Jon Watts is doing it.” And obviously he came up with kind of the kernel idea. But how much was actually in place when you guys came on board, and how much were you able to make it your own? Stein: They had done one draft of the script based on Jon’s idea when we first got involved. And the core of it was there. The idea of the opening would take place with Iris, I think it was the 1950s originally? But in the past, and then flash forward to her granddaughter. That was there. The details of who each person was, what all the death scenes were, completely changed over the course of two years of us being involved. But the core thing of it being a family that was fractured, that then could come together in a way, even as death was chasing them. That got us really excited. That was present in the original. io9: I’ll come back to some more of that soon but just as guys who are film fans, filmmakers, film nerds, what was the most exciting thing about the freedom of, presumably having your biggest budget? Besides the food. Everyone says the food. Lipovsky: We never had time to eat food. [Laughs] I think for us, it’s working with the caliber of crew that we had. You’re suddenly working with some of the best people at their craft in the world. You have the most incredible stunt people, special effects people, makeup effects people, and incredible actors. All the toys you’ve ever wanted. You can be like, “I really need this very special lens for this one shot I want to do.” You have it. So that, as a filmmaker, is just so much fun. Now, of course, you never have enough time or money. Because as soon as you start going, “Oh we could do that too, and do this,” you max out all the ability. Stein: You build a 120-foot set, surrounded by a volume, and light it on fire, well, that costs a lot. [All laugh.] But I think as filmmakers, the thing that we really got a kick out of is Final Destination, what makes it special as a horror franchise, is that there’s no personified villain coming for the characters. There’s no guy with a knife and a mask. What comes for the characters is the filmmaking. It’s these close-up, insert shots connected to other shots that build this mouse trap in the perfect, suspenseful way. It’s really like the directors are coming for the characters. So that was so much fun to kind of relish that experience. © Warner Bros./New Line io9: Speaking of the effects, just knowing you guys, I know wanted to do practical as much as you can. So talk about when you’re coming up with the death scenes, when, you know, “Okay, this is as far as we can push the practical, and then we have to kind of finish it off with digital.” Lipovsky: Yeah, we call it “the Guillermo del Toro school of filmmaking” where you do as much as you can practically, knowing that visual effects can help with the magic trick. And then the visual effects are really removing the things that are supporting the practical element. So we have a practical body or a practical set or something like that, or even people with a whole bunch of green rods and blue screens and things around it that are making it so that that practical thing can happen right at the center of frame. And then you use the visual effects to extend the set or erase the rod or do those things so that it really becomes hard to tell at which point what’s real and what isn’t. So there’s always something real there. And then the visual effects just kind of make it magical and kind of impossible. We try to do that whenever possible. Even there’s people falling through the dance floor and they’re falling and grabbing onto things dropping 40 feet, they’re [actually] falling through a dance floor and grabbing onto things, dropping 40 feet. But then everything around them is extended and kind of beautifully done by the visual effects team. But at the heart of it, we always just wanted something real. Stein: To give you another example, there’s a character that gets torn apart in the opening sequence. And there was a full-size mannequin body of this person with puppeteers that rip it in pieces, but then you erase the puppeteers. But the real thing you’re looking at really happened. io9: What sequence changed the most during either pre-production or editing as you were thinking about the balance of the practical and digital? Anna Lore in the barbecue scene.  – Warner Bros./New Line Lipovsky: I think one sequence that changed dramatically was what became the backyard barbecue scene, which is a really great scene. It actually started as a kids’ play place, Chuck E. Cheese-type set piece with bumper cars and bowling and all that crazy stuff. But we kind of ultimately realized that the core of these movies, especially this movie, was family, and also very relatable things. And so by making it a barbecue, you can kind of do all the things that we all have in our house, which is even more terrifying. And so it kind of changed into that. io9: This film—almost more than the other ones, which I watched beforehand—really messes with you with the red herrings. And I love it so much. So how early do you have to think about that, to make sure you have all the coverage while editing to know that these are like 15 things that we’re going to use to mess with you? Stein: You plan it out way before editing, in storyboards and scripting. To plant things that come back much later or to misdirect the audience. Because the main thing we wanted to do was keep it surprising. So you have a character walking backwards into a road and everyone in the audience goes, “Oh my god, oh my god,” and then [the car] misses him. So the audience kind of knows that we’re playing with them. Death is toying with the characters, just like we’re playing with the audience. Because we always wanted you to feel on the edge of your seat, like you don’t know what’s about to happen. So we had to plan that very far in advance. We were inspired by some of the other movies—the guy in FD2 throws the spaghetti out the window, and then his house catches on fire, he almost gets his hand caught in the garbage disposal, and all this stuff happens, and he gets on the fire escape and then slips on the spaghetti. So we tried to do that kind of thing where, like, there’s something that happens with a vending machine that you kind of forget about, and then it comes back. Stefani and her mom are not having a scream. – Warner Bros./New Line io9: Oh it comes back, yes it does. Another thing that I loved about this is that it takes the formula and it tweaks it in a couple of really interesting ways. One that happens early, so it’s not a huge spoiler, is we don’t get the premonition right way. So how early was that in the process that you’re like, right from the beginning we’re making this a new Final Destination? Lipovsky: That was a designing principle which was not have the premonition working exactly the way that all the other movies had, so that fans of the franchise right away went, “Wait, this is different than I’m used to. What is going on here?” And almost worried that we’re jumping the shark or breaking the rules or doing something wrong. But then, slowly, as the movie continues on and you realize what’s going on, you realize, “Oh, this does fit within the canon. It obeys all these rules that we’ve come to love.” But it was, like Adam was saying, it was building on that idea that as early as possible, we wanted people to not know where this was going next. And it’s really difficult with a Final Destination movie because there’s basically a formula. It’s something that you know what’s going to happen. But that makes for a boring movie. And so you have to figure out ways to still be true to it, but also keep it fresh io9: And you guys crushed that. Another thing I loved about it is, I love lore. Star Wars, Marvel, I love all that. And here the whole thing is lore, basically, right? So how early on was it decided that all the other movies are kind of the baby of this one? Stein: I mean, I think that was kind of a fun aspect of having this character, you know, Grandma Iris, who’s been in this cabin for decades, who’s been researching all the ways that people have died in the other movies. And it was actually inspired by FD1 how Alex in that movie, Devon Sawa’s character, traps himself in the cabin and is opening tuna cans with oven mitts because he knows death is coming. Well, we always loved that scene. And we thought, “Okay, what if you did that for decades? How would your life be? What would you know? What would you be researching?” And so Grandma Iris’s book with all the lore from all the other movies, that’s how that came together. Lipovsky: We even put an Easter egg in there where in FD1, he says, “I see you, you fuck” to death. And then Iris says the same thing in her cabin. © Warner Bros./New Line io9: One thing we haven’t seen now in six movies, though, is, death always wins but something is giving them the premonition. Something is battling. Stein: Yes. We have a theory. io9: Okay. I would love to hear your theory but I was just wondering, is that something you think could be introduced into a future movie or would that ruin kind of the formula? Stein: There have been lots of fan theories about some force of good that’s providing the premonition. I mean, we don’t want to piss people off and that is very valid theory. Lipovsky: And we don’t have a canon answer, but we have theories. Stein: Our own personal answer is that it’s death is bringing the premonitions because death, you know, he gets bored. He wants to have fun. So he does this thing, gives them enough clues that they could escape it if they’re paying attention, knowing that he’ll get them in the end in an even more fun way later. Tony Todd with the cast and crew of Bloodlines. – Warner Bros./New Line io9: I like that and I think fans will like that. Before I finish, I have to ask about Tony Todd. The fact that he passed is obviously horrible, but having him with this role in your movie it gives it this aura and this heart that is totally unexpected. So tell me about like first shooting with him. It was like when you found out? Lipovsky: Yeah. Well, we knew from while we were developing, we knew that he was sick. So it was developed with that in mind with him. You know, at first we were worried that he wouldn’t want to be in it or he wouldn’t be able to be in it. But he was so excited to be in the movie. Stein: And he’s like, “Don’t write me out of this movie. I have to do this.” Lipovsky: And we were very grateful that we could write the movie with that in mind, knowing that at the very least, this would be probably his last Final Destination movie, maybe his last movie ever. But we didn’t know that for sure. But that this would be saying goodbye to Bludworth. And that was designed from the beginning and worked very closely with him. And then even beyond that, when we shot that scene that day he was full of so much joy. It was just this electric feeling of seeing him do what he does so well. And then when it came to doing that last moment where he says goodbye, even with all the preparation we had done, we just said, “Tony, just throw it all away and speak from the heart about what this has all been about and what’s on your mind.” And, you know, his own mortality was on his mind. And he just spoke about how precious life is and how to take advantage of it. And that’s what he had shown us all day on set. He had done that. And it really comes through on screen when he he’s just he says that. Stein: Yeah, he’s speaking directly to the audience there. And I think takes a lot of people by surprise how much emotion they feel in that moment. © Warner Bros./New Line io9: It’s wonderful. Now that your first studio movie is in the books, and I hope there are many more, but what do you say the biggest lesson you guys took out of it? Lipovsky: The biggest lesson… I think the biggest thing that we learned was just that you don’t ever want to lose that same enthusiasm you had when you started making small movies and trusting your gut on the things you think that the audience will love. And just kind of trying to ignore the studio-ness of it all and just make that movie for yourself who’s the fan and bring that to life. And hold on to that, that joy of cinema and making a movie with your friends in your backyard and just trying to do that with cooler toys and amazing actors. Io9: One last stupid final question. The little kid at the beginning. You hate him so much. Stein: By the way, I love the theater reaction in that moment. The first time we screened it for a test audience and we had someone jump up in their seat and pump their fits when [he dies]. So you’re on the right track. That was really fun. io9: But since that was in the premonition, did we ever see him die again in real life? Lipovsky: There is a there is a newspaper article on the wall and if you look for the headline, I think it says “Pickpocket hit by piano moving van.” Final Destination Bloodlines is now in theaters. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

By Matt Novak Published May 16, 2025 | Comments (0) | Elon Musk waves as he arrives for a state dinner at the Lusail Palace on May 14, 2025, in Doha, Qatar. © Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool Grok went haywire on Wednesday, responding to innocuous questions on X with information about “white genocide” in South Africa. It was a confusing and sometimes hilarious glitch, but we now have some answers about what happened from xAI. And frankly, they just leave us with more questions. xAI posted a tweet Thursday night laying out its explanation, including the exact time that changes were made to Grok that made it pump out sentences about “white genocide” no matter what users asked. “On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X,” xAI wrote. “This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability.” You’ll notice that xAI, which is owned by Elon Musk, strongly suggests there was an internal actor who made this “unauthorized modification” but doesn’t use the language you’d expect if it was an employee at the company. And we’re guessing that might have something to do with the fact that it wasn’t an employee necessarily, but the owner. Musk has long been obsessed with the “white genocide” conspiracy theory, the idea that white people are being killed around the world by nonwhite people. The conspiracy theory often includes elements of anti-semitism and is similar to the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which claims global elites are trying to replace white people with other races in wealthy countries around the world. Musk is particularly interested in the supposed “white genocide” that’s happening in South Africa, the country where he was born and raised before emigrating to Canada and then eventually the U.S., and has shared tweets where he insists white farmers are being slaughtered for their race. The day before Grok started acting oddly, Musk quote-tweeted a post about South Africa that contained misinformation. The person Musk was quote-tweeting posted video that showed a street in South Africa where hundreds of white crosses had been placed on each side. The poster claimed that each cross represented a white farmer who had been murdered. “Each cross represents a white farmer who was murdered in South Africa,” the account Dr. Maalof wrote. “And some people still deny that white South Africans/Boers are persecuted and say they don’t deserve asylum because they are white.” Musk shared the tweet with “So many crosses,” and naturally a bunch of X users asked Grok if this was true. Grok responded that the crosses were called Witkruis Monument and each cross actually represents farmers of any race who’ve been killed. The next day, people started to notice that Grok was acting weird, responding to unrelated queries with information about white genocide. Changes were made to Grok at 3:15 a.m. PT (6:15 a.m. ET), which led to jokes Thursday night about how late Musk stays up each night. The billionaire frequently tweets at all hours, but you don’t need to assume Musk was up late to think he may have been behind the change to Grok. The billionaire oligarch is currently in the Middle East with President Donald Trump, meeting with world leaders. Qatar’s timezone is 10 hours ahead of Pacific Time, meaning it was 1:15 p.m. in Qatar when the tinkering was taking place. Elon’s Jet, the social media account that tracks Musk’s plane and has been banned from X, shows the billionaire was soon to be landing in Doha when all of this was happening. Landed in Doha, Ad-Dawhah Municipality, Qatar. Apx. flt. time 16 min. [image or embed] — Elon Musk’s Jet Tracking (@elonjet.net) May 14, 2025 at 5:06 AM To be clear, we don’t have proof that Musk was involved. It’s entirely possible that some workers at xAI saw Musk getting fact-checked by Grok about white genocide and wanted to tilt the AI tool in their boss’s favor. But Musk is notorious for tinkering with his products to suit his needs and make himself feel better. There’s an infamous story, first reported by Platformer in 2023, where Musk became extremely upset about President Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet getting more likes and views than Musk’s. Biden’s tweet about the Super Bowl received 29 million impressions and Musk’s just 9 million, prompting Musk to fly back to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand changes to the algorithm. Those changes made it so that users on X were seeing an absolute flood of Musk tweets. It wasn’t subtle. We’re guessing something similar happened here. xAI wrote on Thursday night it would start publishing system prompts to Github in an effort to be more transparent and “putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail.” This, of course, makes it sound like this was a problem of automation rather than an insecure man-child tinkering with his multimillion dollar toy to make himself feel better. But whatever they have to tell themselves. The long and the short of it? These systems are inherently biased by the way they’re trained. And they’re also incredibly difficult to manipulate with precision, given the way large language models work. Grok is essentially just a fancy predictive text machine. And as long as Musk has control of tools to shape public opinion, he’s going to use them—unfortunately, for fascist purposes. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Isaiah Colbert Published May 16, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published May 16, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 16, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published May 15, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 15, 2025 By Vanessa Taylor Published May 15, 2025

Many light gaming laptops also try to bill themselves as creative laptops as well. Few provide any features beyond a pretty screen that actually support artistic types. Acer’s 14-inch Predator Triton 14 AI has a glassy, haptic touchpad that also works with a stylus. This means the touchpad can act as a digital drawing pad for creatives who prefer a PC and don’t want to draw directly on a touchscreen. For those who haven’t tried a haptic touchpad like that on the Triton 14 AI, it’s a slightly different experience than a traditional mechanical pad. It uses force feedback on your clicks, but the benefit beyond looks is uniform force feedback along a wider surface area. Despite this, few devices have thought to take advantage of a flat surface with full stylus support. Unlike Dell’s XPS 13 design from last year, the Triton 14 AI breaks up the flat palm rest with plastic brackets when your finger or pen is trying to draw outside the lines. The size of the Triton AI’s trackpad won’t stand up to a full drawing pad or a quality creative-minded tablet like an iPad Pro M4, but stylus support without covering up a laptop screen could be handy in a pinch. I had the chance to try out the Triton 14 AI, but Acer wasn’t about to let me put the laptop through its paces. Just like every other laptop brand, Acer has a slate of new gaming laptops sporting Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs, but it’s still hard to get excited for most of them. And then the company dropped the Predator Triton 14 AI on my lap, and I was immediately intrigued. It seems Acer took a page from the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 from last year—still one of the best-feeling gaming laptops you can buy for this size. The shell has a very sturdy frame based on my short time with it. Save for its large Predator logo on the back, the Triton can pass as a non-gaming machine if you opt to not show off the per-key RGB. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo Other devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro or Asus ProArt PZ13 may also fit the bill as Windows machines for artists, but the Triton AI has one element those devices don’t—a discrete GPU. The device sports an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V CPU, the top-end Lunar Lake processor from last year that only now seems to be featured in today’s mobile devices. As for graphics, configurations top out with an Nvidia RTX 5070 laptop GPU. The device also supports up to 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 2TB of SSD storage. That’s about what we expect from a device of this size, and we can expect with that GPU it should be enough for 1440p gaming in most intensive titles. The laptop isn’t too heavy either at 3.5 pounds. As is necessary for a modern creator’s laptop, the Triton 14 AI houses an OLED display with a 120Hz, 2,880 x 1,800 resolution panel and a stated peak brightness of 340 nits. That might not be enough for working in bright daylight, but at least you should be able to hold onto it without burning your fingers. Acer packed a graphene thermal interface material on the CPU, which it claims is far better at transferring heat than traditional thermal grease or paste. The touchpad works with Acer’s Active stylus which comes bundled with the laptop. The one missing piece is a magnetic attachment point for users to keep their pen close during use. At least, the Active pen includes pressure sensitivity and tilt response, plus it has built-in haptics for force feedback when pressing down on the tip. It supports AES 2.0, USI 2.0, and MPP 2.5 protocols, which encompass the majority of digital pens that work across capacitive touchscreens and pads. Acer did not reveal pricing for the Triton 14 AI or when we can expect it to hit store shelves. The company was one of the early few that explicitly raised prices on its devices, citing Trump tariffs. The Zephyrus started at $1,600 but the RTX 4070 model with more RAM cost closer to $2,000. If the Triton 14 AI costs more than that, it may be a hard machine to justify, even if you want to practice your penmanship on your laptop.

A plane flies off into the sunset, John Williams’ unforgettable theme blares out of the speakers, and a tear streams down my face. When I finished playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I felt like I did back in 1989 when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came to theaters. I’d just seen an incredible Indiana Jones story. One I’d never forget. Except, this time, I was Indy. When Bethesda and Lucasfilm first announced they were making an Indiana Jones video game in 2021, I was incredibly excited. Even though I’ve been a massive Indy fan for as long as I can remember, I’d never played an Indy video game. Or, at least, never played an Indy game I felt any connection to. I hoped this was it, but since I don’t have an Xbox or PC, I was forced to wait five more months than everyone else. When Great Circle first released, io9 editor James Whitbrook played the game and found it very frustrating. His headline reading “Every Moment You’re Playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Feels Like Torture” was more than concerning. It was terrifying. Was this Crystal Skull all over again? So, when Great Circle was finally announced for PlayStation 5, while I still knew I would play it, I tempered expectations drastically. Which, in the end, was probably a good thing. Using a map in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Bethesda/MachineGames One of James’ biggest complaints was about the controls and combat. And pretty early on, I knew I agreed with him about that. Fist fighting just wasn’t particularly fun, and the controls never really felt that comfortable. It was button-mashing, for the most part. I also was disappointed to figure out that pulling your gun, or stealing one from a Nazi, was an even worse idea because then a bunch of other Nazis come after you and you’re dead. Then I realized something. If I were an adventuring archaeologist running around Europe in the 1930s, I wouldn’t want to fight. In fact, I’d do everything to avoid that. I’d want to survive. I’d sneak around, be quiet and avoid trouble. And so, unless absolutely necessary, that became how I played Great Circle. I used logic. I was sneaky. I was Indiana Jones. That’s not to say I didn’t punch more than a few Nazis or even shoot a few if need be, it just was never the first option if I could avoid it. And I don’t even like stealth games that much, but viewing the mechanic through the lens of Indiana Jones‘ down-to-earth reputation changed my entire mindset. I was the one deciding how Indiana Jones was going to solve this mystery and things only got more exciting and interesting from there.  It even made me like the first-person viewpoint more than I had expected. The POV upped the immersion, plus you get to pull back and see Indy more often than you’d expect. © Bethesda/MachineGames But really, what works the most about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the story. A story that, at every turn, was seemingly crafted to be perfectly in line with the first three Indy films. Without spoiling anything, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle sees Indy traverse the globe attempting to acquire specific stones that will grant a magical power. And, of course, he’s doing it in competition with some particularly brutal Nazis. Having Great Circle in the title also doesn’t give away what the Macguffin is like, unlike “The Lost Ark,” “Crystal Skull,” and “Dial of Destiny” do. It feels more like “Last Crusade” in that way, but with elements of Raiders and Temple of Doom too. Several sections of the game let you go anywhere you’d like, exploring, fighting, whatever. Others are more limited but provide even greater action. When I tell you there are some action set pieces in this game that the movies could never, ever match, I mean it. But whether you’re solving puzzles to enter a temple, flying a plane, or climbing up a wall with your whip, the game simply understands Indiana Jones. Indy will regularly comment about historical connections. He’s infinitely curious and filled with wonder. You use notes and images to solve mysteries and document your findings. You wear disguises, make ample use of the whip, and always make sure to get your hat back. Indy even has a new female sidekick, Gina, who often feels like real competition for Marion Ravenwood. Then there is the full reveal of the Macguffin, which feels like it comes in too late but is wholly satisfying anyway. That culminates in a truly epic finale that, as you play it, you constantly wish you could see on the big screen. I realized later that if Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was a movie, it would easily be the third best Indiana Jones movie: Raiders, Last Crusade, then this. And I love Temple of Doom, but it’s great because it’s different. This one is not different from the other two, which is part of what makes it so special. Exploring in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Bethesda/Machine Games Best of all, it’s done with the Indiana Jones you know and love. As wonderful as Harrison Ford was in Dial of Destiny, and as hard as James Mangold tried to recapture that magic, it was simply not the same as the original trilogy. Dial explored a new aspect of Indy. This is classic, younger Indy. Our favorite Indy. Which is possible both because this is a video game and because of Troy Baker. Seriously, this game is not possible without Troy Baker. His voice work as Indiana Jones is so good, it should be studied by voice actors forever. Never for a second do you not hear Harrison Ford coming out of your game. It’s perfect and only helps the total immersion and cohesion of the story. Now, do I wish it were a little longer? Yes. Are there minor problems here and there? Also yes. But for the most part, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was not just worth the wait for this Indy fan, it was beyond my wildest expectations. It made me break out a few of my action figures. Put on the movies while I worked. And, once again, rekindle my eternal love for Indiana Jones. I want to play it again right now, or maybe watch someone else play it, almost like it’s the next great Indy movie. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is available on PlayStation 5, PC, and XBox X/S. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

2025 Sony has a team of magicians on staff. It’s the only rational explanation I can come up with for how it’s raised the bar for active noise-cancelling headphones year after year. I really thought Sony couldn’t improve upon last year’s model, the class-leading WH-1000XM5. But the WH-1000XM6 (yes, the naming convention still sucks) has so many new features—a revamped design that folds again, a new processor and drivers, and more mics—I can’t argue with the results. The XM6 ANC headphones don’t have many flaws to speak of. Although the estimated 30 hours of battery life is solid, I’m always looking for more time off the charger. Honestly, the only downside is the hefty $450 price tag, but then again, Apple seems to have no problem selling AirPods Max for $550. Sony WH-1000XM6 Sony's WH-1000XM6 outdoes its predecessor in just about every category, making them the headphones to beat this year, noise cancelling or otherwise. Pros Cons At first glance, you may not notice all the refinements that Sony made to the XM6. But I assure you, they all add up to a more comfortable and polished pair of headphones. The leatherette over-ear cups create a nice passive noise-cancelling seal, the headband is wider for better weight distribution on your dome, and it’s great to see Sony listened to feedback and made them foldable again. Even little touches like a larger power button that’s easier to press are worth appreciating. Sony’s playing it a bit safe with the usual black, silver, and midnight blue colorways, but hopefully it’ll roll out more interesting shades down the line. It’s not hard to get the XM6 connected to your smartphone or laptop. The minute you flip the included magnetic hard case open, you’ll get a pairing prompt on your phone, which walks you through connecting the headphones via Bluetooth, and then you’re ready to go. The initial pairing process only takes less than three minutes, but I still wish it was faster, like it is on most modern wireless earbuds. Play your cards right, and you’ll rarely have to touch your phone. Unlike AirPods Max, you can control audio from the touch-sensitive surface on the right ear cup using taps and swipes. A double tap plays and pauses audio or answers and rejects a call, while a forward or backward swipe switches to the next and previous track, respectively. Swiping up or down adjusts the volume, while holding your hand over the earcup launches Quick Attention, which pauses audio until you remove your hand. And if you don’t feel like touching the headphones, you can nod your head or shake it to answer or reject a phone call. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo The NC/AMB button (noise cancellation and ambient noise mode) also pulls double duty. Press it twice to Quick Access a chosen app (Amazon Music, Spotify, or Endel). You can program a second app to launch with three taps, but you’ll need the Sony Sound Connect app (previously called Headphone Connect) to configure that. I’m always wavering between Bose and Sony when it comes to noise-cancelling tech. Right now, Sony has taken a noticeable lead. In its quest for silence, or at least a quieter environment, Sony has brought its new QN3 processor and 12 upgraded microphones (versus eight on the XM5). It also wouldn’t be 2025 without a healthy dose of AI. To that end, the XM6 has AI noise reduction, which the company says was trained on over 500 million voice samples. The result is some seriously quiet phone and video calls. You also have a refreshed AI Noise Optimizer feature, which works to identify and eliminate pesky ambient noises. I took the XM6 and the Bose QuietComfort Ultra headphones for a trip on the New York City subway—a place full of random smells and noises. Neither pair of cans did anything for the summer bod funk in the air, but plenty for the latter. In terms of regular train noises (opening and closing doors, moving along the tracks, train announcements, etc.), the XM6 was slightly better at muting the din without any music playing. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo Sony’s newest ANC headphones also did a better job of shielding me from a lover’s spat on the train. I typically hear more ambient sound while wearing Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra. I cued up Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” on the XM6 and committed myself to minding my own business. Okay, I may have switched over to Ambient Sound to hear some of the juicier details, but not for the whole conversation. Speaking of Ambient Sound, that’s the mode I engage when I’m walking alone at night or in unfamiliar surroundings. It lets in outside noise so you can keep tabs on your surroundings. One minute, I’m hearing nothing but the deep bass and raunchy lyrics in the Ying Yang Twins’ “Wait (The Whisper Song),” and the next, there’s birds chirping and traffic sounds filtered in. Deeper bass, brighter highs, and fuller mids—what a difference a driver makes. The 30mm drivers utilize a more rigid dome construction, which translates into more balanced audio performance. Since my regular playlist covers a wide swath of music genres, I kept the built-in equalizer off to get the flattest frequency possible. That means when I listened to Sevendust’s “Enemy,” there wasn’t any artificial bass being added. It was just me, crisp cymbals, bombastic percussion, an energetic set of electric guitars, and silky smooth vocals juxtaposed against guttural screams. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo Even without spatial audio or Cinematic mode, the XM6’s soundstage is seriously generous. I can really make out the finer vibrations of the twang of the guitars on “Raised Right” by Reyna Roberts. The violin and vocals were just as clean, where I could hear some of the plosives as Roberts enunciated words like “night” and “taught.” But what about the low end? No, the XM6 don’t go as hard on the bass as the Sony’s Ult headphones. But I discovered they still bring the boom as I listened to Pop Smoke’s “Dior.” The bass was nice and weighty but didn’t overwhelm the violin, hi-hats, or the Nextel chirps and other electronic elements throughout the drill track. Whether I’m watching a movie or listening to music, spatial audio has become one of my favorite features to indulge in. Seriously, cue up a music service that supports Dolby Atmos or Sony’s 360 Audio format—you’ll thank me. It’s a cool, almost eerie feeling to move your head from right to left or up and down and have the music respond to your location accordingly. It essentially creates your own personal concert hall. Spatial audio is at its best watching action scenes, as the gunfire and subsequent explosions gain an extra dimension of immersion. Previously called Headphone Connect, the renamed Sound Connect app retains all previous functionality while adding new features. While I love a kitchen sink approach to features, I have a feeling that many users won’t touch more than 50% of them. Speak-to-Chat, Spatial Audio, Ambient Sound Control, Adaptive Sound Control, and multipoint pairing are all present. Something new to the scene is Listening Mode, which lets you toggle between Standard, Background Music, and Cinematic modes. The first one is pretty straightforward: you listen to your music with whatever settings you’ve got enabled. Background Music lowers the volume so you can carry on a conversation. The audio is a bit diffused, but you can still bop without losing too much detail. Cinematic mode is the exact opposite and expands the soundstage. It’s not on a par with spatial audio, but it’s the mode I recommend using when you’re watching movies or TV. (If you’re concerned about protecting your hearing, the app has a Safe Listening feature that tracks your sound allowance as advised by the World Health Organization. It can also track how much ambient noise the cans have protected your ears from.) There’s also Scene-based Listening (SBL). This goes hand-in-hand with Adaptive Sound Control. Where the latter automatically adjusts noise cancellation based on your location, SBL will start playing music from your chosen player based on activity or location. You can set it to play at the start of your commute, while you’re taking a jog or working out at the gym and the app will learn your habits and adjust ANC levels accordingly. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo My only complaint is that some of the cooler features, like spatial audio and Find Your Equalizer, aren’t front and center. Instead, they’re tucked away in smaller menus that aren’t easy to navigate. You really have to hunt for the setting you’re looking for. I already mentioned the XM6 has a set of 12 microphones on each side, half of which are beamforming devices designed to focus on picking up your voice. Combine that with the AI Reduction technology, and you’ve got crystal clear calls whether you’re connected to a smartphone or laptop. I was most impressed with how well the AI reduction worked. Whether I was in a busy coffee shop or walking down a construction-laden street, my callers reported little to no background noise. That doesn’t mean that they totally blocked out the jackhammer I walked by or the overhead train. The headphones muted them and all but killed any wind resistance, but certain noises don’t totally disappear. The XM6 has the same 30 hours of battery life (with noise cancellation on) as the XM5, with a quick charge that translates to three hours of power after being plugged in for three minutes. The battery shoots up to 40 hours if you disable the noise cancellation. Keeping the volume at about 50%, I’ve only had to charge the headphones twice over the course of a week. While I would have loved for Sony to give the XM6 even more battery life, that doesn’t mean the company didn’t give us some sort of improvement. Unlike previous headphones in the WH-1000 series, you can charge the XM6 while they’re in use. Instead of having to face a long commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx sans music or ANC, I just plugged them into my Anker battery pack and maintained my peace on the train. I’m going to do my damnedest to stop doubting Sony when it comes to outdoing itself. But it’s so hard when it seems like the company’s ANC headphones can’t get any better. Because let’s be clear, the XM5 landed on many a best noise-cancellation headphones list. But the Sony WH-1000XM6 has taken just about everything I loved about its predecessor and given it a big update. Better driver? Check. New processor? Yep. Actually useful AI features? You betcha. The result is a refined and feature-packed pair of premium ANC headphones with best-in-class ANC and a comfortable, albeit safe design.

Andor‘s final batch of episodes had to walk a steady balancing act, tying together myriad swirling character arcs into the overarching looming shadow of not just the events of Rogue One, but the events of Star Wars itself. In navigating those final climactic days where Andor could be itself as well as the passer of the torch, the show managed to give us and its characters alike the endings that perhaps mattered most. Luthen © Lucasfilm It’s impossible to talk about the final arc of Andor without talking about the ending it gets out of the way first. Luthen’s long-awaited confrontation with Dedra is tragic in many ways, not just because of his choice to sacrifice himself to deny her the information she craves, but because, in contrast to the other rebellious stories we see climax here, it’s so incredibly lonely. There is no grand exit, no long goodbye—he gets a brief moment with Kleya when he sends her away, and of course, Dedra’s attempts to keep him alive make the actual moment of his end occur after the course of episode 10, “Make It Stop.” He dies quietly, he dies unable to really know just what an impact he’s about to have on the people he knew, the people he loved, the Rebellion, and the fate of the galaxy itself. But Luthen’s final moment standing, before he takes the knife to himself, as sad as it is, is also a beautiful one—one that thematically then ties the endings of the rest of the rebels across Andor‘s final act together brilliantly. “The Rebellion isn’t here anymore, it’s flown away,” he tells Dedra. “It’s everywhere now… there’s a whole galaxy out there, waiting to disgust you.” The work Luthen did may have been isolatory by design, playing cells and operatives off each other, the paranoia of all the secrets he helped keep. But as he burns brightly, for that sunrise he knew he’d never see, he is defiantly steadfast that what he has helped create has connected voices all over the galaxy. That there are, as his agents’ code phrase said, friends everywhere. Partagaz and the ISB © Lucasfilm It is this particular thematic throughline sparked by Luthen’s words that also defines the endings of our Imperial antagonists across the arc in stark contrast. We’ll get to Dedra separately, but it’s interesting that the endings we get for Andor‘s ISB apparatus—represented by her, Partagaz, and Heert in these episodes, and to a lesser extent double-agent Lonni—are lonely for very different reasons than Luthen’s was. Syril’s death on Ghorman laid the blueprint here: Andor‘s vision of the Empire is defined in equal parts the abuse of its systems for personal glorification, and the deadly threat of that system subsuming even its most ardent supports and benefactors, because that’s exactly what the Empire is designed to do. Lonni might die at Luthen’s hands, it’s implied, but he dies because his use as a tool of the system he’d turned on is over. Heert’s grand chase of Kleya—a mirror to Dedra’s obsession with Axis that he’d sneered at her for—is rewarded with K2 tossing his lifeless body around as a meatshield, crumpled and forgotten. Partagaz’s is perhaps the most deliciously bitter, not just for the system he helped create crashing down around him, but because, again, his final moments are spent realizing that the rebellion is so much bigger than the “disease” he thought he could contain and sterilize. He’s alone in a room, committing suicide, after hearing Nemik’s manifesto: he has no idea who it is. He just knows, again, that it’s getting out everywhere. Kleya © Lucasfilm Kleya’s end is not so much an end, but a continuation of a legacy that she’s followed her whole life. Luthen’s sacrifice gives her a chance to flee and tell the Rebellion about the Death Star, but it also pushes her out from under his lonely world of cloak and daggers, in a way. In the flashbacks that are woven throughout her solo mission to lay Luthen to rest before the Empire can pull him from the brink, we see her story start alone and afraid and angry—and in choosing to save this orphaned child and help her point that anger somewhere as she grows up, Luthen’s final gift to Kleya is to give her something bigger to be part of. Perhaps it’s a story we’ll revisit someday, of Kleya’s life in the Rebellion, but in this moment that set of facts doesn’t really matter, it’s that she gets to carry on his spirit as the Rebellion flourishes. Dedra © Lucasfilm It’s fitting and so telling then, that Kleya and Dedra’s final moments on-screen in Andor are side-by-side. If Kleya wakes up to on the new dawn of being part of the thing her mentor helped build, then Dedra—clad in those white-and-orange scrubs of the Imperial prison system—is to witness the structure that she helped build and champion chew her up and spit her out into some forgotten hole. We know from season one’s arc on Narkina-5 that the Empire has now designed these facilities to never really grant freedom. There’s a fascinating parallel to Syril’s own death in her ultimate punishment, the idea that her obsession with Axis, as his was with Cassian, pushed her and pushed her to a point where the Empire itself could turn on her and discard her, and she’d be too blinkered to notice it until it was too late. It’s not just that Dedra’s hoarding of information she shouldn’t have lands her in Krennic’s crosshairs, it’s her drive to get Luthen, to keep him alive once he mortally wounds himself, in the hopes that she will be rewarded regardless of any transgression she’s made to get there. That the Imperial system she believed in will work for her, rather than her for it. But the Empire exists to consume even its most loyal adherents, and so her punishment for championing it so ardently is as satisfying to watch as it was inevitable. Bix © Lucasfilm If any of Andor‘s endings might prove controversial, it’s perhaps its very last one. In some ways, Bix’s isolation from the final act of Andor (a decision she makes, but one that still takes her out of the broader fight she had previously yearned to be part of), only for her to part the series with the revelation that she’s given birth to Cassian’s child—a child he’ll never know—treats her story as less her own, and more in the service of Cassian’s. But it’s likewise also compelling that Bix is the rare character who ends the series given the chance of peace, of not having to fight and struggle. Many of the journeys that close out Andor are ones that we know will continue, and more specifically that continue in the sense that their fight isn’t over yet. That she is the final vision we have the show feels, in part, that this is what it was all for: to be free to live life with loved ones, a generation that can grow up in the hope that they in turn don’t have to fight and struggle to maintain that peace. Bail Organa © Lucasfilm But wait! Bail Organa’s journey doesn’t end in Andor. He’s in Rogue One! He’s technically in A New Hope, or at least very, very tiny atomized parts of him are! But while those stories are, chronologically speaking, Bail’s last moments in the Star Wars saga, it feels like Andor actually gives the man himself a proper sendoff—more proper than the hasty one he gets in Rogue One to go meet his explosive destiny—in his brief chat with Cassian. It’s short and sweet but laden with meaning, to give Bail a little teeth, and a moment of bonding with Cassian after their initial disagreements. We don’t ever get to see Bail’s final moments from his own perspective on screen (they’re retold, if you’re interested, in the From a Certain Point of View anthology), but giving him a goal to go out swinging feels like a fitting coda. The Stories Left Untold © Lucasfilm But for all the above stories that Andor wraps up in its last act, there’s just as many—and it’s just as important—that it leaves so many paths open. There’s characters we just simply don’t see again, like Leida after her wedding, or even further flung characters like Kino Loy from season one. There’s characters for who the story just continues elsewhere, like Cassian and K2 themselves, or Mon Mothma, last seen chatting to Vel amid the hubbub of Yavin IV, or Saw, staring down the Imperial occupation of Jedha. Some of these are famous Star Wars figures, and we know where they end up, but just as important is getting flashes like Wilmon and Dreena sharing food, or, in a grimly hilarious fashion, a drunken Perrin hanging off the arm of Davro Sculden’s wife. Perhaps most fitting then is an end we glimpse, but never get: when Cassian wakes from his slumber to go on his mission to Kafrene, he dreams of his long-missing sister. Andor‘s first major story thread, the focus of its opening scenes to put this whole story into motion, never gets resolved. Some people may be frustrated by that, in an age when Star Wars fans and Star Wars itself, at times, is obsessed with checking off the facts and details of its world. But we get everything we need to know: Cassian still thinks about her. He dies never getting the answer. We will, perhaps rightfully, never learn ourselves. Not all ends definitively. Life goes on. Even as we know the broad strokes of what’s about to go down in this moment in Star Wars, some answers are just never found. But there’s a whole texture of existence beneath that sweeping saga and those big questions, and that’s what Andor was always reminding us of. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

By Ed Cara Published May 15, 2025 | Comments (0) | By the time you reach your 30s, your lungs are already declining in function, new research finds. © CDC Our lungs may start to lose their steam earlier in life than we thought. Research out today suggests that lung function tends to peak in young adulthood and only gets worse from there. Scientists at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) led the study, published Thursday in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. After analyzing data from earlier population studies, the researchers found that peak lung function is usually reached by our early 20s and—contrary to current wisdom—continues to steadily decline as we age. According to lead author Judith Garcia-Aymerich, co-director of the Environment and Health over the Life Course program at ISGlobal, it’s been assumed that our lungs follow a specific trajectory: they gradually get stronger until our mid-20s, reach a steady plateau over the next few decades, then decline as we reach middle age. But this assumption was based on studies that only examined lung function at certain time periods, rather than over the course of an entire life. To bridge this knowledge gap, Garcia-Aymerich’s team combined and analyzed data from eight different population studies in Europe and Australia. These studies collectively involved around 30,000 people from the ages of four to 82, and lung function was measured through forced spirometry, a test where people blow out as much air as possible after taking a deep breath. The researchers first identified two broad stages of lung development: a phase of rapid growth in early childhood, followed by slower, steady growth through the early 20s. On average, this peak was reached around age 20 for women and age 23 for men. Unlike other research, they failed to find any evidence of a steady period of lung function following this peak. “Previous models suggested a plateau phase until the age of 40, but our data show that lung function starts to decline much earlier than previously thought, immediately after the peak,” said Garcia-Aymerich in a statement released by ISGlobal. The findings, somber as they are, might help improve how respiratory health is tracked and maintained, the researchers say. They found that certain risk factors for poor lung health, such as asthma and smoking, might affect lung function a bit differently than suspected, for instance. Chronic asthma appears to weaken lung health at an early age, a weakness that then persists throughout a person’s life. Smoking, on the other hand, seems to rapidly worsen a person’s lungs starting in the mid-30s. Equipped with this knowledge, it might be possible to intervene early on, the researchers say. “Early detection of low lung function may allow interventions to prevent chronic respiratory diseases in adulthood,” said Garcia-Aymerich. While our lungs might not stay in tip-top shape as long as hoped, there are things most anyone can do to keep them as healthy as possible, such as regular physical exercise. Daily Newsletter

TP-Link has long been associated with delivering quality networking equipment at competitive prices. Their routers have been famous for their reliability, ease of use, and excellent value, and the Archer BE550 Wi-Fi 7 router is no exception. Being TP-Link’s latest model, this router brings next-generation tech to large homes in the form of its powerful performance, wide coverage and great features that are designed to meet contemporary “connected” home needs. The router is available on Amazon for just $199 now, down from its usual price of $299. Even better, using code 30BE550 at checkout, you can get an extra $30 off, which brings the final total down to just $169 which is a whopping 45% discount that makes this deal hard to resist. See at Amazon Up to 5760 Mbps The Archer BE550 is a Tri-Band BE9300 Wi-Fi 7 router which is designed to deliver incredible speeds and uninterrupted connectivity throughout your home. With Multi-Link Operation, Multi-RUs, state-of-the-art 4K-QAM, and super-wide 320 MHz channels, it provides scorching wireless speeds: up to 5760 Mbps on the 6 GHz band, 2880 Mbps on the 5 GHz band, and 574 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band. For streaming 4K or 8K content, participating in lag-free AR/VR gaming or downloading large files, the Archer BE550 will deliver a smooth experience. With six internal antennas and advanced beamforming technology, the Archer BE550 is built to cover up to 2,000 square feet, which makes it perfect for large homes where multiple floors and solid walls often cause dead spots. For even greater coverage, TP-Link’s EasyMesh technology allows you to add compatible routers, range extenders or powerline adapters to establish a whole-home network that eliminates dead zones and keeps you connected throughout your home. Future-proof your home network with the Archer BE550’s full complement of 2.5G WAN and LAN ports. Equipped with a 2.5G WAN port and four 2.5G LAN ports, you can take full advantage of your wired devices and future-proof your network for tomorrow’s smart home devices’ increasing demands. With TP-Link HomeShield, you get whole-network protection, robust parental controls and IoT security in real time, so you can be safe at home or away. The router also has the feature to set up a private IoT network which isolates your smart devices from your main network and adding security through WPA3 encryption and advanced threat protection. With this time-limited promotion ($169 with promo code 30BE550) it’s the ideal time to introduce next-gen Wi-Fi 7 performance to your residence! See at Amazon

By Passant Rabie Published May 15, 2025 | Comments (0) | The Athena lander ended up lying on its side on the surface of the Moon. Intuitive Machines Earlier this year, an ill-fated lander skidded across the lunar surface and ended up lying sideways in a cold, dark crater. Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander was declared dead on arrival at the Moon. Now, the company has released a report detailing the chain of mishaps that led to its demise. Athena touched down on the Moon on Thursday, March 6, following a week-long journey through space. After a less-than-ideal touchdown, the lunar lander ended up on its side in a shallow crater in the Moon’s Mons Mouton region, 820 feet (250 meters) from its targeted landing site. During an earnings call on Wednesday, Intuitive Machines listed three factors that affected Athena’s ability to land on the Moon, SpaceNews reported. The first issue had to do with the lander’s laser altimeters, instruments designed to help it estimate its distance from the Moon during descent. “In the final phase of descent, we saw signal noise and distortion that did not allow for accurate altitude readings,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during the call. The Houston-based company also blamed conditions at the Moon’s south polar region. According to Altemus, the sunlight’s low angles and the topography “created long shadows and dim lighting conditions that challenged the precision capability of our landing system.” The third factor that resulted in Athena’s lunar tumble was the lander’s inability to recognize craters on the Moon from lower altitudes. Intuitive Machines relied on photos captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnoissance Orbiter to guide the lander’s optical navigation system during its descent. Those images, however, are captured at an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) and therefore “could not accurately account for how craters appear at lower altitudes with south pole lighting conditions as you approach the landing site,” Altemus said. The company is treating Athena’s failed mission as a set of lessons learned as it prepares to launch its third lander sometime next year. “We’ve added dissimilar and redundant altimeters to the sensor suite, and they’re going through more rigorous and extreme flight-like testing than we’ve done before,” Altemus said in Tuesday’s call, according to Space.com. “We’ve incorporated an additional lighting-independent sensor for surface velocity measurements. We’ve expanded onboard terrain crater database for enhanced navigation across the surface of the moon.” Intuitive Machines launched its first lunar lander, Odysseus, in February 2024. It reached the lunar surface, but the landing wasn’t exactly smooth. One of the lander’s legs may have gotten caught during its descent, causing it to tip onto its side and end up lying sideways on a rock. The mission did operate for seven days on the lunar surface, making Intuitive Machines the first company to land a private lander on the Moon. “Moving forward, we will succeed,” Altemus said. “Land softly, land upright, land ready to operate.” Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Passant Rabie Published May 10, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 9, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 8, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published May 2, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 2, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 1, 2025

With the weather starting to warm up, we’ll all be rushing to spend some more time relaxing outside with our loved ones and maybe even planning some much needed camping trips. You can facilitate these outdoor activities with a portable power station. EcoFlow has an 1800W power station with a solar panel included for a solid 46% off as part of a limited time deal. Normally priced at $1,299, you can now get it for just $699—saving you $600. See at Amazon Fast Charging for All of Your Devices This portable battery can power almost anything and power all your appliances with its 1800W output. That’s on par with gas powered outdoor generators but no fumes nor noise. You can draw enough power to have an outdoor movie night with a projector plugged into the power station. It’ll power a projector for 12 hours or a 50″ TV for nearly eight hours. You can recharge your phone fast, getting it from 0% up to 80% in just 50 minutes. Get it all the way up to 100% in just 80 minutes using the AC power. This makes this a wonderful utility to bring outside in the backyard when you have guests or to use in an emergency situation if the house has lost power. As far as ports are concerned, the EcoFlow Delta 2 power station has two USB-A fast charging ports , two standard USB-A ports, two USB-C ports, two DC5521 ports, a solar and car charging input, the AC charging input, plus six AC output sockets. That means you can power up to 15 devices are once. The battery on this standalone power station has a capacity of 1,000Wh but that can be expanded by another 3000Wh with option extra batteries. Perfect of camping, RV traveling, or off-the-grid living. This listing on Amazon includes a 220W solar panel to ensure you never run out of power. It’ll bring your Delta 2 power station back from zero to 100% in under six hours. The EcoFlow Delta 2 power station is built to last, able to sustain charging and depleting over 3,000 times in its lifetime. That’ll get you years and years of use before running into any issues. Plus with the companion app, you can monitor real-time energy insights and control from afar. Spring is still a couple months away, but if you’ve been on the lookout for a portable power station either for leisure use, to have on hand in an emergency, or both, look no further than the EcoFlow Delta 2 — currently down 46% at just $699. See at Amazon

By Vanessa Taylor Published May 14, 2025 | Comments (6) | Elon Musk wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses with Trump in the background © (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) Ahead of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the House and Senate established caucuses to ostensibly work with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. But since its creation, DOGE has regularly shirked safeguards and oversight. Now, one House member says that the DOGE Caucus is dead. But even if that’s the case, DOGE itself sure as hell isn’t. In a recent interview with Politico, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), the House DOGE caucus’s first Democratic member, said, “The DOGE caucus is dead. It’s defunct. We haven’t met in months. We only had two total meetings in five months.” According to Moskowitz, the caucus’s three Republican chairs, Reps. Aaron Bean (Fla.), Pete Sessions (Texas), and Blake Moore (Utah) told lawmakers that they would have a hand in DOGE’s decisions. He told Politico, “They told us that they were going to work with us. They told us these things would come through Congress. None of it happened.” Instead, Moskowitz said that the caucus “[wasn’t] involved at all in anything [happening at DOGE]” and “Musk did it all on his own.” These statements come only months after Moskowitz similarly said in a CNN interview that “we were told this is where the discussion is going to happen…There’s been no discussion. Elon’s been doing it all himself.” Shortly before, Democratic Rep. Val Hoyle (Ore.) left the caucus over Musk’s tactics. Although Moskowitz added that “DOGE was a complete failure,” his sentiments aren’t shared by everyone. Per Politico, caucus co-chair Bean said that their work is “just getting started”. He added, “Congress can enact long-term change, and our 100 committed members and eight specialized working groups are working to codify critical reforms and preparing legislation that will unlock savings for the American people.” But to be so real, Moskowitz’s statements aren’t illuminating. It’s more like…Yeah. No shit? Misdirection aside, it still should’ve been clear that the caucus wasn’t going to have real power. It exists to be a yes man and enforce DOGE’s whims. Per its own description, the DOGE caucus “lead[s] government efficiency initiatives” in the House, and, on the same page, Bean’s introductory statement says “taking on Crazy Town will be no easy task – they will need partners.” In a short time span, DOGE has spread into federal agencies like the plague. Thus far, it has fired over 216,000 people, attempted to dismantle numerous agencies, amassed data from various agencies to build a master database to surveil immigrants, and more. But recently, DOGE has struggled to justify its existence. Musk’s original promise of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget has steadily reduced to $150 billion. On its website, DOGE claims that it has saved $170 billion through workforce reductions, contract and grant cancellations, and more. However, NPR reported that doesn’t add up. Plus, the Partnership for Public Service’s analysis found that DOGE likely cost taxpayers $135 billion. Keep in mind this analysis doesn’t include the additional costs of DOGE’s lawsuits, like the dozens from former federal employees and multiple watchdog groups who sued over the agency’s lack of transparency. When it comes to verifiable claims for cuts, the DOGE trackers at Musk Watch have put the number at just $16 billion. Recently, DOGE has appeared to be losing steam after Musk announced his plans to step back. But Musk’s potential word games about his future level of involvement aside, DOGE has done plenty of damage in just months. Even if people will be hearing less from Musk himself, the agency isn’t being disbanded. DOGE’s largely under-qualified and unvetted teams will remain. And even if the agency magically disappeared tomorrow, it will take time to repair DOGE’s handiwork. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Matt Novak Published May 14, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 14, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published May 13, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published May 13, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 13, 2025 By Ed Cara Published May 13, 2025

If you’ve ever purchased a power bank with high capacity, you know how pricey they can be. That’s why we love this Amazon sale on the Moihosso 56,800mAh portable power bank so much: For only $34, down from $249 (a massive 85% off), this is an all-time low price and it’s almost unbelievable that you can get a battery this big for this cheap. See at Amazon Massive Capacity At the top of the list is its behemoth 56,800mAh capacity: To put that into perspective, you can charge most modern smartphones eleven times before you’ll need to recharge the battery pack itself. Tablets which typically require more power can be topped up several times as well. This makes it the perfect companion for long road trips, camping weekends or business travel where access to outlets is limited. You’ll also like the 22.5W fast charging capability – which is not the best of the market, but which is still very decent. That still means you can have your devices at 100% a lot quicker than with standard chargers. If you want to charge your phone in time for an instant departure out the door, or keep your tablet charged for a long flight, this power bank supplies stable, consistent power to keep you moving. The two USB-A and one USB-C output ports allow you to charge three at once which means you can charge all of your devices at once or share with friends. The Moihosso power bank has also overcharge, overheat and overcurrent protections built into it, so your devices are safe while charging. With a near-perfect 4.9 out of 5-stars rating from dozens of customers and over a thousand units sold within the previous month alone, it seems that customers are quite satisfied with their purchase. We love its real-world battery life, build quality and simplicity of the smart LED display which displays the percentage of power left at a glance. Of course, $240 is hard to justify on a power bank (even with such a high capacity) but $35 on a 56,800mAh battery pack with fast charging, multi-device charging, and a great reputation is a very good deal. With an all-time low price point and highly positive reviews, this power bank is a worthwhile investment for those who need backup power. See at Amazon

As the Muppets’ presence at Disney Parks continues to evolve, the beloved Jim Henson Company characters are marking their 70-year anniversary at the same time as Disneyland. With that in mind Disney Experiences and Muppet Studios collaborated on a special show to fit perfectly along with the celebrations across the Disneyland Resort. io9 was present for the premiere of the Muppets’ special greeting before the first showing of World of Color: Happiness, the nighttime water spectacular at Disney California Adventure. Before the show, representatives and producing teams from Disney Experiences discussed the latest collaboration between Disney and Henson. “Well, there’s a lot of hijinks I can tell you that for sure,” said Susanna Tubert, creative director of Disney Live Entertainment. “But it quickly became apparent to us that the Muppets are actually celebrating their 70th anniversary as well. So when we reached out to our partners at the Muppet Studios and said, ‘Hey, do the Muppets want to play with us? It was also resounding: yes.” Tubert added, “I will share that Miss Piggy had a lot of requests, there were a lot of wardrobe requests. There are a few special outfits that may have been made for her for this. Gonzo got into some hijinks [and] it all kind of went rolling down hill very quickly, but we had a lot of fun.” © io9 Gizmodo The Muppets moment before World of Color presents some classic Muppet Show-style shenanigans, as they’re there to give audiences instructions on how to spectate the show they’re about to watch. All of the iconic characters get in on the action and it makes you wish they’d just run the rest of the show. There’s music and classic gags. Be sure to watch out for Gonzo the Great making a death-defying jump over the water, and of course there’s enough Mayhem to go around with Dr. Teeth and friends. What’s interesting is that World of Color: Happiness heavily features Paul Williams’ iconic Muppets tune “Rainbow Connection” covered by Boys II Men—but the characters themselves don’t appear in the show, which is such a wasted opportunity. Inside Out fans will be happy to know all of Riley’s emotions handle the mix-tape tinged new water show that fits the chaotic tone that takes you on a real rollercoaster of feelings with new and nostalgic Disney musical moments. But we wanted more Muppets! We lost their 3D show in California years ago and Disney World’s version just followed suit. While we look forward to the Muppets coaster on the East Coast, we hope the West Coast isn’t forgotten. The World of Color intro got some good cheers and showed how even projected on water, the Muppets energy cannot be contained. And as they celebrate 70 years of timelessness, that is something we shouldn’t take for granted. World of Color: Happiness with a special message from the Muppets will be projected on scheduled nights during Disneyland’s 70th Anniversary at the Disneyland Resort. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

It’s been a long road for Star Trek: Prodigy, getting from there (Paramount+) to here (Netflix). But, perhaps fitting for a show so engaged as a spiritual sequel to Star Trek: Voyager, that journey homeward bound might need to keep going on for a bit longer: it’s emerged this week that the animated series is starting to run out of time before it needs a new savior. This week it was confirmed that Netflix—who saved Prodigy from being completely scrubbed off streaming services last year, after Paramount abruptly pulled the plug on the show during the production of its greenlit second season—is about to lose the streaming rights for Prodigy‘s first season next month, with rights for the second season set to expire at the very end of 2025, on December 31. “While the future removal of Star Trek: Prodigy on Netflix is disconcerting, it has little to do with lack of viewership or anything nefarious,” Kevin and Dan Hageman, Prodigy‘s showrunners, said in part in a post on social media about the licensing rights.. “We hold out hope someone will pick it up. The next generation of Trek fans deserve it.” Although the Hagemans dance around it, the lack of news about a potential third season of Prodigy since the sophomore’s debut on Netflix last year, paired with the news about the series’ licensing renewal, doesn’t paint an optimistic picture for the series’ future beyond simply finding a place for the current seasons to stream online. But at least this time fans don’t have to worry as they did when Paramount first tried to scrub the show offline, leaving certain episodes unable to watch at all: Prodigy season two got a physical release on Blu-ray and DVD last year, so even if the show is beamed off of Netflix without renewal in the coming months, at least the series will remain accessible in a more reliable form. We’ll bring you more on Star Trek: Prodigy’s fate as and when we learn it. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

You’re looking for a reliable laptop at a reasonable price point? The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 is currently available on Amazon at a record low, and this is one of the best-sellers among its category right now. This 15″ laptop with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage boasts an impressive 4.8 out of 5 stars from customer reviews, and it has seen its price slashed by a huge 73%, now selling for just $399, down from its original $1,499 list price. If you’re searching for a great value for money laptop, that’s the one. See at Amazon Perfect for Home or Business The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 is designed to serve home and business users. It is powered by an Intel Celeron N4500 dual-core processor with a speed of up to 2.8 GHz. While this processor is designed for standard use (and not heavy gaming or video editing), it’s more than sufficient for web surfing, word processing, streaming media, and light gaming. The processor is also complemented with integrated Intel UHD Graphics to ensure smooth motion when watching videos. It also has an impressive 32GB DDR4 RAM and multitasking will be very easy. You can open various apps and browser tabs without noticing the lag which is a big advantage for professionals and students. The 1TB PCIe SSD provides you with lightning-fast boot-ups and ample space for all your documents, files, photos, and business information. The 15.6-inch Full HD anti-glare display screen is another great feature and it offers crisp text and vibrant colors. The thin configuration gives you ultimate screen real estate so you can stream your top shows, do work on papers or virtually attend classes with no compromise. Sound is one aspect that’s often sacrificed on budget notebooks, but IdeaPad 1 excels with its two Dolby Audio speakers. With the HD 720p camera featuring a privacy shutter, you can be sure and have full control over your online meeting or virtual gathering privacy. You will also enjoy several ports on the laptop, including USB 2.0, USB 3.2 Gen 1, USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 for data transfer, HDMI 1.4b, a card reader, and a headphone / microphone combo jack. It will be easy connect to external monitors, storage devices and other peripherals. What’s more, Windows 11 Pro is pre-installed and you’ll enjoy a modern, secure, and intuitive operating system perfect for work and play. The English non-backlit keyboard is comfortable to type on and the Cloud Grey color scheme gives it a fashionable, professional look. Last thing: This deal is unlikely to last long, so if you’re looking for a new laptop, now is the perfect time to act. See at Amazon

By Matt Novak Published May 14, 2025 | Comments (0) | A Sherman Tank crushes a Tesla with the license plate "FASCISM" in a YouTube video. Screenshot: YouTube / Led by Donkeys Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave two Nazi-style salutes the day President Donald Trump was inaugurated back in January, giving the public explicit confirmation of what everyone knew already. The billionaire oligarch was aligning himself with some of the most evil people in history. And a new viral video sends a hopeful message about who will ultimately land on top. Ken Turner, a 98-year-old veteran of World War II, is featured in a new video showing exactly what he thinks of fascism. Turner served in the British Army and the video shows this hero rolling a Sherman tank over a Tesla. “I’m old enough to have seen fascism the first time around, now it’s coming back,” Turner says in the video while sitting in the U.S.-made tank. “Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is using his immense power to support the far right in Europe and his money comes from Tesla cars,” Turner continued. “Well, I’ve got this message for Mr. Musk: We’ve crushed fascism before, and we’ll crush it again.” The video, which was created by a British political group Led By Donkeys, is available on Bluesky and YouTube. The Tesla Model 3 has a license plate that reads “fascism” and gets absolutely crushed by the tank. It’s pretty satisfying to watch. Hilariously, defenders of Musk and his companies seem to think the video demonstrates something positive for Tesla. Teslarati, a pro-Tesla blog, wrote that the video is actually good for Tesla. The website seems to think it demonstrates just how durable the vehicle is. “As could be seen from the wreckage of the Tesla Model 3 after its Sherman encounter, only the glass roof and windows of the all-electric sedan were crushed,” Teslarati wrote. “Looking at the wreckage of the Model 3, it seemed like its doors could still be opened, and everything on its lower section looked intact.” You’ll notice the website only focused on the durability of the Tesla without acknowledging Musk’s embrace of fascism. Because the billionaire oligarch not only spent a quarter of a billion dollars to help get Trump elected, he’s currently dismantling the government in the most corrupt power-grab of the modern era. And it’s really hard to deny that Musk is a far-right extremist. Musk actually would eventually deny he was doing a Nazi salute on Jan. 20. But it was much, much later, coming only after he kept making Nazi jokes and embracing the attention he was getting online for his salutes. But we all knew what we saw. The billionaire told podcaster Joe Rogan he was making a gesture meant to communicate, “My heart goes out to you.” But there’s no universe in which any reasonable person looks at the gesture Musk made and believes he was expressing love. That’s the look of a man determined to make a fascist salute. Elon Musk appears to give one of two Nazi salutes on Jan. 20, 2025. © Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images In fact, Musk didn’t do just one salute, which may have given him more plausible deniability. This guy did two Nazi-style salutes on that stage. As you can see by the expressions of the people behind him, everyone knew what was happening. And they loved it. © Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Even before Musk made his salutes, many politically middle-of-the-road people who had to serve under Trump understood what the MAGA movement stood for. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, was extremely worried about the possibility of Trump attempting a coup after he lost the 2020 election. Milley was correct, and Trump tried a self-coup on Jan. 6, 2021, when he instructed a mob to descend on the U.S. Capitol. After Jan. 6, Milley held drills with top military and law enforcement officials in preparation for Joe Biden’s inauguration. It was their job to protect Washington D.C. if they tried it again. “Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in,” Milley was quoted as saying by CNN. Trump would later call for Milley to be executed for treason. Most Americans hate what Musk is doing, and Tesla’s profits have plunged 71%, all because the world can see what he’s doing to advance the cause of fascism. And we can take at least one World War II vet’s word that all of this needs to be crushed immediately. Elon Musk is a fascist. He’s spent hundreds of millions of dollars to further the MAGA cause, and he’s currently in the Middle East as an unelected representative of the U.S. government, getting lucrative deals with the leverage of a corrupt oligarch. None of this stops without Musk getting stripped of his power. And while the billionaire keeps saying he’ll leave government eventually, we’ll believe it when we actually see it (like we saw his salutes). Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Lucas Ropek Published May 13, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published May 13, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 13, 2025 By Ed Cara Published May 13, 2025 Laura Newcombe Published May 12, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published May 8, 2025

With 700 lumens and HD live view, this product has everything you might be looking for in an outdoor camera at only half its original price. The setup is simple and wire-free. You can install it in minutes and experience up to two years of powerful battery life. Control the brightness of the lights and activate them conveniently from the Blink app. It is built to withstand rain, snow, or extreme temperatures. This reliability means you can depend on the Blink Outdoor 4 Floodlight Camera to keep your home secure without constant maintenance. Once installed, it is ready to go. It is a proactive security camera, perfectly suitable for someone who doesn’t want to periodically check whether it is working or what it is capturing. The best news? You can get it on Amazon for only $64.99, which is the lowest price it has ever reached. See at Amazon Light Your Way Home As the Blink Outdoor 4 Floodlight Camera also works with Alexa, it allows you to control the device using just your voice with any compatible device. It enables live-streaming functionalities, easy arming and disarming, activating the lights, setting helpful Alexa Routines, and much more. Experience the enhanced motion detection and all the convenience and added benefits of Blink. The lights are bright enough to light up large surfaces like the immediate backyard area of your house or a back patio. You can control the brightness and activate them conveniently from the Blink app. With enhanced two-way audio and weather resistance added to the list of amazing features, the Blink Outdoor 4 Floodlight Camera has a resolution of 1080p HD video and sets a new standard in home security. It can save and share your clips and even activate smart notifications to let you know whenever a person is detected with embedded computer vision. It can tell the difference between people, objects, and animals for added peace of mind. You can customize motion detection zones and sensitivity levels to reduce false alarms and ensure you are notified of genuine security concerns. CV is processed securely on your device. With a battery life of up to two years based on default settings, a high-speed internet connection, and a field of view of 143° diagonal, its customers find the security camera easy to install, use, and appreciate the amazing features it offers at such a low price. This deal is a great opportunity to own one of the most advanced and beautifully made cameras available on the market, at a price that is hard to pass up. At just $64.99, this Blink Outdoor 4 Floodlight Camera from Amazon is an unbeatable deal. See at Amazon

VPN discount campaigns are all across the internet. Honestly, it feels tiresome to sift through them after a while. However, NordVPN’s biggest price reduction yet sticks out like a healthy thumb, amongst the sore ones. With the biggest discounts yet, NordVPN slashes its price by at least 72% and up to 77% depending on the chosen plan. Better yet, everything else is the same — security, privacy, speed, performance, and compatibility. Let’s see why everyone’s rushing to get NordVPN at a record-breaking low price and lift off the curtain of mystery. Explore NordVPN Discounts Now NordVPN’s Biggest Discounts Uncovered Judging by current prices, that won’t last long, by the way, it’s clear as day why so many are dazzled. First of all, biennial plans now come with 3 free months, and the Basic one starts at a meager $3.09/mo or $83.43 upfront. This price affords you a world-class VPN with all of its advanced and basic features. But, NordVPN spices up the deal with the Plus plan at 73% off. Simultaneously the best option, it costs $3.99/mo with a few extras. NordVPN Plus blocks ads and malware with Threat Protection Pro, while also including NordPass as a nifty password manager. Up the ladder is NordVPN complete at $4.99/mo which sprinkles 1 TB NordLocker on top. If you’re brave, the Prime plan at a whopping 77% drops in NordProtect as ID theft insurance and a considerable privacy boost. At $6.99/mo for 27 months, it’s easily the most capable VPN package you can buy in 2025. 30 Days to Test It Risk-Free Did you know that each initial purchase is risk-free? Well, now you know. It’s another piece of the puzzle — the one with millions rushing to lock in their privacy with NordVPN. Once you obtain the chosen plan, you have 30 days to get a refund if you’re unsatisfied. The money-back guarantee is… well, a guarantee! This means you don’t have to justify your reasons for getting a refund. Not like it? Don’t need it? Contact NordVPN, get your money back, and forget about it. NordVPN is confident it won’t come to such hard feelings, though. What Can You Do With NordVPN? While you certainly can’t take it out on a date, you can get some things that an ordinary date usually doesn’t come with: Stream geo-restricted content Share files over P2P anonymously Protect your general online privacy Stay safe on public WiFi hotspots Play games online with no lag, and much more. NordVPN can always do these things, whether it’s on sale or at its priciest. When you think about it, you want to be on the cheaper side of it. This sale is an adequate opportunity to live your dreams at a bottom-shelf price. Try NordVPN Risk-Free

A newly described creature from the Cambrian period is putting a bizarre twist on what we thought we knew about early animal evolution. Meet Mosura fentoni—a three-eyed, clawed, and flappy-limbed predator about the size of your finger, recently identified from Canada’s famed Burgess Shale. The alien-looking animal is part of a group called radiodonts, a now-extinct lineage of arthropods best known for Anomalocaris, a three-foot-long (one-meter-long) sea terror with spiny limbs and a circular mouth full of teeth. Like its cousins, Mosura had a similar feeding disk and paddle-like limbs for swimming. But it also had a strange surprise out back: a tail-like segment of 16 tightly packed body sections, each lined with gills. The Royal Society Open Science published the team’s description of the creature today. “As much as we learn about radiodonts, there always seems to be something new and surprising about this group around the corner,” said study lead author Joe Moysiuk, curator at the Manitoba Museum, in an email to Gizmodo. “The ‘abdomen’ in Mosura is different in that its segments are small and they have only tiny flaps that would have been basically useless for propulsion.” The researchers aren’t totally sure why Mosura needed this extra breathing real estate, but it could be related to how or where it lived—maybe hanging out in low-oxygen environments in the lively Cambrian seas, or leading an especially active lifestyle. A life reconstruction of the radiodont. Illustration: Art by Danielle Dufault, © ROM Its unique shape, with broad swimming flaps and a slender abdomen, earned it the nickname “sea-moth” from the researchers—hence the name Mosura, a nod to the Japanese kaiju Mothra. But despite its nickname, Mosura is only distantly related to moths. Mosura is part of a much more ancient lineage of arthropods—and though the radiodonts are long-gone, their remarkable preservation in the Burgess Shale is routinely yielding new species to science. Beyond its sci-fi looks, Mosura is also offering rare glimpses of internal anatomy from half a billion years ago. Some of the 61 fossils of the creature studied show preserved nerve tissue, eye structures, a digestive tract, and even reflective patches representing an open circulatory system—essentially a heart pumping blood into internal cavities called lacunae. Those same features, previously mysterious in other fossils, are evident in the team’s Mosura specimens. The fossils, mostly collected by the Royal Ontario Museum over the last 50 years, came from Yoho and Kootenay National Parks—part of the Burgess Shale region. The region was part of the ancient seafloor and is known for its exceptional preservation of the soft-bodied organisms that called the seafloor home. Moysiuk has recently unearthed a couple of other creatures from the Cambrian Explosion, including Titanokorys gainesi in 2021 and Cambroraster falcatus, named for the Millennium Falcon, in 2019. “So many science fiction creatures have been inspired by living organisms,” Moysiuk said. “It seems only natural that scientists should take some inspiration in return.” “There are loads of other possible inspirations for species names, but I do think there’s a lot of potential with the ‘Tremors’ franchise,” Moysiuk added. “The giant worms in that series are supposed to be relicts of the Precambrian, and although that makes no sense scientifically, it could make for a fun reference.” You heard it here first: As long as the creatures getting discovered keep looking as alien as Moysiuk’s recent finds, no science fiction franchise is safe from becoming scientific nomenclature.

For the theme park's 70th anniversary, the snack bucket game receives a fun tech upgrade.

There is a lot to love in Andor. It is a dense show, a big show, one that is filled with fascinatingly layered characters worth diving deep into, twisting plotlines that hold a mirror up to our world and the galaxy far, far away alike. It’s a show that, in spite of a certain reputation in contrast to other Star Wars stories, is filled with little nods to the franchise’s history old and new. But right now, at least in our moment of interest, it’s a show where Cassian Andor’s blaster pistol goes vuh-weeeeee. Just like Andor more broadly, there’s also a lot to love about Cassian’s blaster pistol. It’s a MW-20 Bryar pistol, itself one of those aforementioned little nods: the design is heavily inspired by the legendary K-16 Bryar pistol wielded by Kyle Katarn in the Star Wars video game series Dark Forces, a character with intriguing parallels to Cassian even beyond the latter in part subsuming the role of the former in modern continuity. It’s a good-looking gun design even beyond that legacy, just a flat wedge of weaponry with a handle attached—different enough to Han’s iconic DL-44 but in that sort of vein, that excellent Star Wars mix of looking just askance to a real-world gun but with a greebled, sci-fi layer. It also does a little flippy-thing with the body of the blaster that’s very cool, which brings us to that sound. The vuh-weeeeeewith incredible sound design, it’s maybe one of Andor‘s best additions to the auditory canon. It’s subtle, but pointed, a layer of Cassian’s intimidation whenever he pulls the pistol out to point at someone. Star Wars guns don’t need cocking or reloading like some actual weapons do; a blaster bolt is superheated gas condensed into a shard of pure energy. Maybe that’s the gas being primed, maybe the chamber is re-filling the flow of tibanna ready to be charged up and fired. Honestly I don’t really care to know, because while the internal mechanics of a MW-20 Bryar blaster pistol might be cool, but they’re kind of not the point. © Lucasfilm The vuh-weeeeeeka-chunk noise too, presumably of that spinning section locking back into place on the blaster, but it’s the vuh-weeeeee that really sticks in your ear, this high-pitched little whine. In Andor Cassian is the kind of man who rarely pulls out a blaster pistol to not use it: from Skeen to Cloris, when the bryar’s broken out, he means business. You hear that ka-chunk, as it settles into a vuh-weeeeee, and you know Cassian’s good to go, and that somebody’s probably about to get a bolt put through them. This high strung, intense little noise is not unlike the wielder of the weapon that makes it. After all, what is Cassian Andor if not a primed bolt of pure energy, ready to go off at a moment’s notice, ready to be aimed in the direction of something and fired at it for maximum effect? All it takes is a ka-chunk, then a vuh-weeeeee, and he’s ready to burn a hole through the structures of power he’s rebelling against. Perhaps all that’s true. But maybe it’s also just true that vuh-weeeeee sounds cool as hell, and in a show already bursting with so many ideas and details, at the end of the day, you also just need a bunch of cool spacey noises. Andor is all that character work, all that symbolism and commentary, but it’s also the vuh-weeeeee. And it wouldn’t quite be Star Wars if it wasn’t both. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Ten years have passed since Lego teamed up with everyone’s favorite animated family, The Simpsons. The family’s house was the first set released in 2014; their local convenience store, the Kwik-E-Mart, was released a year later. Now, after a long wait, it’s time to make some burgers. Mmmm… burgers. *drools* Lego just announced it will soon be releasing a Lego Krusty Burger set to continue its relationship with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, and the town of Springfield. Scheduled for release June 4, with Lego VIP access starting June 1, this 1,635 piece set includes seven minifigures: Homer, Krusty, Sideshow Bob, Bart, Lisa, Lou, and Squeaky-Voiced Teen. Here are a few images. Lego Simpsons Krusty Burger – Lego Lego Simpsons Krusty Burger – Lego Lego Simpsons Krusty Burger – Lego Lego Simpsons Krusty Burger – Lego Lego Simpsons Krusty Burger – Lego Lego Simpsons Krusty Burger – Lego Lego Simpsons Krusty Burger – Lego Lego Simpsons Krusty Burger – Lego In line with a set of that size, Krusty Burger costs $210 and you can see more images here. Plus, if you order on the official Lego site, and are a Lego VIP, you get an incredibly cool gift along with it. It’s a Lego version of The Simpsons couch. The Simpsons couch in Lego – Lego This is how Lego gets me: “Hmm… $200 is a lot but I really like that small, cheap set it comes with, so maybe I’ll buy it anyway.” Seriously. It’s happened before. As a proud owner of the original two sets, it’s worth pointing out that Lego goes all in with these. Every little detail is some wink or nod back to the show which, even if you haven’t watched it since the last set was released or before, you can still appreciate. What are your thoughts on the Lego Krusty Burger? Will you be giving it a bite? Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Labubus have captivated the world under a spell of mischievous fantasy that is making the plush purse baubles a must-have collector’s toy. And if you’re a Jim Henson creature fan (think Labyrinth and Dark Crystal) or grew up on Where the Wild Things Are with a dash of Donnie Darko’s Frank the Bunny, you’ll find them hard to resist. Much like the lucky spirits of forest folklore that inspired them, Labubus are everywhere all at once and yet hard to find if you’re trying to buy one. Pop Mart, which distributes artist Kasing Lung’s beloved characters in vinyl and plush collectible form, releases drops that immediately sell out. Cutesy toy collectors are often having to turn to re-sellers at a steeper mark-up than the $20-30 the keychains usually go for, with prices often reaching hundreds of dollars for elusive variants. And while Pop Mart encourages fans to shop through official outlets, many fall for the trap of the Lafufus—faux Labubus, many of which are so cursed-looking, with eyes that fall out or bald peeled heads, they’ve garnered their own cult following as well.  “The Monsters,” as the series that spawned Labubu is called, continue to gain global recognition through popularity in the fantasy cottagecore realms of the internet. Labubu is the breakout species of the Monsters crew; the main character is also named Labubu and became the standout of the group thanks to the extreme ugly-cute quality that made her a viral sensation. Other characters in the Smurf-like tribe of Labubu include the rare pink Mokoko and the Labubu leader Zimomo (who has a tail), who also have a cult following of their own. Toy collectors love them, including celebrities like Blackpink’s Lisa (The White Lotus), What We Do in the Shadows‘ Harvey Guillén, and Madame Web’s Emma Roberts. io9’s conversation with Labubu figure creator Kasing Lung, conducted over email, delves into how Nordic supernatural folklore inspired the fuzzy elven creatures. Also—as fans ourselves, often awake at all hours of the night trying to nab an official Labubu on the Pop Mart app—we were excited to explore with Lung why he thinks the Monsters’ enchanting whimsy has taken over the world. Sabina Graves, io9: I’ve read that the creation of the Monsters was inspired by your time in the Netherlands when you were young. What about that experience inspired the Monsters story book idea, and how did that shift to making them into a physical art form? Kasing Lung: That’s right—Labubu was born from my fascination with Nordic mythology and European folklore, which I was surrounded by while growing up in the Netherlands. I’ve always been drawn to creatures that live in the space between fantasy and reality—figures that are both familiar and mysterious. I wanted to create a character that embodied that duality: mischievous yet endearing, strange yet deeply human. Labubu, like all the characters in the Monsters universe, has an emotional depth that makes her feel alive. When I partnered with Pop Mart, I was able to bring that imagination into the physical world—transforming Labubu from a storybook figure into something people could collect, connect with, and make their own. io9: What makes Pop Mart the ideal collaborator to share the Monsters with the world? Were you a part of collector culture growing up, and if so, what toys did you collect? Lung: Pop Mart’s design-forward philosophy makes them an ideal collaborator for any artist. They prioritize artistic integrity and allow creators like me the freedom to develop characters without compromise. That kind of trust is rare. It means every figure stays true to its roots—from concept to final collectible—and collectors can feel that authenticity in every piece. As for collecting, yes—I have always been interested in that world. I was drawn to toys that sparked imagination, whether it was action figures, miniature creatures, or things with unexpected personality. I think that fascination with small, expressive objects has stayed with me. The Monsters are really just a grown-up extension of that childlike wonder. [TK unboxing IG reel link] io9: I’d love to get your perspective on seeing your creations begin to appear in so many places on a global scale, even on fashion and music icons like Lisa. What do you think about the current fashion craze that the Monsters are a part of? Lung: Seeing Labubu embraced by fans worldwide, from dedicated collectors to global icons, is surreal and incredibly humbling. When I first started sketching Labubu, I wasn’t thinking about fame or fashion trends. I was just following a feeling, creating something that felt true to me. So to now see people lining up for drops, customizing their collections, and making Labubu part of their daily lives—it’s overwhelming in the best way. What’s happening in fashion feels like a natural evolution. Today, people want to wear their personalities, to show the world who they are through what they carry, collect, and wear. Labubu speaks to that desire for something playful, expressive, and a little bit rebellious. The fact that the Monsters are becoming part of that cultural language means the world to me. It pushes me to keep expanding the universe, to keep creating characters that surprise people and give them something they can connect with—emotionally and personally. io9: What are your plans to continue to expand the stories for the Monsters characters alongside the figures release? Are there any collaborations and projects related to them coming up that you can share that will open up their story to more fans around the world? Lung: Right now, I’m letting the Monsters story evolve naturally. These characters are always growing in my mind, and every new figure is a chance to explore a different side of their world. I never want to force their direction—it’s more about following the emotion behind them and letting that guide the creative process. In terms of collaborations, there are definitely exciting projects in the works. Most recently, we collaborated with One Piece for the Monsters × One Piece Series Figures. While I can’t reveal too much just yet, I’m always looking for opportunities to expand the Monsters into new mediums and formats, so fans can experience them in deeper and more immersive ways. © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart © Pop Mart To see Pop Mart’s selection of the Monsters’ blind box offerings and collaborations, visit the retailer’s official site. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

By Passant Rabie Published May 13, 2025 | Comments (1) | An illustration of a decaying neutron star. Daniëlle Futselaar/artsource.nl Around 13.8 billion years ago, a tiny but dense fireball gave birth to the vast cosmos that holds trillions of galaxies, including the Milky Way. But our universe is dying, and it’s happening at a much faster rate than scientists previously estimated, according to new research. The last stellar remnants of the universe will cease to exist in 10 to the power of 78 years (that’s a one with 78 zeros), according to a new estimate from a group of scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands. That’s still a long way off from when the universe powers down for good—but it’s a far earlier fade-to-black moment than the previous 10 to the power of 1,100 years estimate. The new paper, published Monday in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, is a follow-up to a previous study by the same group of researchers. In their 2023 study, black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak, and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom suggested that other objects, like neutron stars, could evaporate in much the same way as black holes. The original theory, developed by Stephen Hawking in 1974, proposed that radiation escaping near a black hole’s event horizon would gradually erode its mass over time. The phenomenon, known as Hawking radiation, remains one of the most surprising ideas about black holes to this day. Building on the theory of Hawking radiation, the researchers behind the new paper suggest that the process of erosion depends on the density of the object. They found that neutron stars and stellar black holes take roughly the same amount of time to decay, an estimated 10 to the power of 67 years. Although black holes have a stronger gravitational field that should cause them to evaporate faster, they also have no surface so they end up reabsorbing some of their own radiation, “which inhibits the process,” Wondrak said in a statement. The researchers then calculated how long various celestial bodies would take to evaporate via Hawking-like radiation, leading them to the abbreviated cosmic expiration date. “So the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time,” Falcke said. The study also estimates that it would take the Moon around 10 to the power of 90 years to evaporate based on Hawking radiation. “By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory, and perhaps one day, we unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation,” van Suijlekom said. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Isaac Schultz Published May 11, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published March 20, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published February 10, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published February 2, 2025 By Margherita Bassi Published February 1, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published January 28, 2025

This weekend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s new health czar, once again demonstrated his general lack of qualifications for the job by taking his grandchildren swimming in a toxic Washington D.C. waterway. Kennedy, who is Trump’s new director of the Department of Health and Human Services, inscrutably decided to take his grandkids for a dip in Rock Creek, a tributary near the nation’s capital that has been officially deemed not suitable for human activity. “Mother’s Day hike in Dumbarton Oaks Park with Amaryllis, Bobby, Kick, and Jackson, and a swim with my grandchildren, Bobcat and Cassius in Rock Creek,” Kennedy posted on X, over the weekend. This pastoral scene might be endearingly folksy, were it not for the fact that Rock Creek is the unfortunate dumping ground for the region’s sewage discharge. As such, the government has officially banned area residents from swimming, or even wading, in the creek. “Swimming and wading are not allowed due to high bacteria levels,” the National Park Service has said, of the creek. “Rock Creek has high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health. Please protect yourself and your pooches by staying on trails and out of the creek. All District waterways are subject to a swim ban – this means wading, too!” In the photos shared online by Kennedy, the HHS director can be seen dunking his grandson into the bacteria-laden water. Gizmodo reached out to the HHS for more information about this photo-op. The HHS director happily dunking his head in a poop-polluted creek seems like an apt visual metaphor for national health policy right now. Indeed, Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration seem to be doing everything in their power to make more areas of America like Rock Creek—that is, polluted and uninhabitable by humans. Over the past few months, the Trump administration has sought to drastically cut environmental regulations across the board—including for water and air safety. At the same time, the HHS, under Kennedy, has attacked vaccine programs and laid off thousands of federal workers at the Food and Safety Administration and other parts of the federal health workforce. At the same time, Kennedy has leaned increasingly into unproven conspiracy theory rhetoric, signaling a willingness to spend federal money and resources on his own personal preoccupations and fringe science.