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Nintendo’s Switch won’t be out until March 2017, but more details on the multifaceted video game console are starting to trickle out. A representative from the company went on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Dec. 7 to demonstrate its forthcoming iOS mobile game, Super Mario Run. Nintendo’s first real mobile game—discounting the Kafkaesque […]Read More

Google has spent the better part of 2016 teaching its robot dogs a few new tricks, but it seems the company is still unsure what the bots will actually be good for in the real world. One possibility floated by Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert is using the million-dollar bots to deliver ordinary packages. “Many […]

The superhero genre has become tedious, saturated by a deluge of repetitive films. These films still make a lot of money, but that may not last forever. Audiences are beginning to reject sequels and reboots, and superhero movies could be next if studios can’t figure out how to reinvigorate the lucrative business. But Hollywood, ever […]

Most entrepreneurs know that not all funding is equal. The guidance and connections they receive from investors can be just as important as the capital—but what they may not consider is that investors feel that way too. Investors want to back entrepreneurs who they can mentor. Because many investors believe their time and expertise to […]

Movie buffs might soon be able to rent new releases as early as two weeks after films hit theaters. Apple is reportedly in talks with three movie studios—21st Century Fox, Warner Bros., and Universal Pictures—to offer movie rentals through iTunes for films that are in theaters, Bloomberg reported. Those rentals would be priced at a […]

As he nears the end of his term, and prepares to be succeeded by one of the ringleaders of a racist campaign to undermine his legitimacy, US president Barack Obama offered some candid thoughts about race in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, aired on Dec. 8. “I think there’s a reason why attitudes about […]Read More

Scientists have discovered a feathered dinosaur tail trapped in a piece of 99-million-year-old amber, bought from an amber market in Myanmar. The specimen is definitive proof that two-legged dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex had bird-like feathers. While a dinosaur-era feather had been found embedded in amber in 2011 and again in June 2016, those small specimens […]

As sophisticated as our brains are, they can be easily fooled. Take vision for example: Our eyes gather in information about the outside world and signal to the optic nerve, which turns this info into electrical signals in a part of the brain called the visual cortex. Our visual cortex tells us what we’re looking […]

In the late 19th-century comedy Cyrano de Bergerac (and in the brilliant 1987 Steve Martin adaptation, Roxanne) the clever-but-homely hero coaches the handsome-but-dull Christian to help him win the affection of a beautiful woman. There was a similar dynamic at work this year in a Silicon Valley conference call involving Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and […]

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the planet, has died at the age of 95. On Feb. 20, 1962, with broadcaster Walter Cronkite shouting “Go Baby!,” a 40-year-old Glenn launched from Cape Canaveral Florida. Aboard the tiny Friendship Seven capsule, in just under five hours, Glenn circled the globe three times, captivating the country […]

What does an iPhone have in common with a wind turbine in rural China? Apple is behind them both. Apple has invested in four subsidiaries of Goldwind, China’s largest wind-turbine manufacturer. Each branch is located in a different province—Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, and Yunnan—and Apple will take a 30% stake in each, according to a Dec. […]Read More

Narendra Modi is in a hurry to transform the way India’s economy works. A month after the Indian prime minister surprisingly withdrew all the Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes—which accounted for as much as 86% of the cash in circulation—his government, on Dec.08, offered a slew of incentives to push millions of Indians towards digital payments. […]Read More