Technology

He’s real, he’s here, and I am so happy. The stonks guy is now a five-inch-tall, $30 thing you can buy, complete with a line graph that’s forever up 69 percent. It first debuted last July, but don’t let that stop you. Officially his name is Meme Man, and he’s the wonky former mascot of at least one surrealist meme page, though he began his life as a failed model of a human head over at 4chan’s 3D modeling board. Meme Man, however, has transcended his origins. You probably know him best in his banker config, confidently and wordlessly asserting that the Line Will Go Up and that numbers, by extension, can be trusted. I’m not gonna lie to you: I have never wanted anything so dumb so badly before. Possibly that’s because of the climate. A pack of wild redditors nearly bankrupted at least one h...

Amazon is no stranger to Super Bowl ads, and the company has another one ready for this year’s big game. The 2021 ad stars actor Michael B. Jordan, who you might know as Erik Killmonger from Black Panther or quarterback Vince Howard from Friday Night Lights, as the company’s Alexa smart assistant. In the ad, a woman dreams of what it would be like if Alexa was personified as the very handsome Jordan, and she’s appropriately smitten with the AI. At one point, for example, the woman asks Alexa to dim the lights, and Jordan takes off his shirt in response. (Her partner then humorously rushes over to demand Alexa turn the lights back up.) The ad is a fun twist on Super Bowl ads that use attractive women to sell something. (Some of Carl’s Jr. and GoDaddy’s infamous Super Bowl commercials come t...

After being missing in action for years, Electronic Arts announced today that it will be making college football video games again. EA is working with the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC), a well-known licensing partner for many schools, to secure the use of over 100 teams in the FBS, including the stadiums, mascots, and uniforms used by these institutions. EA Sports College Football is currently in the works and still very early in its development cycle, with no launch window currently revealed yet. More importantly, EA Sports College Football won’t use any real names or players’ likenesses. EA Sports College Football will be the first college football simulation game released by EA after the publisher canceled the series in 2013 after former college athletes brought a class-action laws...

McDonald’s new plant-based burger, which the company announced in November, has debuted for a trial run in Denmark and Sweden, according to Bloomberg. Dubbed the McPlant, the burger features a patty made from pea and rice proteins, which was co-developed with Beyond Meat. The trials began in January and will last until March 15th in Sweden and April 12th in Denmark. The McPlant’s Scandinavian success will be evaluated before potentially rolling out to other markets. The patty is cooked on the same grill as beef burgers, so it’s not technically vegan (or vegetarian, depending on your dietary strictness). Nonetheless, a press release from McDonald’s Sweden pitches the McPlant as the latest option for “flexitarians” — people who are loosely vegetarian but still eat some meat. McDonald’s and B...

Like most recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has shifted from an in-person showcase to a virtual one. Despite the change, we’ll still be bringing you reviews on the most interesting experiences we find, from indie films to VR experiments. The Pink Cloud starts with a message that underlines the distressing ludicrousness of where we are: it’s a movie about people stuck in a never-ending quarantine because of a deadly threat outside their doors. It’s also an early prescient one, as it was written in 2017 and filmed in 2019. It has no purposeful connections to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s impossible not to draw parallels between The Pink Cloud and our current reality. The movie is set in a Brazilian city where a mysterious pink gaseous cloud hovers over residents...

Mushrooms are helping architects and engineers solve one the world’s biggest crises: climate change. These fungi are durable, biodegradable, and are proving to be a good alternative to more polluting materials. “Our built environment needs these kinds of materials,” says David Benjamin, founding principal architect at the firm The Living. “Different countries have really ambitious climate change goals, and this material could really help jump-start some of that progress.” ”Our built environment needs these kinds of materials.” Building materials and construction make up about a tenth of global carbon dioxide emissions. That’s way more than the global shipping and aviation industries combined. And the problem is getting worse. Materials made with mycelium, the fungal network from which mush...

Astra plans to become the first small rocket maker to go public, the company announced Tuesday, after reaching space for the first time in December. It’ll become the second publicly traded space venture after Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. The Northern California-based rocket firm’s “3.2” launch vehicle blasted to space for the first time in December from its Kodiak, Alaska launch site, a key test mission that “far exceeded our team’s expectations,” Astra CEO Chris Kemp told reporters at the time. The launch demo, though just barely missing orbit, propelled Astra into a small group of firms that have reached space. The company has 50 customer launches lined up, and over $150 million of contracted launch revenue so far. Now, Astra is merging with special purpose acquisition company (or ...

Tesla has agreed to recall more than 134,000 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs that will eventually suffer from faulty displays after pressure from the leading US safety regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Tesla announced the recall to customers in an email, according to Electrek, and said a software update could allow them to keep accessing crucial features like the backup camera in the meantime if their displays fail. The problem that prompted the recall has to do with the 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory device that Tesla used in its massive touchscreen displays on most 2012–2018 Model S sedans and 2016–2018 Model X SUVs. These chips eventually wear out, as Motherboard first reported back in 2019, and when they do, it bricks the entire “media control unit” — cutting o...

Remedy’s supernatural thriller Control was one of the best games on the previous generation of consoles, but it’s also one that clearly struggled on the hardware. In 2019, when I reviewed the game on a base model PS4, you could feel the action chug along when the action got too intense. It worked, but just barely. (I don’t think any game has made my PS4’s fan quite so loud.) We already know that one of the best things about the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X is that they make older games better, whether that’s through backward compatibility or, in the case of next-gen Control: Ultimate Edition, brand-new versions that make use of the hardware. And now that I’ve spent a few hours with Control on the PS5, I can say it really feels like the ideal way to play. The most obvious improvements ar...

TF Securities analyst Ming-chi Kuo has corroborated reports that Apple and Hyundai are working together on an electric car. In a research note quoted by AppleInsider, Kuo says that Apple’s first car will be based on Hyundai’s E-GMP platform for battery-powered electric vehicles. The E-GMP platform was announced late last year and is expected to be the basis for Hyundai’s electric cars from this year on. Hyundai claims that E-GMP vehicles can theoretically get over 500km (310 miles) in range on a full charge, with the battery able to reach 80 percent capacity in 18 minutes via fast charging — though individual vehicle performance would of course vary based on design. Kuo claims that the first Apple car will be produced together with Hyundai, but other vehicles involving collaboration with G...

Stock trading app Robinhood is facing dozens of lawsuits after the company restricted several stocks popular on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. At least 30 parties across 10 states have sued the company in federal court, many seeking class action status. They allege that Robinhood users lost millions of dollars because they were unable to buy or sell stock during the freeze, and that the company chose to “manipulate the market” to help other financial institutions. Robinhood, which bills itself as a democratizing force in the stock market, helped facilitate an unprecedented boom around a handful of “meme stocks” last month. But on January 28th, it infuriated users by freezing trades on several of these stocks. That included GameStop ($GME) as well as AMC ($AMC), BlackBerry ($BB), Bed Bath ...

Investment app Robinhood has plummeted back down to a one-star rating on Google Play, thanks to a flood of thousands of new negative reviews. The latest low rating comes just days after Google salvaged the app’s rating by removing nearly 100,000 reviews, following a flood of negative ratings after the Robinhood blocked purchases of popular stocks from Reddit’s /r/WallStreetBets like GameStop or AMC last week. Google confirmed to The Verge at the time that it was actively removing negative reviews on the app. The review rollercoaster for Robinhood’s rating has been nearly as up-and-down as GameStop’s stock price. When users began to review bomb the app last Thursday, Robinhood reached a one-star rating with nearly 275,000 reviews. Google then removed nearly 100,000 of those reviews, putting...