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Gusto will launch from Antarctica. | Image: Geoffrey Palo / GUSTO Team NASA is preparing to begin an experiment named GUSTO - short for Galactic / Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory - to gather data that will be used to create a 3D map of a portion of the Milky Way Galaxy.The GUSTO experiment involves a telescope that will float 120,000 feet over Antarctica on a high-altitude balloon for at least 55 days, soaking up high-frequency radio waves percolating through the cosmic interstellar medium - a term that refers to the gases, dust, radiation, and other materials that make up the space between stars. NASA has a fun guide to its scientific balloons that explains the zero-pressure and super-pressure balloons it uses for missions like this. Image: Jose Silva / GUSTO Team... Continue reading...

Image: Disney Disney has dropped Jonathan Majors from his leading Marvel role as Kang the Conqueror after he was found guilty of reckless assault in the third degree and of harassment, according to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. The verdict comes after a two-week trial following Majors' arrest last March after an altercation with his ex-partner Grace Jabbari.Marvel had been setting up for Majors to be the next supervillain for the franchise, but now the company is changing course. It's unclear if Disney plans to recast Kang or change its planned storylines more drastically. Majors had already appeared in both seasons of Loki and in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and was set to star in one of the next planned Avengers movies, subtitled The... Continue reading...

Trevor Milton, the founder and former CEO of electric truck company Nikola, was sentenced to four years in prison after a jury found him guilty of misleading investors about the company's technology. Milton was also ordered to pay a $1 million fine.Federal prosecutor said Milton had lied about Nikola's capabilities, including an assertion that it had built its own electric truck, the Nikola One, from the ground up." They also accused him of staging a video that purportedly showed its Nikola One semi driving under its own power when it was actually rolling down a hill.During the sentencing hearing, Milton made several bizarre statements. He claimed that his resignation from Nikola was not a result of the fraud allegations but because... Continue reading...

Spotify Wrapped 2023 summaries | Image: Spotify You were listening, walking, and playing, and they were watching. Now Spotify and other apps are repackaging that data to recap your 2023. Continue reading...

Image: Acura Acura's first fully electric vehicle is now available for customers to reserve, with the first deliveries scheduled for early 2024.The 2024 Acura ZDX starts at $60,000 and will come in several trims, including the base-model A-Spec, with single-motor rear-wheel drive. A more expensive Type S dual-motor powertrain with 500 horsepower starts at $70,000. Acura previously said that the ZDX will get up to 325 miles of estimated range and have an operating system powered by Google.The 2024 Acura ZDX starts at $60,000 and will come in several trimsThe ZDX will start customer deliveries around the same time as the 2024 Honda Prologue. Like the Prologue, the ZDX will be the product of the three-year partnership between Honda and General... Continue reading...

Travel website Expedia wants to get people to start their travel search on its site with AI instead of using an external search engine.Expedia already uses AI for some customer service features and to help property owners describe their homes and hotels. The company hopes in the future that AI will help it recommend travel destinations to customers based on previous trips and bring more direct traffic to its site. It's a long-term plan to shift the balance of power on the web - albeit one that's still in its earliest stages for the company.Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and head of data management at Expedia, says the goal is to get users started on their trips in one place. Expedia hopes to produce recommendations trained with its... Continue reading...

Flipboard has been experimenting with fediverse integration for months now. | Image: Flipboard Flipboard is taking its biggest step yet into the fediverse. The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.Right now, only 25 accounts (including The Verge's) have been federated with ActivityPub, but by March Flipboard says it plans to allow anyone on the platform to open their account to the fediverse and allow any Flipboard user to follow any fediverse account from within the Flipboard app. At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of... Continue reading...

One-on-one mech duels in Armored Core VI are a thing of beauty - and stress. | Image: FromSoftware 2023 has been filled wall to wall with great games, but one of the low-key best is now selling for its best price. FromSoftware's Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon is available in disc form for $39.99 ($20 off) at Amazon (PS5 / Xbox / PS4), Best Buy (PS5 / Xbox / PS4), and direct from the Bandai Namco Store. The game is still fresh off its win for Best Action Game at the Keighleys, but it's not gotten many notable discounts before now.The Armored Core series has always been a bit niche, mostly appealing to mecha sickos who love battling through postapocalyptic sci-fi worlds with robots they've customized out the wazoo, and FromSoftware brought it back for 2023 with a true-to-form installment. AC6 may be from the same developer that... Continue reading...

Image: Chris Harris / Netflix Netflix is kicking off 2024 with a vision of our dystopic future. The streamer just released a new trailer for The Kitchen, which imagines a near-future version of London, complete with reckless biker gangs and lots of holographic displays to complete the cyberpunk look. The film is helmed by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya (who also serves as co-writer and co-producer) and starts streaming on January 19th, 2024.According to Netflix's description, in this version of London the gap between rich and poor has been stretched to its limits," which leads to the titular setting of the movie.

Image: Jason Fochtman / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images Southwest Airlines is facing a $140 million fine after last year's holiday meltdown left millions of passengers stranded at airports across the US. On Monday, the Department of Transportation announced it's imposing the civil penalty over numerous violations of consumer protection laws" during and after the mass cancellations.Following an investigation, the DOT found Southwest failed to provide adequate customer service assistance," stating passengers stranded at airports were met with busy signals, long queues, and dropped calls when trying to get in touch with the airline. The DOT says Southwest didn't provide timely or accurate flight status notifications to customers, either, and also failed to provide prompt refunds to... Continue reading...

Image: Beeper Following a tumultuous few weeks for Beeper, which has been trying to provide an iMessage-compatible Android app, a group of US lawmakers are pushing for the DOJ to investigate Apple for potentially anticompetitive conduct" over its attempts to disable Beeper's services. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) as well as Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Ken Buck (R-CO) said in a letter to the DOJ that Beeper's Android messaging app, Beeper Mini, was a threat to Apple's leverage by creating [a] more competitive mobile applications market, which in turn [creates] a more competitive mobile device market."In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky and 16-year-old developer James Gill talked about... Continue reading...

The Verge / Photo Courtesy of Apple Books There are podcasts, videos, games, live performances - and then there are books, one of the oldest and still most popular ways to learn something new or escape (at least temporarily) from today's troubled world. We asked the staff of The Verge what their favorite reads were over the last year. Their answers ranged from science fiction novels to autobiographies to lessons on how to draw and an examination of the addiction of gambling.Read on, and see if there's anything here that you may want to check out during the holidays.Thar She Blows: A NovelBy Susan EmshwillerThis maybe-but-not-quite-fantasy centers on two people, a woman named Ann and her adult son Brian, who through the course of the story learn to trust their own inner... Continue reading...

The Verge / Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales This year has been a relatively quiet one for smartwatches. It makes sense. The smartwatch renaissance of 2022 was always going to be a hard act to follow, let alone top. But among the slew of iterative updates, there was one thing that kept catching my eye: the messy Googlefication of Fitbit.Basically, Google, which owns Fitbit, spent this year taking two steps forward before shooting itself in the foot and taking a step back. Every time I felt encouraged by what I was seeing, unforced errors would leave me doubting again.2023 kicked off with a massive, multiday Fitbit server outage. Shortly after, Fitbit announced it was shuttering legacy community features like Challenges, Adventures, and Groups. Google said these social features... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, may have broken the European Union's tough new Digital Services Act rules, regulators said as they announced the opening of a formal investigation today. A key concern of the investigation is the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel," the European Commission says.In a press release, the Commission said it will look at X's attempts to counter the spread of illegal content on its platform and will examine X's efforts to stop information manipulation" via its Community Notes system and other policies. It's also looking into matters beyond content moderation, including deceptive design" relating to the so-called Blue checks," advertising... Continue reading...

A dog passes a pile of destroyed items that were removed from a once flooded home as residents begin the recovery process from Hurricane Harvey August 31, 2017 in Houston, Texas. | Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images More than 16 million people in the contiguous US - roughly 5 percent of the population - live in a place with heightening flood risk and a shrinking population, according to new research. It makes the case that climate abandonment areas" are becoming a more prevalent phenomenon in the US as people avoid places particularly vulnerable to climate-related disasters.What's a climate abandonment area? It's a census block where flood risk has grown high enough to start pushing people to leave. Many of these areas lie along the Texas Gulf Coast, coastal Florida, and the mid-Atlantic.But it's by no means confined to these regions, which can get hit repeatedly by storms during the Atlantic hurricane season. Climate abandonment areas are... Continue reading...

Image: May Mobility You probably haven't heard of autonomous vehicle operator May Mobility because the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company is exceptionally good at avoiding the types of headlines generated by other AV companies.In its six years in operation, there haven't been any injuries, crashes, blocked intersections, or mass layoffs. While there have been some struggles, the company has proven to be an outlier among AV operators by continuing to raise money while others have seen their funding dry up.And now, May Mobility is ready to go fully driverless, a milestone that has the company taking stock of its successes - and looking ahead to the future.The most capital-efficient AV company that the world has ever seen"It's not robotaxis," May... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Peloton is opening up its app to third-party treadmills for running, walking, or Tread Bootcamp classes. Pelo Buddy spotted a new support page on Peloton's site announcing that the app can now record and display metrics on any treadmill that uses Bluetooth FTMS. The offer is only open to subscribers of the company's most expensive subscription workout plan, Peloton App Plus.To pair, you'll start a Tread class in the Peloton app, then tap the Connect a Bluetooth Device" option. Pick your treadmill from the list, and a green check mark lets you know when it's connected.Peloton says users can check their incline, speed, pace, and distance via the app during a class session. After the class is over, the app will also show estimated... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple announced a pilot program called contingent pricing for subscriptions" on Friday that will let App Store developers offer discounts for customers with multiple subscriptions. Developers will be able to base this on subscriptions from one developer or two different developers" as long as both subscriptions remain active, opening up the possibility of partnerships between different companies.According to 9to5Mac, the discounts can be used in App Store advertising and marketing outside of it, in addition to within the app itself.Pete Hare, an Apple engineering manager, said in a LinkedIn post that the company will handle all the eligibility checks and commerce work" and that customers can download and subscribe to apps being... Continue reading...

Illustration: William Joel / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 18, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, hello, happy holidays, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I've been combing this list for new board games to try, reading about the NFL's obsession with ping pong and the rise of chess influencers and the wacky history of Yahoo Pipes, watching Lupe Fiasco thoroughly explain how rap works, testing Anytype as a Notion alternative, trying to figure out how to justify buying myself a Lego Polaroid, and adding Us to all my words on Threads to welcome my European friends.I also have for you a new way to play Grand Theft Auto, some new AI-powered note-taking and journaling... Continue reading...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Congress has extended Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for a few more months to April 2024. According to The New York Times, the program was included in the $886 billion National Defence Authorization Act, which passed the House by a vote of 310 to 118, with support from the majority of both parties, on December 14th. FISA was due to expire on December 31st, 2023.Senator Ron Wyden wrote in a press release on December 8th that the vote to reauthorize FISA was inserted into the NDAA without a vote or debate" before the Senate authorized and passed it to the House. Now, the vote has headed to the desk of President Biden, who has called for it to be reauthorized.Section 702 empowers US intelligence agencies... Continue reading...

Opal's latest webcam makes for a nice carry-on companion, one that packs a bigger, better sensor than Opal's first offering. | Image: Opal Happy Saturday, dear readers! It's been a relatively quiet week on the deals front - well, aside from the return of Walmart's $349 Xbox Series X deal and a smattering of well-timed discounts on smart holiday string lights. Today, however, we have something completely new. Right now, Opal's Tadpole webcam for laptops is receiving its first discount to date at the Moment store, where you can pick it up for $140 ($35 off) when you use coupon code HOLIDAY20 at checkout.Unlike Opal's first webcam, the C1, the Tadpole provides a smooth experience right out of the gates. Opal's second effort features an adjustable clip that fits most laptop displays, along with a half-inch, 48-megapixel Sony IMX582 sensor, an f/1.8 lens, and the ability to... Continue reading...

Image: Epic Games Apple rules the iPhone's App Store with an iron fist - sideloading outside it is not allowed. Google lets anyone install any app on an Android phone. But guess which one of these two companies has an illegal monopoly, according to the courts?As you probably already know, Google is the one that lost its fight against Epic Games this week. It's a fight that Apple previously (mostly) won in a similar trial in 2021, beating claims that it had violated antitrust laws by charging mandatory in-app transaction fees and kicking Epic's game Fortnite off the App Store. Google tried a similar move, but in its case, a jury found it had maintained an unlawful monopoly with the Play store; a judge is scheduled to consider remedies next month.L... Continue reading...

The two women are the stars of one of the most watches shows on Netflix this year. | Image Amanda Matlovich/Netflix Stop me if you've heard this one. You're at a holiday gathering and some very offline family member starts chatting about the show Yellowstone. Pretty soon after a very online family member looks up in confusion and asks either what the show is or why they keep hearing about it when no one they know seems to watch it.But maybe it's not Yellowstone. Maybe its La Reina Del Sur, or The Glory, or maybe its Ginny & Georgia. What those three shows all have in common is they're three of the most watched shows on Netflix between January and June 2023, and if you haven't heard of them it's probably because you're part of the increasing gulf between the shows people talk about online and the ones everyone is actually watching.These new Netflix... Continue reading...

Image: Max Though there are a handful of human survivors at the core of its story, the real star of Scavengers Reign isn't a person; it's a planet. The animated series features a group of astronauts stranded on a bizarre alien world and follows them as they contend with the harsh, confusing, and downright odd environment around them. There are flying creatures that can double as gas masks and giant monkey-frogs that use psychic powers to lure in victims. Things only get weirder from there. But the fun of the show is seeing how the characters are able to use the strange plants and animals to their advantage. I think it's a universally satisfying process to watch people try to survive with limitations," says supervising director Benjy Brooke.Based... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge On Friday, two days after Threads finally started publicly testing ActivityPub integration, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared a thread on Threads detailing the company's plans for its continued integration with the fediverse. Right now, it's possible to follow a few Threads accounts (including Mosseri's) from other platforms, but Meta has much bigger plans for Threads interoperability that Mosseri says will take the better part of a year" to realize.Here's what's in the works, according to Mosseri.

Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge Researchers found Microsoft's chatbot on Copilot provided false and misleading information about European elections.Human rights organization AlgorithmWatch said in a report that it asked Bing Chat - recently rebranded as Copilot - questions about recent elections held in Switzerland and the German states of Bavaria and Hesse. It found that one-third of its answers to election-related questions had factual errors and safeguards were not evenly applied.The group said it collected responses from Bing from August to October this year. It chose the three elections because these are the first held in Germany and Switzerland since the introduction of Bing. It also allowed the researchers to look at local contexts and compare responses in... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Apple has paid $25 million to settle a class action lawsuit over its Family Sharing feature, and you might be eligible for a payout, as reported by MacRumors. The settlement, which you can read about on a dedicated website, stems from a 2019 lawsuit accusing Apple of misleading users about the apps you can use Family Sharing with.Family Sharing is a perk that lets you and up to five other family members share subscriptions to Apple services, including Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus, Apple Card, and Apple Arcade. It also lets you share subscriptions to third-party apps if the developer allows it. That part is what the lawsuit takes issue with, arguing that Apple misrepresented the ability to share subscriptions to non-Apple... Continue reading...

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you haven't enabled Bluetooth on your Stadia controller yet, you don't need to rush. Google has extended the deadline for when its controllers will no longer work wirelessly from the end of this year to December 31st, 2024, as shown on its website (via @wario64).After Google announced the discontinuation of its Stadia cloud gaming service last year, the company said it would let its controllers live on as wireless Bluetooth gamepads compatible with PCs, Macs, phones, and other systems. It also rolled out a special web-based tool in January that you can use to activate Bluetooth on your Stadia controller. Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge Google previously gave users until December 31st, 2023 to complete the... Continue reading...

Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Google will soon store Maps users' location history locally on their devices instead of in the cloud, a big change that will make it more difficult for law enforcement to access the data.Controversial geofence warrants" allow law enforcement to gather tech companies' data on mobile phones that have passed through a certain area during a specific time period. The FBI has used the warrant to collect information about a Black Lives Matters protest in Seattle as part of an investigation into attempted arson, for instance.With privacy concerns and the potential for geofence warrants to turn anyone at the scene of an alleged crime a potential suspect, Google has faced pressure for years to change the way it stores users' location history.... Continue reading...