Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and other climate impacts are throttling cocoa production and driving up chocolate prices.

It's hard to believe it's been 50 years since the release of The Stepford Wives, a film based on the 1972 novel of the same name by Ira Levin. It might not be to everyone's taste, but its lasting cultural influence is undeniable. A psychological horror/thriller with a hint of sci-fi, the film spawned multiple made-for-TV sequels and a campy 2004 remake, as well as inspiring one of the main characters in the hit series Desperate Housewives. The term "Stepford wife" became part of our shared cultural lexicon, and Jordan Peele even cited the film as one of the key influences for his 2017 masterpiece Get Out.

(Spoilers below for the novel and both film adaptations.)

Levin's novels were a hot commodity in Hollywood at the time, especially after the success of his most famous novel, Rosemary's Baby (1967), adapted into a 1968 horror film starring Mia Farrow. (The novels A Kiss Before Dying, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver, and Levin's play Deathtrap were also adapted to film.) The plot of the The Stepford Wives film follows the novel's plot fairly closely.

Read full article

Comments

© Columbia Pictures

Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that federal workers would soon get an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.” According to the New York Times, the email from the Office of Personnel Management went to agencies across the federal government that afternoon, including the FBI, State Department, and others, with a deadline for response by 11:59PM ET on Monday. 

However, the message lacked a detail from Musk’s tweet, according to the Times, where he said, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” which a number of lawyers have said would be illegal. The Washington Post reports that experts said it “may be asking some recipients to violate federal laws,” and Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor quoted by the Times, said, “There is zero basis in the civil service system for this.” 

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement Sunday that “Elon Musk is traumatizing hardworking federal employees, their children and families. He has no legal authority to make his latest demands.”

The stunt is another echo of Musk’s approach after he took over Twitter, with requests to review engineer’s code and saying that failing to respond to an email would be regarded as a resignation. Across hundreds of tweets posted on Saturday and early Sunday, Musk — who may or may not run the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), in addition to his various companies — claimed, without presenting evidence, to be rooting out fraud and employees who don’t do any work.

Leaders of at least some of the departments, like the FBI and State Department, reportedly told their workers to await guidance to respond, while the Post reports that acting Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Bridget Bean told staff to comply with the “valid request.”  

Unions like the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union told employees “not to respond, either just yet or at all,” Axios writes. CNN reporter Pete Muntean said the National Air Traffic Controllers Association called the “email an unnecessary distraction to a fragile system.”

As school districts struggle to support the mental health of their students, a startup called Sonar Mental Health has built a “wellbeing companion” called Sonny to help. As described in the Wall Street Journal, Sonny is a chatbot that relies on a combination of human staff and AI. When students text their questions to Sonny, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In another version of Brave New World, Sam would've become more directly connected to the looming MCU crisis.

Intuitive Machines, the company that pulled off the first-ever commercial moon landing this time last year with its Odysseus spacecraft, is gearing up for another shot at touching the lunar surface. Its second flight under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program is scheduled to take off no earlier than Wednesday February 26, launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The company is once again sending one of its Nova-C landers, this one nicknamed Athena. It’s expected to take about a week for Athena to travel to the moon, before it makes a landing attempt around March 6.

Athena is carrying NASA instruments including a drill and mass spectrometer, which will be used to attempt “one of the first on-site demonstrations of resource use on the moon,” according to the space agency. These tools will measure volatiles in the soil at the landing site in the lunar South Pole. The mission also offers Intuitive Machines another chance at landing its spacecraft with all six feet on the ground. Odysseus, though successful in touching down on the surface, toppled over and ended up lying on its side.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/intuitive-machines-is-expected-to-launch-its-second-lunar-lander-this-week-174703197.html?src=rss

©

© SpaceX

The camera has always been the reason to buy a Pixel phone. As time has gone on, though, Google’s camera lead has eroded both as the competition improves, and as the Pixel’s camera feels just a tiny bit worse. Despite it being “boring,” though, there’s one reason that there’s no phone I’d rather carry besides a Pixel.

more…

America's terrifying spy agency is done with DEI.

When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI’s latest flagship model, in a live stream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” Yet it appears that Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk himself. Over the weekend, users on social media reported […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

If you take a look at the current landscape of charging accessories in 2025, it seems like everyone is doing the same thing. Every brand has its flagship 3 in 1 charger or a 140W wall charger, or a Magsafe charging brick. So what I wanted to do is highlight some products that have brought some unique twists to a product category that seems to have been stale. Let me know which is your favorite!

more…

Our favorite zero-drop, minimalist footwear will let you feel the ground beneath your feet.

A central goal of Trump’s henchmen is to defang the EU’s regulatory power for the benefit of American Big Tech

Saber Interactive's been conscripted to bring their magic on Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II to make a game out of a major Hasbro brand.

We may see the M4 MacBook Air as soon as March. In the Power On newsletter this weekend, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is readying itself for the launch of the upgraded laptop next month. The company is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut,” according to Gurman’s sources, and it’s letting inventory of the existing models wind down. The M4 MacBook Air is expected to come in two sizes, 13-inch and 15-inch, like the previous model.

Apple introduced the M3 MacBook Air last March, and unveiled its new M4 chip a few months later, bringing that first to the iPad Pro. In October, it refreshed the iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pros with the M4 family of chips. The MacBook Air is now due for its turn. While the laptop didn’t get the M4 chip in the fall, Apple did announce a long-awaited memory boost for the lineup at that time, with the M2 and M3 now starting at 16GB of RAM.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/apples-m4-macbook-air-could-be-here-in-just-a-few-weeks-153004599.html?src=rss

©

© Apple

Chinese-made medical devices are found in almost every corner of the medical ecosystem, from hospitals to clinics, and the government is getting more concerned.

The method speeds up CO2 absorption—potentially helping the fight against climate change.

Hades II just received its second major update as part of its early access development, which was a great  excuse for me to jump back in. Since its initial release, I’ve logged more than 30 hours and actually held myself back from playing much more – I don’t want to get tired of the game before it hits 1.0 – but with the new update, I wanted to see what’s new and try to beat the new final boss on my very first run.

Sadly, I haven’t even been able to see what the boss is yet. I did make it to the update’s new region, but I got destroyed by a dangerous miniboss. Still, I’ve still been really impressed with what Supergiant Games has added since May to make what’s already a very good game even better.

The big additions are impressive. Hades II initially launched with six regions — four for an Underworld route and two for a “surface” route — and with each major update, Supergiant has added a new region with new enemies, characters, and music to round out that surface route.

The first major update, which came out in October, added the game’s first new region, Mount Olympus, and it feels as epic as Mount Olympus should. It has grand architecture, fearsome e …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple is readying its MacBook Air line for an update to M4 chips in March, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. With the slim laptops’ spec bump, the MacBook line’s M4 transition will be complete.

Gurman didn’t provide timing beyond that the laptops are coming next month, but as usual before it launches a product, Apple is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut” and letting its retail stock of the laptops clear out. Both the 13-inch and 15-inch models are expected to come at the same time, like last year.

Since the Apple Silicon transition, the MacBook Airs have largely shared specs with the low-end MacBook Pro, just packed into a slimmer laptop with omissions like fewer ports and no cooling fan. The base model 14-inch Pro starts with 10-core CPUs and 10-core GPUs and feature 16GB of RAM — you can get a sense of that configuration’s performance from our review of the base M4 MacBook Pro. Ideally, the new Air models will also get the Pro’s key upgrade of being able to simultaneously connect to two external displays with the lid open.

That leaves only the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, which are still M2-generation machines, without M4 chips. Gurman has pegged the Mac Studio’s M4 bump for “between March and June” and the Mac Pro’s anywhere from June to this fall.

The $100 SCUF Valor Pro is so close to $200+ controllers like the Instinct Pro, but that doesn't mean those more-expensive, wireless devices are moot.

Dude, where’s my webcam? Lenovo’s new trick hides it behind the LCD—but kills its quality along the way.