Google has quietly revealed the pricing of Veo 2, the video-generating AI model that it unveiled in December. According to the company’s pricing page, using Veo 2 will cost 50 cents per second of video, which adds up to $30 per minute or $1,800 per hour. Google DeepMind researcher Jon Barron contrasted this pricing with […]

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Netflix dropped a blooper reel this weekend from the first season of its live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender show, giving fans a look at some cute behind the scenes antics while they wait for the next season. The first season was released a year ago, and Netflix announced shortly after that the show had been renewed for two more. There’s no release date yet for the new episodes, but the streaming service said on Saturday that production for the second season is underway. The third season will be its last.

News surrounding Avatar: The Last Airbender has been surprisingly plentiful this week. On top of the updates from Netflix, Deadline reported that there’s a new animated series on the way that’ll pick up after the events of The Legend of Korra. That series will be called Avatar: Seven Havens. And, Magic: The Gathering announced an Avatar crossover coming out in November.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/netflix-releases-bloopers-from-avatar-the-last-airbender-and-says-season-2-production-is-underway-215253100.html?src=rss

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Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp opens his new book with a provocative declaration: “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Over the past decade or so, as the data analytics company rose to prominence with its work for U.S. military and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight. Last year, in a rare […]

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Last July, citizens of South Korea started a petition asking Apple to enable Find My support in the region. It was assumed that Find My was unavailable due to government restrictions, but that wasn’t actually the case according to the petition.

Apple later agreed to launch Find My support for the region in spring 2025, and that integration is finally starting to roll out.

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On Friday, the Space Force published a picture taken last year from a camera mounted on the secretive X-37B space plane while high above the Earth. Space.com notes that the “one other glimpse” of the plane in space was while it was “deploying from Falcon Heavy’s upper stage” during its December 2023 launch.

The Space Force says it snapped the photo during experimental “first-of-kind” aerobraking maneuvers “to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel.” The Air Force said in October this would involve “a series of passes using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere,” and that once complete, it would resume its other experiments before de-orbiting.

An X-37B onboard camera, used to ensure the health and safety of the vehicle, captures an image of Earth while conducting experiments in HEO in 2024.The X-37B executed a series of first-of-kind maneuvers, called aerobraking, to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel. pic.twitter.com/ccisgl493P

— United States Space Force (@SpaceForceDoD) February 21, 2025

This is the X-37B’s seventh mission; its sixth, which concluded in November 2022, lasted about two-and-a-half years (or 908 days) and was its longest mission to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you need some new Lord of the Rings media in your life, War of the Rohirrim may give you a fix.

You’ve heard of roguelike, you’ve heard of Soulslike, but have you ever heard of Rootlike? Root Bear is one of those games that just perfectly encapsulates the spirit of Playdate; it’s silly as hell, uses the crank and will engage your competitive side as you rack up tips from soda-drinking bears and try to beat your own high score. The game has been a massive success, so it’s no surprise to see it’s now inspired the development of other games in its style. Well, one game at least. Pup Cup, which recently arrived on the Playdate Catalog from developer Ledbetter Games, is a “Root-like score-chaser” where instead of serving soda to bears, you’re making delicious sweet treats for dogs (and a few other surprise guests).

In Pup Cup, you have 60 seconds to earn as many tail-wags as possible from the dogs who show up to your whipped cream stand. Some might want a towering heap, while others just want a little taste. The key is to fill the pup cup only to the height of the little box hovering over it, or the “Good Boy Zone,” by putting the crank in the forward position. If you serve too much, whipped cream is going to splat all over the place. But too little will leave the dogs disappointed, and who wants that?

There’s also Bork Mode, in which you can pet the dogs and add toppings, like a squeaky rubber duck, to earn yourself some more time. This makes things a little more complicated, though, as you have to pay attention to the D-pad icon that will briefly flash next to the dog in order to know which button to press, and you have to coordinate this correctly with the timing of your pour.

Pup Cup is a feel-good take on Root Bear. The gameplay is a little more relaxed, and it’s hard not to smile at the rotation of cute dogs popping up on your screen. Some of them wear outfits and accessories, and they may end up with a swirl of whipped cream on their nose. Each dog has its own little anxiously waiting animation, and happy customers will give you heart eyes when their orders have been fulfilled. It’s adorably goofy. You might even encounter a familiar knife-wielding goose or robotic dog.

As if all that wasn’t wholesome enough, the team also went out and served pup cups to dogs IRL during the Puppy Bowl. You can get Pup Cup on the Playdate Catalog for $3.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/if-you-liked-the-playdate-game-root-bear-you-should-check-out-pup-cup-201408441.html?src=rss

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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.

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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, […]

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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

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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.

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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 […]

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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!

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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.