Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Most of you probably think mattresses are inanimate objects, forever lying stationary until some living creature, typically a human, picks one up and moves it. You’ll all think differently after seeing this video.

The video, shot in Colorado on Aug. 17, claims that this mass mattress migration is an accident. “We were hanging out by the pool and apparently they were setting up for ‘movie night under the stars’ with pillows and mattresses and then a storm rolled in.”

Maybe that’s true. Or maybe someone set these mattresses up, knowing the looming storm would bring about this dramatic scene. Whatever the truth really is, this shit is hilarious. Read more…

More about Mattresses, Culture, and Web Culture

Marvel Comics wants to steer clear of politics. Even in the introduction to an anthology spanning the period of time during and immediately after World War II.

Marvel: The Golden Age 1939-1949 was originally supposed to include an intro penned by Art Spiegelman, the famed graphic novelist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on Maus — a personal story about the Holocaust, featuring a cast of cartoon animals. But now Spiegelman claims that the essay he wrote, which refers to Donald Trump as the “Orange Skull” — a reference to Captain America’s Nazi nemesis, Red Skull — didn’t fly with Marvel. Read more…

More about Donald Trump, Marvel Comics, Art Spiegelman, Entertainment, and Activism

Marcel was always bound for great things.

It’s been a lot of years since we spent any time with Ross Geller’s pet capuchin monkey on Friends — she’s actually a female named Katie with her own IMDb page. But that may change once Y: The Last Man, a Brian K. Vaughn comic book adapted for TV, hits FX.

It’s not yet certain that Katie will make the final cut, but FX CEO John Landgraf confirmed it was her during the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour, per The Hollywood Reporter. He first noticed — and recognized — Katie as he looked through early cuts of Y.

In a subsequent check-in with Katie’s trainer, THR was able to confirm her involvement in the show. It’s been a long time since that first season of Friends, which premiered in 1994, but Katie — who must have been so young back then! — is apparently in her mid-to-late 20s. Read more…

More about Friends, Monkey, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

After eight hours of driving through heavy traffic, re-routed directions to avoid congestion, and a close call with the highway patrol, I was more than grateful for the bright glow of information projected onto my windshield.

The 2019 Lincoln Navigator I was driving from New York City to northern Vermont had a “heads/head-up display,” or HUD, with navigation directions, driving speed, speed limits, the time, temperature, and other information superimposed onto the road ahead. The display worked just as well during the day or night, showing me which exit I should take or the speed I should drive. It immediately became an essential driving tool. Read more…

More about Tesla, Hud, Heads Up Display, Tech, and Elon Musk

Don’t have any plans for Labor Day weekend? Why not use this opportunity to kit out your house with smart home products. With Amazon offering up to 42% off select Echo devices and saving up to $250 off LG 4K TVs that are Alexa compatible at Rakuten, allowing you to control your entire connected home.

Check out more of today’s best deals from Amazon, Walmart, Dell, Best Buy, Rakuten, and BuyDig for Sunday, Aug. 18.

Read more…

More about Smartwatch, Smart Home, Laptops, Lg Tv, and Mashable Shopping

If you’ve ever used Siri or Google to call a business, you could be in danger of falling victim to a new scam. 

Phone calls made with voice assistants could open people up to scammers, who have found a clever new way to exploit our growing dependence on Siri and Google. That’s according to the Better Business Bureau, which issued a warning about the scheme.

Here’s how it goes down, according to the BBB: you need to call a business, like an airline, but you don’t know what number to call. So you do what many of us do and ask Google or Siri to “call [business name]” for you you. 

But instead of calling your bank or your airline, the assistant calls a scammer impersonating someone from the company, who will try to trick you into sending them money. Read more…

More about Tech, Siri, Google Assistant, Tech, and Consumer Tech

Alexa and Siri aren’t nearly as capable as Google Assistant, according to new research. 

Research firm Loup Ventures recently published its semi-annual report on smartphone-based digital assistants, and the results once again show that Google is significantly ahead of Amazon and Apple. 

To find out which assistant was best, analysts Gene Munster and Will Thompson asked each one the same 800 questions across five different categories and graded them on understanding and accuracy. 

According to their findings, Google Assistant understood every single query they asked and answered correctly 92.9 percent of the time. Siri understood 99.8 percent of questions and answered 83.1 percent correctly, while Alexa understood 99.9 percent and answered correctly 79.8 percent of the time. To put that in perspective, that means Alexa answered approximately 162 questions incorrectly while Google got just 57 wrong.  Read more…

More about Tech, Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Tech

Just like people, stars get old. Also like people, aging stars release a lot of gas.

This newly captured image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows us NGC 2022, a planetary nebula in the Orion constellation. Yes, it’s a star and not a planet; it’s called that because of the rounded shaped produced by the star’s expanding ring of gas.

As stars get older, they get larger and take on more of a reddish glow. As that process plays out, the star sheds its outer layers into the surrounding space. As its mass shrinks the star’s core gets hotter, which in turn releases more ultraviolet light.

Those UV rays create a distinctive glow in the surrounding space as they interact with the gases that have been released. That’s how we end up with this picturesque scene. Read more…

More about Nasa, Hubble Space Telescope, Science, and Space

The slightly refreshed Nintendo Switch is now officially available, but reports that Nintendo is handing out free hardware upgrades aren’t accurate. 

The newly released Switch is the same device that launched back in 2017, only this one sports an updated CPU that’s more efficient, resulting in improved battery life. Both versions of the console are on shelves now, and a Friday report from Polygon had suggested that Nintendo was giving people who recently purchased the older version a free upgrade to the new one.

Nintendo says that’s not the case — not officially, at least — in a statement provided to Mashable on Saturday. Read more…

More about Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Entertainment, and Gaming

A Ligue 2 soccer match between AS Nancy Lorraine and Le Mans FC was temporarily halted Friday night after some Nancy fans began a homophobic chant, NBC Sports reported.

Referee Mehdi Mokhtari stopped the match and players pleaded with fans to stop. The game was put on hold for about a minute and resumed after fans stopped their problematic singing.

This is the first time a professional soccer match has been stopped in France for this reason, and the decision to temporarily halt play fell in line with one of France’s new rules against discrimination, FIFA employee Alex Stone said on Twitter.

Both Roxana Mărăcineanu, the French sport minister, and Marlène Schiappa, France’s secretary of state for gender equality, commended the referee on Twitter for taking a stand against the offending fans. Read more…

More about Soccer, France, Lgbtq, Entertainment, and Identities