Amazon’s got a big fall season coming up, so the Prime Video app is getting overhauled ahead of time. 

The company formerly run by Jeff Bezos announced Monday that its streaming service would get a new user interface after years of looking the same. The update will start rolling out to streaming devices like Amazon’s own Fire TV line this week, with a vague “summer” promise for when everyone can expect to have it. Screenshots don’t entirely do it justice, so Amazon also released a short video explaining all the changes.

It looks like content is still sorted into horizontal rows with large, rectangular images promoting each show or movie, but how you access all of that has changed somewhat. There are now six primary tabs, each accessible through a new sidebar menu rather than arranged horizontally along the top of the screen like before: Home, Store, Find, Live TV, Free With Ads, and My Stuff. Content that comes free with a Prime Video subscription (or presumably any attached subscriptions, like Paramount+) is marked with a blue checkmark, while anything you’d need to rent or buy has a shopping bag icon now.

The “Home” screen has easy access to other subscriptions, as well as a new “Continue Watching” row that shows not only what you’ve been watching, but how far into it you got before stopping last time. A new Top 10 section shows what’s been popular lately, in case you don’t want to miss out on any zeitgeists. In addition to all that, there’s a new “Sports” sub-menu here that gives you access to any live sports your various subscriptions offer. Given Amazon’s upcoming debut of exclusive weekly NFL games through Prime Video, this is going to be an important page for millions of customers to know about.

The Live TV section looks like it’ll pull in live programming from services like Paramount+.
Credit: Amazon

Generally, it’s all a bit sleeker and cleaner, though the tiles are very large, and the update looks to still heavily promote Amazon originals over anything else. This update was really only a matter of time after Amazon overhauled its whole Fire TV UI in 2020 with a new experience that looks very similar to the new Prime Video app.

Let’s just hope the streaming quality on those NFL streams lives up to the slick new UI you’ll use to watch them.

Working from home is great for so many reasons: no commuting, saving money by making your own lunch, a better work-life balance.

And, of course, the spontaneities of life occurring all around you while you do a TV spot from your home office. However, that bonus might be more for us, the viewers, than the individuals themselves.

Everyone knows about the now infamous “BBC Dad,” Professor Robert Kelley, whose TV appearance went viral after his two kids (and their nanny) made guest appearances throughout his interview on the network.

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The latest moment comes from CNBC’s Squawk Box, featuring guest Karen Firestone of Aureus Asset Management. During the segment, host Aaron Ross Sorkin is just trying to talk about the stock market when he’s interrupted by a couple of barking dogs who won’t stop yapping. Firestone motions off the screen, ostensibly for whomever is in the house to go take care of the loud canines. 

Cue a man in nothing but his underwear walking by in the background.

Honestly, for the purpose of good quality television production, it was probably best for the guy to go where he needed to so he could quiet the dogs.

Could he have quickly thrown on a shirt and maybe some shorts, too? I don’t know; it’s not his TV spot. Why should he have to ruin his perfectly fine summer day?

Hulu has released a full version of “Angel in Flip Flops” from Only Murders in the Building Season 2. In the series, Steve Martin’s character Charles-Haden Savage released the song in 1989, and it was huge in Germany. At least, until the Berlin Wall fell and stopped its track momentum. Womp womp.

Now, many years later, we can enjoy the cheesy tune in all its glory, complete with a hilarious animated video. Watch as Charles and his Angel in Flip Flops get together and stop tanks in their tracks (yes, really). That’s the power of the pitta putta.

Well, it’s Monday again, and you should probably get your week off to a nice start by having a go at the latest Wordle. If you’re having a hard time finding the solution, though, we’re here to lend a hand.

The answer to the July 18 Wordle, puzzle #394, can be found at the end of this article, or you can simply read on for a few tips, gentle hints, and strategies to help you every day.

Where did Wordle come from?

Wordle‘s sudden explosion at the end of 2021 led to a round of press focused on its creator. Former Reddit engineer Josh Wardle actually came up with the game in 2021 as a private exercise for him and his word game-loving partner. It eventually became a staple of their family WhatsApp messaging, and that’s when Wardle started to suspect he might have something special enough to merit a wider release.

Thousands of people around the globe now play this game each day, and fans have even created alternatives to Wordle inspired by the original format. This includes music identification game Heardle, Hollywood nerd faves Actorle and Framed, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once.

Not the day you’re after? You’ll find the Wordle answer for July 17 here.

What’s the best Wordle starting word?

We have some ideas to help you pick the perfect first move. Such tips include choosing a word with at least two different vowels in it, plus a few common consonants such as S, T, R, or N. Also, even if you’re attached to your mathematically sound starter, once it’s been the answer on any given day it won’t be the answer again for a few years — so if you happen to get the elusive 1/6 result, celebrate by swapping out your starting five.

What happened to the Wordle archive?

While you could once play the entire archive of past puzzles, the archive was taken down at the request of the New York Times, according to the site’s creator.

Is Wordle getting harder?

If you’ve been finding Wordle too easy, there is a Hard Mode you can enable to give yourself more of a challenge. But unless you activate this mode, we can assure you that Wordle isn’t getting harder. 

Why are there two different Wordle answers some days?

The whole point of Wordle is that everyone’s solving the same puzzle, with the same answer, no matter where you are in the world. However, occasionally the puzzle game will accept two different correct solutions on the same day. This aberration is due to changes the New York Times began making after it acquired Wordle earlier this year, excising words form Wardle’s original list that the team considers obscure or potentially offensive.

To make sure you’re always getting the same puzzle as everyone else, refresh your browser before you play — don’t worry, the site will keep your streak.

A subtle hint for the Wordle answer on July 18

It’s something you’d associate with birds.

Wordle today is a 5-letter word that starts with…

…the letter F!

Does today’s Wordle word have a double letter?

No double-ups today, friend.

Wordle today: What’s the answer?

Ready?

We’re going to actually tell you today’s word now.

It’s…

Flock.

Reporting by Caitlin Welsh, Sam Haysom, Amanda Yeo and Adam Rosenberg contributed to this article.

In the first image NASA released from the Webb telescope, some galaxies look like strings of stretched taffy.

That’s because the universe itself has altered our view of the deep cosmos.

Astronomers recently pointed the colossal James Webb Space Telescope at a cluster of galaxies dubbed SMACS 0723. Crucially, galaxies are enormously massive objects as they contain hundreds of billions of stars, millions of black holes, and perhaps trillions of planets. The combined mass of these galaxies warps space, like a bowling ball sitting on a mattress.

This warped space essentially creates a “lens” that we look through. So the light from the galaxies behind this galactic cluster that we (or the Webb telescope) ultimately see is distorted. It’s an occurrence called “gravitational lensing.” As the Space Telescope Science Institute (which runs the telescope) explains: “It’s like having a camera lens in between us and the more distant galaxies.”

Albert Einstein predicted the effect of gravitational lensing over a century ago. Some of the galaxies we can view below in Webb’s first deep view into the cosmos, then, are magnified, and some are profoundly stretched or distorted.

“They’ve been magnified by the gravity of the cluster, just like Einstein said they would,” NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby said at the reveal of Webb’s first scientific images.

NASA calls this image “Webb’s First Deep Field.” It’s an image of the galaxy cluster “SMACS 0723.” The mass of the galaxies distorts, and magnifies, more distant galaxies in the background
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI

In the image above, the cluster of white-looking, ethereal galaxies are some 4.6 billion years old. They formed around the same time as the sun and Earth, Rigby said. It’s these white galaxies that magnify and alter the view behind.

These more distant objects, which include both the red dots and bizarrely-distorted galaxies, are among the oldest objects in the cosmos. “All the super faint, dark-red tiny dots, as well as many of the brighter, strangely shaped objects in this astounding image are extremely distant galaxies that no human eye has seen before,” Harald Ebeling, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for astronomy, said in a statement.

The faintest objects in this Webb image are some 13.1 billion years old, Rigby said. Yet Webb will soon look even farther into the past, over 13.5 billion years ago, soon after the first stars and galaxies formed.

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The deep space observatory

The Webb telescope — a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to make unprecedented discoveries. “With this telescope, it’s really hard not to break records,” Thomas Zurbuchen, an astrophysicist and NASA’s associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, recently said at a press conference.

Here’s how Webb will achieve unparalleled things:

• Giant mirror: Webb’s mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That’s over two and a half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects.

  “We’re going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed,” Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable last year.

• Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that’s visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn’t as often collide with and get scattered by these densely-packed particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can’t.

  “It lifts the veil,” said Creighton.

• Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment, called spectrometers, that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be it gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will look at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find.

  “We might learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.

By now, everyone’s probably at least heard of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. The “MyPillow Guy” became infamous over the past few years for his seemingly undying support for former-President Donald Trump, getting his own company’s Twitter account permanently banned for trying to spread disinformation about fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

However, Lindell was far from the only corporate CEO to go to bat for Trump in his attempts to overturn his loss in the election.

At the latest Jan. 6 committee hearing last Tuesday, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne was revealed to have attended at least one meeting at the White House in December of 2020 and was directly involved in discussions with Trump and his administration on how to overturn the election.

According to CNN, Byrne, the former head of the e-commerce giant, spent nearly 8 hours behind closed doors testifying to the House select committee just this past Friday. 

The day after Tuesday’s hearing, Overstock released a statement following the revelations of its former CEO’s involvement in Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.

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While it is true that Byrne did not have a relationship with Overstock during these events, he did take part in wild conspiratorial claims while he was still CEO. In fact, in an official Overstock press release in August 2019, Byrne would release a conspiratorial statement about the “deep state” and supposed political espionage that was being conducted by the Obama administration against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The press release can still be found on the official Overstock.com investor website.

Shortly after the press release was published, Byrne was revealed to be having a romantic relationship with Russian spy Maria Butina. He resigned as Overstock CEO on August 22, 2019, as a result.

The December 18, 2020 White House meeting attended by Byrne has been a major focus of the committee. Trump, himself, as well as his QAnon-believing former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his lawyer Sidney Powell were also in attendance. The meeting focused on ways to overturn the election results in Trump’s favor and included a discussion on how to block the certification of Joe Biden as president. Other possibilities, such as seizing voting machines, were also discussed. A former White House aide called the meeting “unhinged” with various Trump confidants arguing over how to proceed with their attempts to subvert democracy.

Just 6 hours after that meeting with Byrne, Flynn, Powell, and others, Trump tweeted a call-to-action to his followers, asking them to show up at a protest in DC on Jan. 6.

“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” tweeted Trump at 1:42 am on Dec. 19. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

A few weeks later, Trump supporters would storm the Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the election results for Trump.

A decade ago, not long after the decline of Ashton Kutcher’s supremacy on Twitter, in the days when the @horse_ebooks account was making the concept of “Weird Twitter” mainstream, an enigmatic character quietly surfaced.

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But there’s much more to this guy than coffee, and if his most recent activities are any indication, his tragic, ten-year story arc may finally be approaching its climax — or perhaps a new beginning.

The account known as “coffee dad,” with the handle @coffee_dad, is “just a dad who loves his coffee,” according to his bio. Coffee dad almost exclusively posts brief, low-key updates about his present status vis-a-vis his favorite hot drink. The updates tend to be nothing more than sentence fragments about obtaining, making, or consuming coffee. Posts might be “need coffee,” “time for coffee,” or just “coffee.”

Coffee dad might occasionally seem unusually keyed up or overcaffeinated just because he, say, posted “MAKING COFFEE” in all caps, but hey, you can chalk that up to him being a middle-aged dad, and probably not great at using Twitter, not any sort of deeper pathology…right?

Don’t be so sure. Every so often, when his followers least expect it, coffee dad takes a break from sipping coffee to drop hints about his intense struggle with powerful and prolonged grief over the untimely loss of his son. “Please leave me alone today. This is a very difficult day for our family. Thinking of you always my son,” he tweeted in 2013. Over time the rare mentions of coffee dad’s son became more and more elaborate. 

Months may pass with nothing but coffee tweets, and then coffee dad will post something like this:

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Apparently, the son died in some sort of motorcycle-related event, and the dad feels at least partly responsible. These blink-and-you-miss-them outbursts of pain aren’t funny. They’re more cathartic, and they give the “normal” coffee tweets a tragic subtext. The experience of following a grieving dad for years and years makes his followers admire the depth of his love, and it’s hard not to root for him to find a path out of his despair. 

But there have long been indications that this story was not headed toward a happy ending. Tweets like 2017’s “It is time for them to pay for what they have done,” suggest that coffee dad holds some unknown group — bikers? — responsible for his son’s death, and these people have reason to fear coffee dad’s righteous anger.

Many of coffee dad’s non-coffee tweets have suggested that the dad’s quest for retribution has already begun. But one posted on Sunday, July 17 — a date established back in the account’s first year as the son’s birthday — hints at a finality that has never been present in a coffee dad tweet before:

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I’ll let you tease out the meaning of this one, but it’s clear to me that coffee dad’s enemies aren’t the only ones in danger now. I doubt this is the end of coffee dad, but he’s clearly crossing a threshold, and the next time he posts about needing coffee, I’ll wonder if it’s because he’s in a place where there is none to drink.

The “good times” for crypto miners really do seem to be coming to an end.

Just last month it was reported that Bitcoin miners were selling off more Bitcoin than they were bringing in in order to cover their energy costs during the crypto crash, which saw the token plummet in value. With energy costs rising as well, mining companies were seeing profits dwindle from their mining endeavors.

Now, cryptocurrency miners have a new issue on their hands: U.S. Congress.

Congressional Democrats, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are looking into crypto mining requirements that would force mining companies to report their energy usage. 

Senator Warren, along with five other Democratic members of Congress, wrote a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy requesting that the two agencies work together to create rules requiring crypto mining companies to report on their energy use and emissions data.

The move comes, according to the New York Times, after an investigation into seven of the United States’ largest Bitcoin mining companies. The inquiry found that these Bitcoin miners are heading towards using up “as much as 1,045 megawatts of power, or enough electricity to power all the residences in a city the size of Houston.” Houston is Texas’ most populous city and the fourth largest in the country with more than 2.3 million residents.

“The results of our investigation, which gathered data from just seven companies, are disturbing, with this limited data alone revealing that cryptominers are large energy users that account for a significant – and rapidly growing – amount of carbon emissions,” reads the letter.

The letter points out that miners’ energy use is also passing on additional costs for those who live and work in the cities where they are based. Notably, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates Texas’ power grid has had to ask crypto miners in the state to voluntarily shut down operations when energy demands spike due to heatwaves.

The largely-unregulated cryptocurrency mining industry uses massive amounts of energy due to the high-powered computer processing power necessary in order to validate transactions on the blockchain. In exchange for successfully guessing the random string of numbers required to put a block on the chain, miners are rewarded with Bitcoin. As time goes on, this process becomes more difficult and the Bitcoin remuneration will be cut in half. 

According to the report, one mining company, Marathon Digital Holdings plans to grow its operation from its current 33,000 mining rigs to 199,000 rigs by early 2023. Right now, the company powers its operation thanks to a Montana-based energy company that generates electricity by burning coal.

With crypto miners set to use up even more energy in the near future, it seems Senator Warren’s letter is a step towards monitoring the industry and possibly passing regulations to curtail at least some of its more destructive behavior.

When you delete a text message, is it truly gone forever? Given America’s willingness to spy on its citizens, simple common sense would suggest that no they’re not gone forever, and law enforcement agencies can use inexpensive consumer-grade software to recover at least some of your deleted text messages if they can get into your phone. But deleted text messages between two Secret Service agents have become the focal point of the House committee’s investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot because, for the moment, those messages are gone without a trace, and may or may not be able to be recovered.

Messages between the agents in question on Jan 5 and 6 are nowhere to be found as the House committee examines whether or not those missing messages can be reconstructed, The Guardian reports. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, the watchdog of the Secret Service, told Congress this past Thursday that those records were deleted after his office had requested them. According to The Guardian, the Secret Service asserts that the messages “were lost during a pre-planned, agency-wide cellphone upgrade scheme in January 2021 because some agents apparently had not backed up messages as required.”

The House committee is currently looking at ways to forensically reconstruct the deleted communications — communications from a government agency with “secret” right there in its name — as they believe they may provide “greater clarity on how security plans developed” in the days before and during the capitol insurrection, The Guardian reports. Multiple sources have reported on the role the Secret Service played in keeping then-President Donald Trump from returning to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6.

For the majority of Americans who are not Secret Service agents, these current events raise interesting questions about how a normal citizen can protect their text messages. Whatever the outcome of this investigation, the assumption that any text message you send, receive, and delete is still being digitally recorded somewhere is not an outlandish one, but details about where the lost texts might be found are scarce. Are they potentially in the cloud? Are they some kind of ghost data still on the agents’ phones? When you delete anything on your phone, your device labels that space as available to be overwritten by new information, but until the new information arrives to overwrite it, it’s still there. It’s like deleting any information about your house in a phonebook, but still being able to find the house if you just walk around the neighborhood.

But privacy-focused messaging apps like Signal do exist, offering end-to-end encryption allowing only the people involved in conversations to see the content of their messages — so not even the company itself can spy on you. Signal says that the app is truly private and that even if the Feds do come knocking, the company doesn’t have data to hand over. Just to be clear, however, end-to-end encryption does not necessarily mean your messages are truly off the grid, but it’s certainly more secure than texting.

Whether or not the House committee can reconstruct the Secret Service texts remains to be seen, but this isn’t the first time the agency has abruptly lost documents sought by investigators. And this also isn’t the first time the inspector general has been asked to reconstruct text messages, having used “forensic tools” in 2018 to recover texts from two senior FBI officials who investigated Hillary Clinton and Trump.

You really can find anything on the internet.

Once thought to be long-lost, a 1986 WWE wrestling match featuring superstar wrestler Bret Hart has resurfaced in full on the internet. Yes, this was back when the pro wrestling giant was called WWF, and Hulkamania was taking over the world.

On Saturday, Instagram user @abuyousef2007 uploaded the wrestling match, clocking in at 10 minutes and 10 seconds, on the social media platform. It’s the first time ever that this much-talked-about match has been available at full length.

Why is Bret Hart vs. Tom Magee a big deal?

The bout features Hart taking on an up-and-comer Tom Magee in October 1986 at the Rochester War Memorial Arena in Rochester, New York. While Hart vs. Magee was part of an event taped for television, it was previously thought that the match never actually aired anywhere. However, the existence of this particular version: the full bout with Arabic commentary, appears to prove that the match did air in at least one market in the 80s.

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Making the event even more noteworthy was the fact that the WWE itself, which has one of the most comprehensive wrestling video archives in the world, could not locate the match in their vault. So over the years, the match became somewhat of an urban legend. 

However, back in 2019, wrestling photographer Mary-Kate Anthony found the long lost tape in her collection. According to Anthony, she had previously helped Hart convert his personal collection of matches on VHS to digital and Hart had not requested the physical copies back. The legendary Magee match was in that collection. 

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The discovery was such a big deal in the wrestling community that the WWE reached out to Anthony in order to obtain the match. The wrestling company quickly produced an entire documentary about the once-lost match and its resurfacing called Holy Grail: The Search for WWE’s Most Infamous Lost Match, which is available on the WWE Network on Peacock. The documentary includes a better quality recording of the Hart vs. Magee match, but for some reason this version starts mid-fight.

The match itself gained notoriety in pro wrestling circles because of its backstory. Magee was an all-star athlete at the time, competing in powerlifting and strongman competitions, and had a physique and look well suited to pro wrestling. But he was unproven in the world of wrestling. So, to test the waters, WWE booked Magee to take on a seasoned veteran in the form of Bret Hart.

Hart, at the time, was less than a decade into his wrestling career, but the match truly showcases why he’d go on to be known as “the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be.” Magee is green as can be in the match, yet Hart helps carry the rookie throughout the 10 minute bout and makes Magee look like a future superstar. Reportedly, WWE owner Vince McMahon, on the lookout for his next Hulk Hogan-esque superstar shouted “that’s my next champion!” when watching Magee take on Hart from backstage. Pro wrestling journalist David Bixenspan dubbed the fight the “holy grail miracle match.”

Hart would go on to become WWE world champion and help spark the 90s wrestling boom known as the “Attitude Era.” Magee, without having a talent such as Bret Hart to put him over in his matches, would quietly fade out of the wrestling industry by 1990 without much success.

The internet has been really good at rediscovering lost content recently. An episode of Sesame Street from 1976 was recently uploaded online for the first time. The episode in question was originally removed from the air after parents complained that it was too scary for the kids. It featured Margaret Hamilton reprising her classic Wicked Witch of the West role from the Wizard of Oz.

So whether it’s an old wrestling match you think may not exist, a weird kids’ TV show episode, or some other pop culture artifact you only half-remember, ask the internet to hunt it down, and it may miraculously surface like Hart vs. Magee.