More proof that you’re never too small to make a difference: Six-year-old Owen Colley from Hingham, Massachusetts, is making clay koalas to help animals affected by the Australian bushfires, and has already raised over $240,000 Australian dollars. 

Owen’s mother Caitlin told CNN her son had been upset when he learnt of Australia’s bushfires, and particularly their impact upon the country’s wildlife. Owen’s father Simon grew up in Sydney, and he himself spent a few months there as a toddler, so he felt “a pull to Australia.”

The news of the crisis thus prompted the kindergarten student to draw a picture of Australia’s native animals in the rain. “It was really the first time Owen had made a wish for something other than LEGO or something other than himself,” Colley said. Read more…

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It’s been almost 50 years since the first openly gay sitcom character appeared on All In The Family in 1971, but Apple isn’t waiting for the big anniversary to drop its epic docuseries Visible: Out On Television. It boasts an incredible lineup of talking heads — entertainment icons and queer trailblazers ranging from Billy Porter and Rachel Maddow to Lena Waithe, Indya Moore, Asia Kate Dillon, Anderson Cooper, and even Oprah. 

The five-episode series promises to span early censorship and taboos, how TV documented historical moments like Stonewall and the AIDS epidemic, the iconic LGBTQ characters and personalities beamed into people’s living rooms all over the world, Soap and Queer As Folk and Pose and I’m not crying already, you are. Read more…

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What if a car, but on the moon? 

The designers for Lexus and Toyota went beyond Earth to cook up concept ideas for out of this world rides. But instead of an all-electric autonomous vehicle with drone helpers like the LF-30 concept car released in 2019, the design team came up with moon cars.

Lexus calls it “moon mobility concepts” but let’s be real: These ideas are for riding around the moon like a boss. Seven space vehicle concepts were dreamed up and a selected design featured in Document Journal, an art and culture magazine. 

The selection? A concept called “Zero Gravity” that looks like a futuristic motorcycle that can go 310 mph and handle the bumps of the moon’s surface, no problem. Read more…

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More like Egg-On-Your-Facebook, amirite?

Facebook is striking an apologetic tone after Burmese text posted on the website showed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s name as “Mr. Shithole” in an English translation. The social network is blaming the error on a tech foul-up.

“We fixed a technical issue that caused incorrect translations from Burmese to English on Facebook. This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We sincerely apologise for the offence this has caused,” a statement provided to The Guardian reads.

The UK paper goes on to note that Google’s own translation feature doesn’t show the same error. Though it turns out there is an explanation for how exactly this happened. Read more…

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There’s the Lime app, the Lyft app, the Uber app for Jump scooters, then there’s Bird. And don’t forget about Spin, Scoot, or Skip, each with its own smartphone app to unlock, rent, and ride a two-wheeled electric scooterScooter Map arrived in 2019 with all that scooter data aggregated. In One. Single. Place. Thank you.

But developer Victor Pontis’ creation is facing scrutiny from bigger scooter companies. The latest issue comes from scooter operator Lime, The San Francisco-based company recently sent another cease and desist letter to Scooter Map, which pulls Lime scooter data like location and battery level onto its app.  Read more…

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama has been a proponent of exercise since she founded the Let’s Move public health initiative in 2010, but these days she’s encouraging people to stay active in a different way. 

Obama posted a list of her favorite workout songs to Twitter complete with nine songs for cooling down, and the list contains songs from Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino, Bruno Mars, Nipsey Hussle, and more. 

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Beyoncé’s anticipated new line of Ivy Park X Adidas athletic wear has already sold out, but that didn’t stop British grocery chain Sainsbury’s from having some fun with the Beyhive when the first promotional images emerged online. 

Ivy Park’s new color scheme is burgundy and orange, which happens to be the same color as the uniforms worn by Sainsbury’s employees. The official Sainbury’s twitter account tweeted out an image marked with the hashtag #SainsBey, and from there all bets were off. 

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Diving into the ocean is as easy as… riding a scooter. Sounds absurd, but here we are.

Another underwater electric scooter made its debut in Germany on Saturday after a lightweight, handheld e-scooter made a splash at a water tank at the CES tech show. The Amazea e-scooter from German electronics company Jamade is modeled after dolphin anatomy and made from biodegradable materials.

Those materials are printed from a large-format 3D printer to make up the scooter’s main body and some front parts, so about 75 percent is printed materials. The two 3.1 KW engines and lithium-ion battery are sadly not printable. But the power system lets the scooter reach up to 12 mph when submerged and nearly 19 mph when gliding on the water. The battery lasts up to an hour, depending how hard you drive it. Read more…

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If Dolittle is on your must-watch list, you should know there are spoilers ahead. (And also that I’m sorry.) This is your only chance to turn back.

I hope you’re still here, because this is some weird and wild stuffDolittle, in case you hadn’t heard, is Robert Downey Jr.’s first big post-Marvel movie. It’s a reboot of the Dr. Dolittle series, in which a renowned doctor and veterinarian has adventures. Also, an important point to add: He can talk to animals.

Downey’s turn as the leveled-up animal whisperer sends him off to a mythical island as he hunts down a cure that will save the ailing queen. The story eventually brings him face to face with a dragon, with a climactic showdown that’s immediately followed by… hastily executed rectal surgery? Read more…

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It’s been a long, cold weekend of hunkering down for people living in eastern Canada.

A powerful blizzard dumped a record-shattering amount of snow on the province of Newfoundland across Friday and Saturday. After moving through the northeastern U.S. at the end of the week, it developed into a powerful weather event known as a “bomb cyclone.”

Meteorologists use that term to describe a kind of rapidly strengthening storm that occurs when the weather event’s minimum central pressure drops by at least 24 millibars in a 24-hour period. That process of rapid intensification – “bombogenesis,” as it’s called – is where the “bomb cyclone” name comes from. Read more…

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