Whatever it was that led to Friday’s Jeopardy foul-up, people aren’t happy.

A category called “Where’s the church?” presented the clue: “Built in the 300s AD, the Church of the Nativity.” The church in question is located in Bethlehem, a city in the West Bank. It’s the stretch of land that wraps around Israel’s capital city of Jerusalem, but the West Bank is Palestinian land. It’s also at least partially occupied by Israeli forces.

Still, the way maps are drawn, the correct question in response to that clue would be “What is Palestine?” That’s how contestant Katie Needle answered, even though she was marked as incorrect. Another contestant buzzed in after her and answered with what the show deemed as the correct answer: “What is Israel?” Read more…

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Today in stuff we’re (probably) gonna hate: Teslas “talking” to pedestrians. 

On Friday, Tesla CEO and professionally exhausting human Elon Musk tweeted a video teasing an upcoming Tesla feature, involving external speakers and possibly artificial intelligence. Captioned “Teslas will soon talk to people if you want. This is real,” the brief clip shows a Model 3 driving past people and saying, “Well, don’t just stand there. Hop in!”

An alarming thing to be sure if you, uh… didn’t know the driver?

Although Musk didn’t share much about the new feature, he promised consumers it would be compatible with Tesla’s fart mode and “Sentry” anti-theft mode.  Read more…

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There’s been some buzz already about what Samsung will be revealing on Feb. 11, but it doesn’t get much clearer than these newly surfaced photos.

Images of a device purported to be Samsung’s as-yet-unrevealed Galaxy S20 popped up on XDA Developers on Sunday. The website credits the photos back to an anonymous source. Assuming they’re legitimate, the leak amounts to our first real look at Samsung’s next flagship smartphone.

The images (you can see more at the link above) show the device’s front and back. The most intriguing details come from the back, with a camera bump that includes what appears to be four different lenses, a flash, and a much smaller hole that may or may not be a microphone (for video, perhaps?). Read more…

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It’s sweet potatoes and carrots to the rescue for the wildlife of New South Wales. 

As raging bushfires continue to decimate the animal population of Australia, rescue efforts to save survivors are mounting. Estimates place the death toll anywhere in the millions to billions (although, the accuracy of these figures is up for debate), and hundreds of thousands remain stranded in their burned environments. 

Chief among them are wallabies, a population that was already at-risk before the fires began. 

“The wallabies typically survive the fire itself, but are then left stranded with limited natural food as the fire takes out the vegetation around their rocky habitat,” said Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean, in an interview with The Daily Mail. “The wallabies were already under stress from the ongoing drought, making survival challenging for the wallabies without assistance.” Read more…

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Cause you know I’m all about that… baaaad guy.

Pop princess Meghan Trainor recently stopped by BBC Radio 1 to promote her third studio album Treat Myself (due out Jan. 31). Toward the end of the interview, host Scott Mills engaged Trainor in a round of “Your Lyrics Different Song,” asking her to perform the words from one of her hits over the tune of another.

Singing to the music of Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” Trainor revamped her 2014 hit “All About That Bass” — turning the throwback summer anthem into a chilling remix.

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The social team at the New York Times definitely seems to have a good handle on wringing engagement out of Twitter. Just ask angry Canadians.

In a Saturday tweet, the Times called the United States’ northern neighbor a “sprawling, bone-chillingly cold country” that’s lacking in “razzle dazzle.” The paper’s tweet asserts that potential new residents Meghan Markle and Prince Harry could bring the missing razzle dazzle.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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We got a taste of it on Thursday, but now it’s official: Samsung’s Galaxy Xcover Pro is coming to the U.S., removable battery and all.

The latest update to Samsung’s almost decade-old line of more durable Galaxy smartphones seems like a big one. In addition to having a replaceable battery, the Xcover Pro also embraces the more modern Galaxy look of a button-free front display.

The $499 smartphone is IP68 water- and dust-resistant and sports a beefy enough design (MIL-STD-810), according to Samsung, that it can survive falls of up to five feet without a protective case. The highlight for most people will probably be the battery, though. It packs a 4,050 mAh power source that offers plenty of juice on its own, but you can also swap in another and extend your usage, unlike most other modern smartphones. Read more…

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Six hours in and I’m still not sure what The Outsider is trying to say. It weaves an intriguing mystery, but I’m not convinced there’s enough happening week-to-week to keep a hungry audience chasing its baited hook.

Richard Price’s HBO adaptation of the 2018 Stephen King novel leans in heavily on the spooky mystery, and it works well enough on that level. Every answer we get only leads to more unsettling questions. It’s the same kind of recursive loop that made Lost so popular, but with a hefty side of menace creeping in from the shadows.

To what end, though? I haven’t read the book, so I couldn’t even begin to guess at where things are headed. But I’ve had a tough time syncing up with this dark story’s underlying themes, and I think this is an issue lots of viewers will face. The show’s success or failure hinges on how the central mystery eventually wraps itself up, but fair warning: You’d best be patient. Read more…

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All the way back in 2019, a few tech companies decided the world really needed phones with bendable screens. We didn’t actually get our hands on very many of these mobile oddities, but the most notorious, Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, was at least an interesting failure.

All you have to do is take one look at the Galaxy Fold to know that, as a consumer product, foldables aren’t quite there yet. We’ve seen plenty of concepts from companies like TCL, too, but even those are far off from being in our hands. The good news is we know that a handful of foldables will come out in 2020 and some of them look pretty neat. Read more…

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Gen Z’s intergalactic takeover has begun. 

On Monday, NASA announced that its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which captures images to be uploaded to the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project, had evidence of a new planet. The first circumbinary planet captured by TESS, “TOI 1338 b” as it is now known orbits two stars in the constellation Pictor — approximately 1,300 light-year away from Earth.  

The person responsible for the new discovery? 17-year-old intern Wolf Cukier. 

In summer 2019, Cukier was tasked with examining “variations in star brightness” in images captured by TESS. In a NASA press release, Goddard researcher Veselin Kostov explained that the human eye is better equipped than an algorithm when it comes to detecting subtle changes and patterns — so, a perfect job for a first-week intern.  Read more…

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