The revised age may help make sense of 2-million-year-old stone tools elsewhere in China. Two skulls from Yunxian, in northern China, aren’t ancestors of Denisovans after all; they’re actually the oldest known Homo erectus fossils in eastern Asia. A recent study has re-dated the skulls to about 1.77 million…
Games appear to be mostly unmodified ports of the well-regarded remakes. For my money, the 2004 Game Boy Advance re-releases of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are still the best versions of the original Pokémon games. They fixed most of the bugs and balance issues present in the originals—partly by also including the rosters…
The stainless steel pickup truck is Tesla’s first real flop. Last night, Tesla made some hefty cuts to Cybertruck pricing in an effort to stimulate some sales. The bombastic tri-motor “Cyberbeast” is $15,000 cheaper at $99,990, albeit by dropping some previously free features like supercharging and FSD. And there’s…
The company that attempted China’s first orbital-class rocket landing says it will soon try again. Welcome to Edition 8.30 of the Rocket Report! As I write this week’s edition, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket is undergoing a second countdown rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The outcome of the…
Technology is a double-edged sword in the $399 Rubik’s Cube-inspired toy. There’s something special about the gadget that “just works.” Technology can open opportunities for those devices but also complicate and weigh down products that have done just fine without things like sensors and software. So when a product…
New skill tree paths offer a fun twist on some generally familiar mechanics. Diablo II is one of those storied classic PC games that’s pretty much always fun to come back to—so much so that some players have put thousands of hours into the game over more than two…
There seems to be a deep-seated association between sounds and shapes. Does “bouba” sound round to you? How about “maluma”? Neither are real words, but we’ve known for decades that people who hear them tend to associate them with round objects. There have been plenty of ideas put forward…
Everyone’s trying to get mileage as F1 undergoes huge technical changes. It’s just two weeks until F1 gets underway in Australia, and teams are currently in Bahrain, midway through their third and final preseason test. The 2026 season promises to be wildly different from those of the past few…
Where we’re racing, we don’t need roads. In Formula One, grip is everything. The world’s best engineers devote their careers to designing cars that maximize downforce and grip to squeeze every bit of performance out of a set of four humble tires. These cars punish their drivers by slinging…
“It raises the possibility that social motivation plays a role in why some dogs end up learning object names.” We love hearing about the latest findings coming out of an Eötvös Loránd University (ELU) research group focused on gifted word learner (GWL) dogs—if only for the pictures of adorable…
