Have you seen this video of a very human-looking robot walking up a driveway? It’s gotten a lot of people online freaked out about the coming robot apocalypse. But you can rest easy... for now. This “robot” was created using computer graphics. As in, it’s totally fake.

PepsiCo will buy the Israel-based DIY soda company SodaStream in a deal worth $3.2 billion. The move is widely seen as an effort by Pepsi to prop up its catalog of “healthy” food and drink options as it continues to wage battle against longtime rival Coca-Cola. Both PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have invested heavily in both…

When I was a kid, my favorite movie in the world was 1985's Captain EO. Yes, the 17-minute Michael Jackson sci-fi fantasy played at the Disney theme parks, but it also made an appearance on TV. My parents recorded it on VHS for me, and I honestly wore out the tape rewatching it so many times. And if you loved the…

Donald Trump only understands the world through the lens of popular culture. And a new story from The Daily Beast illustrates that perfectly.

Phone calls here in 2018 seem to be more and more rare, especially with younger people. But most Americans still know basic phone etiquette, like saying “hello” when you answer the phone, and not hanging up without some kind of goodbye. But in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a helpful guide from 1950 that was produced…

Cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin is understandably upset that he lost a combined $24 million in two different hacks of his phone over the course of seven months. Terpin alleges that the hacks were only possible because the hackers had an inside person at AT&T who provided access to Terpin’s account. And he’s…

Americans who opened the newspaper on January 5, 1961, were greeted with an article by Associated Press science writer John Barbour. He described the futuristic world of the year 2000 and the great medical advances that would be achieved by then. And quite frankly, reading about all of the medical miracles we were…

Alex Jones, America’s most unhinged vitamin salesman, has been temporarily suspended from Twitter. The social media company has sent Jones to what users call “Twitter jail,” meaning that he can’t publish any tweets for the next seven days. The InfoWars Twitter account, which has just over 400,000 followers, is still…

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the country of 81 million people will boycott American consumer electronics, including Apple’s iPhone. The declaration comes as a trade war between the United States and Turkey has caused the Turkish currency, the lira, to plummet over the past few days, sending…

Never say never. Thomas Edison was both a great inventor and an amusing prognosticator. But nobody, no matter how smart, knows the future. And that goes for Edison as well. Back in 1894, Edison predicted that transatlantic phone calls would be impossible. But his doubts would prove silly roughly 30 years later when…

With few places to turn, Alex Jones started publishing videos more frequently at Vimeo last week. But it looks like he’s not wanted there either. Vimeo deleted a number of InfoWars videos over the weekend, citing violations of its terms of service.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, the American government’s foreign propaganda arm, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), invented fake names for journalists to plant stories in newspapers. In 2016, I wrote about Guy Sims Fitch, just one of the pseudonyms that was used globally. But I recently stumbled upon a few more names…

Gina Haspel was confirmed by the Senate to be director of the CIA on May 17th. But the public never got to see the memos that she wrote and authorized about the brutal torture of Al Qaeda suspects at a CIA black site that she oversaw in Thailand in 2002. Until now.

Gab, the Twitter knock-off of choice for the far right, has 48 hours to delete offending content that Microsoft says incites violence. If Gab doesn’t delete the two posts, created by a user of the site, Microsoft says it will suspend its hosting services.

Back in June, Microsoft built an underwater data center off the Scottish coast. The company has installed some underwater cameras to keep an eye on things, but Microsoft isn’t keeping the view all to themselves. The company is generously livestreaming the view, just in case watching fish swim around large submerged…

Alex Jones and his conspiracy theory empire InfoWars have officially been booted from Apple, Facebook, and YouTube. But Twitter is one of the last big social media companies that has declined to ban Alex Jones. And Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended his decision to allow Jones on the platform in a series of tweets last…

Have you heard the famous Winston Churchill quote that “the fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists”? Well, it’s a fake quote. Churchill never said it. But that didn’t stop Texas Governor Greg Abbott from tweeting the fake quote late last night. And while Abbott is rightly being taken to task, the…

A lot of things were supposed to kill newspapers in the 20th century. There was radio, then TV, then the internet. Somehow newspapers have survived, in one form or another. But it’s still interesting to take a look at the predictions that people of yesterday had for how the news business would change. Like this comic…