Sony has managed to best its top-of-the-line noise cancelling earbuds with a new, improved, and best of all, cheaper model.

However, this new arrival isn't exactly great news for the environment.

Strange as it may sound, Animal Crossing: New Horizons feels like where Breath of the Wild should have ended up gameplay-wise.

As well as announcing reminders to stay away from each other, the robots also estimate how many people are in the park at any given time.

Please, I implore you: jump on this bandwagon.

Big Tech is coming for your transaction data.

Anything that encourages more people to enable two-step verification can only be a good thing.

It delivers almost all the functionality Apple promised, with a steep Apple-like price tag to match.

As a very ugly standoff develops between legacy cinemas and legacy studios, Disney appears to be playing its cards close to its chest.

While this experiment may sound odd, it could represent the start of a whole new field of research.

This solar contact could provide a potential explanation for the asteroid's weird, two-tone surface.

Boba Fett has been on Lucasfilm’s to-do list for a while now.

Google has been folding in a score of updates to help delineate Duo from the dozens of other video chat services available.

If you think you’ve got something of value to share with the world – or maybe you just want a project to tackle to fill the hours – then we’ll take you through what you need to know.

The majority of these children have tested positive for the virus or seem to carry antibodies from an earlier infection.

Just after the prosecutor assigned to the case resigned on Thursday, the Department of Justice announced that it dropped the charges against Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor who’d already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. 

President Trump forecast this before it happened. Last week, he insisted that Flynn had been exonerated.  Apparently referring to his pardon power, Trump suggested that if the court did not do something he would use “a different kind of power.”

And now it’s happened. While the president has the broad power to pardon, he should not control individual prosecutorial decisions, especially those concerning a political ally. It is extremely unusual for the government to dismiss charges after a guilty plea. This is a sign that the historic independence of the Justice Department has been compromised. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Marissa Guale is like all too many Americans right now. Her husband and father of her two children, Raul, is on a ventilator in a hospital on Long Island, fighting for his life while sick with COVID-19. Raul, a 34-year-old nurse, likely caught the disease while working in a nursing home. When the National Institutes of Health announced an emergency use authorization for the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir, Marissa scrambled friends and family on Facebook to figure out how to get access for Raul, emailing hospital administrators, senators, and doctors. They pressed the Guale family’s case for a potentially lifesaving treatment on social media to anyone who would listen.

Her confusion about where and how to get access to the drug isn’t unique. All over the country, families, doctors, and hospitals are wondering how to get the drug and on what basis it’s being distributed. The Trump administration, which is in charge of allocation, hasn’t published any guidance on how it’s making decisions about the scarce supplies of the drug.

So who decides which hospitals get remdesivir? And what’s the most ethical way to prioritize access?

Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Queen gave a 75th anniversary VE Day speech Friday night that doubled as a rallying cry against coronavirus. “Never give up, never despair, that was the message of VE Day,” she told the British people.

Second World War heroes would “recognize and admire,” the sacrifices the British were making today in the fight against coronavirus, the Queen added. It was her second major coronavirus-themed speech to the nation.

“It may seem hard that we cannot mark this special anniversary as we would wish. Instead we remember from our homes and our doorsteps. But our streets are not empty,” the Queen said, “They are filled with the love and the care that we have for each other.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Adele posted a message to her social media channels this week thanking those on the front lines fighting COVID-19. In the process, the celebrated singer unveiled a thinner frame—and the internet had a lot of thoughts about it, almost all trash.

Enter Bill Maher, noted #MeToo skeptic, with perhaps the most garbage take of them all.

On Friday night, during the interview portion of his HBO show Real Time, the comedian began by placing the bulk of the blame for the high amount of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. compared to other countries on America’s obesity problem—not, say, the fact that the Trump administration didn’t do a single thing during the month of February to contain the spread of the virus.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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SAVANNAH, Georgia—Allegations Friday that a Georgia district attorney blocked police officers from arresting the killers of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery were just the latest blow to a local law enforcement apparatus that has been rocked by a series of troubling and deadly scandals.

Brunswick DA Jackie Johnson’s office allegedly prevented the Glynn County Police Department from arresting Travis and Gregory McMichael in connection with the shooting death of Arbery, an unarmed black man, in late February, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Johnson has recused herself from that case. But one Glynn County commissioner suggested she personally intervened in early plans to make arrests “to protect her friend” Gregory McMichael. McMichael was a former cop and investigator in the Brunswick DA’s office for 25 years who had reportedly investigated Arbery in the past. 

It is far from the first time the office—and local law enforcement more generally—had come under scathing scrutiny. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It seems like during quarantine, everyone has taken up cooking. Some people have been baking bread. Others have been perfecting their pie crust. Even my brother, who I’ve never seen cook a thing in his life, made a chicken pot pie the other day. But berry season is almost upon us and so, I have been prepping my jam making skills. 

While jelly is translucent and made from the juice of fruits, and marmalade is made from citrus fruits and can be overly complicated, jam is fairly easy to make. It’s made with whole or cut fruit and cooked with sugar, and can end up either chunky or completely smooth, depending on how you like yours. 

Jam is all about being assertive, about testing out different add-ins and sugars. To help you get the most out of the berry season, we’ve rounded up everything you need to make ideal jam.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

For the past two months, Katie Holliday has been cooped up alone in her Brooklyn apartment thinking longingly about an unlikely erogenous zone: the lower half of a stranger’s face. 

“I remember joking to my friend before all of this started, ‘Imagine if someone’s face becomes their most coveted body part?’” Holliday, who is 31, told The Daily Beast. “‘When someone removes their mask, is it a sign of trust? Is it like letting someone see you naked?’ I was kidding back then, but now it’s reality.”

Holliday doesn’t know exactly when it will be safe to start seeing people like she did before the pandemic began, but she’ll return to a singles scene unlike any other in history. “I’m picturing walking into a bar where everyone’s wearing masks,” she said. “I’ll meet someone whose face is covered. Are they cute or not? I don’t know!” 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Morningside USA was supposed to be apocalypse-proof. 

A gated, stucco fortress in the southwest corner of Missouri’s Ozark mountains, Morningside is an evangelical Christian community built to rent condos right through the end of the world.

“Where are you going to go when the world's on fire? Where are you going to go? This place is for God's people and this place, we need some farmers to move here,” Morningside’s founder, the disgraced doomsday televangelist Jim Bakker, said in a May 2018 sermon. “Did you know people from the government, from NASA, research from so many of them, they have said in their research, the safest place to live in troubled times is right here?”  

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Campaigns and consultants have spent the last four years worrying about the Trump campaign’s digital operation. Even before COVID-19 upended the election and forced candidates online, the Trump campaign was geofencing campaign rallies, micro-targeting digital ads, and amplifying deepfake videos.

And now, as both the crisis and the general election enter their third month, panic is beginning to set in about the startling digital gap between the two parties, amplified by the recent Trump campaign announcement of both a new app experience and the start of a $10 million digital push against Joe Biden. 

President Trump’s campaign manager has called what he’s built a “juggernaut” and is likening his digital infrastructure to a Death Star. In reality, what he's built is a trap.  

Read more at The Daily Beast.

On Tuesday the president took his first trip since the coronavirus grounded the country, to a Honeywell factory in battleground state Arizona. This particular Honeywell factory produces N95 masks. Pictures of the trip immediately surfaced on the internet, and they showed a president sporting his usual mango-tinted, ever-tan skin, his usual topiary-structured hair tinted a baffling yellowish, and a pair of clear safety goggles.

But what was missing? What we did not see on the president’s face was a mask. While the rest of us cover our faces as recommended by the CDC, the president does not. In fact, we have never seen a mask on the president, despite the president’s love of masking himself when it comes to his tax returns, his sexual assault allegations, and his financial dealings.   

On Wednesday, when pressed on his decision not to wear a mask at a mask factory, the president responded with the very fishy, “I had a mask on for a period of time, I had it on back, backstage. But they said you didn’t need it, so, I didn’t need it. And by the way, if you noticed, nobody else had it on that was in the group.” Okay. Whatever you say. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It’s not going out on much of a limb to say that the single greatest line in any rock and roll song—shall we double down and say all music ever?—is “A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!!”

Surely that says it all.

As with any truly oracular pronouncement, it inspires consternation in the first-time listener, and the second-time listener, and the third, the fourth, and on and on. The mystery never diminishes.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

STATE pension age is continually being reviewed and altered by the government. The latest change occurred earlier this week.

Whether it was driverless cars, lab-grown meat or faster-than-light neutrinos, some things just didn't live up to the hype in the 2010s

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will search for signs of life on Mars, and New Scientist’s Leah Crane visited it in the clean room where it is being assembled

The Quadrantid meteor shower has a short peak period that lasts only a few hours, so midnight on 3 January is the best time to view in the UK

We may not have found alien life yet, but new methods and the discovery of exoplanets and extreme life on Earth is revolutionising the hunt, says the doyenne of SETI research

Two stars in the constellation Sagitta are predicted to smash together in the year 2083, producing an explosion that will outshine every star in the sky

China has connected the world’s first portable ground station for quantum communication to the Mozi satellite, and has plans to launch another quantum satellite soon

The brains behind the first plant ever to germinate on the moon explains how the Chinese mission succeeded

When asteroid Armageddon is upon us, we can't just call Bruce Willis. Meet the people who really do watch the skies – and make detailed plans for our survival

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft, set to launch on 7 February, will give us our first clear views of the sun’s poles and help unravel the mystery of the solar wind

The best picture of the sun is more than five times more detailed than the previous highest-resolution images, revealing weird structures on our star’s surface

How can we get a picture of the whole Milky Way if we are inside it? Good sleuthing is needed to combine all the clues, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts that fast-spinning objects stretch space and time around them, and we’ve watched that effect make a pair of stars wobble

A spacecraft designed to study re-entry into Earth's atmosphere has a nose coated in cork, a cheap and lightweight alternative to other materials

SpaceX and the space tourism firm Space Adventures have announced a plan to fly paying customers into Earth orbit, higher than the International Space Station

There’s nothing like crash-landing on an alien planet. Journey to the Savage Planet doesn't always get it right, but it has echoes of classic Metroid Prime, says Jacob Aron

Stars like our sun formed in a dense cluster with thousands of others, during which time they may have swapped planets