Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Ken Bone has logged on, and for a guy who has pounded three beers in under 20 minutes, he’s making some reasonable points. The Ignatius J. Reilly lookalike who rose to memedom as an undecided question-asker during the 2016 presidential debates—only to fall from grace after his Reddit history revealed more than anyone needed to know about his sexual predilections—tweeted a drinking game of his own creation at the outset of Trump’s first State of the Union.

One of the major advantages of capitalism is the constant, nagging impulse to buy stuff. And lucky for you spendy Americans out there, Amazon is leveraging its purchase of Whole Foods once again, making it easier than ever to purchase things impulsively. You’ll soon be able to buy Amazon products in Whole Foods parking lots. Just like you’ve always wanted! The new initiative represents a predictable iteration of Amazon’s Treasure Truck gimmick.

Elon Musk’s tunnel-drilling company made millions over the weekend by selling a product that has nothing to do with tunnels or drilling. On Saturday night, Musk announced pre-orders for the Boring Company Flamethrower, a $500 gimmick that is really more of a flame-sputterer than a flamethrower. Flamethrowers shoot out an ignited stream of flammable liquid so that agricultural workers, soldiers, and pyrotechnicians can ignite things that are several yards away.

Nature’s beauty can originate from the most unlikely places. Take leech cocoons, the sacks in which leeches lay their eggs. They have an incredible solid-foam surface, as the image below shows: A team of researchers at Rutgers University, Camden (and one scientist from Turkey) took a look at these structures to figure out how they formed, and why they look the way they do. And why did they do that? “Because it’s fun,” said the study’s first author William Saidel.

Donald Trump’s administration has touted big plans for NASA in the past few months, but it hasn’t been willing to put up much cash. So the White House has come up with a way to stretch the space agency’s budget further: Forwarding the bills for the International Space Station to, like, anyone else. Per budget documents seen by the Verge, at least one draft budget proposal from the White House proposes terminating U.S.

Back in 2016, CNN bet $25 million on a celebrity vlogger with an app called Beme he himself seemed to have abandoned. The network hoped that Casey Neistat and his Beme co-founder Matt Hackett would help lure in millennials, but on Thursday, BuzzFeed reported that CNN is shutting down the media venture. Neistat and Hackett confirmed the news in a YouTube video and Medium post, respectively.

50 Cent has a way of pulling money out of thin air by making prescient early investments. Though he hasn’t been doing so great lately, he’s still got some tricks up his sleeve. It turns out he accepted Bitcoin payments for his 2014 album Animal Ambition and never cashed them out. Suddenly, he’s richer than he realized. In 2004, Fiddy signed an endorsement deal with a little company called Vitamin Water that ended up netting him half a billion dollars.

When last we heard of “Mad Mike” Hughes, the 61-year-old limo driver and stuntman who planned on launching a $20,000 steam-fueled rocket with “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” painted on the side some 1,800 feet into the air at 500 miles per hour, the gosh darn government had intervened to tell him he couldn’t conduct any such launch on public lands.

It’s one of the most obnoxious and common experiences on the internet—you check out a product online, let’s say a new mattress, and then for weeks afterward, ads for the mattress stalk you around the internet, showing up on every website you visit. Maybe you decided to buy another mattress, or maybe you even bought the one featured in the ad, but the ad will still follow you around insistently.

The Grey Lady has pulled some reprehensible stunts over the years, including writing puff pieces on neo-Nazis, helping lead the United States into a deadly war in the Middle East, and even employing Bret Stevens. But today it finally burned its most dedicated customers: those of us who pay the paper of record $6.99 a month to play its once-vaunted crossword on our phones.