Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Roger Stone is one of President Trump’s most vicious attack dogs, whose bark has always been worse than his bite. But the dog has been muzzled, at least by Twitter. Stone has been suspended from using the social media platform, and according to Buzzfeed it’s a permanent ban. Stone is a veteran of numerous political campaigns dating back to the 1970s and even has a tattoo of President Nixon on his back.

Medicine is perfect for heartwarming stories. Some close relative is facing the most hopeless prognosis, such as being in a vegetative state. Someone tries a wild treatment, and boom, people are crying, the relative is awake, and the headlines go viral. But science doesn’t really work this way. A man recently “woke” from a vegetative state, crying again after “regaining consciousness,” creating a flurry of news coverage.

Two American women and their dogs have been rescued after spending nearly 5 months stranded on the Pacific Ocean surrounded by sharks. Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiava set off for Tahiti on May 3rd, but suffered engine failure and even a broken mast. To make matters worse, their phone fell overboard on the first day. The two women, both from Honolulu, Hawaii, were finally spotted on Tuesday by a Taiwanese fishing vessel roughly 900 miles southeast of Japan.

2017 has been what some might call a “real doozy” of a year, but it’s still got some brutal surprises up its sleeve. On Wednesday, the United States Air Force publicly denied the existence of Santa Claus, who in exactly two months was ostensibly scheduled to deliver presents to the nation’s children. After Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota began arguing on Twitter over whose air fleet is more powerful, CNN reported, the official U.

Physicist Albert Einstein, one of history’s greatest minds, has been proven right in the long term about a lot of things, like the continued success of his theory of general relativity to aspects of that theory which eluded detection for decades, like the existence of gravitational waves. Now he’s been proven right on his split decision to jot down some stuff on a piece of paper instead of giving a messenger a cash tip.

The largest mud volcano eruption has been raging in Indonesia since May 29, 2006. At its peak, 180,000 cubic meters of mud flowed daily from a site near a heavily populated region of Java—enough mud to completely fill the Empire State Building every six days. Almost 60,000 villagers have fled since then, and it’s still spewing 80,000 cubic meters per day.

No one said that monsters needed to be big or even scary. But when James Dwight Dana first spotted one strange plankton species back in the 19th century, he knew he had something weird on his hands. “Little monster,” Monstrilla seemed like as good a name as any. After all, scientists can name species after pretty much anything, even penises. A 2014 expedition to the Arctic revealed a whole new species of these little monsters hanging out beneath the ice.

Just over 10 years ago, television producer Steve Molaro ordered a pizza from the Domino’s website. Like anyone using the online system, he made his selections with a set of radio buttons labeled “whole,” “left,” “right,” and “none.” He selected “none” cheese. He selected “none” sauce. And he selected “left” beef. Thus was born what is arguably the internet’s most famous pizza: None Pizza with Left Beef.

In a troubling series of tweets with more emotional intensity than an entire season of Homeland, the CIA’s official Twitter account told the story of Lulu, an adorable bomb-sniffing dog who refused sniff bombs. Lulu, the agency wrote early in the thread, “began to show signs that she wasn’t interested in detecting explosive odors.

If you, like me, are tired of this world—these people—tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives, Google now allows you explore 16 other planetary bodies that are more serene than this one. Yesterday, Google announced that it has added 13 new worlds to its digital recreation of our solar system. The site previously only provided virtual tours of our Moon, Mars, and the International Space Station.