Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

It’s hot in Japan. Hot enough to melt a dashboard rubber duck into a forlorn pool of gooey plastic. And hot enough to make thousands of people intent on proving or disproving the authenticity of a now-viral tweet. The initial tweet, posted yesterday and already garnering close to 500,000 retweets, depicts a small green duck succumbing to the heat and becoming the flat-faced avatar of humid summer doldrums. It reads “This is the worst, I can’t believe it.

Samsung’s AI assistant Bixby is finally available in the US—months late. But, hey, at least it doesn’t explode. Akin to Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa, Bixby is a voice service that lives inside the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus smartphones. It was first announced in March and was supposed to arrive by the end of spring, but the feature kept being delayed because Samsung, allegedly, didn’t have enough data to teach the assistant English.

Amazon is an unstoppable beast, consuming all industries that are ripe for disruption and unfortunate enough to cross its path. On Monday, its latest victim was the struggling food delivery service Blue Apron. Following Amazon’s bombshell announcement of an agreement to acquire the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.7 billion, stock prices for competitors in the industry have been seesawing for weeks. Kroger, Target, Wal-Mart, and Costco, have all recently felt the Amazon effect.

At a Bastille Day event on Friday, the French army marching band did something unusual and amazing: they played electronic music. And not just any electronic music, either. The horns and drums and woodwinds performed a stunning medley of Daft Punk’s greatest hits. Donald Trump apparently did not enjoy it. Do you know who looks like he loved the celebration of French culture, though? French president Emmanuel Macron, and pretty much everyone else at the event (except maybe Melania Trump).

Under capitalism, money imprisons us all, but for one man in Corpus Christi, Texas, this arrangement transcended mere metaphor recently. On Wednesday afternoon, the contractor (whose name has not been released) was fixing a lock in a room connected to a Bank of America ATM when, suddenly, he trapped himself in. Having left his phone in the car, he was unable to call for help. So, with an impending Castaway situation at hand, the man had to get creative—or else.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is a giant nightmare beach. While its electrically charged sand wouldn’t make for a relaxing vacation, new research suggests the planet might not be as hostile to robotic visitors as we think. Although its lakes are full of ultra-cold liquid methane and ethane, they could be placid enough for future space probe to land on. Still not great for swimming, though.

Fox News, the president’s favorite TV channel, is just asking questions. But not about anything important. Last night, most people were talking about the explosive revelations that Donald Trump Jr. sought to collude with a Russian lawyer to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. But Tucker Carlson thought that it might be a perfect time to discuss a different topic: The safety of vaccines. Vaccines don’t cause autism. But people like liberal activist Robert Kennedy Jr.

Amazon has touted its “Prime Day” each year as a new kind of holiday, one in which the deals are virtually endless and anyone would be a sucker not to take advantage of them. But each year we learn that it’s mostly an opportunity for Amazon to offload the shit it couldn’t sell. We’ll be keeping you updated on all of the worst turds that Bezos and Co. hoped to polish this time around. Dishwasher Magnet Clean/Dirty Sign People, just look at the fucking dishes.

After spending 40 years and unspeakable amounts of investor money to make his dream a reality, Paul Moller’s flying car is finally available for purchase. But because flying cars are perpetually “just two years away,” Moller is actually auctioning off his original prototype, not a production model. You’ve probably seen the G90 M400 Skycar before.

Last night, planet Earth rumbled in a place where it usually doesn’t rumble: Montana. But it also rumbled in the Philippines. Come to think of it, it rumbled in Vanuatu and Japan too. The Earth rumbles a lot. Folks were especially surprised by the earthquake that registered a 5.8 on the Richter scale in Montana. Why? Well, we’re America, and weird stuff that happens to us tends to make news. But more importantly, it is kind of strange for an earthquake to happen in Western Montana.