Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Brad Webster was just showing a friend around the isolated town of Unalakleet, Alaska when they stumbled on a stark example of just how brutal nature can be—two dead moose, still locked in combat, frozen in ice. Webster, who is a social studies and science teacher, wanted his friend to experience walking on ice for the first time. When they saw the moose they were given an up-close look at the dangers that are inherent to the region.

Google Maps, as we all know, has a tendency to surface some pretty odd scenes. Trump Tower, too, contains many oddities. But do you know what happens when you combine the two? Fucking. Fucking happens. Or at least that’s what a couple of images from the photo stream for Trump Tower on Google Maps suggest. One depicts two couples in the act of what definitely looks like coitus. Both couples are in the bathroom: one near the sink, and one near the stalls.

Fancy computer phones are great. They let us communicate, work, document, learn, complain, order dinner, find consensual sex friends, and plenty of other fun things. If I could attach myself to my phone with some sort of strange, dystopian umbilical cord-like apparatus, I would. But there is one thing you should never do with a smartphone: sleep with it. (No, not like that.) Take it from Melanie Tan Pelaez, an Australian woman who recently woke up with painful, second-degree burns on her arm.

The new MacBook Pro is far from perfect. It’s expensive, the Touch Bar feels like a gimmick, it’s not upgradable, and the USB-C ports means you’ll be stuck using dongles, at least in the short-term. These are all valid reasons for Mac fans to be unhappy with the new MacBook Pro. But the silliest reason to hate on the MacBook Pro is the loudness of its new keyboard. Yet that’s exactly what some people are doing.

Nintendo won’t be giving us more details about the upcoming Nintendo Switch console until January, but we’re already getting leaks of the expected launch pricing. It almost seems too good to be true. According to a (now deleted) webpage from Toys ‘R Us in Canada (a cached page is here), the Nintendo Switch base model will be $330 in Canada. That’s the equivalent of about $250 US dollars. The problem, of course, is that we don’t know what you actually get for $250.

Late last night, Twitter made the decision to suspend @EastwoodUSA. The account’s final message—and presumed reason for being booted off the social network—read: Thank you America, I don’t have long left to live but now I know the last few years will be great, I can’t thank you enough #PresidentTrump Users reacted in outrage to the account’s removal, calling the suspension an example of censorship and liberal bias.

Now that Donald Trump is our President-elect, his best buddy and literal comic book villain Vladimir Putin has sent his congratulations. You might think that Putin would do this over a phone call, because that seems like the right and polite thing to do. Or if not a call, at least a text. We know Trump favors Android, so iMessage is probably out, but Putin could at least use an app like Signal. It’s encrypted, at least. Nah. Putin decided to be totally old-school and send a telegram.

The US Navy’s brand new $4 billion warship is an incredible technological feat. The futuristic DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer is equipped with two guns that can hit targets from a stunning 80 miles away. The only problem? Rounds for the guns cost over $800,000 each. And the Navy has now decided that it can’t justify spending that much.

Incredible photographs from a beach in Nyda, Siberia, show thousands of naturally formed snowballs spread across an 11 mile stretch of coast. This is now officially the best place in the world to have a snowball fight. The giant snowballs began to appear on the beach about a week and a half ago. Locals in the village of Nyda, which is situated on the Yamal Peninsula just above the Arctic circle, have never seen anything quite like it.

Entire lifetimes have come and gone without the moon looking quite as large as it will this month. On November 14th, skygazers will witness the closest full moon, or “supermoon,” of 2016. But more excitingly, it’ll be the closest full moon since 1948—and we won’t get another one like it until 2034. The reason the moon appears to shrink and grow in the sky is that its orbit is not a perfect circle, but rather, a modest ellipse.