Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

SpaceX’s rocket just isn’t big enough to please NASA, Boeing says. Shouldn’t a big, important space agency be looking for a longer, more powerful rocket to fulfill its deep-space desires? Ars Technica’s Eric Berger reports: Recently, Boeing created a website called “Watch US Fly” to promote its aerospace industry—a grab bag of everything from Chinese tariffs to President Trump’s visit to the company’s facilities in St. Louis.

Astronauts hoping stay on the moon long-term missions have another reason to worry about moon dust: It could be quite harmful if inhaled, as demonstrated in a new study. We’ve long known that moon dust could cause trouble. During the Apollo missions, astronauts complained of sneezing and watery eyes after tracking dust from their spacesuits back into their ships. Scientists need to take moon dust and rocks into account when designing lunar landing equipment, because it sticks to everything.

A 38-year-old woman was forced to endure the sort of body horror that would make John Carpenter shudder: An all-consuming, if benign, ovarian tumor that swelled up to 132 pounds. But thankfully, doctors were able to successfully remove the monstrosity with relative ease. According to the woman’s doctors at the Danbury Hospital in Connecticut, she first noticed things were amiss when she started gaining roughly 10 pounds a week over a two month-period.

A little over a decade after the release of the original iPhone, it seems we have arrived at some basic grounds rules for phone use in movie theaters: calls are verboten, texting is a major offense, and checking your screen in anything but the most surreptitious manner is frowned upon. But what about when watching a movie at home with others? I’ve found that the proper protocol here has remained largely unspoken—a mistake if we, as a society, want to remain on the same page.

Just when you thought all data breaches amounted to hacker shenanigans, the largest bank in Australia has belatedly confirmed a different sort of breach story. BuzzFeed reports that the Commonwealth Bank lost 12 million customers’ data after magnetic tape backups containing their personal financial history from 2004 to 2014 went missing. It just lost them. They may have literally fallen off a truck. And the bank didn’t even bother telling its customers about the incident.

Before smartphones or mobile VR there were precious few waysfor your eyes to feast on a far off land. The View-Master was one of the best ones. It could transport a person anywhere—provided they had the imagination and the patience to thumb through the dozens of slides on a View-Master wheel. Rebecca Kilbreath had that patience, and has amassed one of the larger collections of View-Masters and View-master reels.

The only thing more terrifying than being stuck on a roller coaster, is being stuck at the highest part of the ride. And the only thing more terrifying than that is if it happens to be one of those coasters where you’re hanging upside down from a harness, leaving nothing but 98-feet of free-fall spacebetween you and the ground. That’s the nightmare that 32 thrill-seeking visitors had to endure yesterday at the Universal Studios Japan theme park, in Osaka.

On Amazon’s neverending quest to dominate every single retail category imaginable, the company has settled on its next frontier. According to Bloomberg, Amazon is getting into the pet business and is starting with its own line of dog food. The pet-centric branch of Amazon’s private-label product line will be called Wag, the last remnants of Wag.com, which Amazon acquired when it bought out Quidsi in 2011. Wag.com now redirects to the landing page for Amazon’s Wag brand of products.

It’s still unclear who, exactly, has been begging to give Facebook even more intimate data, but the social giant’s newly announced dating features nevertheless pose a significant threat to other online dating businesses. News of Facebook Dating sent shares of the Match Group (the parent company of Tinder, OkCupid and Match.com) tumbling on Tuesday, and the company’s corporate owner wasn’t going to let it pass without talking a little shit.

No one wants to pay for both cable and internet anymore. What’s more, no one, and I mean absolutely no one, wants to pay separate rental fees to put four cable TV boxes in their family’s home. What year is this? For cord-cutters who subscribe to Comcast, it’s apparently time to get screwed. While I’ve never personally paid for cable in my entire life, even my 84-year-old grandmother now has a Roku.