Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Russia launched the world’s first floating nuclear power plant on Saturday. The 70-megawatt vessel, christened the Akademik Lomonosov, was towed away from St. Petersburg by two boats. It is currently coasting through the Baltic Sea to the town of Murmansk for fuel, and is then supposed to embark for the Arctic town of Pevek in 2019, according to a release from the state-run firm that built the rig.

Realtors have a new warning for prospective homeowners: you’re being watched. When realtors show houses to buyers, homeowners are now relying on an array of cheap, wifi-enabled cameras to keep an eye on them as they move through the homes, according to USA Today. From simpler nanny cams to more expensive Nest home camera systems, homeowners are increasingly surveilling the people walking through their houses during views.

If you’re one of the millions of subscribers who signed up for MoviePass’s virtually unlimited theater subscription service in the last few months, count yourself lucky and use it while you can. As the company’s finances are called into question, MoviePass has switched to a four ticket per month limit, and the company’s CEO has indicated that the old plan may never return for new subscribers.

In its latest display of public penitence in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook released a new ad today acknowledging past fuckups while promising to do better. Titled “Facebook Here Together”—an apparent reference to our everlasting blood pact with the social media giant—the video serves as the company’s most explicit admission yet that, yes, the website kind of turned to shit.

The upcoming horror movie Hereditary is being touted as one of the scariest films of the year. So when a theater outside Perth, Australia accidentally played the trailer before a screening of Peter Rabbit, you can guess what happened. “It was dreadful,” one parent at the screening told the local news website WA Today. “Very quickly you could tell this was not a kid’s film. Parents were yelling at the projectionist to stop, covering their kids’ eyes and ears.

Just in time for spring, Snap has released a new version of its original Spectacles, after FCC filings unveiled a bit more about the upcoming pair of camera sunglasses. You’ll also be happy to know, if you wrote them off entirely due to their garish appearance, that you made the right choice. These Spectacles look more like a remaster than a sequel. Also, they’re still ugly as sin.

Google may have paused development on Allo, but it seems the company can’t quite quit its habit of churning out apps just to keeps the wheels moving. Today it launched Google Tasks on Android and iOS, which actually rises above Google’s overloaded app cycle thanks to a clean UI and handy integration with Gmail and Google Calendar.

Google may have paused development on Allo, but it seems the company can’t quite quit its habit of churning out apps just to keeps the wheels moving. Today it launched Google Tasks on Android and iOS, which actually rises above Google’s overloaded app cycle thanks to a clean UI and handy integration with Gmail and Google Calendar.

On this most blessed of days, the Centers for Disease and Prevention is telling everyone to stay the hell away from a different sort of green, one that might cause you to have bloody diarrhea and vomiting for days on end: romaine lettuce. Just today, officials updated their warning over an outbreak of Escherichia coli linked to romaine that has spread to at least 16 states and sickened over 50 people since mid-March.

Astronomers fromthe European Space Agency’s Gaia missionwill release the biggest map of our galaxy ever tomorrow, using data collected by the Gaia space telescope. That includes 1.7 billion stars, as well as new information that could potentially solve some cosmic mysteries. The ESA’s Gaia telescope launched in 2013 and soon after began its galaxy-mapping mission. Back in 2016, it released position and brightness data for 1.