The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) concluded its Lift Challenge last week, and although none of the participants achieved the desired goal of building a drone capable of lifting four times its weight, they came close.
The agency announced that the company AVIDrone pushed the limits with its electric helicopter design that lifted an unprecedented payload-to-weight ratio of 3.84…
How US military funding propelled China’s robot dogs
August 19, 2026
China’s Unitree Robotics — among the world’s biggest producers of humanoid and quadruped robots — based designs for its most successful robot dogs on innovations funded by the U.S. military, according to a former U.S. defense technology official and three top…
10 years ago, a game almost broke me. A wide-eyed 24-year-old, as yet undecayed by nearly a decade in games media, I found myself enraptured by The Witness. Eager to eat up every one of the maze-like puzzles hidden around its island setting, I simply couldn’t get enough.
Mortal Shell 2 Review
August 18, 2026
As a fan of Mortal Shell’s scaled-down approach to the soulslike back in 2020, I was very skeptical of Mortal Shell 2’s enthusiasm for making everything about it way larger, because bigger is not always better. If you felt the same, then allow me to assuage those fears from the top here: besides being bigger, Mortal Shell 2 is also better in almost every way. It still has its rough edges…
The Mafia video game franchise is often compared to the Grand Theft Auto games. The rivalry began when the first Mafia game came out in 2002, just a year after GTA 3. Fast forward nearly a quarter of a century and, in the run up to the release of last year’s Mafia: The Old…
Binance provided Russian law enforcement with customer identification documents and transaction records connected to donations supporting Ukrainian military causes. The disclosures helped authorities build a terrorism case against a Russian information technology…
The FBI received reports of $20.877 billion in internet-crime losses during 2025, while complaints involving cryptocurrency accounted for $11.37 billion. Trump’s memorandum directs the creation of a federally supervised program that would let vetted U.S. companies disrupt foreign criminal networks.
Key Takeaways
Vetted U.S. companies could execute federally supervised cyber…
Coinbase will open more than 170 derivative contracts to eligible UK professional investors, with leverage of up to 50x. The offering spans crypto, commodities, equities, and foreign exchange, while availability expands progressively from the coming weeks into the following…
A 'river' of cosmic gas 1 trillion miles long sent planets in the Orion constellation into tilted orbits
August 18, 2026
A rare planet-forming disk around a young triple-star system in the Orion constellation has been tipped over by a river of gas over 1 trillion miles (1.6 trillion kilometers) long. The discovery, made at radio wavelengths with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter…
'This is unprecedented': Why the Pentagon's recent UFO file releases are so important
August 18, 2026
As “The X Files” famously told us, “the truth is out there.” But at the same time, inquiring minds are immersed today in finding out whether or not the proof is out there — specifically, proof that at least some unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) come from somewhere beyond Earth.
The UAP acronym originally stood for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” a term…
