A UPS driver is being praised for braving an icy pond to rescue a young dog trapped in the ice. Ryan Arens was on his route shortly before Christmas when he rolled up to a house in Bozeman, Montana, and heard a dog in distress. "This dog was screaming and crying and going crazy," he said.

I remember when Quantic Dream first introduced us to Kara back in 2012. Originally just a tech demo, the short about an erroneously sentient android begging not to be disassembled was haunting and beautiful. The tech itself was gorgeous and lifelike beyond anything I had seen before, but hearing Kara cry out, “I’m scared!” was what stayed with me years later.

We're back with the reveal of our top ten most played games of the year. If you've missed them all week you can also catch similar stats stories on the most popular DLC, most popular ID@Xbox games, and the first half of this top 20. Some of the list below should surprise no one, while a few others very well may. What do you think of 2018 as a whole?

The Capitol Hill bistro didn’t boast the trappings of Scott Pruitt’s former office. No 19th-century paintings on loan from the Smithsonian. No captain’s desk or stately fireplaces. No biometric locks. But Radici, near Eastern Market, offered President Trump’s former Cabinet member something he needed after he was forced out of the Environmental Protection Agency in July: a friendly landing spot.

After the massive success the gaming industry achieved in 2017 and 2018, the next years seems really bright especially for Xbox One owners as a host of titles are announced for the coming years as exclusives and shared with the PlayStation platform. Thanks to third-party support in the form of Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts III releasing towards the end of January and Ubisoft’s Trials Rising. There is definitely going to be a title for everyone on the console.

Over the last 30 years, scientists have discovered thousands of new planets. But one of the big questions that remains—especially for those hunting for alien life—is whether those planets and their atmospheres could support life. Ground- and space-based telescopes can tell us the basics of each planet's specific cocktail of gasses that form its atmosphere, but to get a closer look, scientists are using sophisticated tools to simulate faraway planets in their earthbound labs.

If there is one message Facebook has been trying to send to the world in 2018, it's that the company understands it needs to rethink the way it operates. Facebook says it understands that it must better police the content that appears on its platforms. And as a result of the Cambridge Analytica scandal early this year, Facebook says it must be more effective in how it protects user data, more transparent about all the data it collects, and more clear about who has access to the data.

An African grey parrot has made headlines recently for inadvertently making orders via his owner’s Amazon Echo. Originally reported via The Times of London, the parrot — whose name is Rocco — would mindlessly activate Alexa and have the virtual assistant tell jokes and play music. Rocco even tried to order a few items from Amazon, but the owner wisely had set up controls to prevent unauthorized purchases.

Fifty years ago last Sunday, a computer engineer named Douglas Engelbart gave a live demonstration in San Francisco that changed the computer industry and, indirectly, the world. In the auditorium, several hundred entranced geeks watched as he used something called a “mouse” and a special keypad to manipulate structured documents and showed how people in different physical locations could work collaboratively on shared files, online.

Packing the cobblestone streets and clad in prosthetic beards, sandals, and crowns of thorns, thousands of drunken revelers poured into the Vatican this week to take part in the city-state’s annual ChristCon Pub Crawl. “Every December, it seems like there are more of these jackasses at bars, taking selfies in St. Peter’s Basilica, and tying up traffic while decked out as some version of Our Lord and Savior,” said Cardinal Angelo Sodano, noting that ChristCon’s all-day route, which begi...

An increase in illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest has reached "epidemic" proportions, a study has revealed. The report, released by the Amazon Socio-Environmental Geo-Referenced Information Project (RAISG) on Monday, exposed the damage that illicit mining for gold has had on forest and waterways, as well as on the life of indigenous tribes in the area.

As I read the coverage of George H.W. Bush’s death and funeral over the past week, I kept returning in my head to a quote from Noam Chomsky about the way American media operates...

Stephen Coss, the marvelous historian who writes from Madison, Wisconsin, about the founding moments of the American experiment, responded to the dark machinations of Wisconsin Republicans—who have used a lame-duck session of the state legislature to disempower the Democrats elected on November 6 to serve as governor and attorney general—with a line from the greatest Republican.

dianep is now level 34 with 3,556,550 XP.

Using detailed computer models of asteroidal-type objects between the Sun and Jupiter, two Harvard University researchers find that at least four known objects are likely to have origins from outside our solar system. After becoming gravitationally-trapped, the four potentially interstellar objects --- 2011 SP25, 2017 RR2, 2017 SV13, and 2018 TL6 --- are thought to spend most of their time between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. However, during their closest approaches to the Sun, they do pa...

The important data loss bug that interrupted the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809, may be fixed, but it turns out there are plenty of other weird problems with the release. As spotted by Paul Thurrott, the update also breaks the seek bar in Windows Media Player when playing "specific files."

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: In your opinion, is the United States of America a true democracy or is it a plutocratic regime? Mike Ferner: The U.S. was never intended to be a true democracy. First of all, it is a republic, meaning elected representatives, not people directly, institute the laws. This was modified somewhat when some states instituted initiative and referendum laws, allowing citizens to put proposed legislation directly to the voters by getting large numbers of signatures on petitions.

When “Mystery Science Theater 3000” returned for what was technically Season 12 on Thanksgiving Day, it did so under the weight of a huge cliffhanger: At the end of Season 11, Jonah (Jonah Ray) had been devoured by a robot snake — his ultimate fate left in the balance…a fact that gets totally brushed aside at the beginning of the first episode, so that Jonah and his faithful robot friends Crow (Hampton Yount) and Tom Servo (Baron Vaughn) can get back to what matters: making fun of bad mo...

There are no collectibles in Half-Life. It’s incredible. That’s not how I would have praised the groundbreaking first-person shooter, which turns 20 years old today, when I first played it. At that point, I might have described how Half-Life infused sci-fi shooters with a sense of realism. It set an alien invasion in an Earthbound scientific research facility called Black Mesa, where an ordinary man (or at least, an ordinary MIT-trained theoretical physicist) named Gordon Freeman is forced t...

Have you ever wondered why every planet we know about is shaped like a sphere? Why not a cube, or an hourglass? While those—and let's be honest, most other shapes—would definitely break the laws of physics, there's one odd planet form that wouldn't: a donut.