Starbucks' Plastic Straw Ban Is More Important Than You Think

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | stefanamer) It's clear that streaming services are the present and future of video distribution. But that doesn't mean that cable companies are ready to give up on your monthly dollars. A sign of this is Comcast, the US's second-biggest cable company, debuting a new streaming service today.

Enlarge / The Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC, in May 2023. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto) The US Supreme Court has avoided making a final decision on challenges to the Texas and Florida social media laws, but the majority opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan criticized the Texas law and made it clear that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment. The Texas law "is unlikely to withstand First Amendment scrutiny," the Supreme Court majority wrote.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is based on a 2008 limited series by Mike Mignola and artist Richard Corben. It has only been a few years since David Harbour starred in the 2019 reboot of the Hellboy film franchise—a critical and box office failure, although Harbour's performance earned praise. But via Entertainment Weekly, we learned that there's a new reboot coming our way: Hellboy: The Crooked Man.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Pavlo Gonchar) A federal grand jury has indicted an embattled Alzheimer's researcher for allegedly falsifying data to fraudulently obtain $16 million in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a controversial Alzheimer's drug and diagnostic test. Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, a medical professor at the City University of New York, was a paid collaborator with the Austin, Texas-based pharmaceutical company Cassava Sciences.

Enlarge / Right now, the software doesn't do arms, so don't go taking on any aliens with it. (credit: 20th Century Fox) Exoskeletons today look like something straight out of sci-fi. But the reality is they are nowhere near as robust as their fictional counterparts. They’re quite wobbly, and it takes long hours of handcrafting software policies, which regulate how they work—a process that has to be repeated for each individual user. To bring the technology a bit closer to Avatar’s Skel Suits or Warhammer 40k power armor, a team at North Carolina University’s Lab of Biomechatronics and Intelligent Robotics used AI to build the first one-size-fits-all exoskeleton that supports walking, running, and stair-climbing.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu / Contributor | Anadolu) Meta continues to hit walls with its heavily scrutinized plan to comply with the European Union's strict online competition law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), by offering Facebook and Instagram subscriptions as an alternative for privacy-inclined users who want to opt out of ad targeting. Today, the European Commission (EC) announced preliminary findings that Meta's so-called "pay or consent" or "pay or OK" model—which gives users a choice to either pay for access to its platforms or give consent to collect user data to target ads—is not compliant with the DMA. According to the EC, Meta's advertising model violates the DMA in two ways.