It's Christmas of 1994, and I am 16 years old. Sitting on the table in our family room next to a pile of cow-spotted boxes is the most incredible thing in the world: a brand-new Gateway 66MHz Pentium tower, with a 540MB hard disk drive, 8MB of RAM, and, most importantly, a CD-ROM drive. I am agog, practically trembling with barely suppressed joy, my bored Gen-X teenager mask threatening to slip and let actual feelings out. My life was about to change—at least where games were concerned.

I'd been working for several months at Babbage's store No. 9 , near Baybrook Mall in southeast suburban Houston. Although the Gateway PC's arrival on Christmas morning was utterly unexpected, the choice of what game to buy required no planning at all. I'd already decided a few weeks earlier, when Chris Roberts' latest opus had been drop-shipped to our shelves, just in time for the holiday season. The choice made itself, really.

Gimli and Luke, together at last! Credit: Origin Systems / Electronic Arts

The moment Babbage's opened its doors on December 26—a day I had off, fortunately—I was there, checkbook in hand. One entire paycheck's worth of capitalism later, I was sprinting out to my creaky 280-Z, sweatily clutching two boxes—one an impulse buy, The Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual , and the other a game I felt sure would be the best thing I'd ever played or ever would play: Origin's Wing Commander III: The Heart of the Tiger . On the backs of Wing Commander I and Wing Commander II , how could it not be?!

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Amid the Trump administration's attack on universities, Harvard has emerged as a particular target. Early on, the administration put $2.2 billion in research money on hold and shortly thereafter blocked all future funding while demanding intrusive control over Harvard's hiring and admissions. Unlike many of its peer institutions, Harvard fought back, filing and ultimately winning a lawsuit that restored the cut funds.

Despite Harvard's victory, the Trump administration continued to push for some sort of formal agreement that would settle the administration's accusations that Harvard created an environment that allowed antisemitism to flourish. In fact, it had become a running joke among some journalists that The New York Times had devoted a monthly column to reporting that a settlement between the two parties was near.

Given the government's loss of leverage, it was no surprise that the latest installment of said column included the detail that the latest negotiations had dropped demands that Harvard pay any money as part of a final agreement. The Trump administration had extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from some other universities and had demanded over a billion dollars from UCLA, so this appeared to be a major concession to Harvard.

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Flush door handles have been quite the automotive design trend of late. Stylists like them because they don't add visual noise to the side of a car. And aerodynamicists like them because they make a vehicle more slippery through the air. When Tesla designed its Model S , it needed a car that was both desirable and as efficient as possible, so flush door handles were a no-brainer. Since then, as electric vehicles have proliferated, so too have flush door handles. But as of next year, China says no.

Just like pop-up headlights, despite the aesthetic and aerodynamic advantages, there are safety downsides . Tesla's handles are an extreme example: In the event of a crash and a loss of 12 V power, there is no way for first responders to open the door from the outside, which has resulted in at least 15 deaths.

Those deaths prompted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to open an investigation last year, but China is being a little more proactive. It has been looking at whether retractable car door handles are safe since mid-2024, according to Bloomberg , and has concluded that no, they are not.

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OpenAI is prioritizing the advancement of ChatGPT over more long-term research, prompting the departure of senior staff as the $500 billion company adapts to stiff competition from rivals such as Google and Anthropic.

The San Francisco-based start-up has reallocated resources for experimental work in favor of advances to the large language models that power its flagship chatbot, according to 10 current and former employees.

Among those to leave OpenAI in recent months over the strategic shift are vice-president of research Jerry Tworek, model policy researcher Andrea Vallone, and economist Tom Cunningham.

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On November 2, 1988, graduate student Robert Morris released a self-replicating program into the early Internet. Within 24 hours, the Morris worm had infected roughly 10 percent of all connected computers, crashing systems at Harvard, Stanford, NASA, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The worm exploited security flaws in Unix systems that administrators knew existed but had not bothered to patch.

Morris did not intend to cause damage. He wanted to measure the size of the Internet. But a coding error caused the worm to replicate far faster than expected, and by the time he tried to send instructions for removing it, the network was too clogged to deliver the message.

History may soon repeat itself with a novel new platform: networks of AI agents carrying out instructions from prompts and sharing them with other AI agents, which could spread the instructions further.

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The launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its launch platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"Engineers pushed through several challenges during the two-day test and met many of the planned objectives," NASA said in a statement following the conclusion of the mock countdown, or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), early Tuesday morning. "To allow teams to review data and conduct a second Wet Dress Rehearsal, NASA now will target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test."

The practice countdown was designed to identify problems and provide NASA an opportunity to fix them before launch. Most importantly, the test revealed NASA still has not fully resolved recurring hydrogen leaks that delayed the launch of the unpiloted Artemis I test flight by several months in 2022. Artemis I finally launched successfully after engineers revised their hydrogen loading procedures to overcome the leak.

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If you know anything about the history of id Software, you know how 1992's Wolfenstein 3D helped establish the company's leadership in the burgeoning first-person shooter genre, leading directly to subsequent hits like Doom and Quake . But only the serious id Software nerds remember Catacomb 3D , id's first-person adventure game that directly preceded and inspired work on Wolfenstein 3D .

Now, nearly 35 years after Catacomb 3D 's initial release, id co-founder John Romero brought the company's founding members together for an informative retrospective video on the creation of the oft-forgotten game. But the pioneering game—which included mouse support, color-coded keys, and shooting walls to find secrets—almost ended up being a gimmicky dead end for the company.

Texture maps and "undo" animation

Catacomb 3D was a follow-up to id's earlier Catacomb , which was a simplified clone of the popular arcade hit Gauntlet . As such, the 3D game still has some of that "quarter eater" mentality that was not very fashionable in PC gaming at the time, as John Carmack remembered.

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Crunchyroll is one of the most popular streaming platforms for anime viewers. Over the past six years, the service has raised prices for fans, and today, it announced that it's increasing monthly subscription prices by up to 20 percent.

Sony bought Crunchyroll from AT&T in 2020. At the time, Crunchyroll had 3 million paid subscribers and an additional 197 million users with free accounts, which let people watch a limited number of titles with commercials. At the time, Crunchyroll monthly subscription tiers cost $8, $10, or $15.

After its acquisition by Sony, like many large technology companies that buy a smaller, beloved product , the company made controversial changes. The Tokyo-based company folded rival Funimation into Crunchyroll; Sony shut down Funimation, which it bought in 2017, in April 2024.

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SpaceX has formally acquired another of Elon Musk's companies, xAi, the space company announced on Monday afternoon.

"SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform," the company said. "This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!"

The merging of what is arguably Musk's most successful company, SpaceX, with the more speculative xAI venture is a risk. But Musk strongly believes that artificial intelligence is central to humanity's future and wants to be among those leading in its development.

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