On Monday, American Girl revealed a brand new mini Xbox One S gaming accessory set for its dolls, and honestly, none of us were ready.

Seeing the tiny gaming bundle in action immediately inspired a conflicted mixture of "WOW I NEED THIS" and also "Wait, do I Iook that dead inside while #gaming?" 

But while the American Girl dolls modeling alongside the pretend console may be caught in the uncanny valley, we've got enough feels to make up for their thousand-yard stare. Namely, it's the feel of: HELL. YES. 

The tiny Microsoft console not only projects 10 different gaming screens, but also comes with two physical discs you can actually insert into the console, with boxed versions of such gaming classics as Dance! (in no way affiliated with Just Dance) and BLOKS (in no way affiliated with Minecraft).  Read more...

George Takei wrote that the plight of detained immigrants at the U.S. border is worse than the Japanese internment camps he was forced into as a child "in one core, horrifying way." He wasn't separated from his family like the more than 2,000 children suffering due to Trump's zero tolerance policy.

"At least during the internment of Japanese-Americans, I and other children were not stripped from our parents," Takei wrote in an essay for Foreign Policy published on Tuesday. "We were not pulled screaming from our mothers' arms. We were not left to change the diapers of younger children by ourselves." Read more...

Without warning, President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he's directing the Pentagon to form a new arm of the military called the "Space Force."

Sounds pretty cool right? Well, as cool as it may sound, even if it is eventually created, the Space Force may not change very much for U.S. military operations in space.

The U.S. military already has a huge presence in orbit, armed with a fleet of both known and classified satellites that spy down on potential threats to the nation day and night.

"The U.S. military has been very active in space for 60 years," John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said in an interview.   Read more...

Executives at Apple, Microsoft, YouTube, Uber, and more tech companies are joining other Americans with a conscience in speaking out against the Trump administration's practice of separating children from their families at the border. 

“It’s heartbreaking to see the images and hear the sounds of the kids," Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Irish Times. "Kids are the most vulnerable people in any society. I think that what’s happening is inhumane, it needs to stop."

Over a six-week period ending in May, the United States government separated over 2,000 children from their families as they attempted to cross the border and placed the children and parents in separate facilities. Increased media coverage of the practice, featuring new images of immigrants being kept in cages and ProPublica's gobsmacking audio of children wailing, has led to national outrage in recent days. The public has responded to the revelations with an outpouring of donations to immigrant advocacy organizations and calls for change. Read more...

Somehow, Facebook is still finding ways to make Facebook Messenger more annoying.

Now, the company plans to bring autoplaying video ads to users Messenger inboxes as soon as Monday, according to a report from Recode.

Ads aren't new to Messenger, but until now they've been limited to static, News Feed-style ads, not the more intrusive autoplaying videos. 

But after more than a year of testing those ads, which have appeared about halfway down in users' inboxes, the Messenger team reportedly thinks the automatically playing videos won't be a nuisance. Read more...

Uber wants to encourage its drivers to start using electric vehicles (EVs) rather than the gas-powered ones they typically use.

The company launched a pilot program on Tuesday in eight North American cities (Austin, Los Angeles, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle) that connect its drivers to national and local EV organizations. 

The program, called the EV Champions Initiative, will include a bunch of new features in the app for Uber drivers. For example, a new feature in the driver app will help combat range anxiety, which can often discourage drivers from going electric for fear that they might run out of fuel on an unexpectedly long trip. Read more...

Making friends as an adult is just as nerve-wracking as it was in middle school, and moving to a new city or working at a new job where you don't know anybody can seriously be depressing. What are you supposed to do? Go sit at the bar by yourself? And talk to strangers?

Then comes the lightbulb idea: You can make friends online! If online dating is so popular and successful, there's no way that there aren't a few legit sites where you can make adult friends in your area with similar interests. Hmm, AdultFriendFinder.com sounds familiar.

Even if parking your yacht is the last thing you're worried abut, it's pretty cool to see the vessel wedge into a tight space on its own.

Volvo Penta's self-docking technology did just that at a demo at the Volvo Ocean Race in Sweden this weekend. The 68-foot yacht did the work itself while the captain kept his hands off the wheel. 

A boatload of sensors (alright, just four), a computer system, and GPS navigation helped calculate and steer the boat into the narrow berth. 

While it looks highly autonomous, the self-docking feature — targeted for a 2020 launch on Volvo's personal and commercial marine vessels — still requires a person at the ready. After all, someone needs to be able to intervene if necessary. The system, which is only for deployment of the docking portion of the ride, will alert the captain to impending collisions. The boat is human-controlled for the majority of the time on the water. Read more...

The internet can be a pretty bleak place. From the 24-hour news cycle to online arguments, it can be daunting to find some positivity online. But if you're in need of some eyebleach after a rough day, here's some wholesome content for you.

Someone edited the dancing scenes from almost 300 movies together into a cheerful seven minute montage of partying. You can watch Shrek jam back to back with Mary Poppins, to the tune of "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and "99 Red Balloons."

From My Fair Lady to The Lord of the Rings, there are hundreds of happy moments in this montage — even if they're from darker movies. Check out the full list of movies included in this edit here.  Read more...

You have to hand it to Oppo: In the somewhat stale world of smartphones, many of which are currently very alike, it really tries hard to do something different. 

On Tuesday, at an event in Paris, the company launched the Oppo Find X, a phone with a huge 6.4-inch screen that covers most of the phone's face, and it even curves on the sides, a la Samsung's Galaxy series. And the cameras? Well, the phone's motor-powered top lifts up to reveal both the rear and the front camera. 

This sounds similar to Vivo's NEX, which was revealed last week, but the design is quite different. On the NEX, only a small rectangle pops up from the top of the phone to reveal the front camera. But on the Oppo Find X, the phone's entire top side basically slides out, which appears to me to be the more elegant and aesthetically pleasing solution.  Read more...