Netflix has inked a deal with iHeartMedia to begin showing video podcasts, so the content will never, ever run out. The partnership covers new episodes from more than 15 popular podcasts, including The Breakfast Club, Dear Chelsea, My Favorite Murder and others. Customers will have access to video podcast episodes in early 2026. In addition to new footage, the partnership includes a select library of archival episodes from each show.

If you can take your mind way back to the beginning of 2025, you might remember a fresh wave of rumors suggesting that Half-Life 3 was finally reaching the final stages of production, and could be announced and/or released at any moment. Now, though, 2025 seems set to come to a close without any official news of a game fans have been waiting literal decades for.

Is Final Fantasy VII Remake running at 30fps on Switch 2 disappointing or good enough? Is the Game Awards bump really worth an estimated $12 million in new sales? And just how long will fans have to wait for Terminator: Survivors to come out of its self-imposed indefinite delay? It’s the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture.

The same historic facilities that some 50 years ago prepared NASA’s twin Voyager probes for their ongoing interstellar odyssey are helping to ready a towering commercial spacecraft for a journey to the Moon. Launches involve brutal shaking and astonishingly loud noises, and testing in these facilities mimics those conditions to help ensure mission hardware can survive the ordeal. The latest spacecraft to get this treatment are Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 vehicles, set to launch to the Moon’s far side next year. 

If you're looking for something to watch during a holiday break from work or school, you can't go wrong with anime, and right now you can sign-up for for as low as $65. Holiday discounts running through December 29 bring the anime streaming service's year-long Fan subscription from $80 down to $67 and its Mega Fan subscription from $120 down to $100.

“If data centers end up providing less business to the utility companies than anticipated, consumers could be left with massive electricity bills as utility companies recoup billions in new infrastructure costs, with nothing to show for it,” senators wrote. Already, Utah, Oregon, and Ohio have passed laws “creating a separate class of utility customer for data centers which includes basic financial safeguards such as upfront payments and longer contract length,” senators noted, and Virginia is notably weighing a similar law.

TV audio quality has improved dramatically over the years, but slim modern displays sacrifice speaker quality for sleek designs and leave you with tinny sound that undermines your viewing experience. Finding space for full surround sound systems proves challenging in apartments or smaller living rooms where bulky speakers and subwoofers simply don’t fit the layout. Sonos has built its reputation on delivering premium audio in compact formats and the Beam (Gen 2) addresses the soundbar needs of space-conscious homes without compromising performance: This Dolby Atmos soundbar currently sells for $369 on Amazon, down from its regular $499 price, and marks an all-time low for one of the most respected names in home audio.

Volunteers participating in the Lake Observations by Citizen Scientists and Satellites (LOCSS) project have been collecting water level data in lakes since 2017. Now, the LOCSS team has used these data to examine the accuracy of water level measurements made from space. The results, published in GIScience & Remote Sensing, showed that modern satellites with special instruments called nadir altimeters can capture water level variation with relatively high accuracy even for lakes smaller than one square kilometer. 

This all bodes well for when we eventually get to drive the final production of the Type 00. But of course there's much that can still go wrong between now and then. And considering the company's form of late, you wouldn't bet against fate dealing Jaguar yet another bad hand. Glover is clear all this was necessary, however, to ensure the survival of the brand.

Professional gaming demands precision and customization that standard controllers simply cannot provide, and the DualSense Edge addresses these needs with hardware-level adjustments that competitive players have requested for years. This premium controller takes everything great about the standard DualSense and adds swappable components, remappable buttons, and adjustable sensitivity curves that let you fine-tune performance for specific games or playstyles. The Midnight Black edition currently sells for $169 on Amazon, down from its regular $199 price, and…

Despite changing its name and using decidedly bird-free branding, X is trying to hold on to its original Twitter trademarks, TechCrunch reports. The xAI-owned social media platform has updated its terms of service to include references to Twitter after previously only mentioning X, and seemingly attempted to counter a startup's petition to cancel the company's Twitter trademarks with a petition of its own.

After 25 years of continuous human presence in space, the International Space Station remains a training and proving ground for deep space missions, enabling NASA to focus on Artemis missions to the Moon and Mars. The orbiting laboratory is also a living archive of human experience, culture, and connection.   With 290 visitors from 26 countries and five international partners, the space station has celebrated many different cultures during its 25 years of continuous human presence.

“We don’t have moments of terror for the deployment,” Townsend said. “Obviously, launch is always a risk, the tip-off rates that you have when you separate from the launch vehicle… Then, obviously, getting the aperture door open so that it’s deployed is another one. But these feel like normal aerospace risks, not unusual, harrowing moments for Roman.” It also helps that Roman will use a primary mirror gifted to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government’s spy satellite agency.

The New York Times is getting in on the year-end roundup bandwagon. The publication's new Year in Games wraps up stats about which of its daily puzzles and brain-teasers readers played over the course of 2025. People can get their own personalized reports, or just look over the community stats for the Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee and Strands games. The Year in Games reviews are available on the iOS and Android apps for…

When storms knock out power in the winter, portable power stations are very important because you need backup power for heating, medical devices, or just to stay connected in case of an emergency. The Anker Solix C1000 (Gen 2) fixes the main problems with older portable power stations by charging much faster and giving off more power. This newer model is now $371 on Amazon, down from its regular price of $549 and it is close to the lowest price ever, just before Christmas when power outages caused by bad weather become more common.

NASA is now accepting concepts for a new research challenge. The Opportunities in Research, Business, Innovation, and Technology (ORBIT) challenge is a multi-phase innovation competition designed to empower university and college students to develop next-generation solutions that benefit life on Earth and deep-space exploration. With up to $380,000 in total prize funding, NASA’s ORBIT challenges student teams to bring their most forward-thinking concepts to the table, either utilizing NASA intellectual property or conceptualizing their own.

When consumers first start up a Samsung smart TV, they “must click through a multipage onboarding flow before landing on a consent screen, titled Smart Hub Terms & Conditions,” the lawsuit said. “Upon finally reaching the consent screen, consumers are presented with four notices: Terms & Conditions: Dispute Resolution Agreement, Smart Hub U.S. Policy Notice, Viewing Information Services, and Interest-Based Advertisements Service U.S.

As part of its last Xbox-focused software update of the year, Microsoft is improving the Bluetooth performance of the Xbox Wireless Headset to make it work even better with Windows 11. Microsoft released the latest Wireless Headset as an accessory for Xbox Series X/S and PC, but as of this update, Xbox Wireless Headset owners on Windows will now have a leg up on their console counterparts thanks to support for Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio.

The first trailer for legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s next movie, Disclosure Day, is here, and it’s unlike many of his recent projects. The famous director is returning to the world of UFOs and aliens for his next film, and it looks to be a big one. Here’s the first teaser trailer for Disclosure Day, which stars Emily Blunt (

Written by Michael Allen An international team of astronomers using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) has identified the origin of X-rays in a supermassive black hole’s jet, answering a question that has been unresolved since the earliest days of X-ray astronomy. Their findings are described in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, by the American Astronomical Society, Nov.

The Black Friday streaming deals bonanza is over. But holiday streaming deals continue in December, and some of the December deals are better than the one I signed up for in November. Buyer's remorse is eternal, but this time it's also reversible. The best December streaming deals are ad-free. It's not an eye-poppingly low number, but you can get a 4K-streaming, ad-free bundle of HBO Max, Disney+, and Hulu for $33.

‘Tis the season for gift-giving, family feasts and companies turning their harvested user data into lighthearted recaps. Valve's take on the year-end rewind, Steam Replay, is now available. It follows similar offerings from Spotify, Apple Music, PlayStation and, increasingly, just about every service you use. Hell, even Uber and The New York Times somehow justified getting in on the action this year.

Today, Bloomberg posted an interview with Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke in which he explained that the Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity developer has started integrating generative AI into its workflow. This is being used for PowerPoint presentations, placeholder text, and concept art, and according to Vincke, “everyone at the company is more or less OK with the way using it.” Despite Vincke’s best efforts to contextualize the ways in which the technology is being used and his promise that no genAI would make its way into the finished product, many fans are not happy, and the statements have generated a massive backlash on social media.

With a second Trump Administration at the helm in 2025, NASA marked significant progress toward the Artemis II test flight early next year, which is the first crewed mission around the Moon in more than 50 years, as well as built upon its momentum toward a human return to the lunar surface in preparation to send the first astronauts — Americans — to Mars.

Samsung’s first tri-fold smartphone is making headlines—but not just for its ambitious design. New repair pricing details suggest that fixing the Galaxy Z TriFold’s main display could cost nearly as much as buying a brand-new Galaxy S25 Ultra outright. The Galaxy Z TriFold launched last month as Samsung’s boldest foldable yet, introducing a complex tri-folding screen that expands into a tablet-like canvas.