Most of what Nintendo uploads to its Nintendo Today app is fairly predictable; think a screenshot or trailer for an upcoming game or the latest soundtrack being agonisingly drip-fed onto Nintendo Music. But today’s surprise drop is more mysterious than usual. If you opened up the app this morning, you’ll have been met with a decidedly Pixar-like animated short, with virtually no context.

Titled “Close to you,” the almost four-minute video focuses on a baby playing with what appears to be an enchanted pacifier. In the child’s attempt to catch the flying soother, they start to walk for what seems to be the first time, given the reaction of the mother when she walks into the room. The whole thing is accompanied by some typically pleasant piano music, but ends without Nintendo telling us what any of it means.

Could this be a teaser for the recently-announced The Super Mario Galaxy Movie? Is the child in the short a young Rosalina, perhaps? They certainly seem to have a relationship with magic. There’s also already some speculation that Nintendo could be teasing a Pikmin film. Anyway, the short is now all over Nintendo’s various social media platforms too, so hopefully we’ll find out more soon. For now, it’s a perfectly nice (albeit unexpected) way to spend a few minutes.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/nintendo-just-released-a-mysterious-animated-short-140749774.html?src=rss

India’s electricity grid is struggling to accommodate the nation’s economic expansion and isn’t adequately equipped to handle future data center demand. Goldman Sachs estimates that power required from utilities needs roughly 7.2% annual growth between fiscal years 2025 and 2035, up from a prior 5.6%.

India’s data center base sits in the low single gigawatts today, but Bernstein forecasts reach 5 to 6 gigawatts by 2030. AI servers draw five to seven times the power of a legacy server rack, according to HSBC. Solar farms can be built in 12 to 24 months, but they flood the grid when daytime demand is comparatively low and then fade as households and commercial loads climb after 5 PM. On Goldman’s full-year models, the system runs a 1 to 4% energy deficit by fiscal years 2034 through 2035.

Assessments suggest India may need roughly 140 gigawatts of additional coal capacity by fiscal year 2035 versus 2023 levels. The government’s current target is roughly 87 gigawatts by fiscal year 2032. Coal plants can run around the clock and can ramp up production during the evening hours to meet surging demand. Some of this coal is bridge capacity to stabilize a faster greening grid, but the scale required exceeds what policymakers have publicly acknowledged or what most analysts expected even two years ago.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source.

With Halloween around the corner, let’s take a look at a spooky and supposedly true story going viral this week. Recently, a 911 call surfaced of a North Carolina man calling authorities because he thought he saw a bloody man by the side of a desolate country road. While he was speaking to the operator, something landed in the bed of his pickup truck, causing the 911 caller to start screaming “It’s not human! It’s not human!”

Check out the video:

My first reaction upon seeing this was the same as yours: It’s fake. Compelling, sure. but fake, like 100,000 other online “paranormal videos.” There’s no picture of the creature. We don’t know who the guy is. We don’t know the context. There’s no effort and no risk in making and posting a video online, so there’s no reason to think it’s real, so I swiped to the next video. But it turns out there’s enough evidence here that it at least deserves a deeper look.

The true part of the story

Unlike the overwhelming majority of spooky videos posted online, a big part of this story is true. It’s a real recording of a 911 call placed at 11 p.m. on July 31, 2021 in Pender County, North Carolina. The verifiable details that the caller reported in the call are accurate too. Snopes listened to the entire 11-minute 911 call, and cross-checked the details to make sure the distance the caller said he’d driven check out, and they do.

The caller didn’t hang up, either. He waited around for Pender County Sheriff’s department officers to arrive, and he cooperated with the investigation. This means an actual person out there is willing to stand behind the story—that’s a much higher level of evidence than most paranormal claims online have. The cops didn’t find anything, but that was in keeping with the 911 call, too: Dude said he slammed on the brakes and the inhuman thing in his truck bed flew out, landed on the road, and took off into the woods.

“It’s some yahoo calling in a hoax report to 911,” you might be saying. Fair point, but that’s a crime, and the unnamed caller was apparently believable enough that he wasn’t arrested for filing a bogus police report. The sheriff took the incident seriously enough to open up a file about it, use state resources to look into it, and later do a media interview.

How much evidence is enough evidence?

If the 911 caller had been reporting something else in this call, like a wounded deer in the highway or something, we wouldn’t question whether it actually happened. The recording and the police report would be overkill; we’d believe the guy just because he said it happened.

But I’m still 99.99% sure this guy either mistook something mundane for a monster or made up a tale entirely.

According to the 911 caller, the thing in the back of his pickup truck had shallow sunken eyes, and no nose, like someone had “taken skin and put it on a human skull and stretched it thin.” It was not human. As Carl Sagan once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and a mystery creature in South Carolina would certainly be extraordinary. If it was true, it would upend everything we know about biology, zoology, evolution, and North Carolina. I’m open to the possibility, but we need more than a 911 call to accept it. We’d need extraordinary evidence: video, photos, corroborating witnesses, and physical evidence wouldn’t even be enough. You’d have to catch one before it would make sense to rewrite the zoology textbooks.

There actually could be a monster in North Carolina

Don’t lose hope, all you “I want to believe” people. It could still be real. Up until the mid-1800s, gorillas were basically Bigfoot, as far as Western science was concerned: A few people told tales of spotting them deep in the jungle, but there wasn’t a compelling reason to think they existed. Same with giant squids: Occasionally a sailor would swear he encountered one, but it wasn’t until the 1840s that there was physical evidence, and we didn’t have a photo of a giant squid until 2004.

Yeah, a previously undiscovered creature would have a harder time hiding out in modern North Carolina than gorillas had staying scarce in Cameroon in the 1840s, but it’s October, so I’m calling it a (barely, technically possible) mystery instead of an outright lie.

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

Amazon Big Deal Days is coming October 7-8, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before it’s over.

• Follow our live blog to stay up to date on the best sales we find.

• Subscribe to our shopping newsletter, Add to Cart, for the best sales sent to your inbox.

• New to Prime Day? We have a primer on everything you need to know. Sales are accurate at the time of publication, but prices and inventory are always subject to change.

Apple’s open-ear earbuds are a more comfortable alternative to the AirPods Pro, and they’re much cheaper, too. And now, with the AirPods 4, Apple has even introduced an Active Noise Cancellation option, as well as premium audio features once limited to the AirPods Pro.

Right now, you can get both versions of AirPods 4 at their lowest prices, matching the prices they reached during Amazon’s Prime Day sale in July 2025. The base AirPods 4 are discounted to $89.00 (down from $129) and the AirPods 4 with ANC are $119 (from $179).

Apple AirPods 4 Wireless Earbuds

$89.00
at Amazon

$129.00
Save $40.00

$89.00
at Amazon

$129.00
Save $40.00

The AirPods 4 feature shorter stems than their predecessors and a smaller case, but with the same open-ear iconic design. The tips now feature a better in-ear fit, without the need for the silicone tip found in the AirPods Pro.

The AirPods 4 feature the same H2 chip found in the premium AirPods Pro 2, bringing the same level of audio processing, and features like Voice Isolation, Conversation Awareness, and Personalized Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking. The model with ANC gets a slightly less powerful version of noise cancellation, though (thanks to the absence of the silicone tips). AirPods 4 with ANC get Apple’s Transparency mode, which pumps in the sounds from the outside world, adjusting the intensity so it’s not too loud, while keeping you aware of your surroundings.

Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds

$119.00
at Amazon

$179.00
Save $60.00

$119.00
at Amazon

$179.00
Save $60.00

There’s USB-C charging in the case, and the AirPods 4 with ANC are also compatible with Qi and MagSafe charging, plus they have a built-in speaker for Find My tracking.

The AirPods 4 last for five hours on their own, and the case adds up to 30 hours of listening time. In ANC mode, they last for four hours. But a quick five-minute charge adds around one hour of listening time.

The AirPods 4 are a great choice for anyone looking for ANC on a budget, and for people who don’t like silicone ear tips. PCMag gave the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation four out of five stars, and an Editor’s Choice award. According to PCMag, “The AirPods 4 are capable of what no other open earbuds have yet to attempt: high-quality active noise cancellation. They also deliver excellent audio performance.”

And if you don’t want the ANC, you can save even more. The base AirPods 4 at $90 are one of the best deals in tech.

Looking for something else? Retailers like Walmart and Best Buy have Prime Day competition sales that are especially useful if you don’t have Amazon Prime.

• Walmart’s Prime Day competition sale runs from Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. ET through Oct. 12 and includes deals up to 50% off. It’s an especially good option if you have Walmart+.

• Best Buy’s Prime Day competition sale runs from Sept. 27 through Oct. 12, and has some of the best tech sales online. It’s an especially good option if you’re a My Best Buy “Plus” or “Total” member.

• Target’s Prime Day competition sale runs from Oct. 5 through Oct. 11, and it has deals going up to 50% off. You can become a Circle member for free.