Uber has teamed up with UK self-driving car startup Wayve and Nissan to launch a pilot program for a robotaxi service in Tokyo in late 2026. The program will use Nissan Leaf EVs powered by Wayve’s AI Driver automated vehicle technology, which will then be connected to Uber’s platform. Trained drivers will be behind the wheel at first, as the deployed vehicles gather real-world data to be able to navigate Tokyo’s driving conditions and complex streets that are also a lot narrower than the roads in the US.

Another company backed by Uber, Nuro, will also test its vehicles on Tokyo’s challenging streets soon. Nuro has been trialing its self-driving tech in the US for years now and plans to launch a robotaxi service, as well. They’re not the first companies to take on Tokyo streets, however: Waymo deployed its Jaguar I-PACE autonomous vehicles in the metropolis last year to collect data on its roads and the driving patterns of locals.

The pilot program in Tokyo is just part of Wayve’s and Uber’s plan to roll out a robotaxi service in more than 10 cities around the world. In the future, the companies are planning to offer self-driving vehicles as an option in the city through a licensed taxi partner in Japan.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/uber-is-piloting-a-robotaxi-service-in-tokyo-112133871.html?src=rss

I grew up in a Star Trek household, not a Star Wars one. More to the point, I wasn’t even allowed to watch Star Wars when I was a kid, so I didn’t see the original trilogy until I was nearly an adult—about 17 years old, as I recall.

For my then-fundamentalist Christian family, the so-called “Eastern mysticism” of Star Wars was a bridge too far, something that could apparently corrupt my impressionable young Evangelical mind irreversibly. Star Trek was OK, though, because my parents didn’t feel it condoned witchcraft, or what have you, and they liked the original series from when they were younger.

Because of all that, my first true immersion in the Star Wars universe wasn’t the movies. It was the video games, and one in particular—Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, which you can nab on GOG.

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Regardless of your interest in motorsport, you’ve almost certainly heard of the Monaco Grand Prix, Daytona 500, and Indianapolis 500. These iconic races are easy to spectate, with grandstands lining the course and a camera or two at every turn. Video feeds from the race can be transmitted live thanks to the infrastructure of the populated areas surrounding the tracks.

But what if your course is 100 miles (161 km) from nowhere? It’s 1,000 miles (1,610 km) long, and the only way to access it is on bumpy, dirty access roads that require four-wheel drive and plenty of clearance. If you want to watch the whole race with your own eyes, you’ll need to hire a helicopter. And broadcasting it live on TV? Good luck.

All that is changing with the advent of StarStream, a video and content streaming service that can be used with Starlink, the low-Earth-orbit satellite Internet system that has changed the way off-road race teams communicate. But George Hammel, a former motocross and UTV racer, saw even more potential: a way to bring fans into the cockpit, live.

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A Pew Research Center survey found that only 53% of U.S. adults went to a movie theater in the past year, while 7% said they’ve never seen a movie in a theater at all. “The findings reflected a domestic box office still fighting to regain its footing since the COVID-19 pandemic, when ticket sales collapsed 81% in 2020 due to theater closures,” reports Variety. From the report: In 2025, moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada bought 769.2 million tickets, less than half of the all-time peak of roughly 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, according to data from Nash Information Services. However, an August 2025 study field by NRG/National Research Group showed that 77% of Americans ages 12-74 went to see at least one movie in a theater in the previous 12 months.

Box office revenue peaked at an inflation-adjusted $16.4 billion in 2002, and annual ticket revenue held relatively steady through the 2000s and 2010s before falling to under $3 billion in 2020 when theaters closed for months. Last year, U.S. theaters sold just over $9 billion worth of tickets, per media analytics firm Comscore. The number represents a recovery, but nowhere near a full one, as ticket sales have been lagging around 20% below pre-pandemic levels.

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US self-driving startup Nuro, which is backed by the likes of NVIDIA, Toyota and Uber, has started testing its autonomous vehicles on Tokyo’s challenging streets, Bloomberg reported. The company, which plans to launch a robotaxi service with Uber and Lucid in San Francisco this year, will be testing a “handful” of vehicles in the city. Human safety drivers will be at the wheel, as is required by Japanese law. 

Tokyo presents a challenge for autonomous vehicles, given its narrow, crowded streets and left side of the road driving. “Testing the capability of the autonomy system in such an interesting market with some international complexity really is a good pressure test of what the system is capable of,” said CEO Andrew Chapin. The company’s ultimate goal is to achieve Level 4 autonomy, which allows full self-driving under limited conditions. 

Waymo is the other major robotaxi operator testing vehicles in Tokyo in collaboration with Japanese taxi operators Nihon Kotsu and the country’s leading taxi app, Go. It has been operating in the nation since April 2025 in collaboration with Toyota.

Nuro has yet to announce which operators or vehicle manufacturers it will be partnering with, but Chapin said it may not limit itself to autonomous rides. “A universal autonomy platform that can be extended to a lot of different applications and form factors is a bit different than the approach Waymo is taking,” he told Bloomberg. The company previously teamed with 7-Eleven on autonomous deliveries in Mountain View, California. 

Uber plans to have up to 100,000 autonomous vehicles including 20,000 robotaxis powered by Lucid and Nuro, with a rollout starting in 2027. It introduced its new vehicle design recently at CES 2026. Uber is also collaborating with Nissan and Wayve with the aim to introduce pilot cars in Tokyo by late 2026.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/nvidia–and-uber-backed-nuro-is-testing-autonomous-vehicles-in-tokyo-081200366.html?src=rss

GFiber (a.k.a. Google Fiber) and Astound Broadband announced that they plan to merge into a deal backed by infrastructure investor Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners. The resulting company will be majority owned by Stonepeak, with Alphabet becoming a “significant minority shareholder.” Light Reading reports: Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners teamed with Patriot Media to acquire Astound in November 2020 for $8.1 billion. Stonepeak is Astound’s largest investor. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The combined business will be led by the existing GFiber executive team. GFiber is currently led by CEO Dinni Jain. Jain, a former Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications exec, took the helm of what was then called Google Fiber in 2018.

“This agreement advances GFiber’s mission of redefining internet connectivity and represents a major step toward its goal of operational and financial independence,” the companies said. “GFiber will have the external capital and strategic focus needed to accelerate its next phase of growth, expanding its customer-first approach and pioneering fiber technology across the country.” GFiber’s combination with Astound represents “a strategic opportunity to scale our customer-focused approach to connect more households to a truly different type of internet service,” Jain said in a statement.

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Google Play has introduced a new feature called Game Trials, which will let you play a portion of paid games for free before you commit to buying them. It’s now rolling out to select paid games on mobile, and it’s coming soon to Google Play Games on PC. Titles that offer Game Trials will show a button marked “Try” on their profile pages. When you click it, you’ll see how long you can play the game before you have to buy it. In Google’s example, the survival and horror game Dredge will give you 60 minutes of free play time, after which you’ll get the option to either buy the game or delete it from your device.

Google has also announced that it’s releasing more paid indie games over the coming months, including Moonlight Peaks, Sledding Game and Low-Budget Repairs. It has launched a new section in the Play store, as well, to feature games optimized for Windows PCs. You can wishlist the games from that section to get a notification when they’re on sale.

Finally, the company is rolling out Play Games Sidekick, the Gemini-powered Android overlay it announced last year, to select games downloaded from Play. Sidekick can show you relevant info and tools for whatever game you’re playing without having to do a search query. But if you’d rather ask other people for gaming advice instead of an AI, you can also look at a game’s Community Posts, a feature now available in English for select titles on their Play pages.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/google-play-will-let-you-try-a-game-before-you-buy-it-051854016.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair. […] People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study. […]

Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models. The first, “legs in, legs out,” suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall. The second model, “tuck and turn,” suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements. […]

The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match. “The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck,” Dr. Higurashi said.

Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the “legs in, legs out” model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says. The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

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