Visionary filmmaker David Lynch —whose work spanned midnight movie staples like Eraserhead (1977), neo-noir psychological thrillers like Mulholland Drive (2001), and beyond— has died at 78. According to Deadline Hollywood , the director had to evacuate his home due to the LA wildfires. He had been diagnosed with severe emphysema a few years ago and rarely left his house due to COVID-19 fears. Following the evacuation, his health deteriorated, and he passed away at his daughter's house.

“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” the director's family said in a statement . “We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

Reactions from Hollywood were swift and heartfelt. Kyle MacLachlan, who became a star when Lynch cast him as Paul Atreides in 1984's Dune , Blue Velvet (1986), and the TV series Twin Peaks , described the director as "the most authentically alive person I'd ever met":

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General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar agreed to a settlement that prohibits them from sharing driver location and behavior data with third parties, the Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday. The proposed settlement comes less than a year after GM responded to public backlash by announcing that it stopped sharing driving data from its connected cars with companies such as LexisNexis.

The FTC said it "is taking action against General Motors (GM) and OnStar over allegations they collected, used, and sold drivers' precise geolocation data and driving behavior information from millions of vehicles—data that can be used to set insurance rates—without adequately notifying consumers and obtaining their affirmative consent." GM did not admit to or deny the allegations.

GM and OnStar "will be banned for five years from disclosing consumers' sensitive geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies," the FTC said. Under the settlement , "consumer reporting agency" means a firm that collects or evaluates "consumer credit information or other information on consumers for the purpose of furnishing consumer reports to other parties and which uses any means or facility of interstate commerce for the purpose of preparing or furnishing consumer reports."

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Post-pandemic, my creed became "Bicycles deliver the freedom that auto ads promise." That belief is why I’ve almost exclusively used a bike to move myself around Portland, Oregon since (yes, I have become a Portlandia stereotype ).

However, that lifestyle is a lot more challenging without some pedal assistance. For a few summers, I showed up sweaty to appointments after pedaling on a $200 single-speed. So in 2024, I purchased the FX+ 2, based primarily on my managing editor’s review . It’s since been a workhorse for my daily transportation needs for the past year; I've put more than 1,000 miles on it in eight months.

So given my experience with that bike, I was the natural choice to review Trek’s upgraded version, the FX+ 7S .

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Thursday's teaser trailer for the Switch 2 made it abundantly clear that the upcoming console will be quite a bit larger than the original Switch that came before it. But Nintendo is still being coy about the specific dimensions of the Switch 2's expanded tablet and Joy-Cons.

Fortunately, the trailer itself features a number of head-on shots of the Switch 2 hardware next to a known quantity—the original Switch Joy-Cons. Using the established measurements of that older controller ( 102×35.9 mm ) and some Photoshop pixel counting, we can use freeze frames from that trailer to extrapolate a rough size and shape for the Switch 2 hardware.

Using the original Switch Joy-Cons as a reference, we can estimate the size of the Switch 2 shown in the trailer. Credit: Nintendo / Ars Technica

After spending a good chunk of Thursday performing just those calculations, we're ready to estimate that the Switch 2 hardware features a roughly 7.9-inch screen (measured diagonally), up from 6.2 inches on the Switch and 7 inches on the Switch OLED. We also learned that the Switch tablet itself has a roughly 33 percent larger footprint than that of the original Switch (in terms of total area), while the joysticks on the Switch 2 Joy-Cons have a roughly 26 percent larger diameter than those on the Switch.

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Blockbuster weight-loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic top the list of 15 drugs selected for the second round of federal price negotiations, which are scheduled to begin this year, with resulting bargained prices going into effect in 2027.

The first round of negotiations , involving 10 high-cost drugs, wrapped up in August, with resulting prices being 38 percent to 79 percent lower than list prices. Those negotiated prices will go into effect in 2026 and are expected to save people with Medicare prescription drug coverage $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs.

“Last year we proved that negotiating for lower drug prices works," Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement. "Now we plan to build on that record by negotiating for lower prices for 15 additional important drugs for seniors."

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Apple released new beta versions of iOS 18.3 to developers and the public yesterday, and one of the changes coming with the new software update will (at least temporarily) disable Apple Intelligence notification summaries for all apps in the App Store's News and Entertainment category, at least temporarily.

Apple said earlier this month that it would be instituting updates to how these notifications are handled after complaints from news organizations, and the company has apparently decided to turn them off entirely while it decides what those updates will look like. Most prominently, one user's notification summary from the BBC suggested that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died of suicide; this was not true. Other examples have been cropping up since then.

For the notification summaries that remain, Apple is instituting changes to make it clearer when users are reading summaries and to make it easier to turn those summaries off. Notification summaries in iOS 18.3 will be italicized to help further distinguish them from individual non-summarized notifications—before, there was a small icon next to the text to indicate you were looking at a summary. Apple is also making it possible to turn off summaries on a per-app basis directly from the lock screen without diving into the Settings app to do it.

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Lithium may be the key component in most modern batteries, but it doesn't make up the bulk of the material used in them. Instead, much of the material is in the electrodes, where the lithium gets stored when the battery isn't charging or discharging. So one way to make lighter and more compact lithium-ion batteries is to find electrode materials that can store more lithium. That's one of the reasons that recent generations of batteries are starting to incorporate silicon into the electrode materials.

There are materials that can store even more lithium than silicon; a notable example is sulfur. But sulfur has a tendency to react with itself, producing ions that can float off into the electrolyte. Plus, like any electrode material, it tends to expand in proportion to the amount of lithium that gets stored, which can create physical strains on the battery's structure. So while it has been easy to make lithium-sulfur batteries, their performance has tended to degrade rapidly.

But this week, researchers described a lithium-sulfur battery that still has over 80 percent of its original capacity after 25,000 charge/discharge cycles. All it took was a solid electrolyte that was more reactive than the sulfur itself.

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TikTok has lost its Supreme Court appeal and will likely shut down on January 19, a day ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration, unless the app can be sold before the deadline, which TikTok has said is impossible.

During the trial last Friday, TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco warned SCOTUS that upholding the Biden administration's divest-or-sell law would likely cause TikTok to “go dark—essentially the platform shuts down" and "essentially... stop operating." On Wednesday, TikTok reportedly began preparing to shut down the app for all US users, anticipating the loss.

But TikTok's claims that the divest-or-sell law violated Americans' free speech rights did not supersede the government's compelling national security interest in blocking a foreign adversary like China from potentially using the app to spy on or influence Americans, SCOTUS ruled.

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Brussels has ordered Elon Musk to fully disclose recent changes made to recommendations on X, stepping up an investigation into the role of the social media platform in European politics.

The expanded probe by the European Commission, announced on Friday, requires X to hand over internal documents regarding its recommendation algorithm. The Commission also issued a “retention order” for all relevant documents relating to how the algorithm could be amended in future.

In addition, the EU regulator requested access to information on how the social media network moderates and amplifies content.

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