When Google released the Pixel last year, it was taking a stand. No longer would Google hardware be tainted with the brands and logos of other companies, even if behind the scenes, Google still needed help from those same companies to actually build its phones. And despite designs that were almost offensively ugly, a lack of standard flagship features such as water-resistance and expandable storage, and massive supply chain problems that made it hard to actually buy one months after its initial release, there were bright spots like the Pixel's excellent HDR photo mode and an untainted Android experience.

Remember AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence to defeat a grandmaster at Go? Well, the program just got a major upgrade, and it can now teach itself how to dominate the game without any human intervention. But get this: In a tournament that pitted AI against AI, this juiced-up version, called AlphaGo Zero, defeated the regular AlphaGo by a whopping 100 games to 0, signifying a major advance in the field.

The largest mud volcano eruption has been raging in Indonesia since May 29, 2006. At its peak, 180,000 cubic meters of mud flowed daily from a site near a heavily populated region of Java, Indonesia -- enough mud to completely fill the Empire State Building every six days. Almost 60,000 villagers have fled since then, and it's still spewing 80,000 cubic meters per day.

Researchers from Sweden made headlines last week after claiming to have found the Arabic characters for "Allah" and "Ali" woven into Viking burial costumes. The discovery suggested a more intimate cultural relationship between the Vikings and the Arab world, but some experts are now questioning key assertions made by the Swedish researchers.

The Los Angeles Police Department approved a test program to deploy drones alongside its officers on Tuesday, with the Police Commission voting 3-1 to roll out a year-long "small Unmanned Aerial System" program.

In recent years, superbugs have become one of the biggest threats to modern human health. At present, the CDC estimates that some 23,000 people die every year from multidrug-resistant infections in the United States. The threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to global health is big enough that this year the World Health Organisation for the first time published a list of the 12 superbugs that pose the greatest threat to humans.

Respecting your elders is a staple of all cultures. But you really respect them when they can use their shoe like it's a switchblade knife.

There are multiple terrors lurking in Christopher Alender's horror short Kinderfänger. The first is telegraphed by the title, which loosely translates to "child snatcher." The second, as you can see in the thumbnail below, is a ghoulish, flute-playing creature. The third... well, you're gonna have to watch and see.

Batman's undergone countless permutations in thousands of comics over the last eight years. Yet for all that storytelling, the actual politics of a Gotham City protected by an obsessed vigilante has been an under-explored notion -- and it's one Sean Murphy's going right to the heart of in Batman: White Knight.

Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, hates all life as we know it -- so of course it makes sense that he would hate Mondays too.

The idea of a Samurai Jack movie sounds amazing -- all the style and drama of what made Genndy Tartakovsky's scifi sword-swinging cartoon so good with the budget and screen real estate of a film. But it turns out we could've got one in the gap between the show's fourth and fifth seasons... and it doesn't sound as good as you'd think.

Rumours have been circling about Western adaptations of Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's seminal manga epic Lone Wolf and Cub for years at this point. But the latest attempt is now underway at Paramount, with a little help from Aquaman and Star Trek: Beyond's Justin Lin.

Fear the Walking Dead is about to change. The third season just ended and the finale left many characters' fates a mystery. This was by design, because Dave Erickson, showrunner for the first three seasons, is leaving. However, in a new interview, he gave fans a tease of how he might have ended the show if he continued.

British spy agencies have collected and shared huge databases of personal and social media information on millions of individuals, and effectively circumvented the investigatory body tasked with surveillance oversight, according to documents newly obtained by Privacy International, a London-based consumer advocacy group.

A crane left parked in front of a sugar factory for months in Baltimore, Maryland, prevented photographer Paul Frederiksen from getting the exact shot he wanted. He had assumed that using Photoshop to erase the obtrusive crane was all but impossible, until Denyer, a UK-based photographer, performed a photo-editing miracle.

The trailer is so bonkers, I'm not sure if there are any other words necessary.

Regina Dugan, a tech exec with roots in the government sector as the former director of DARPA, is leaving Facebook -- and her departure calls into question the status of one of the craziest things Facebook has been working on.

It's the season of spooks and monsters, and no one loves a good spook or monster than Guillermo Del Toro. But the director recently shared some thoughts on what makes the monstrous so fascinating to people, and his answer was suitably chilling.

Donald Trump's appointment of former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as chief of the Environmental Protection Agency this year drew eyebrows, because Pruitt had made his career as a longstanding legal opponent of the EPA and a prominent climate change sceptic. Since he's been put in charge of the agency, Pruitt has allegedly made plans to water down federal scientific research on the climate, deflected from the issue during natural disasters, and cut loose hundreds of employees in a deregulation push.