Uber and Volkswagen are teaming up

April 26, 2025

🚐 Uber and Volkswagen are teaming up: They’re launching a robotaxi service in the U.S. with self-driving electric microbuses. First stop? Los Angeles, starting in late 2026. But don’t get too excited just yet. You’ll still see a human behind the wheel until at least 2027. Why? They’ve gotta wait for those permits to clear.

Tags: driving, Los Angeles, service, Uber, Volkswagen

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Wi-Fi slow? It’s probably this

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You pay for high-speed internet, but your current connection is slower than your mom who took nine months to come up with a good joke. Something’s off, and no, it’s not Mercury in retrograde (this time).

Enter: DNS.

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$50 billion

That’s how much Google Chrome might be worth if Google was forced to sell it off. At least that’s what DuckDuckGo’s CEO estimated at Google’s antitrust trial. (Spoiler: DuckDuckGo will not be bidding.) The DOJ is still deciding how to break up Google’s search monopoly, and selling Chrome is on the table. AI players like OpenAI and Perplexity say they’d be interested.

4

The number of toys your toddler needs to be happy. Yep, no need for a mountain of plushies and plastic cars. A study found that kids given too many playthings got overstimulated and jumped from toy to toy. But with just four? They slowed down, focused and played longer. Oh, and no need to toss everything. Just rotate them.

$100

That’s how much people are allegedly paying for six ice cubes from Greenland. Greenland entrepreneurs are harvesting 100,000-year-old glacial ice (paywall link) and shipping it to Dubai, where it’s sold in cocktails like the $218 Scotch-on-ice at Nahaté. Talk about an ICE detention center.

1 terabit per second

Of data was sent over 750 miles using optical fiber. For context, that’s like streaming around 40 Netflix shows in Ultra-HD at the same time. The real twist? Researchers did it completely securely. How? They built a new “IEAC” system that hides the encryption inside the light signal itself. Pretty genius.

3,000 years old

The age of a mummified crocodile scientists recently cracked open. They used X-ray and CT scans to peek inside and found gastroliths, aka small stones crocs swallow to help with digestion. Even weirder? They also discovered a fish and a bronze hook, still intact, meaning the croc was probably caught right before it was sacrificed.

Three per day

Satellite or rocket parts crash back to Earth. A 4-inch shard from the ISS punched through a Florida roof last month, as if those hurricanes weren’t bad enough. We may hit 15 daily as Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper launch more satellites. Did you hear about the film they’re making, where Dallas gets destroyed by space junk? Debris Does Dallas. (Thank you for that chuckle.)

5 minutes

China’s top battery makers have reached five-minute charging speeds for EVs, more or less the time it takes at a gas station. CATL and BYD just flexed batteries that can deliver up to 320+ miles of range off a five-minute charge. Meanwhile, most U.S. EVs take 15 to 30 minutes.

$550 billion

That’s how much analysts say Google can get for YouTube if forced to sell it. Now the top streaming platform by viewership, YouTube is worth more than Disney, and all it took was 20 years of cat videos and Minecraft speedruns. Fun fact: The YouTube founder sold it to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006.

$1 million

A rare photo of Abraham Lincoln might sell for that at auction. The pic was made between 1895 and 1900 using an original negative from 1860. Bidding starts at $250,000 and kicks off today at 10 a.m. ET. I’ll never forget when I told my son to get off his Xbox and said, “When Abraham Lincoln was your age, he used to walk 10 miles every day to get to school.” Ian responded, “Really? Well, when he was your age, he was president.” Kids.