Buss bought the Los Angeles Lakers in the late 1970s, and his family sold the team to Mark Walter in 2025, according to several reports.
Buss bought the Los Angeles Lakers in the late 1970s, and his family sold the team to Mark Walter in 2025, according to several reports.
A SpaceX Starship vehicle has exploded yet again, and this time, it happened before it even took off. NASASpaceflight has captured the event in a livestream, wherein you can see the spacecraft (Ship 36) suddenly explode into a fireball after the company tested its forward flap and just before it was supposed to conduct a static fire test. The company said on X that on June 19 at approximately 12AM Eastern time, the Starship it was preparing for its 10th flight test “experienced a major anomaly” while it was on a stand in its Starbase, Texas facility.
Since SpaceX maintained a safety clear area around the vehicle, all its personnel were safe and accounted for. It also said that there’s no danger to nearby residents, but it’s asking people not to approach the area. According to local authorities, the explosion happened due to a “catastrophic failure.” No injuries have been reported, and investigation is already underway to determine the root cause of the incident.
Starship is the super-heavy-lift launch vehicle SpaceX is developing for bigger launches with more payload and for missions heading farther than low Earth orbit, such as to the moon and to Mars. Based on its most recent tests, however, it’s far from ready. During its seventh and eighth flights, its second stage, which is known as the “Ship,” exploded during ascent. It was the Ship that exploded on Wednesday night. The second stage managed to reach space during its ninth test flight in May, but SpaceX lost contact with it and wasn’t able to achieve a controlled splashdown into the ocean. SpaceX also lost contact with its Super Heavy booster stage upon re-entry, and it went through a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” six minutes after launch.
On Wednesday, June 18 at approximately 11 p.m. CT, the Starship preparing for the tenth flight test experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase. A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted…
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 19, 2025
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/spacexs-starship-explodes-on-the-ground-during-a-routine-test-130025133.html?src=rss
The Dodgers’ owner is making headlines for buying the Los Angeles Lakers. Learn more about his financial standing, his background, and his rise in the world of sports ownership.
The Dodgers’ owner is making headlines for buying the Los Angeles Lakers. Learn more about his financial standing, his background, and his rise in the world of sports ownership.
Milestones are worth celebrating, and for Million Dollar Luxe, reaching 15 years as a leader in luxury hospitality demanded nothing less than an event as elegant and memorable as the brand itself. On June 5th, 2025, Marina Drabkin hosted The Million Dollar Soirée at their exclusive Hollywood Hills villa, bringing together a glittering mix of…
Milestones are worth celebrating, and for Million Dollar Luxe, reaching 15 years as a leader in luxury hospitality demanded nothing less than an event as elegant and memorable as the brand itself. On June 5th, 2025, Marina Drabkin hosted The Million Dollar Soirée at their exclusive Hollywood Hills villa, bringing together a glittering mix of…
DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused web browser and search engine, has expanded the scope of its Scam Blocker tool. In addition to being able to protect you from standard phishing and malware attempts, Scam Blocker now also covers fake e-commerce storefronts, survey sites and cyptocurrency exchanges, as well as “scareware” pages falsely claiming that your device is infected and want you to click a button or a link to clean it.
If the tool determines that you’ve clicked on a link leading to one of those websites, it blocks the page from loading altogether. Instead, it shows you a warning message telling you that the website may be a security risk and that it has been flagged for “trying to manipulate people into transferring money, buying counterfeit goods, or installing malware.” The warning also lets you safely navigate away from the scam website without loading it.
DuckDuckGo built Scam Blocker itself, and it doesn’t rely on any Google technology like other browsers do. The company said it means it doesn’t send data to any third parties and it doesn’t track your activities. It constantly refreshes its list of malicious URLs from independent internet services provider Netcraft and passes the updates to its browser every 20 minutes. That list of dangerous sites lives locally on your device, and the tool checks URLs you’re visiting against it to determine whether to show you a warning message.
Scam Blocker is completely free on desktop and the web, and it’s switched on by default. If you’re paying for DuckDuckGo’s $10-a-month Privacy Pro subscription service, Scam Blocker will even protect you while using other browsers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/duckduckgos-browser-now-protects-you-from-fake-crypto-exchanges-and-scareware-120024473.html?src=rss
A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded off the southern tip of Texas. Find out what happened and how it affected the area.
A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded off the southern tip of Texas. Find out what happened and how it affected the area.
Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday (or Thursday?), broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.
Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.
I’ve been playing the Switch 2 alongside 3.5 million of my closest friends since Nintendo’s new console came out on June 5, and I’m having an excellent time. Although to be perfectly transparent, a vast majority of my play has been dedicated to Mario Kart World, a game I’ve been looking forward to for months and that perfectly scratches the couch co-op itch I’ve been meaning to ask my doctor about. Mario Kart World is colorful, bright and infinitely replayable, and one feature that’s getting a lot of attention is its elevated skill ceiling. This installment introduces new mechanics like wall riding and rail grinds, which significantly alter how the game is played at its highest levels, where shortcuts and strategic pathing are a must. There’s too much variability in Mario Kart for it to be a professionally competitive franchise, but that doesn’t stop people from getting extremely good at it, and players are already trying to milk the most milliseconds out of the new moves in Mario Kart World. It’s going to take a while, since these mechanics are surprisingly complex, and I’m excited to see what secrets the community uncovers in the near future.
While that’s happening, I’d like to highlight something on the opposite side of the skill spectrum. Mario Kart World is far less frustrating in moment-to-moment gameplay than Mario Kart 8, and I think this is one of its greatest strengths. I don’t have empirical data here, but it’s a distinct feeling I have every time I play: Getting hit with shells, running over banana peels and bouncing into obstacles is more forgiving than ever. These moments are less jarring than they were in Mario Kart 8 specifically, and it takes noticeably less time to recover and get back into the race after taking a red shell to the behind. Either the stun time is shorter, the post-collision acceleration is faster or there’s some witchy combination of these factors happening, but whatever the cause, I deeply appreciate the effect.
Mario Kart World is flow-friendly and accessible, and these subtle tweaks diminish some of the series’ most annoying aspects, like resetting after a barrage of explosive bullshit gets hurled into your bumper. The only item in Mario Kart World that feels like a true hard stop is the lightning bolt, but at least that one affects every character around you with the same momentum-jamming force.
Meanwhile, the tracks in Mario Kart World are so very, very pretty — looking at you, Starview Peak and Rainbow Road — the character roster is stacked with super adorable fresh faces, motorcycles are more stable than previous games, and the 24-player Knockout Tour is a fun test of skill. With the potential for 23 items to be aimed at your back, it makes sense that Nintendo would try to make recovery more seamless this time, and I just wanted to say that I notice it and appreciate it.
Now, to figure out this wall riding thing.
Xbox president Sarah Bond announced that the company’s next generation of hardware will be powered by AMD, just like the Xbox Series X/S and the coming ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. That’s cool, but it also offers some clues about the future of Microsoft’s gaming division, and things are looking more decentralized with each new morsel. Xbox appears to be positioning itself as a platform-agnostic software provider, leaning into PC and handheld play, and running an all-inclusive storefront that follows you across devices. It really sounds like the next Xbox could be more of a PC that lives under your TV, rather than a dedicated, closed-system video game machine. Ouya was just 12 years too soon, it seems.
Did you hear that sonorous, well-articulated sigh of relief? SAG-AFTRA suspended its strike against 10 major video game studios, following nearly a year of negotiations over AI use and actor compensation. The union and the studios signed a deal that includes wage increases for more than 24 percent of performers and protections around the deployment of AI and digital replicas.
Maybe this is for the best. Bungie has indefinitely delayed Marathon, citing a need to overhaul the game as it currently stands. The delay follows a slew of bad news out of Bungie, starting in July 2024, when the studio laid off 220 employees, or 17 percent of its workforce. In May 2025, Bungie was caught using stolen artwork in the Marathon alpha and several former employees accused the studio of fostering a toxic environment. Whether Marathon really requires a revamp or Bungie just needs a moment to breathe, a delay feels like the right move.
It will cost $70.
It’s official — Bloober Team is remaking the original Silent Hill for Konami. The project follows Bloober’s highly successful reimagining of Silent Hill 2, which landed in October 2024 and garnered oodles of acclaim from critics and players alike. There’s no word on a release date for the new remake, but it’s joining a trio of other in-development projects in the Silent Hill universe: Silent Hill Townfall from Annapurna Interactive and No Code, Silent Hill: Ascension from Bad Robot and Genvid, and Silent Hill f from author Ryūkishi07.
Senior reviews writer Sam Rutherford is a beast for collecting all of his thoughts on the Switch 2 so quickly and with such fabulous insight, and it’d be a shame if you didn’t get to absorb all of that delicious knowledge for yourself. This has been my review of Sam’s review of the Switch 2 — a console that is also pretty fantastic, by the way.
Summer Game Fest 2025 officially wrapped up on June 9, but the embargoed stories, interviews and our hands-on impressions from the show just keep on coming. Since we last spoke, Engadget’s SGF 2025 crew has published articles about Resident Evil: Requiem, Mixtape, Mouse: PI for Hire, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Grounded 2, End of Abyss and Pragmata.
Every Saturday morning on Engadget, contributing reporter Kris Holt publishes a roundup of fantastic-sounding and freshly available indie games, so be sure to check for that regularly. This week, the Kris list features The Alters, Dune: Awakening and Instants, among other shout-outs. In related new-game news, Remedy’s extraction shooter FBC: Firebreak and Bithell Games’ isometric action experience Tron: Catalyst are also available now. And finally, we’re halfway through Playdate Season Two, which has already provided a firehose of oddball experiences — all lovingly parsed through each week by Engadget weekend editor Cheyenne Macdonald.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/video-games-weekly-mario-kart-world-is-the-opposite-of-punishing-110039837.html?src=rss
Photo modes are a pretty common feature for video games where players go bounding around an interesting open world. Today, Minecraft joined their ranks, making an in-game camera available in the Minecraft Marketplace as a free add-on called Vibrant Memories. The feature requires a copy of Minecraft’s Bedrock Edition on any platform; the Java version doesn’t appear to support the camera.
As well as capturing the moment as-is and saving particular camera angles to reuse later, Vibrant Memories will let a player decide whether or not to appear in the image. It will also let them set whether the weather is sunny or rainy and if the time is sunrise, sunset, day or night.
That’s a pared-back take on photo mode, but then in many ways, Minecraft is a pared-back game. Sure, it’s gotten loads of new features and creatures over the past 15 years, but at heart, it’s just about mining and crafting.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/minecraft-now-has-a-photo-mode-with-vibrant-memories-215948221.html?src=rss
Adobe launched its own take on how smartphone cameras should work this week with Project Indigo, a new iPhone camera app from some of the team behind the Pixel camera. The project combines the computational photography techniques that engineers Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz popularized at Google, with pro controls and new AI-powered features.
In their announcement of the new app, Levoy and Kainz style Project Indigo as the better answer to typical smartphone camera complaints of limited controls and over-processing. Rather than using aggressive tone mapping and sharpening, Project Indigo is supposed to use “only mild tone mapping, boosting of color saturation, and sharpening.” That’s intentionally not the same as the “zero-processing” approach some third-party apps are taking. “Based on our conversations with photographers, what they really want is not zero-process but a more natural look — more like what an SLR might produce,” Levoy and Kainz write.
The new app also has fully manual controls, “and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide,” whether you want a JPEG or a RAW file at the end. Project Indigo achieves that by dramatically under-exposing the shots it combines together, and relying on a larger number of shots to combine — up to 32 frames, according to Levoy and Kainz. The app also includes some of Adobe’s more experimental photo features, like “Remove Reflections,” which uses AI to eliminate reflections from photos.
Levoy left Google in 2020, and joined Adobe a few months later to form a team with the express goal of building a “universal camera app”. Based on his LinkedIn, Kainz joined Adobe that same year. At Google, Kainz and Levoy were often credited with popularizing the concept of computational photography, where camera apps rely more on software than hardware to produce quality smartphone photos. Google’s success in that arena kicked off a camera arms race that’s raised the bar everywhere, but also led to some pretty over-the-top photos. Project Indigo is a bit of a corrective, and also an interesting test whether a third-party app that might produce better photos is enough to beat the default.
Project Indigo is available to download for free now, and runs on either the iPhone 12 Pro and up, or the iPhone 14 and up. An Android version of the app is coming at some point in the future.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/adobe-project-indigo-is-a-new-photo-app-from-former-pixel-camera-engineers-213453207.html?src=rss
After period dramas and political thrillers, he’s headed for blockbuster territory with ‘Jurassic World Rebirth.’ Get to know the actor behind the roles here.
After period dramas and political thrillers, he’s headed for blockbuster territory with ‘Jurassic World Rebirth.’ Get to know the actor behind the roles here.
