Mike Murphy

GoPro, the company that makes small, mountable cameras for those who enjoy the extreme (and their pets), has hit a rough patch. This week, Morgan Stanley analyst James Faucette downgraded the company’s outlook, and Wall Street’s confidence in GoPro’s ability to produce another hit is fading: GoPro stock dipped from about $65 in August to $18 this week—roughly 25% lower than its IPO price back in June 2014.

Updated at 10:15am ET.

What started as a project in Google’s “moonshot” lab back in 2009 will become its own business in 2016 under Google’s parent company, Alphabet, according to Bloomberg. The company’s self-driving cars are expected to be used as a for-hire ride service, competing with the likes of Uber and Lyft.

Amazon pulled hoverboards from its US and UK sites earlier this week. Now it’s going a step further, advising that UK customers who purchased certain hoverboards get rid of the devices themselves, due to fears that faulty plugs are causing them to explode.

While we’re not all lucky enough to be strong with the Force, anyone with the Chrome web browser and a smartphone can at least pretend for a little while. Google has launched a new online game called “Lightsaber Escape,” which follows Finn—the star of the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens—using his ancient weapon to take on a group of stormtroopers.

If you need to hang a picture or just generally like fixing things, there’s nothing more important than a level. But in case you can’t find yours, or never bothered to pick one up when you finally decided to hang all those pictures gathering dust in the hall closet, Google is there to help.

In the future, science fiction tells us that we’ll be able to hold complex conversations with our starship’s computer as easily as we would our robot crew-mates or even other humans. But before we reach that point, we’ll have to make do by chatting with fridges and vacuum cleaners.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced today (Dec. 14) that starting next week, all drone owners will have to register their drones to fly them in the US. To encourage owners to register, the process will be free online for the next month, but after Jan. 20, 2016, anyone wanting to fly a drone will have to pay the US government $5 for the privilege.

Celebrities seem to enjoy giving their kids bizarre names, but ordinary folk need a reason. A woman in India who took an Uber to the hospital decided to name her child after the on-demand taxi service after she ended up giving birth in the cab.

Twitter has notified a group of users it believes may have had their accounts hacked by “state-sponsored actors” over the weekend, The Guardian reported today (Dec. 14). The publication lists over 30 accounts that have apparently been contacted via email by the social-networking site.

If you long for the days of dial-up modems, help is at hand. A new web portal, called oldweb.today, lets you surf the web using some of the web’s earliest browsers, like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer 3.0.

Disney is running its Star Wars franchise with the efficiency and ubiquity of its galaxy’s Empire. Over the past year or so, it has marketed the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, which opens across the world this week, with a relentless efficiency not seen since the execution of the Jedi religion.

This post has been updated with comments from Sam Altman and corrected.

Looking like a cross between a Transformer and one of those machines that wraps up Christmas trees, a new robot is being tested by the New South Wales Fire and Rescue department.

In an old pier on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, Autodesk—the design software company—invites artists, tinkerers, engineers, and makers to “design and build the future.” The company hosts a group it calls the “artists in residence” each year to build whatever they feel like in its workshop. At their disposal is just about any manufacturing tool any maker could hope for, from massive industrial 3D printers, to computer-controlled milling machines, woodworking tools, metalworking tools, and even a kitchen.

GoPro had a pretty rough end to the year. Prices on its newest camera got slashed, seemingly out of lack of interest, and the company’s stock price tumbled to new lows as Wall Street remained unconvinced that the brand had any new tricks up its sleeve. But one of GoPro’s big bets for 2016, a quadcopter drone, is edging closer to a release. And now it has a name: Karma.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, a whiny teenage farmer just wanted to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters with his friends. One thing led to another, and he ended up becoming a starpilot that overthrew an evil empire.

This was the year we were supposed to get hoverboards and flying cars. Instead we got more robots that fall over.

As we approach the physical limits of shrinking the components on computer chips, it’s getting harder to attain more computing power. But quantum computers—which rely on the strange properties of atom-sized logic gates—could have exponentially more power than even today’s most advanced supercomputers. These machines could be used to develop new drugs, crack codes, or potentially even create true artificial intelligence.

Later this month, crowds of excited fans will stand in lines to see one of the most-hyped and likely profitable things of the year. For once, that’s not an Apple product—it’s the seventh Star Wars film, The Force Awakens. But the Californian tech giant and space film franchise do have something in common: design.

Things IBM invented or that wouldn’t exist without it:

Star Wars: The Force Awakens will finally open in theaters this month, on Dec. 18, after one of the longest and most expensive marketing campaigns in movie history.

If you’re thinking of rolling through security and onto a plane with a self-balancing scooter, you might be in for a shock—if not an explosion. Hoverboards, which are generally made in rapid fashion by a plethora of Chinese manufacturers, have been having explosive battery issues of late. They’ve been setting houses on fire in the UK while they’ve been charging, a man in Alabama said his caught fire while he was riding it, and the UK government this week confiscated 15,000 boards at a customs check for fear that they may explode. As such, self-balancing scooters probably aren’t the safest things to take on planes.

While the debate in the English-speaking world unfortunately seems to be dying down on what to call hoverboards—the self-balancing personal transport devices that don’t actually, you know, hover—there doesn’t yet seem to be one catch-all term in the Spanish-speaking world.