Amazon still markets this little black dongle as a way to watch movies. That pitch misses half the point. Second-generation Fire TV Stick 4K Max is a $49.99 (was $85) HDMI stick that also runs Xbox Game Pass, Amazon Luna, and GeForce NOW, so a living room TV becomes a cloud console after you pair a Bluetooth controller.
Inside a 60-foot steel sphere at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, a team has begun a new series of tests that look simple on paper and get complicated fast. They fire scaled rocket exhaust into a shallow bin of jagged gray powder that stands in for lunar soil. Each run lasts about six seconds. Cameras and sensors record crater shape, how high and wide the flying sheet of dirt rises, where the particles land, and how fast they travel. That data will help keep future landers, astronauts, and nearby hardware from getting sandblasted when real engines light on the Moon.
LEGO just put Darth Vader’s flagship back on the table, and this time the ship eats a shelf the way the original ate a Rebel fleet. Set 75457, the Ultimate Collector Series Executor Super Star Destroyer, is a 6,130-piece model that stretches 53.5 inches long, 20 inches wide, and a little more than 7.5 inches tall. Finished weight sits above 11 pounds. Retail is $799.99 in the United States, £649.99 in the UK, and €749.99 in Europe. Builders get first crack on October 1, 2026, at LEGO stores and LEGO.com.
Microsoft confirmed the news this morning during Gamescom coverage. A feature that lets you claim a digital license from physical Xbox One and Xbox Series X game discs is heading to testers first, then to everyone with a compatible console. Players spent years stacking those cases. Some bought on disc, some bought downloads, and plenty own a mix across two generations of hardware. Jason Ronald, Xbox VP of next generation, said the goal is simple: make those libraries easier to carry forward.
Samsung showed up at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne with a pair of portable SSDs that finally put USB4 to work. Flagship P9 is the one that matters if you live in large files. Sequential reads reach 4,000 megabytes per second. Sequential writes reach 3,800. That is about twice the T9, which maxed out at 2,000 MB/s on USB 3.2 Gen 2×2.