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Despite Tesla trademark application, the Megapod concept already existsMegapod's trademark is owned by someone elseNvidia and others already dominate this marketTesla has filed a trademark application for ‘Megapod’ as the company begins to expand beyond electric cars, batteries and solar energy. Already with fingers in the autonomous transportation and humanoid robotics pies with Robotaxi and Optimus, the company is now looking to build modular AI data center infrastructure.Though the filing is based on an intent-to-use application, meaning that no commercial product is available yet, it describes a self-contained AI computing platform that includes servers, AI hardware, networking equipment, power distribution units, cooling and software.However, the project and associated trademark application has already hit three big walls – the concept already exists, the ‘Megapod’ trademark is already owned by somebody else, and the market itself is highly crowded with Nvidia, Huawei and others already more established.Megapod could be related to MegapackTesla already uses the ‘Mega’ naming strategy, as evidenced by its Megapack. A battery system that offers a similar commercial proposition to the proposed Megapod, consisting of factory-built complete modules that can be deployed quickly with minimal on-site assembly or construction.Rather than customers assembling servers, networking, cooling and other infrastructure themselves on-premises, Megapod could arrive as a plug-and-play AI data center, expandable by its modular design.The news comes around a year after Musk’s company reportedly wound down its Dojo AI training computer project, indicating that it’s no longer gunning for the AI chip market. It now looks like Tesla could be going after more complete physical infrastructure using existing chips, instead.Mitsubishi already has its own MegaPod, and it possesses a trademark already. And it’s not the first time Musk has faced complications over trademarks, failing to acquire a Robotaxi trademark over it being too generic and facing Cybercab trademark delays after another applicant got in first.Submer even sells its own MegaPod, described as a data center in a box, adding to the naming complications.Is there room for Tesla to join the market?Trademarks aside, if Tesla were to launch a Megapod-type product, it would face stiff competition from established rivals. Nvidia’s DGX and HGX platforms are already commonplace in enterprise deployments, and Huawei has also developed its own solutions based around its Ascend accelerators. Server manufacturers like Dell and HPE also have their own hardware.However, Tesla could bring its broader experience to the market to entice some customers into its ecosystem. Integration with its Megapack could, for example, give it uninterrupted power supply – xAI has already purchased $1 billion worth of Megapacks. Purchasing power and other internal efficiencies could also keep costs low.While the company doesn’t really have an existing enterprise customer base, AI startups could be sold on its tech.Integrated cooling could also be a major selling point, with thermal efficiency now nearly as important as chip performance itself. Nvidia, for example, has already introduced next-generation liquid cooling specifically for its Rubin systems.As for what’s next, given Musk’s track record and those of his companies, we’re probably more likely to learn about any potential Megapod developments via X posts or surprise launches, rather than blog posts and official announcements.

There's one thing all videogame adaptations in film and TV have in common: they stink. Or at least, that's how it felt for a long time—personally, I stopped adding the caveat 'good for a videogame adaptation' after I watched the Fallout show and learned these things didn't have to be somewhere between middling and godawful. But what do Fallout's designers and developers think of the show?We know series co-creator Tim Cain loved it thanks to his YouTube channel, and more recently, New Vegas director Josh Sawyer said in an interview with The 41st Precinct that he enjoyed both seasons, watching them as they came out—and Sawyer specifically had some love for the show's interpretation of his game's factions and setting."I think it's an amazing adaptation, honestly," he said in the interview. "I know that the bar is not always very high for TV or film adaptations of videogames, but I think it's one of the best that I've seen, certainly." While there are things he might have done differently, he dismissed those as personal nitpicks: "Any writer is gonna look at something and be like 'meh, I don't know if I'd do that.'"As far as the show's take on New Vegas itself is concerned, Sawyer said he loved Justin Theroux's take on the character and wasn't "too bent out of shape" about changes that were made to suit the script, like the Dinky the Dinosaur landmark being turned to face a different direction than it is in the game (that might sound like an extremely small detail if you haven't played New Vegas, but trust me, people have opinions on this stuff). "I get why people get upset about that, but also the scene wouldn't work at all [if Dinky's orientation matched the game]," he laughed in the video. "Maybe people will say I'm a traitor to Fallout now, or something. But I don't know, I thought it was a good representation of a lot of the iconic stuff."That lines up with what Sawyer has said in previous interviews, where he noted he thought of himself as "a guest" working on Fallout rather than someone who'd need a say in how it's represented in a TV show a decade and a half later. 2026 games: All the upcoming gamesBest PC games: Our all-time favoritesFree PC games: Freebie festBest FPS games: Finest gunplayBest RPGs: Grand adventuresBest co-op games: Better together

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they've stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report, 69% of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.Globally, 40% report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It's the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.Wired for bad newsLong before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What's changed is the size of the world it's asked to scan for threats.News fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It is the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate. (Image credit: pzAxe via Getty Images)Scanning the whole worldFor most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.It's crucial to recognize the tactics meant to exploit our negative biases and create cognitive distance (Image credit: cbies/Shutterstock.com)Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17% of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61% reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with 6% of those who didn't.For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we're not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.Looking away is not the fixWhat's the solution to news fatigue? Well, it's not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We're wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.Finally, be wary of "rage bait" — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.The news will not become less "heavy." But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.