Month: February 2018

Wednesday night saw the reveal of a brand-new series of videos for Nintendo's big, weird Labo launch coming on April 20. We learned a lot about the build-your-own-cardboard toys of this new Switch "game" when it was first announced in January, but now, we're getting a better idea of the actual games in this thing—and there might actually be some decent ones in here.

The biggest information dump comes in the form of the Labo Robot Kit, which will ship with a game that requires building and wearing a cardboard backpack rig. Wednesday's explainer video went further to break down how gameplay will work. A default mode will dump players into a cartoony city, which they will destroy by punching, stomping, flying, shooting lasers, and transforming into either a tank or a larger robot. The more stuff you smash, and the more combo attacks you trigger, the more points you'll get. Only one level of this mode was shown, and it's unclear whether this will play as a rudimentary arcade game or as a more complicated campaign.

Enlarge / Dara Khosrowshahi, seen here in 2013, has been Uber's CEO since September 2017. (credit: Matthew Lloyd/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

According to recently-released financial numbers, Uber lost $1.1 billion during the fourth quarter of 2017, while taking in $2.26 billion in revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets that have reviewed a privately-held financial statement. By comparison, Uber reportedly lost $1.46 billion during the third quarter.

The quarterly figures come less than a week after Uber settled what could have been a very expensive lawsuit brought by Waymo. The fact that Uber's revenue has continued to grow despite an expanding list of setbacks and scandals last year may suggest that the company hasn't been significantly impacted overall.

For the entire year of 2017, Uber sustained a loss of $4.46 billion on sales of $7.36 billion.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The internal watchdog at the Department of Energy released an audit report (PDF) this month detailing profligate spending, approved by the Office of Fossil Energy, on a clean coal initiative that was supposed to result in a 400MW carbon capture-enable plant.

The Office of Fossil Energy had partnered with a private company called Summit Texas Clean Energy LLC (owned by the Seattle-based Summit Power) to complete the project. Fossil Energy committed to funding $450 million of the $1.8 billion project, which would have been built outside of Odessa, Texas. Summit claimed that its plant would have captured 90 percent of the carbon it created.

Instead, Fossil Energy broke off the partnership in June 2016 when the same DOE internal watchdog (known formally as the Office of the Inspector General, or OIG) issued a report pointing out significant project delays and the inability of Summit to secure enough additional private funding to complete the project. In October 2017, Summit Texas Clean Energy declared bankruptcy.