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Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a new low price on RavPower's 90W 2-Port USB-C Wall Charger, which is currently down to $43 on Amazon with an on-page coupon. For reference, we typically see this charger retail between $48 and $55 online.

We recommend this charger in our guide to home office gear, which we published earlier on Friday. It's one of the few USB-C chargers capable of putting out this much power through multiple ports. The device can output 90W of power through either port, which is enough to charge many laptops at or—in the case of especially power-hungry notebooks like the 16-inch MacBook Pro—at least close to their maximum speeds, provided you have an appropriate cable. Given that, the charger has no trouble charging smartphones, tablets, or USB-C devices like the Nintendo Switch as quickly as possible, either. The whole thing outputs a maximum of 90W when both ports are in use simultaneously, but it's smart enough to adjust its output based on what's plugged in, so you could charge two thinner laptops at 45W each or have one port charge a laptop at 60W while the other refills a smartphone at 18W (which is a common maximum for newer phones).

This is a gallium nitride (GaN) charger, so it's remarkably compact for its capabilities, measuring just 2.5 x 2.5 x 1.2 inches. It also includes a USB-C to USB-C charging cable in the box. While we'd prefer it have the safety of a USB-IF certification, it comes with an 18-month warranty, and other outlets have rated it highly. We wouldn't recommend spending this much on a wall charger unless you specifically need a laptop charger and multiple ports—90W is still overkill for most smartphones and tablets for now—but if you do, it will cut down the time you spend waiting for your devices to refill.

Enlarge / Amazon's orange-yellow logo wall. (credit: David Ryder/Getty Images)

New reports released this week serve as a cautionary tale for consumers who shop at Amazon, by far the largest online retailer in the US. While complaints about Amazon's third-party vendor marketplace are by now commonplace, the new reports find that not only did Amazon itself price-gouge customers during the height of the pandemic, but also that many of its white-label, Amazon-branded products are just as likely to be dangerously defective as third-party goods.

Product shortages—both for pandemic-related supplies such as masks and sanitizer and also for basic household goods such as toilet paper—hit nationwide in February, March, and April as the country shut down and everyone who could holed up at home. As tends to happen when demand skyrockets but supply doesn't, prices on a while wide range of items went up. And up. And then up some more.

By March, regulators were desperately trying to stem the tide of price gouging flooding online retailers, especially Amazon's sprawling third-party Marketplace.

Enlarge (credit: Remedy)

Last month, 505 Games announced that it was "unfortunately unable to offer an upgrade path to all existing [console] Control players" for PlayStation 5 and/or Xbox Series S/X enhancements. Today, though, an apparent temporary snafu is showing just how simple such a free upgrade could be for many Control players on current-generation systems, at least.

As reported in a lengthy ResetEra thread, a number of players who previously bought the Control Digital Deluxe Edition on PS4 were surprised last night to find they also owned the Control Ultimate Edition. That new version includes the base game, DLC, and season pass and is the one that "take[s] full advantage of the power and features provided by these new consoles," as 505 Games puts it.

Within hours, though, those same players noted their Ultimate Edition ownership had been revoked and reverted back to the current-generation Digital Deluxe Edition. That version will not get any hardware-specific enhancements when played on next-generation consoles.

Enlarge / Nikola Chairman Trevor Milton unveils the Nikola One truck in December 2016. (credit: Nikola)

Stock in electric truck startup Nikola has plunged for the second straight day after a short-selling investment firm published a bombshell report alleging that the company's December 2016 unveiling of the Nikola One truck was a brazen fraud. Nikola's stock lost 11 percent on Thursday and is down an additional 15 percent in Friday morning trading.

At the December 2016 event, Nikola Chairman Trevor Milton repeatedly described the truck as fully functional. But that wasn't quite true, as Milton admitted to Bloomberg earlier this year. The supposedly hydrogen-powered truck didn't have a hydrogen fuel cell, nor did it have the motors and gears required to drive the wheels. Milton claimed the parts had been taken out of the truck for safety reasons.

The new report from Hindenburg Research claims that the scale of Nikola's deception was even greater than was previously known. The firm claims that the prototype's supposedly functional dashboard display was powered by an extension cord snaking up from under the stage.

Enlarge / Promotional image of Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow emerging from a stylized depiction of the female genital anatomy. (credit: Netflix)

Gwyneth Paltrow—actor, pseudoscience-peddler, empowerer of women, and person who recently learned what a vagina is—will return to Netflix with a second season of The Goop Lab.

The six-episode docuseries of Paltrow’s wellness and “contextual commerce” empire, Goop, has been renewed, according to an exclusive report by Variety.

The first season, which oozed onto the streaming platform in late January of this year, followed Paltrow and her exploited Goopers as they aimlessly took to the high seas of junk science and marinated in snake oil spas. Individual episodes explored important topics such as the bright side of hypothermia, the powers of a magician who can massage your aura with moves he learned watching The Karate Kid, Goopers tripping on mushrooms for pretty much no reason at all, the benefits of a $50 salmon fillet, and how to be a fortune-teller in case you need a back-up career in the circus.

Enlarge / Members of the flight test team pose with the Flying-V model in Germany in June 2020. (credit: Malcolm Brown/TU Delft)

When it comes to new airplanes, the airline industry rarely strays outside its comfort zone. "A cigar-shaped fuselage atop a pair of wings, with three stabilizers at the back" describes pretty much every airliner in service today. Convergent evolution means there aren't even very many double-deckers left, and most planes carry their engines under the wings. Which is why the Flying-V is such a breath of fresh air.

We looked at this weird-looking concept a couple of times in 2019. Originally, it was the brainchild of a graduate student at the Technical University of Berlin, then working on his thesis at Airbus. A year later, it attracted the attention of a research group at TU Delft in the Netherlands, which has worked with Dutch airline KLM to develop the idea as a celebration of the airline's centenary.

Instead of a conventional airliner design, the Flying-V is just a pair of fat wings joined in a V. Passengers would sit toward the front, along the leading edges, with cargo space closer to the wingtips. The jet engines are above the wings, located at the back of each wing opposite a small vertical fin. A full-size Flying-V would have the same width as an Airbus A350—keeping things simple for airports—but would use 20 percent less fuel.