Author: Willoughby Avenue

As food and labor costs rise in the restaurant industry, some businesses are looking for technological solutions to the annoying problem of expensive humans.

A $15-per-hour minimum wage might not lead to armies of content, sufficiently compensated fast food workers. It may instead lead to fewer employees, as bottom-line-obsessed companies move more quickly to replace “expensive” labor with tireless robots. And rising labor costs aren’t the only things getting more expensive for restaurants—wholesale food and real estate prices are also shooting up, says the Washington Post.

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This makes The Expendables look likeThe English Patient.

This time last year, Kevin Hart and Dave Franco illustrated the full power of their gaming rivalry to launch EA Sports’ Madden 15 with a wacky musical number that included flagrant vehicular vandalism, a bit of physical violence, some light stalking, and an epic party that ended with Franco’s house on fire. Now, after a couple of 15-second teasers for Madden 16, the brand turns the batsh*t crazy up to 11 with an action movie trailer that makes The Expendables look like The English Patient.

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The team will be separate from the life extension-focused Calico Labs.

Google cofounder and now-Alphabet president Sergey Brin announced in a blog post last night that Alphabet would be spinning off the life sciences work inside Google X into its own company.

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Tesla charging stations are making their way to eligible Airbnb homes.

Calling all Airbnb hosts in California: If you list your entire home, have rented out your place more than five times, and boast an overall rating of at least four stars, Tesla has a proposition for you.

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Meet the Chinese artist who finds creativity in fire.

Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist based in New York. One of his mediums is gunpowder, one of his native country’s most spectacular and ancient inventions. And this is his latest sculpture, the 500-meter Sky Ladder, which lived its brief two-and-a-half-minute life at Huiyu Island Harbour, Quanzhou, Fujian, last month.

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Who has time to record and review?

Think of how your brain makes memories. You can recall certain moments with crystal clarity: when your child was born, when you first sampled VR, that epic burrito you had at Chipotle. And other moments—like your commute—are so mundane that you forget them instantly. Graava, a new wearable camera, wants to change the way we record our memories by highlighting only the best ones.

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Credit-card issuers are racing to get new cards with embedded chips into customers’ hands. But merchants aren’t ready for the shift.

If you live in the U.S. and have a credit card, you’ve almost certainly received a replacement card out of the blue in the last three months, often paired with an elaborate explanatory booklet. Your new card, the booklet explains, features a special chip that will protect your transactions more effectively, reduce fraud, and make your life better. The first two parts of that statement, at least, are true.

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“They took my floaty!”

The dog days of summer have arrived—actually, make that the bear days of summer.

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Metropia helps cities reduce car traffic by giving people incentives to tweak their driving habits.

There are two competing approaches—both very expensive—to solving traffic problems: Build more roads, or build more public transit. Yi-Chang Chiu, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Arizona, has another idea: Hand out gift cards.

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The ride-sharing giant, valued at more than $50 billion, has not talked about its plans to go public.

Uber could go public within the next two years, according to a report obtained by Reuters.

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