Mashable

Waymo, the ride-hailing app that operates driverless cars and is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, stopped a man from driving off in one of its electric Jaguars on Thursday, CBS News and others reported.

LAPD responded to a report of an attempted auto theft shortly after midnight on Thursday morning, according to the Los Angeles Times, where they found a man sitting in the driver's seat of a Waymo vehicle. The man, who may have been under the influence, had reportedly entered through the passenger's seat and slid into the driver's side. Normally, no one is in the driver's seat save for occasions when a Waymo employee does so to test the car.

SEE ALSO: Security ramps up at CES after Cybertruck explosion at Trump hotel

The company told the LA Times that Waymo cars are designed so people can't override the automated driving system. The vehicles can also move evasively, honk its horns, announce 911 is being called, and fold in exterior door handles so no one can get inside.

If someone does get in the driver's seat, Waymo's rider support team is alerted and can request the person leave the car. If they don't — like what happened with the man on Thursday — the police are called. In the five million rides Waymo has provided, only a "handful" of people have attempted to steal the cars, the company told the LA Times. The Los Angeles man who climbed into the Waymo this week was eventually released by police at the scene.

Waymo's autonomous vehicles are currently servicing Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix, and are coming soon to Austin, Atlanta, and Miami, according to its website.

TL;DR: Live stream Opelka vs. Lehecka in the 2025 Brisbane International final for free on 9Now. Access this free streaming platform from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.

The Brisbane International is really all about top players building momentum and sharpening up before the Australian Open, but at the final stage, remaining players will be desperate to get their hands on the trophy. We're expecting some fantastic tennis from this battle between Opelka and Lehecka.

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How to watch Opelka vs. Lehecka for free

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TL;DR: Live stream Sabalenka vs. Kudermetova in the 2025 Brisbane International final for free on 9Now. Access this free streaming platform from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.

The eyes of the tennis world are about to focus on the Australian Open, but first, the Brisbane International is reaching its dramatic conclusion. Sabalenka and Kudermetova meet in the final of the competition. Both players are looking really sharp as they build momentum before the first Grand Slam of the season.

If you want to watch Sabalenka vs. Kudermetova in the 2025 Brisbane International final for free from anywhere in the world, we have all the information you need.

How to watch Sabalenka vs. Kudermetova for free

The 2025 Brisbane International is available to live stream for free on 9Now, including Sabalenka vs. Kudermetova.

9Now is geo-restricted to Australia, but anyone can access this free streaming platform with a VPN. These handy tools can hide your real IP address (digital location) and connect you to a secure server in Australia, meaning you can unblock 9Now from anywhere in the world.

Access free live streams of the 2025 Brisbane International final by following these simple steps:

1. Subscribe to a streaming-friendly VPN (like ExpressVPN)

2. Download the app to your device of choice (the best VPNs have apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and more)

3. Open up the app and connect to a server in Australia

4. Visit 9Now

5. Watch the 2025 Brisbane International final for free from anywhere in the world

Opens in a new window Credit: ExpressVPN ExpressVPN (1-Year Subscription + 3 Months Free) $99.95 only at ExpressVPN (with money-back guarantee) Get Deal

The best VPNs for streaming are not free, but leading services do tend to offer incentive deals such as free-trial periods or money-back guarantees. By leveraging these deals, you can access free live streams of Sabalenka vs. Kudermetova without actually spending anything. This isn't a long-term solution, but it gives you enough time to watch the Brisbane International final and Australian Open (also on 9Now for free) before recovering your investment.

What is the best VPN for 9Now?

ExpressVPN is the best service for bypassing geo-restrictions to stream live tennis on 9Now, for a number of reasons:

• Servers in 105 countries including Australia

• Easy-to-use app available on all major devices including iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, and more

• Strict no-logging policy so your data is always secure

• Fast connection speeds

• Up to eight simultaneous connections

• 30-day money-back guarantee

A one-year subscription to ExpressVPN is on sale for $99.95 and includes an extra three months for free — 49% off for a limited time. This plan also includes a year of free unlimited cloud backup and a generous 30-day money-back guarantee.

Live stream Sabalenka vs. Kudermetova in the 2025 Brisbane International final for free from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.

There's not even a hint of a looming eruption at Yellowstone.

But you might wonder why, considering its violent past: Yellowstone has hosted "supereruptions" — the most explosive type of volcanic blast that would be regionally devastating, and blanket a large swathe of the U.S. in ash. These blasts were much larger than any in recorded history. (The last eruption, though not "super," happened some 70,000 years ago and poured lava over the present-day national park.)

New research reveals why the famously steamy park, hosting over 500 hot geysers, shows no signs of blowing its top. These days, the reservoirs of magma (molten rock) that feed Yellowstone hold pretty low concentrations of this magma. They simply don't contain enough volcanic fuel to drive the heat and pressure that would stoke an eruption.

"We can definitely say that these areas could not source an eruption in the present day," Ninfa Bennington, a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist who led the study recently published in Nature, told Mashable.

SEE ALSO: What will happen when the next supervolcano erupts, according to NASA

There are different reservoirs, or pods, of magma below the Yellowstone Caldera, which is the sprawling basin formed during an immense eruption and dramatic collapse some 631,000 years ago. You can think of each reservoir like a sponge, filled with pores. There's some magma in these pores spaces, but it's not nearly saturated.

One future day, these sponges may fill up with magma and reach a critical percentage — wherein immense pressure builds beneath the ground and spawns an eruption. Today, however, there is no explosive threat.

"We're so far off from that right now," Bennington said.

Modeled ashfall from a Yellowstone supereruption. Credit: USGS / Mastin et al. The most destructive type of eruptions at Yellowstone, which form great depressions called calderas, are by far the rarest. Credit: USGS

To grasp what's transpiring in these critical reservoirs of magma today, the geologists used a technique called magnetotellurics. In contrast to radar or sonar, the scientists don't create or beam signals to discern what lies beyond or below. Instead, these surveys capitalize on the currents naturally created by Earth's electromagnetic field. And magma, due to its composition, is really good at conducting electricity, allowing insight into its presence deep beneath Earth's surface.

"It could be a long, long time."

The surveys, beyond revealing Yellowstone's inability to host an eruption today, showed that the most primitive magma flowing up from Earth's mantle to Yellowstone connects directly to a reservoir in the northeast region of the Yellowstone Caldera. This suggests this northeast region would become the future center of volcanic activity in Yellowstone.

But there's no evidence of those reservoirs filling up. "It could be a long, long time," Bennington said.

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If magma does once again snake its way from deep inside Earth and saturate these shallower reservoirs, an eruption wouldn't be a surprise. We'd have many decades, if not centuries, of warning. The moving magma would trigger swarms of potent earthquakes, and the ground would majorly deform.

"These parameters are well monitored, so there will be ample warning of any potential future eruption," the U.S. Geological Survey says.

Today, Yellowstone remains a place of low volcanic risk. Sure, there are sometimes small explosions stoked by hot water and steam. But it's mostly thermal pools and awesome geysers, reminding us of what could potentially awake, one distant day.

After calls with foreign leaders, rap sessions with lawmakers, and long classified briefings with advisers, President Jimmy Carter would often escape to the roof of the White House. 

There his son Jeffrey had set up a tracking telescope, Carter said in his book, A Full Life. Feeling the weight of the world, he would gaze at the stars and contemplate his place among them. 

"I recall one winter night going to the White House roof to study the Orion nebulae, but we could barely see the stars, their images so paled by city lights," he waxed in a poem.

That particular evening, on Dec. 18, 1977, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan joined him. They had just visited the U.S. Naval Observatory next to the vice president’s mansion, where they discussed all things space — planets, stars, black holes, and astrobiology. Carter himself was a man of science: He studied engineering in college and did graduate work in nuclear physics.

"It was a welcome diversion from earthly concerns," he wrote in a thank-you note to Sagan. 

Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024 at 100, was an avid astronomer, with a profound curiosity for the cosmos, a part of his story that isn't well-known. It began when he was a lab assistant to an astronomy teacher his freshman year in college, and it continued as he learned celestial navigation in the U.S. Navy, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant. One Christmas while on a ship with his family, he asked the captain if the crew had a sextant on board, a tool for measuring the angle between the horizon and an object in the sky. The captain proceeded to show him one, he said, displayed like a museum artifact in a glass case. 

SEE ALSO: NASA's finally talking about UFOs with Americans. Here's what they said. Tweet may have been deleted

But politics often eclipsed the former president's appreciation for space. Though his first budget funded the program that became NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Carter was maligned for not supporting human spaceflight in the vein of the Apollo program, said Steven Hochman, former special assistant to the president at the Carter Center. He was a supporter of robotic exploration and research that could benefit people's lives, but when it came to the exorbitant cost of sending astronauts into deep space, he preferred spending on domestic concerns. 

"NASA, I believe, has not given him the credit he deserves," Hochman told Mashable. "I believe it is because he was critical of the Space Shuttle program and didn't provide funding for future missions to the moon or Mars." 

For years political adversaries ridiculed Carter for having a tinfoil hat, stemming from an incident in 1969 that later circulated in the press. After a Lions Club meeting in Leary, Georgia, Carter and a few other men spotted something strange moving in the sky: a luminous object, first blue then red, the apparent size and brightness of the moon. About four years later, Carter reported the unidentified flying object to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma.

President Jimmy Carter places the Congressional Space Medal around NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong's neck. Credit: UPI / Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

Though Carter never claimed to have spotted aliens or a flying saucer — to him this was literally an unknown object in the air — people snickered and mistook his UFO sighting as such. Skeptics, who likely knew nothing of Carter's astronomy background, suggested he had merely seen Venus.

"It was not Venus," Carter said in a 2007 interview on "The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe" podcast. 

In fact, his UFO sighting had taken on such mythic proportions, some had wondered whether it was the reason Carter wanted NASA to investigate UFOs in 1977. Despite a White House request expressing a need to address the general UFO "public relations problem," NASA had, surprisingly, declined. 

The Japanese space agency JAXA's Akatsuki mission, aka Planet-C or Venus Climate Orbiter, studies the planet's atmosphere from orbit with an ultraviolet imager. Sulfur dioxide causes some clouds to look dark because of sunlight absorption. Credit: ISAS / JAXA

The subject prompted The Journal of Scientific Exploration to invite Richard C. Henry, the agency's deputy director of astrophysics during Carter's administration, to write an essay about it more than a decade later. Henry, a semi-retired professor at Johns Hopkins University today, came to no definitive conclusions on why NASA rebuffed the White House. But, in a postscript, Henry said he sent his draft to Carter before publication in 1988. 

"The most important point that you could clarify, if you will, is whether you yourself were behind (the UFO panel proposal) letter of July 21, 1977, to NASA," Henry wrote. 

Beside the sentence, Carter jotted his reply in one word: No.

NASA leaders brief President Jimmy Carter before the first Space Shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Credit: NASA

Yet buried within Henry's paper was a small window into Carter's passion for astronomy. In November 1977, the president and his son sent a message to NASA headquarters asking to borrow a seven-inch Questar telescope. Given that there were no telescopes at headquarters — just paper, Henry said — he tried to hunt one down at another NASA campus. 

It turned out Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, had one.

"By great luck, a NASA plane was flying from Huntsville to Washington the next day ([Science adviser Frank] Press was emphatic that the President wanted no special flights or other waste of taxpayer dollars)," Henry wrote. 

President Jimmy Carter sits alone on a bench at Camp David during the Egyptian-Israeli peace talks on Sept. 9, 1978. Credit: White House / CNP / Getty Images

The NASA official and his wife, Rita Mahon, picked up the Questar at Washington National Airport and promptly took it to the White House. They then unpacked the telescope from a large wooden crate and showed the Carters how to set it up on the Truman balcony overlooking the South Lawn. The night was cloudy, but they trained on the moon. 

The president then proceeded to take the telescope with him to Camp David near Thurmont, Maryland, on Nov. 23, 1977, where he and his family spent Thanksgiving, according to his daily diary. He returned it about a week later. 

One has to wonder if Carter brought a telescope with him again just 10 months later, when he invited Egyptian President Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to join him at the retreat. The renowned talks would result in the Camp David Accords, which later earned the Middle East leaders a Nobel Peace Prize.  

U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin share a three-way handshake after signing the Camp David Accords. Credit: Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images

There's an amusing irony to the false urban legend that Carter believed he was visited by aliens: He is, after all, the most likely person to make humanity's introduction to extraterrestrials.

Some 15.5 billion miles away from Earth, hurtling through the cold, uncharted abyss, is NASA's Voyager 1 probe. It is the farthest spacecraft from home, having left the solar system in 2012. Soaring through interstellar space at 38,000 mph, it carries a gold-plated record produced by Sagan, with a melange of sounds from the planet.

Crickets. Wind. Greetings in 55 languages, from Akkadian to Wu. A mother kissing her child. These and a letter from Carter are among the recordings on the disk.

A technician puts the golden record on the Voyager spacecraft in a clean room before launch. Credit: Space Frontiers / Archive Photos / Getty Images

The odds of making contact with aliens, if they exist, are slight, if not insurmountable. Galaxies are spinning away from each other into the infinite unknown. The speed at which space is expanding far outpaces our technology to overcome it. It's as if the universe were contrived to keep its inhabitants apart.

But should some other intelligent life forms encounter Voyager — or Voyager 2, which carries a duplicate record — thousands or even billions of years into the future, they will discover Carter's words: 

"This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings," he wrote. "We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe." 

A copy of the statement President Jimmy Carter included on the golden records for the Voyager spacecraft. Credit: NASA

Many knew Carter's intimate relationship with his faith. He grew up Southern Baptist, the son of a farmer in the boomtown of Plains, Georgia. He referred to himself as a born-again Christian. Long after his presidency, he attended regular church services and taught Sunday School. 

But how his evangelical beliefs squared with his thoughts on the universe aren't clear. He wrote in a poem, titled "Considering the Void:" 

When I behold the charm / of evening skies, their lulling endurance; / the patterns of stars with names / of bears and dogs, a swan, a virgin; / other planets that our Voyager showed / were like and so unlike our own, / with all their moons, / bright discs, weird rings, and cratered faces; / comets with their streaming tails / bent by pressure from our sun; / the skyscape of our Milky Way / holding in its shimmering disc /an infinity of suns / (or say a thousand billion); / knowing there are holes of darkness / gulping mass and even light, / knowing that this galaxy of ours / is one of multitudes / in what we call the heavens, / it troubles me. It troubles me.

What exactly was haunting Carter? Was he expressing a collision of faith and science in what lies beyond? An existential crisis of never knowing the big picture? 

Perhaps, as he wished, humankind will survive this time so that we may live to know more.