Technology

Nintendo is building on its strange but wonderful cardboard Labo platform with some sweet Mario Kart integration and a truly fabulous limited edition Switch with a faux-cardboard finish. It really is just the greatest thing and I would do terrible things to have it. Unfortunately some smart kid will probably get it, because you have to win it by designing something cool with Labo.

So, first the Mario Kart stuff. If you have Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Switch, and you really should because itexcellent, you can now use the Toy-Con (buildable with the Labo Variety Kit) as a sort of real-world controller. You twist the right &handlebar& to accelerate and rotate the whole thing to turn.

This is the first game to get its own special Labo support, but the company says more are on the way. Splatoon 2, perhaps

If you&re a creative type and you have a Labo set, you&re in luck. There are two new contests you can enter, and entry puts you in the running to win the amazing neutral-colored Switch shown up top. I really don&t know why I love it so much, but I do. And if you do too, you should enter. (If you&re in the U.S. or Canada. Sorry, world.)

The first challenge is to create a musical instrument with the Toy-Con pieces and &craft materials.& You&ll have to document its creation and show it working on video; it&ll be judged on &Quality, Creativity, Spirit, and Sound.& Caps Nintendo&s.

The second challenge is to create a game or game-like experience using Toy-Con Garage. Same judgment categories as before, minus Sound.

There will be one grand prize winner and four runners up per contest. Grand prize is that amazing Switch (approximate retail value $1,000!), plus a cool () Labo jacket. Runners up get a pair of cardboard style Joy-Cons and a jacket. Respectable.

If you&ve been looking for a reason to pick up that Labo kit again or use some random pieces you never tried, this is surely that reason. Now get to work!

Tim Cook at an Apple event in 2016.

At FortuneCEO Initiative event today, Tim Cook shared his opinion on a number of contentious issues, including immigration, political news and smartphone addiction. Here are some highlights from his conversation with Fortune executive editor Adam Lashinsky.

On companies taking a stance on public policy and other politically charged issues, including the Trump administrationseparations of migrant families at United States-Mexico border, which Cook recently condemned as &inhumane&:

&Apple is about changing the world. It became clear to me some number of years ago that you don&t do that by staying quiet on things that matter. For us, thatthe driving issue,& he said.

Although there&no formula& dictating what Apple addresses publicly, Cook said the company considers &do we have a standing, do we have a right to talk about this issue& For Apple, he said this means they &typically speak about education, privacy, about human rights, about immigration and the environment.&

When asked by Lashinsky why Apple has standing to speak about immigration and human rights, Cook replied that many immigrants work at Apple, including more than 300 people protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and &several thousand& employees on H1B visas.

&To me, too often in the case of immigration, people quickly get to numbers, but there are real people behind this, who have real feelings and they&re a core part of the United States, so we have significant standing there,& he added.

Cook also claimed that Apple doesn&t address politics directly as a company. &We stick to policy, how people are treated, what is immigration policy. We work with people from both parties or no party. Sometimes one party doesn&t like what we do, or the other one doesn&t, or both don&t.&

On Appleannouncement this week that it will launch human curation in Apple News, starting with coverage of the U.S. mid-term elections. In addition to editors picking stories, the section will also feature articles exclusive to Apple News.

Cook said that &news was kind of going a little crazy& and drew parallels between its approach to Apple News and the App Store, which has had relatively stringent rules about what is allowed since its inception. &Apple has always stood for curation,& he said. &We&ve always believed quality, not quantity, is the most important thing.&

&We felt top stories should be selected by humans, not to be political at all and not to check the views of these, but to make sure you&re not keeping content that just strictly has the goal of enraging people,& he added. &We hope to bring this same kind of view to different subjects over a period of time and will pick from outlets from conservative to liberal to in-between, if there is such a thing anymore.&

On the recent announcement of more parental controls and &digital wellness& features for iOS 12 that are meant to help users manage their screen time.

Despite increasing media coverage about the overuse of devices and potential links to depression and a recent activist shareholder letter calling on Apple to research the impact of smartphones on children, Cook said the companyactions weren&t &in response to a specific point that was made.&

&But I think itbecome clear to all of us that some of us are spending too much time on our devices, and we&ve tried to think through pretty deeply about how we can help that,& he added. &Honestly, we&ve never wanted people to overuse our products. We want people to be empowered from them and do things they couldn&t do otherwise, but if you spend all your time on your phone, then you are spending too much time.&

On how much longer he plans to be CEO of Apple. Cook has been in the position for nearly seven years, taking over in 2011 shortly before the death of Steve Jobs.

&ita privilege to be CEO. Hopefully I&ve got some good time left,& he said.

As part of its Ground X-Vehicle Technologies program, DARPA is showcasing some new defense vehicle tech thatas futuristic as it is practical. One of the innovations, a reconfigurable wheel-track, comes out of Carnegie Mellon UniversityNational Robotics Engineering Center in partnership with DARPA. The wheel-track is just one of a handful of designs meant to improve survivability of combat vehicles beyond just up-armoring them.

As you can see in the video, the reconfigurable wheel-track demonstrates a seamless transition between a round wheel shape and a triangular track in about two seconds and the shift between its two modes can be executed while the vehicle is in motion without cutting speed. Round wheels are optimal for hard terrain while track-style treads allow an armored vehicle to move freely on softer ground.

According to Ground X-Vehicle Program Manager Major Amber Walker, the tech offers &instant improvements to tactical mobility and maneuverability on diverse terrains& — an advantage you can see on display in the GIF below.

While wheel technology doesn&t sound that exciting, the result is visually impressive and smooth enough to prompt a double-take.

The other designs featured in the video are noteworthy as well, with one offering a windowless navigation technology called Virtual Perspectives Augmenting Natural Experiences (V-PANE) that integrates video from an array of mounted LIDAR and video cameras to recreate a realtime model of a windowless vehiclesurroundings. Another windowless cockpit design creates &virtual windows& for a driver, with 3D goggles for depth enhancement, head-tracking and wraparound window display screens displaying data outside the all-terrain vehicle in realtime.