You may not know it, but your iPhone—if an iPhone 8 or later—is capable of much faster charging. The only problem is, Apple doesn’t give you the stuff necessary for it. But a new rumor claims that could be changing, and it should. | Continue reading
This week, I read through a history of everything I’ve said to Alexa, and it felt a little bit like reading an old diary. Until I remembered that the things I’ve told Alexa in private are stored on an Amazon server and have possibly been read by an Amazon employee. This is all to … | Continue reading
It’s unclear if there is one mysterious Hamburglar hacker or multiple scammers, but for months, users of the Canadian McDonald’s app, “My McD’s,” have been complaining about someone gaining access to their accounts to fuel their feeding frenzies. | Continue reading
Apple poached Intel’s lead developer for 5G phone modems, Umashankar Thyagarajan, in February—just weeks before it buried the hatchet with rival chip supplier Qualcomm this April, according to a report in the Telegraph on Sunday. | Continue reading
Twenty years ago, in April 1999, Microsoft introduced an update to its IntelliMouse line of input devices. On top it didn’t look much different than its predecessors—it still had a few buttons and a scroll wheel—but underneath it introduced a technology to the masses that brought … | Continue reading
An asteroid slammed down and did away with all the dinosaurs, paving the way for such developments as the human race, capitalism, and posting on the internet: it’s the story we all know and love. Yet if things had shaken out differently—if the asteroid had stayed in its place, an … | Continue reading
On Friday, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the uBiome Inc. offices in San Francisco for what is reportedly an investigation into the biotech startup’s billing practices. | Continue reading
Computer interfaces in the real world are, generally, frustrating, boring, and at best functional. No one has great joy in using Google Chrome, and everyone is always mad at whatever update Twitter is rolling out. But in sci-fi? In science fiction, user interfaces aren’t just use … | Continue reading
New results from the Hubble Space Telescope have deepened one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy. | Continue reading
Elon Musk has reached a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission following a dispute over his bad tweets and what he can—or more specifically, can’t—share on the platform after he was accused of violating the terms of an earlier agreement. It now looks like Musk will (for … | Continue reading
The U.S. is in the middle of the worst outbreak of measles since the disease was naturally eradicated from the county in 2000. But while the majority of victims are children whose parents decided not to vaccinate them or people who have chosen to go unvaccinated, even some people … | Continue reading
San Francisco is ground zero for an unprecedented year of giant tech public offerings: Uber is the $100 billion main event while Lyft, Palantir, Pinterest, Airbnb, Slack, Postmates, Instacart and more promise billions of their own. And all of them could soon find themselves getti … | Continue reading
Cigarette smoking has been on a historic decline in the US. This leaves slightly less profitable tobacco conglomerates with another opportunity to prove yet again that they’re evil and stupid in equal measure. “What’s something all smokers—the people we are slowly making sick and … | Continue reading
Remember a couple of weeks ago when we learned that humans were monitoring Amazon Alexa commands, essentially spying on users in the name of product improvement? Well, we’ve got some more bad news about the always-on microphone that we’ve all invited into our homes. Employees at … | Continue reading
Among the many tidbits of wisdom that Elon Musk dropped at a Tesla company investor event on Monday was the revelation that Lidar, a laser-based scanning technology that images objects in 3D, was “friggin’ stupid,” and that “...anyone relying on LiDAR is doomed.” It seemed a gran … | Continue reading
By capturing brain signals associated with the mechanical aspects of speaking, such as movements of the jaw, lips, and tongue, researchers have created a virtual, computer-based vocal tract capable of intelligible speech. The system could eventually be used by people who have los … | Continue reading
If you think looking for a job is already daunting, anxiety-riddled, and unpleasant, just wait until the algorithms take over the hiring process. When they do, a newfangled “digital recruiter” like VCV, which just received $1.7 million in early investment, hopes it will look some … | Continue reading
A detector designed to hunt for dark matter has made a particle physics observation that will hopefully help physicists establish important truths about our Universe. No, it didn’t spot dark matter, but the new result proves that these ultra-sensitive detectors are valuable to sc … | Continue reading
Thieves have stolen an astonishing number of Car2Go vehicles in the city of Chicago, Motherboard reported on Wednesday, with up to 100 cars reported missing. According to the Verge, the Chicago Police Department said in a statement that 16 people have been detained for questionin … | Continue reading
Federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against drug distributor Rochester Drug Cooperative (RDC) and two of its former executives, operations manager William Pietruszewski and CEO Laurence F. Doud III, in what the Washington Post reported is the first time the feds have … | Continue reading
On Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke at a company investor day focused on autonomy, relaying news that Tesla had switched to a self-driving computer designed by in-house engineers and dropping some big promises about what, exactly, the future of its Autopilot feature and autonomo … | Continue reading
The man who crafted the languages of Essos for HBO’s Game of Thrones is heading to Arrakis. Dothraki and Valyrian language builder David J. Peterson is doing language work for Denis Villeneuve’s highly-anticipated Dune. Now, how do you say “the spice must flow” in High Valyrian? | Continue reading
This spring, an 80-year-old Japanese chalk company went out of business. Nobody, perhaps, was as sad to see the company go as mathematicians who had become obsessed with Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk, the so-called “Rolls Royce of chalk.” | Continue reading
Samsung is reported to have delayed launch events for its troubled, roughly $2,000 Galaxy Fold phone in Hong Kong and Shanghai, based on reporting by SamMobile and Engadget Chinese editor-in-chief Richard Lai. | Continue reading
When a promotional video for German camera maker Leica hit the web this week, it looked like a bold statement about the hard work done by photojournalists around the world. But the company is now distancing itself from the 5-minute video after Chinese social media users cried fou … | Continue reading
Always tuned-in to the true nature and potential of technology, the influential film director Werner Herzog supports cinephiles who want to pirate his films. | Continue reading
It’s an unsettling glimpse into the inevitable future of warfare where battles are indistinguishable from video games, but watching a pair of robots duke it out is always entertaining. If your aspirations of one day rolling your competitor into the BattleBots arena have been thwa … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Facebook admitted that it was asking some users who signed up on desktop while using email addresses not supporting the OAuth open standard to give them the passwords to their email accounts—with options to avoid doing so hidden in a “Need Help?” sub-menu. Now … | Continue reading
The farther you get from the equator, the less effective solar panels become at reliably generating power all year round. And it’s not just the shorter spans of sunlight during the winter months that are a problem; even a light dusting of snow can render solar panels ineffective. … | Continue reading
Researchers from Yale have developed a system capable of restoring some functionality to the brains of decapitated pigs for at least 10 hours after death. The achievement has tremendous scientific potential, but it raises some serious ethical and philosophical concerns. | Continue reading
How were giant ancient structures like Stonehenge, or the towering Moai heads on Easter Island, assembled at a time when cranes and trucks were still hundreds of years away? Researchers at MIT have given more credence to theories that ancient engineers were masters of balance and … | Continue reading
Zack Geballe spent months screwing together pairs of polished diamonds at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Geophysical Laboratory. Theory predicted that squeezed between the diamonds’ tips could be one of the most miraculous substances of modern physics—a material that, at … | Continue reading
When it comes to their stuff, people often have a hard time letting go. When the object of their obsession are rooms full of old clothes or newspapers, it can be unhealthy—even dangerous. But what about a stash that fits on 10 5-inch hard drives? | Continue reading
The Federal Aviation Administration has released a draft report about its initial review of the Boeing 737 Max software update, following two recent plane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people and led to the grounding of more than 300 of the jets around the wor … | Continue reading
Scientists have found a cometary building block in an unexpected place: deep inside a meteorite, according to a new paper. | Continue reading
Twitter is home to some of the vilest neo-Nazis, racists, and homophobes on the planet. But don’t even think about discussing the one topic that’s apparently taboo on the platform: Piracy of TV shows. | Continue reading
Twitter is home to some of the vilest neo-Nazis, racists, and homophobes on the planet. But don’t even think about discussing the one topic that’s apparently taboo on the platform: Piracy of TV shows. | Continue reading
Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp experienced widespread outages on Sunday for the second time in the past month (and the third time this year), with issues reported starting at around 6:30 a.m. ET and extending until around 9:00 a.m. ET. | Continue reading
We live in the glorious future that technophiles have long dreamed of. Almost everything can now connect to the internet: cameras, coffee pots, televisions, vacuums, toilets, children’s toys, sex toys. If you build it, a wireless connection will come for it. These smart devices a … | Continue reading
Police in Ecuador have arrested Swedish programmer and digital privacy activist Ola Bini for allegedly trying to destabilize the Ecuadorian government by “collaborating” with WikiLeaks. Bini was arrested at Quito Airport in Ecuador on his way to Japan. | Continue reading
The U.S. Department of Defense under Patrick M. Shanahan has quietly pulled funding for an independent organization called the Jason Group under the Pentagon’s latest budget proposal. And it’s just one more way that the Trump regime is chipping away at independent scientific voic … | Continue reading
Senators Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) have introduced legislation to ban so-called “dark patterns” tactics designed to trick users into handing over access to their data, Reuters reported on Tuesday. | Continue reading
Regulators in China are considering a ban on cryptocurrency mining as an “undesirable” economic activity, according to a government document released Monday. | Continue reading
The two tragic crashes of Boeing’s best-selling 737 Max planes increasingly look to be caused in part by a malfunctioning automated system—and the pilots’ lack of training around how to deal with it—that was designed to keep the aircraft from stalling out. The final reports aren’ … | Continue reading
In 2014, Amazon announced that it would power its rapidly expanding fleet of data centers with 100 percent renewable energy. Apple, Facebook, and Google made similar pledges two years before that, and pressure from consumers and environmental groups drove Amazon to follow suit. F … | Continue reading
In an epic road trip spanning more than three years, 33 countries, and roughly 59,000 miles, Dutchman Weibe Wakker set what is believed to be the record for the ‘world’s longest trip’ by an electric car, yesterday. | Continue reading
Elon Musk is, if nothing else, an innovator. He finds new ways to recover rockets from space; new useless holes to drill into the earth; new reasons to get fined by the SEC, and according to a report by Bloomberg, new ways of threatening his subordinates. Mostly you could say he’ … | Continue reading
A popular DNA-testing company seems to be targeting true crime fans with a new pitch to let them share their genetic information with law enforcement so cops can catch violent criminals. | Continue reading