On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden announced his administration’s transition team, including the list of agency review team members that will help his White House “hit the ground running on Day One.” It also, by all indications, includes a deeper bench of big tech figures than … | Continue reading
Another day, another blow to beleaguered theater chains. | Continue reading
NASA’s Voyager spacecraft may be billions of miles away and over 40 years old, but they’re still making significant discoveries. | Continue reading
French and English share the same 26-character alphabet, but additional accents, symbols, and punctuation make it challenging for Francophones to use keyboard layouts designed for English speakers. The solution so far has just been to learn to adapt, but researchers led by Aalto … | Continue reading
Alan Dean Foster, who ghostwrote the first novelization of the original Star Wars and kickstarted the Expanded Universe with "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" has accused Disney of reneging on contracts by refusing to pay him royalties. | Continue reading
The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination. The notion of a supreme pack leader who fought his way to dominance and reigns superior to the other wolves in his pack informs both our fiction and is how many people understand wolf behavior. But the alpha wolf doe … | Continue reading
The Detroit, Michigan-based animation studio Hobbes teamed up with Firefly Drone Shows to produce the latest music video from VWLS, “High in Heaven,” which is performed and shot entirely by a fleet of 200 remote-controlled flying devices. | Continue reading
The company's newest feature is facing heavy criticism for allowing bosses to track how their employees use Microsoft's suite of tools, such as how frequently they send emails, collaborate in shared documents, or have their camera on during virtual meetings. | Continue reading
Keyhole wasps like to build their nests in tiny holes, including the openings of devices used to measure airspeed. A recent investigation shows the problem is worse than we realized. | Continue reading
Have you heard of Amazon Sidewalk? Probably not. But there is a good chance that you or someone you know has an Amazon Echo or Ring camera. And if you own one of those devices and live in the U.S. (or know someone who does), you need to tell them to opt-out of the service as soon … | Continue reading
When you’re a journalist or club promoter or financier, fraud is always a gamble—you might be publicly disgraced and have your venal misdeeds replayed over and over in Netflix documentaries and prestige podcasts, but you might also get away with it. When you’re a scientist—workin … | Continue reading
At $250 you’ve really got to be dedicated to the idea of minimalist computing to really get behind the product, but as a dedicated coding, writing, or sysadmin computer it could be very cool. | Continue reading
The B-side of Chris Sievey's 1983 single "Camouflage" sounds like an unlistenable malestrom of noise. It's not an avant-garde song; it's a program for the ZX-81 computer, and if you could load it correctly, it gave you a (very rudimentary) computer-animated … | Continue reading
The iPhone 12 Mini coulda been a contender, but a tiny battery does more harm than good. | Continue reading
In case you want to wear Alexa on your face. | Continue reading
Asked by Prosecutor Håkan Roswall about when was the the first time he met someone IRL (In Real Life), Pirate Bay co-founder's Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi said he didn't like IRL but AFK (Away From Keyboard) because he "thinks the Internet's real." | Continue reading
Even after being demoed multiple times, the rollable Oppo X 2021 concept phone seems so advanced that it's still hard to believe it's real. | Continue reading
This is it—the largest Lego set ever. Figures not included. | Continue reading
I am going to answer this one right here in the intro: no, you can’t. In 2020, it is hard to just to go to the grocery store without inadvertently surrendering 40 or 50 highly personal data-points on the walk over. Go ahead, delete your Facebook—it makes no difference. It wouldn’ … | Continue reading
MIT researchers have developed an AI that uses neural networks to determine if you have covid-19, even if you aren't exhibiting any symptoms. It's all in the cough, which has subtle differences among covid-19 patients that aren't discernible to the human ear. | Continue reading
Need to send a message to a friend 50 miles away? Today, you’ve got plenty of options—whether it’s SMS, email, tweet, Facebook message, Zoom video chat, or the old-fashioned telephone. But back in the 1930s, the choices were much more limited. You could use the phone or write a l … | Continue reading
The Megaphone acquisition clarifies how to think about Spotify overall: It’s quickly becoming an advertising behemoth—less the Netflix of audio and much more akin to Facebook or Google for your ears. | Continue reading
After receiving 85 reports of doorbells catching fire, Ring has issued a recall of some second-generation Ring doorbells (the one with the blue ring) for igniting and causing "minor property damage." | Continue reading
A ritual I have become accustomed to at the end of a long day is collapsing on the couch, booting up my Apple TV, and launching my various streaming services one after the other looking for something to watch. It’s much like opening the fridge when you know there’s nothing new in … | Continue reading
Good news for WhatsApp users who might want to keep their chat history a bit less permanent: the company announced a new “disappearing messages feature,” which will start rolling out to its more than one billion iOS and Android customers worldwide starting today. | Continue reading
A pro-Trump Facebook group urged its members to “be a presence” at a Detroit ballot-counting site. | Continue reading
On Monday, Spotify announced a new initiative that offers artists the chance to pay their way into automated recommendations. | Continue reading
Ahead of the launch of the new Xbox and Playstation Nvidia finally shows off its next generation of graphics cards, the Radeon 6000 series, and they seem incredible. | Continue reading
Police across the United States are scrambling to secure funding for new cellphone-tracking equipment after the maker of the controversial “Stingray” device quietly announced last year it would no longer sell equipment directly to local law enforcement. | Continue reading
Master Replicas Group, the company behind a working reproduction of HAL-9000, has declared bankruptcy. Which means HAL probably won't ship any time soon. | Continue reading
Police across the United States are scrambling to secure funding for new cellphone-tracking equipment after the maker of the controversial “Stingray” device quietly announced last year it would no longer sell equipment directly to local law enforcement. | Continue reading
In 1965 Texas Instruments set out to build a device to showcase its new integrated circuits, and the first handheld calculator was created. Now one of a handful of prototypes is up for auction. | Continue reading
Astronomers have catalogued more than 3,000 exoplanets using a fairly basic detection technique known as the transit method. What if aliens are using the same technique to spy on us? | Continue reading
Amazon is being hit with a class-action suit alleging that the tech giant’s severs are storing biometric voice data from countless callers, in contravention of an Illinois privacy law. | Continue reading
Impossible is trying to do for cow's milk what it did for beef. | Continue reading
An oversized depiction of a cat has been discovered on a hill at the famous Nazca Lines site in Peru. The artwork dates back some 2,000 years and measures over 120 feet across. | Continue reading
With CEO Mark Zuckerberg's blessing, Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of left-leaning news sites in an attempt to dispel claims that the platform had an anti-conservative bias. | Continue reading
New research from the Center for Democracy and Technology aims to help security researchers decide what level of risk is acceptable for them and their work. | Continue reading
Bytebase, a new app by two Columbia University software engineers, promises to let you store your snippets, thoughts, and notes in a way that is instantly searchable and automatically organized. | Continue reading
After years of customer complaints, Apple is finally releasing a genuinely small iPhone again, and without major sacrifices on features. | Continue reading
Cruise ships reportedly can cost anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion to build and typically have a lifespan of 40 years. Due to the pandemic, the cruise industry has come to a screeching halt, and the ships are being sold for scraps. | Continue reading
Cows are quite possibly the most important domesticated animal in human history, providing vast quantities of meat, dairy products, leather, and let's not forget manure for fertilizer. And yet DNA analysis reveals ancient humans almost didn't succeed in domesticating cows … | Continue reading
Scientists say this one weird trick will make a cat like you, or at least not be so repulsed by you. | Continue reading
The internet is broken and the ISPs bear a big brunt of the blame. But don’t worry, Cory Doctorow has a great plan to fix the problem. This is System Reboot. | Continue reading
If, for whatever reason, you’re debating whether to get a “smart” male chastity device, perhaps reconsider. What can be connected to the internet can be hacked—and that includes dick prisons and other teledildonic gadgets. | Continue reading
These are, absolutely, very bleak times, but in a sense we should cherish them: we’re living through maybe the last stretch of history before employers start mandating microchips en masse. You’re going to miss living in fear of contracting a deadly virus, once HR brings out the s … | Continue reading
Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is th … | Continue reading
Apple’s new iOS 14 has brought iPhone users a trove of wonders. But one cannot have wonders without some bugs. So if you recently noticed that your iPhone seems to suffer massive battery drain after upgrading to iOS 14, we want you to know it’s not just you. And rest assured, the … | Continue reading