Here’s something to raise your eyebrows. Essential, the company founded in 2015 by disgraced former Google exec Andy Rubin, released images of its Project Gem smartphone on Tuesday—and it basically looks like a phone chopped down the middle. | Continue reading
A new study out Monday is yet more evidence that vaping isn’t the completely safe alternative to smoking it was once thought to be. The researchers claim to have found evidence, in mice, that e-cigarette vapor is capable of causing certain kinds of cancer. But there’s still a lon … | Continue reading
Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin has made and ruined fortunes, helped sell fentanyl and books about cryptocurrency, withstood literally millions of jokes and just as many predictions of imminent collapse, and—through a process opaque to most people, myself included—arrived at … | Continue reading
The “highly radioactive” control room at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor 4 at the center of the facility’s infamous 1986 catastrophe is open for tourists, so long as they wear a protective suit, helmet, and gloves while inside, CNN reported. | Continue reading
A few days after the Wall Street Journal reported that a few corporate supporters of Facebook’s cryptocurrency were considering bowing out of its so-called “crypto mafia”, PayPal became the first to do so Friday, announcing that it will no longer participate in the Libra Associat … | Continue reading
The top court in the European Union has ruled Facebook must delete content globally, not just in Europe, if a European court decides that the content is defamatory. The case was brought by an Austrian politician who said that a Facebook user had defamed and insulted her by writin … | Continue reading
Over the next decade, U.S. banks, which are investing $150 billion in technology annually, will use automation to eliminate 200,000 jobs, thus facilitating “the greatest transfer from labor to capital” in the industry’s history. The call is coming from inside the house this time, … | Continue reading
Microsoft is making a 15-inch Surface Laptop for people who needed more screen and power than the 13.5-inch version, and beyond being bigger, the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 will also offer AMD inside. | Continue reading
During its October Surface event on Wednesday, Microsoft revealed something unexpected (besides the Surface Duo phone): A stylish, thin, repairable laptop. | Continue reading
Scientists have discovered nitrogen- and oxygen- containing organic molecules in ice grains blown out by Saturn’s moon Enceladus, according to a new study. | Continue reading
Two decades ago, a rare but deadly fungal infection began killing animals and people in the U.S. and Canada. To this day, no one has figured out how it arrived there in the first place. Now a pair of scientists have put forth their own theory: Tsunamis, sparked by a massive earth … | Continue reading
There’s been no shortage of official opposition to Facebook and dozens of corporate partners’ plans to launch a cryptocurrency powered global payment network, Libra. A short list of the wary might include the heads of the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, the House an … | Continue reading
Despite what the inventors of the world want you to believe, not everything in your home needs to be intelligent, automated, and motorized—except your garbage cans. The inventor of the SmartCan wants to ensure you’ll never again forget it’s trash day, because these cans automatic … | Continue reading
Building an electric vehicle isn’t as easy as swapping a fuel tank for a battery and a gas-guzzling engine for an electric motor, it requires an extensive redesign of the car as we know it, including planning for new risks when an accident occurs. That’s where Bosch thinks intent … | Continue reading
A serious flaw in Google Keystone, which controls Chrome updates, is capable of doing major damage to macOS file systems on some computers and has been linked to data corruption that struck Hollywood video editors and others on Monday evening, Variety reported. | Continue reading
Not too long ago, we here at Giz Asks contemplated what might happen if the entire internet shut down at once. One imaginative stumbling block, in playing out the implications of that scenario, was how something like that could happen in the first place. And so—without advocating … | Continue reading
Starting next Tuesday, Nevada residents may choose to opt-out of having their personal information resold by online businesses. A privacy bill, signed into law this May, requires website operators to respond to requests from consumers and halt the sale of their personal informati … | Continue reading
Dark mode is everywhere. Apple’s newly released iOS 13? Dark mode. Android 10? Dark mode. Windows 10, macOS Mojave, Chrome, Firefox, Gmail, and Slack—blessed, healing dark mode. It’s the must-have feature for the dim days of 2019, its spread eliciting a collective gasp of ecstasy … | Continue reading
Some of the most distant rocks in our solar system act in a way that suggests there’s some massive object out there we haven’t been able to see. A planet? Maybe. But why not a small black hole? | Continue reading
One of the largest and coolest collections of Soviet computers in the world resides in an apartment complex in Mariupol, Ukraine. Dmitriy Cherepanov started Club 8-bit with a small collection of computers built when the Soviet bloc was crafting its own personal computers. | Continue reading
A serious flaw in Google Keystone, which controls Chrome updates, is capable of doing major damage to macOS file systems on some computers and has been linked to data corruption that struck Hollywood video editors and others on Monday evening, Variety reported. | Continue reading
A California-based security company on Wednesday revealed its researchers had discovered more than 1.7 terabytes of proprietary telecommunications data left publicly online, including hardware specifications for a lawful surveillance device used throughout the Russian Federation. | Continue reading
After debuting just shy of two years ago, Boston Dynamics has finally made its Spot robotic dog available for sale, but don’t expect to find a great Black Friday deal on this bot at Best Buy come Thanksgiving. The company hasn’t made them available to the average consumer just ye … | Continue reading
NASA’s Mars InSight lander has observed mysterious nighttime pulses that can last as long as two hours, according to a conference proceeding. | Continue reading
Electric motors guzzle electricity, which can be especially hard on a rechargeable battery. The power cells used in electric vehicles, like Teslas, have an expected lifespan of around 300,000 to 500,000 miles, but a team of battery researchers believes it has come up with a recip … | Continue reading
Mere days before Microsoft workers are set to walk out of their jobs and publicly call on their employer to reduce carbon emissions and sever its ties with fossil fuel companies, the tech giant has announced a major partnership with two of the biggest corporations in the oil indu … | Continue reading
Two individuals were arrested this week in connection with a fraud scheme that manipulated thousands of victims into paying for invented tech services that they didn’t need. | Continue reading
On Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he was committing the world’s largest online retailer to meeting the terms of what he christened “The Climate Pledge.” Broadly outlined, signing the pledge, which Bezos hopes others will do as well, commits a company to meeting th … | Continue reading
A Google researcher’s paper claiming to have achieved quantum supremacy, a major early milestone in the field of quantum computing, appeared on a NASA website this week before being removed, the Financial Times reports. | Continue reading
A Google researcher’s paper claiming to have achieved quantum supremacy, a major early milestone in the field of quantum computing, appeared on a NASA website this week before being removed, the Financial Times reports. | Continue reading
It turns out WeWork’s dicey wifi problem is exactly as bad as suspected. | Continue reading
A Facebook employee died on Thursday at the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters around 11:30am local time. | Continue reading
Apple’s FaceID authentication system started moving smartphone users away from relying on fingerprints to secure their mobile devices, which are arguably less secure. But researchers think they’ve come up with an even better biometric tool for protecting a device that uses a part … | Continue reading
Just on the heels of finding three cubed numbers that sum to 42, scientists have passed another important milestone by finding three enormous cubes that sum to 3. | Continue reading
A group of indigenous people in Bolivia are famous for their healthy hearts, but a new study shows that they are experiencing higher rates of obesity after the introduction of processed cooking oils to their diet. | Continue reading
блядь! An explosion at Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology (Vector) resulted in a fire, glass blown out throughout the building, and one worker suffering third degree burns on Monday, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Vector is one of the on … | Continue reading
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. Because literally, that’s what they’re doing, they’re rebooting Battlestar Galactica again. | Continue reading
Adapting videos to various screens has been a challenge ever since movies shot for wide theater screens were first broadcast on square TVs. We’ve now got devices like tablets and smartphones added to the mix, so Adobe has created an AI-powered plugin that can automatically prep a … | Continue reading
An experimental trial to reduce the number of mosquitoes in a Brazilian town by releasing genetically modified mosquitoes has not gone as planned. Traces of the mutated insects have been detected in the natural population of mosquitoes, which was never supposed to happen. | Continue reading
Richard Stallman is leader of the free software movement and father of GNU. Naturally, he's in demand as a speaker. And so NATURALLY he has a completely ride-the-orangutan insane tour rider. | Continue reading
The prestigious multidisciplinary MIT Media Lab built a “personal food computer” that worked so poorly that demos had to be faked Theranos-style, per a weekend report in Business Insider. Word of the project’s troubles comes as the Media Lab’s attempts to cover up its extensive f … | Continue reading
Israel was allegedly behind the Stingray spy devices discovered around Washington, D.C. in 2017, according to an explosive new report from Politico, which notes that they were primarily intended to spy on President Donald Trump and his associates. The Israeli government denies th … | Continue reading
Superbolts, the strongest lightning bolts, occur at surprising times and in surprising places, a new study has found. | Continue reading
Star Wars, at its core, is a very silly franchise. A delightfully silly one, more often than not, fascinated with minutiae and over-explanation in few ways other sagas would be. But one of my favorite, most enduring silly facts about it is the galaxy far, far away’s fascination w … | Continue reading
The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up the government’s existing program of demanding people entering the country hand over the details of their presence on social media, CNN reported on Friday. | Continue reading
Next year’s interns at Microsoft have a high bar to beat because 2019's class made a whole damn musical over the summer. | Continue reading
On Tuesday, the automation-focused meme candidate Andrew Yang tweeted, “Fast food may be first.” He was commenting on a new CNBC report that reported annual employee turnover rates of 100 percent at the Panera Bread chain—a figure that is low for the fast food industry, which can … | Continue reading