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
Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft has completed yet another intense mission: It used an explosive to blast a crater in the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. This success comes after the probe briefly touched down on the asteroid in February, firing a tantalum bullet into the surface in h … | Continue reading
Back in 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it would vastly expand the number of top-level domains, allowing hundreds of new ones to flourish. You can now buy domains for .mango, .luxury, and .republican if you’re so inclined. But … | Continue reading
Like many people, I don’t use Facebook a lot these days, but when I idly visited the world’s largest digital nation-state this afternoon, I had an odd realization: Wow, it looks like ass. | Continue reading
Boy that big gorgeous Sony TV you spent a paycheck on is nice, too bad Google has implemented a “pilot” program that now serves ads on it. Sony’s televisions, as well as the Nvidia Shield and other products running the latest version of Android TV, has been hit with an irritating … | Continue reading
An internal Microsoft email chain, first reported by Quartz, reportedly details a litany of egregious acts of sexual harassment and discrimination experienced by women at the company. The chain received hundreds of responses since it began on March 20, according to Wired, prompt … | Continue reading
In the extreme world of bacteria, stunts such as living in hot springs or without oxygen are, like, totally unimpressive. But then there are bacteria that live off electricity, feeding directly on naked electrons. Even more surprisingly, scientists are finding that these bacteria … | Continue reading
Several years ago, scientists calculated the properties of an exotic form of carbon—called Carbyne—and found that it promised more strength and stiffness than any other known material. Now, it’s finally been made in a stable form inside an Austrian lab. | Continue reading
In order for Alexa to answer sensitive healthcare questions, it needs to be compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). And, as of Thursday, Amazon says its voice assistant is offering services that are. In a blog post today, the company annou … | Continue reading
If you’re a freelance journalist who covers science, technology, internet culture, and/or the future, we want your stories! Yes, we pay in actual money! Here’s how to send us your ideas. | Continue reading
Big companies like to get bigger, and for many big tech companies these days, the clearest path to growth is increasing how much money generates with content services. That’s why Apple launched a whole slew of them last week, and why Google announced a video game platform the wee … | Continue reading
Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, jumped to a four-month high overnight, briefly breaching $5,000 on the Bitstamp exchange. Bitcoin is up roughly 15% on the day and traders are excited because it really seems like nobody learned their lesson during the last c … | Continue reading
Researchers at the cybersecurity firm UpGuard on Wednesday said they had discovered the existence of two datasets together containing the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users. Both were left publicly accessible. | Continue reading
Microsoft has called for the tech industry to set a uniform approach to violent, extremist content following the sickening massacre of Muslims attending mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand by a white supremacist earlier this month. At least 50 people were brutally murdered, score … | Continue reading
The founder and CEO of NSO Group, the notorious Israeli hacking company with customers around the world, appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday night to defend the use of his company’s tools in hacking and spying on lawyers, journalists, and minors when the company’s customers deter … | Continue reading
In recent weeks Uber drivers in the greater Los Angeles area opened their apps to find the ridesharing company had enacted an approximately 25 percent reduction in their per-mile earnings to just 60 cents, a mere two cents above the IRS’s deductible standards. As a result, Driver … | Continue reading
While not admitting to doing anything wrong, the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday settled a lawsuit for tens of thousands of dollars after unlawfully withholding records from a reporter under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). | Continue reading
Scientists have announced the observation of “CP violation in a D0 meson” at CERN, a discovery that will appear in physics textbooks for years to come. You’re probably wondering what exactly it means. | Continue reading
Guy Rosen is Facebook’s vice president of Product Management. But when the company published an update about the Christchurch massacre in the middle of the night on Wednesday, Rosen got a shiny new title: VP of Integrity. That is, until a journalist called Facebook out on the swi … | Continue reading