Virtuoso Go-playing AI AlphaGo has secured victory against 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol by winning the third straight game of a five-game match in Seoul. AlphaGo is now 3-0 up in the series, but there's no mercy rule here — the remaining games on Sunday and Tuesday will stil … | Continue reading
Seemingly out of nowhere, a new service called Screening Room could soon let consumers watch new movies the same day they hit theaters — for a hefty price. On Wednesday, Variety reported that movie studios and the Sean Parker-backed startup have been in negotiations to help make … | Continue reading
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will retire from the space agency on April 1st — less than a month after he returned from nearly a year in space, NASA confirmed today. Kelly just spent 340 days aboard the International Space Station for NASA's One-Year Mission, an experiment to see ho … | Continue reading
This past week, the Go-playing world was rocked by DeepMind AlphaGo's unexpected victory over legendary champion Lee Se-dol. Sure, supercomputers have beaten chessmasters at their own game before, but due to the extremely complex nature of the 5000-year old game of Go, this was a … | Continue reading
Welcome back to The Verge’s weekly musical roundup. I’m Jamieson, I’m still your host, and I’ll confess that I wrote up this week’s entries while dreaming of the barbecued meats and warm temperatures I’m going to enjoy at SXSW next week. This’ll be my first year at Austin’s music … | Continue reading
It used to be that you'd buy an atlas of the world to hang on your wall, but now you're better off with a map of space exploration. This poster from Pop Chart Lab follows the rough path of every "orbiter, lander, rover, flyby, and impactor to ever slip the surly bonds of Earth’s … | Continue reading
Google wants to get a better idea of how people use its products, so it's put a few researchers inside a van and sent them off to drive around the US to find out. According to the Associated Press, Google's van will stop in a handful of cities throughout March and April, inviting … | Continue reading
President Barack Obama called on the tech community to build a safe encryption key to assist in law enforcement investigations, saying that if it failed, it could one day face a more draconian solution passed by a Congress that is less sympathetic to its worldview. The president … | Continue reading
The federal government has given preliminary approval for a trial to deploy genetically altered mosquitoes in the US as a possible method of fighting the Zika virus. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said today that such a field trial would have no significant impact on anim … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, Google made history when its DeepMind-designed AI beat Go world champion Lee Se-dol — not just once but twice. Still not sure what Go is and why Google built an artificial intelligence program to beat it? Don't worry, we've got you covered. Continue readin … | Continue reading
This week on Verge ESP: Emily chats with food critic Jonathan Gold about the forthcoming documentary City of Gold, a movie about his approach to LA's food. In fact, we discuss a glut of movies this week, including the genre-benders The Witch, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Midnight Spe … | Continue reading
President Barack Obama is kicking off the first day of the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, with a talk expected to focus on the role that technology should play in civic life. The president is making his first appearance at the festival, and will use the occasion to ca … | Continue reading
The CW announced this afternoon that it's ordering new seasons of every scripted show it's currently airing, meaning the network is bringing back almost a dozen shows between this fall and summer 2017. It's a massive show of faith in the network's current lineup, one that's unpre … | Continue reading
Today marks launch day for Samsung's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones, and the company has just released a new ad featuring Lil Wayne in celebration. In the spot, Wayne douses his S7 Edge with a bottle of champagne. "I could pour this champagne on my phone and it still work," he … | Continue reading
SXSW is often more of a marketing free-for-all than an actual conference or festival, so if you're a company that's trying to promote the upcoming Blu-ray release of one of the biggest movies of all time, what do you do? You bring a life-sized TIE Fighter to Austin, Texas, of cou … | Continue reading
A new study of Twitter activity during Hurricane Sandy describes a correlation between activity on the service around the time of the storm in 2012 and actual damage. In the study, published in Science Advances, the authors suggest social media could eventually be used to assess … | Continue reading
The federal government is operating in high gear trying to get out ahead of the self-driving car movement, which is probably good considering the existing laws and regulations are totally unprepared for what the future may bring, according to a draft report commissioned by the US … | Continue reading
Cheap phones are increasingly starting to feel way more premium than their prices would lead you to expect. We saw this with Huawei's Honor 5X at CES in January, and just this week I got my hands on Xiaomi's Redmi Note 3, another phone that's setting the bar for the level of desi … | Continue reading
Games studio Daybreak Game Company has canceled EverQuest Next, an upcoming free-to-play MMO that was supposed to be a successor to numerous EverQuest titles. In a statement posted on the studio's website, Daybreak Game Company's president, Russell Shanks, said the title just sim … | Continue reading
Last night when I put my baby to bed, I closed the door, walked downstairs and made sure that the "parent" end of my audio monitor was turned on. My eight-month-old son wasn’t wearing a booty that monitored his oxygen levels or a onesie that measured his sleep patterns. He didn’t … | Continue reading
Blizzard's addictive digital card game is getting bigger, once again. Today the developer announced the next major expansion for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, dubbed "Whispers of the Old Gods." It will introduce cards and characters from a dark, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired part of … | Continue reading
A customer who tried to import his Tesla Model S to Singapore was surprised when the idiosyncratic city-state slapped him with a tax of around $11,000, rather than a tax rebate of around the same amount. The reason was even more surprising: because it polluted too much.Singapore … | Continue reading
Three weeks ago, Donald Trump announced an impromptu boycott of Apple products "until such time as Apple gives cellphone info to authorities regarding radical Islamic terrorist couple from Cal." A staunch supporter of the FBI's demands, Trump said he owns both Samsung and Apple p … | Continue reading
Even the most sought-after gadgets have a short shelf life, often finding themselves second rate, or fodder for landfills, in a few years due to the rapid pace of technological change. A new startup, Nascent Objects, believes there’s a better way; creating an ecosystem of electro … | Continue reading
Say hello to Brian, full name Dolomedes briangreenei, the most recently discovered spider in Australia. (Although considering it's Australia, it's probably only the 10th most recently discovered spider now). According to a report from Mashable Australia, Brian was revealed at the … | Continue reading
Microsoft's OneNote app has been cross-platform for some time now, but one of the big barriers of moving from a service like Evernote has been the lack of full support for importing existing notes. Microsoft is releasing a OneNote importer tool today that's specifically designed … | Continue reading
Ford is spinning off some of its most interesting work into a wholly owned subsidiary that the company says "will be designed to compete like a startup." The subsidiary, called Ford Smart Mobility LLC, will be led by current Ford board member Jim Hackett, who is stepping down fro … | Continue reading
We've been hearing about a sequel to classic horror-comedy Beetlejuice for years, but director Tim Burton has now gone on the record and confirmed everything. It's. Really. Happening. Speaking to ShowbizSpy, Burton said: "The film is a go and has been approved by the Warner Bros. … | Continue reading
It's apparently impossible to go an entire week without a strange but powerful new integration being added to Amazon's Alexa. This week: Capital One. Its customers can now check their bank account and credit card balances just by asking Alexa. They'll also be able to have Alexa r … | Continue reading
Diablo II — the dark action RPG first released in 2000, which saw a sequel in 2012 — has just received an official patch from developer Blizzard. "It's been a long time coming," the company says. The game received its last official patch nearly five years ago, and the latest — ve … | Continue reading
A nationwide study has found that using incompatible kidneys in transplants is better than doing no transplant at all. Patients waiting for kidney transplants often never find a donor because they're told their bodies will reject organs that don't match their immune system. Inste … | Continue reading
SXSW kicks off today, which means there's soon going to be another crop of cool movies that everyone's buzzing about but most of us have to wait months and months to see. I finally caught up on Dope, one of the hits at Sundance last year, since it recently came on Netflix, and it … | Continue reading
General Motors just announced that it is acquiring Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based autonomous driving startup founded in 2013. Cruise's West Coast office will remain open, GM says, serving as an R&D facility for self-driving technology while working in concert with engin … | Continue reading
About a quarter of a million people are injured in US bathrooms every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but as I'm drowning a man in an ornate Parisian toilet I'm thinking I might have a tough time playing this off as an accident. Even trickier to … | Continue reading
"Idek" is a fairly simple acronym. Among English speakers, it's overwhelmingly used to mean "I don't even know," as a Google search will indicate. But it turns out that putting that same phrase in the text field of a Venmo transaction is a surefire way to get yourself in trouble. … | Continue reading
Remember how Apple laughed off the giant 5-inch phone trend of 2010? “No one’s going to buy that,” said Steve Jobs at the time, “you can’t get your hand around it.” Well, a year later and Samsung would release the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note and forever cement “phablet” into our gadget … | Continue reading
Ai Weiwei, Edward Snowden, and Pussy Riot have partnered with AdBlock and Amnesty International on an online campaign to protest censorship. The campaign will launch at 4PM ET today and will only be visible to AdBlock users, with messages from the activists displayed where advert … | Continue reading
Wikipedia this week announced that it is developing a crowdsourced speech engine in an effort to make its website more accessible to the visually impaired. The online encyclopedia has partnered with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden to develop the "speech synthesis … | Continue reading
Apple's MacBook is a paragon of design, thin, sleek, and convenient — everything its power adapter isn't. The plug that ships with Apple's laptop in North America is awkward when not used with a power bar, a rounded white cube that juts out several inches from any wall it's inser … | Continue reading
As Apple and the FBI head to another hearing on the San Bernardino iPhone case, both sides are growing more aggressive — and the exchange is quickly turning negative. Hours ago, federal prosecutors filed a motion that said "Apple’s rhetoric is not only false, but also corrosive o … | Continue reading
Uber has an emergency phone number for passengers and drivers to get in touch with a human employee at the ride-hail company, according to a report in Inc. Thursday. The number, which has been operational since October, is only available in 22 cities and is only intended for non- … | Continue reading
Last week, my friend and colleague Ben Kuchera posted a video on Polygon about the hidden danger of virtual reality: leaning on a fake desk and falling on your tookus. I admit, I still giggle at the image of a grown man wearing an expensive virtual reality headset, tethered to a … | Continue reading
Split-screen multitasking is one of the biggest new features in the Android N developer preview Google released yesterday, and we're still finding new ways to use it. One bit of functionality that Google added (at least in a very rudimentary form) is the ability to drag and drop … | Continue reading
The first footage from Laika Studios’ new stop-motion feature Kubo and the Two Strings started emerging out in 2015, and it was exciting stuff. The studio behind Coraline, ParaNorman, and The BoxTrolls has always been an ambitious innovator in the stop-motion field, but Kubo look … | Continue reading
A new filing from the government has struck back at one of the central claims in Apple's San Bernardino defense. One of the most controversial aspects of the case has been FBI handling of Syed Farook's phone in the days after the shooting, particularly the decision to reset the p … | Continue reading
By all accounts, the Patriot Hot Wheels Computer was a poorly executed idea. Released alongside the virtually identical Barbie Computer (the two were respectively "Designed specially for Boys [sic]" and "Designed specially for Girls") in the fall of 1999, it sold for $599 and cam … | Continue reading
Every year, Jeep enthusiasts gather in Moab, Utah for Easter Jeep Safari, a weeklong celebration of the iconic SUV, off-roading, and the gorgeous Utah desert. This year is the 50th edition of the event, and Jeep — the company — is bringing along some special concept Jeeps to show … | Continue reading
Today, prosecutors filed a new motion seeking to compel Apple to break security measures on an iPhone used in the San Bernardino attacks. "The government and the community need to know what is on the terrorist’s phone, and the government needs Apple’s assistance to find out," the … | Continue reading