Latest

This Week’s TV: Find Out What Darth Vader Was Up To Before A New Hope

The season finale of Star Wars Rebels airs tonight, and we get an appearance by none other than Darth Vader. Agents of SHIELD returns and things are looking…Inhuman. Plus, CSI launches a cybercrimes division, and we’ve got the latest clips from 12 Monkeys, Helix, and The Walking Dead. Tonight Gotham (8 PM, Fox) When Fish…

Throwing a Giant Gamepad Pillow When You Lose Is Safer For Your Walls

Even if you’re the most well-mannered human being the rest of the time, your inner raging Hulk probably comes out whenever there’s a video game controller in your hand. And the next time you’re sniped by a cowardly camper, or put that straight Tetris piece in the wrong place, try throwing this soft Gamer Pillow…

Paramount To Turn Scifi Classic The Stars My Destination Into A Movie

Paramount is attempting to nail down the rights to The Stars My Destination, a super intense, space revenge novel that is pretty ripe for the big screen (if done correctly). Deadline is reporting that Paramount is in the process of acquiring the rights to Alfred Bester’s classic scifi novel The Stars My Destination. The story…

How Parisians Did “Guillotine Chic”

The Revolution and the Terror devastated French society, and then receded. In their place they left a weird, chaotic society with a very strange form of chic and an even stranger form of fashionable lady. The French Revolution was kickstarted by food shortages, but political change failed to supply people with bread. Wars against foreign…

Blade Runner 2 Is The Least Necessary Sequel Of All Time

Sir Ridley Scott has made some of the greatest genre movies of all time, but in the last several years, he’s also made some horrible mistakes. But his misfires and missed opportunities pale before the grievous error he’s about to make: creating a sequel to Blade Runner. The original Blade Runner is a science fiction…

This Xiaomi Action Cam Beats a GoPro Hero on Specs and Only Costs $64

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has today launched its first action camera. Aimed squarely at GoPro, it beats the Hero on specs and price—though it’s not yet clear if you’ll be able to buy one in the U.S.. The Yi, as it’s called, features a 16-megapixel camera which can shoot 1080p video at 60 frames per…

A Baby Star Pierces Through Its Blanket Of Interstellar Dust

Behold V1331Cyg, a young star located 1,800 light-years from Earth. This object, which is illuminating the dark cloud around it in spectacular fashion, is in the process of contracting as it becomes a main sequence star similar to the Sun. This strikingly vivid image of a snail-like reflection nebula was recently captured by the Hubble…

This satellite deployment feels like a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey

On March 1 SpaceX’s Falcon 9 deployed two communication satellites to a supersynchronous transfer orbit. This video shows the second one, the EUTELSAT 115 West B. And it feels like a clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey. So cool. According to EUTELSAT’s website it “will provide the Americas with new satellite capacity to reach markets…

What Futuristic Inventions Must We Never, Ever Build?

No one sets out to make a dystopia, but there are some futuristic inventions that seem ripe for unintended consequences. So set aside that killer robot you’ve been putting together in your garage and for goodness sake halt your lab work on that food replacement pill, and tell us about your own personal tech nightmares.…

Google Researchers Are Ranking Web Pages By Facts Not Links

Internet searches may be based on algorithmic rigour—but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee the quality of a suggested page. Now, a team of Google researchers has developed a method that sorts results by factual content rather than how well linked a page is. While Google’s search algorithms are complex, they still use the number of incoming…

How Radiation Nearly Broke Physics

It was the heady days of the early 1900s, and radiation was all the rage. Researchers had just found a kind of radiation called “beta decay,” and they discovered that it did something that seemed to smash one of the basic tenets of physics. Here’s how the lowly neutrino saved the entire field. At the…

Blackphone 2 Is Probably the World’s Most Secure Smartphone

“While the rest of the market is going one way, with selfie sticks and curved screens, we’re going down another, to the heart of problems, sticking with privacy and security,” said Silent Circle’s Mike Janke at the launch of the company’s new secure smartphone, the Blackphone 2. And he’s not kidding — though no frills…

Neill Blomkamp Re-Clarifies How His Alien Movie Would Affect Alien 3

Age of Ultron will reveal the Avengers’ darkest fears. Is Suicide Squad really like The Dark Knight? A closer look at some Jurassic World dinosaurs! The movie of Millar’s Starlight is still happening. Plus, set pictures from Doctor Who, a cleaner look at Jem, and hints for what’s to come on The Walking Dead. Spoilers…

A one-in-a-billion perfectly spherical egg has sold for £480 on eBay. Kim Broughton found the egg from her hen, now called Ping Pong. The money from the auction will go to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. [BBC News]

Qualcomm’s New Fingerprint Recognition Could Be Better Than Touch ID

With the launch of the iPhone 5S, Apple set a high bar for finger print recognition with TouchID. Until now Android phones have failed to compete—but now Qualcomm is launching a fingerprint sensor that could change that. At the Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm has announced a new finger print reader—called Sense ID—that uses ultrasound to…

Lumia 640 And 640 XL Hands-On: Microsoft Does Cheap Real Well

Microsoft has made it pretty clear they are not launching any new flagship phones until Windows 10 for mobile is ready. Instead, they have introducedtwo new Lumia models, Lumia 640 and 640 XL. We got the chance to give them a try here in Barcelona. They excel at what Microsoft does best: affordable phones with…

Google+ Is Being Broken Into ‘Photos’ and ‘Streams’

Google is splitting Google+ up. In a post on Google+ today, Bradley Horowitz, an existing Google VP of product, announced that he’d taken over responsibilities for the service, which will now be split into new services called Photos and Streams. That’s not to say that Google+ is dead yet—at least not officially. But it does…

A Successful SpaceX Launch Arcs Over the Night Sky

SpaceX has successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket to deliver the ABS 3A and EUTELSAT 115 West B satellites, with the ABS 3A delivered 30 minutes after launch and the EUTELSAT 115 West B delivered 35 minutes after launch. Image: SpaceX The mission launched from the Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force…

Lumia 640 and 640 XL: More Budget Microsoft Smartphones

Microsoft hasn’t announced a flagship phone at Mobile World Congress this year—but if you need to keep your bank account in the black then the Lumia 640 and 640 XL are here to help. They aren’t quite the flagship devices some Lumia fans may have been hoping for, but they both stick to Microsoft’s policy…

Lenovo’s New Phones: A 16MP Camera-Lookalike, First Dolby Atmos Handset

At the Mobile World Congress, Lenovo has announced a pair of new phones. The first, the Vibe Shot, is a slim phone that has pretensions to be a camera; the second is the A7000, apparently the world’s first smartphone to come with Dolby Atmos. The Lenovo Vibe Shot, pictured above, looks rather more like a…