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If you’re planning to buy one of the new iPhones Apple just announced, you should know something by now: It will have a notch. It’s tough to swallow, I know, but when Apple based all its new phones on the iPhone X, it was always going to show up and take a squircle-shaped bite out…
The House of Representatives passed the National Quantum Initiative Act yesterday. When signed into law, the bill will outline a 10-year plan to push forward applications using the counterintuitive science of subatomic particles. The House bill, sponsored by congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), serves to “ensure the continued leadership of the United States” in this technology—as…
A quiet debate has been brewing in the coding community for years that’s forced programmers to ask if using the terms “master” and “slave” are insensitive. Now, Python, one of the most popular high-level programming languages in the world, has ditched the terminology—and not everyone is happy about it. Master/Slave is generally used in hardware,…
While Uber spent the summer making drastic cuts to its self-driving vehicle operations—firing 100 drivers in Pittsburgh, then winding down its autonomous trucking division—upstarts have been happy to pick up the slack. Case in point: Udelv, which announced today a fleet of 10 self-driving delivery vans deploying in Oklahoma City. The San Fransisco-based startup, which…
The U.S. State Department’s budget has been slashed drastically under President Trump. But that hasn’t stopped some high-level people in government from living the high life. According to a new report, the State Department spent a whopping $52,701 on curtains for Nikki Haley’s Manhattan apartment last year. Why are these curtains so expensive? The New…
Look, I’m not going to say OnePlus is being greedy by axing the headphone jack on the upcoming OnePlus 6T. OnePlus is a company, and companies need to make money, or else they go away. But to say that the reason behind switching to wireless audio on the OP6T was largely down to “waiting for…
Like AOL Kids before it, the YouTube Kids app never really seemed to live up to its kid-friendly potential. Since it came out in 2015 to make browsing online videos “safer and simpler for kids,” the service has gotten a good bit of shit for both its ads and all the weird stuff its algorithms…
On Wednesday, a man went viral after posting his dispute with Apple over three movies that he’d previously purchased that suddenly disappeared from his iTunes library. Many people took it as an opportunity to remember that ownership is dead and we’re all just renting. It’s also an opportunity to remember that’s not exactly the case.…
We tend to think of plants as helpless, passive green blobs, but a fascinating new study, in which scientists used fluorescent light to visualize alarm signals within plants, shows how our photosynthesizing friends are able to mobilize their defenses. New research published today in Science is providing an unprecedented view of the signaling action that…
Facebook is expanding the scope of its fact-checking partnerships to include photo and video posts in 17 countries, ramping up its effort to hinder election meddling as the U.S. midterms approach. The company first opened up in March about fact checking photos and videos as a part of a broader plan to fight election interference…
Jeff Bezos, who is both famously uncharitable and the wealthiest man in modern history, announced today via a tweet that he’d be allocating $2 billion—a little over 1 percent of his net worth—to housing and educating underserved communities. So, where’s the catch? The $2 billion is, as best we can tell, to be divided between…
Yesterday, Apple treated the world to a trio of shiny new iPhones, and while it’s nice to see Apple lean into the big screen trend with the iPhone Xs Max and provide an (almost) bezel-less phone with Face ID that’s actually kind of affordable in the iPhone XR, something big things were happening behind the…
The iPhone Xs will be available for preorder in just a few short hours on September 14th. While we haven’t had the chance to actually review the thing yet, we’re pretty sure a lot of people have already made up their minds that it’s time for a new phone. This week’s big iPhone event confirmed…
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled this week that the United Kingdom government’s surveillance regime violated human rights laws. The matter first came to light in 2013 when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed British surveillance practices—namely that the government intercepts social media, messages, and phone calls regardless of criminal record or suspicions of…
Nvidia recently announced new high-end graphics cards with an RTX designation attached to the model numbers—that RTX indicates the card’s enhanced ray tracing abilities, which could bring a whole new level of realism to games. Here’s what you need to know about ray tracing and how it’s going to feature on the graphics cards of…
Spotify has finally addressed what is, for many users, the biggest problem with its service. On Wednesday, it lifted the number of songs that users are allowed to download for offline listening. Last night something weird happened to me. I was sleepily listening to music, and adding some albums to my Spotify library, when I…
Two Russian men identified by British police as the perpetrators of a nerve agent attack on British soil insist that they’re innocent. They’ve been accused of acting as Russian intelligence agents and attacking a former double agent in Salisbury, but the two men say that they’re just regular businessmen who work in sports nutrition. They…
The Republican Party, and conservatives more generally, are upping their attacks on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google over unfounded claims of bias. To date, that’s included cooking up doctored evidence Google blacklisted Donald Trump’s speeches, a string of Trump tweets about fictitious censorship and non-existent “shadow bans,” xenophobic paranoia about Latino voter turnout efforts, and…
The U.S. government wants to deploy MQ-9 Reaper drones to the border with Mexico as part of the Donald Trump administration’s ongoing and completely unnecessary militarization of the region, TYT Network reported on Wednesday. Yes, those Reaper drones, the remotely piloted aircraft best known for their role in the U.S.’ ongoing, devastating bombing and “targeted…
This is how it happens when extraterrestrials make contact with Earth. It starts with a newspaper report about suspicious activity at a space research facility—government agents and military vehicles. The local sheriff gets angry and confused. Then the TV news reports feature interviews with locals saying things like, “Nothing really happens here very much. And…
