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After a mind-numbing election cycle and a distressing car accident, I dramatically deleted Twitter from my phone early last year, giving my brain a break from the creeping sense of exhaustion that was building up over the holidays. And when I finally did it, a fellow Twitter user offered a prescient, super obvious warning: “Make…
After a precipitous crash, cryptocurrency enthusiasts have been heartened to see a steady climb in the value of frontrunner coins since yesterday afternoon. What’s driving the rebound in an increasingly harsh regulatory climate might be a so-called “stablecoin” widely suspected to be fraudulent. In early December, the Commodities Future Trading Commission sent out subpoenas to…
Companies like Sony and Nvidia have tried to make game streaming a thing for years, so gamers can skip the download process entirely and instead stream games from the cloud. But only recently has the tech been good enough to make it feasible. Sony has PS Now, which can stream games over the internet to…
In June, dental students and a University of Connecticut orthodontics professor took a selfie with severed cadaver heads during a medical training workshop at Yale which, according to the Associated Press, “focused on dental-related facial deformities.” The wire broke the story on Monday but declined to publish the photo because the person who took it…
Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski both believed that they were several moves ahead of everyone else involved in the autonomous vehicle revolution. Today, the pair loom large in a legal battle between Waymo, Google’s self-driving vehicle subsidiary, and Uber, which Kalanick ran as CEO until his ouster last June. The companies are currently fighting in…
Google is bringing Nest back into the fold. Nest, known for it’s slick thermostats and user-friendly security cameras, was acquired by Alphabet (then called Google) for $3.2 billion in 2014. Since then the company has grown, according to Geekwire it has more than quadrupled its staff, and it’s rolled out a wide range of products,…
The self-driving truck startup Otto sold to Uber in August 2016 in a deal valued at nearly $600 million. The deal set Uber on a collision course with Google: Google is currently suing Uber, claiming that Uber acquired trade secrets stolen by Anthony Levandowski, an Otto co-founder and former Google employee. But it could easily…
Following Twitter, Discord, Imgur, and Pornhub, Reddit has taken action to ban the posting of AI-generated fake porn—commonly called “deepfakes.” There’s nothing especially new about the sort of doctored images where a popular celebrity’s face is stitched onto a nude body. It’s smut as old as the internet. But the FakeApp greatly lowers the technological…
At the end of the Cretaceous era, a large meteorite ploughed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The collision set off a chain reaction of environmental calamities that likely contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs. New research is now adding to the list of ensuing catastrophes, suggesting the collision cracked our planet’s seafloor…
The reason I smartened up my house was to find out whether it would betray me.
Legendary producer and arranger Quincy Jones has worked with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Michael Jackson, and he’s old enough now (almost 85!) not to give a shit about saying what, for non-legendary folks in a cutthroat, moribund industry, could be a career-ending gaffe. Various revelations from an interview published in Vulture this morning include:…
A DNA sample from a 10,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Gough Cave near Cheddar Gorge, England, offers a remarkable revelation: the first modern British people had “dark brown to black skin.” According to recent analysis, they also had dark curly hair and blue eyes. In other words, whiteness in Europe is a much newer thing than…
Yesterday Disney CEO Bob Iger went on CNBC’s Closing Bell to talk about the company’s earnings, and brag about Black Panther’s extraordinary ticket pre-sales. During the course of the chat he mentioned a new streaming service for ESPN that’s expected to go for $5 a month. That might sound cheap, but by all accounts it…
Chinese police have begun using glasses equipped with facial recognition-enabled cameras to spot fugitives traveling through train stations. Though Chinese police have said the glasses will spot people using fake IDs or traveling to avoid a warrant, many are concerned about China using the tech to target political advocates and minorities. China has been accused…
Sentient Adderall prescription Logan Paul is back, folks! Even if you’re not subscribed to his channel or interested in his varsity ice hockey meets self-help cult schtick, you might know that already thanks to YouTube. Earlier this week, the site decided to push a notification about Paul’s new video to scores of users who had…
At the bottom right-hand corner of the periodic table sits a fantasy world. Until recently, these elusive elements’ names were just fancy translations of their numbers. They’re enormous and can only be produced in the lab. They only stick around for a few seconds at most before radioactively decaying into smaller elements. And when researchers…
Amazon named 20 finalist cities in its Second Headquarters Thunderdome last month, and the desperate race to woo Jeff Bezos is on. The latest awkward attempt at flirtation comes from Maryland, whose head of transportation said yesterday that he will give Amazon a “blank check” for improvements that would help the company. Money that, uh, Maryland…
A new investigation by the Associated Press has revealed that a whopping 40 percent of 87 American defense contractors who were recently targeted by Russian hackers clicked on fake links sent to them via email, possibly exposing classified information in the process. It’s no secret that both American and Russian intelligence agencies are constantly trying…
Human anatomy is something better learned by studying detailed models, or actual people. Mastering the ins and outs of the human body isn’t the easiest thing to learn from a textbook, although once you hit the last page of Taschen’s latest tome, you’ll have a pretty solid understanding of the human skeleton, having just built…
For all of the Trump administration’s lies, the Trump era has introduced a strange new brand of truth-telling among White House officials. For example, Ben Carson recently described what an attack on the US electrical grid would look like, and it’s not pretty. In Carson’s opinion, America would look like the 2013 movie The Purge. According…
