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Strategically place a ring of fans around a roaring fire and you can turn a relaxing way to toast marshmallows into a terrifying tornado of flames. The effect is even more fascinating in super-slow motion, and when you toss a tiny plastic ATV into the flames, it ends up looking like a stunt from a…
London’s Metropolitan Police believes that its artificial intelligence software will be up to the task of detecting images of child abuse in the next “two to three years.” But, in its current state, the system can’t tell the difference between a photo of a desert and a photo of a naked body. The police force…
After former company president Sean Parker said Facebook was exploiting human psychology to the detriment of its users, and ex-vice president of growth Chamath Palihapitiya implied that Facebook may be responsible for creating “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric,” Facebook says it’s instituting a new policy to help combat some of the more…
Social media users are praising a “hero” who was supposedly arrested in New York City for selling altered Chuck E. Cheese tokens as bitcoins. A report claims that he raked in $1.1 million with the scam. Sadly, there is no hero, and this story is phonier than Monopoly money. Scroll through Twitter and you’ll find…
Did you ever play Frogger and think, “this is great with a joystick, but what would really be awesome is if I could just use my face?” No. You did not. That would have felt like a stupid request unless you’re a game developer exploring new modes of input. But don’t worry, developer Nathan Gitter…
In sheer volume of passengers served, Atlanta International Airport dwarfs LAX, JFK, or Chicago O’Hare. It’s a transportation hub for the entire Eastern United States. It also lost power yesterday, with no flights in or out for nearly 11 hours—leading to over 1,000 flights cancelled and passengers stuck in dark terminals or on the tarmac…
The trouble with the future is that it never seems to arrive. That’s why we call it the future. We consequently have this bad habit of taking the present, and all the wondrous and horrific things it has to offer, for granted. As a reminder that we’re actually living in the future of a not-so-distant…
Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would finally be changing its moderation policies in what was popularly received as an acknowledgement how badly hordes of trolls, white supremacists and swastika-toting Pepes have overrun the site for years. The new guidelines (which Twitter has touted as simply a clarification of existing rules) go into effect…
It is now officially too late to secure a pair of AirPods before the end of the holiday season via the Apple online store, MacRumors reported, with orders originating in the “United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, and several other countries” now showing delivery dates in January. As MacRumors noted, the…
Special counsel Robert Mueller, the former FBI director currently overseeing a sweeping investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections and any possible ties to President Donald Trump and his associates, secretly obtained tens of thousands of emails from the administration’s transition team. Trump’s legal team has reacted with outraged claims of unconstitutional and…
The X-Files are real, y’all. No, seriously, here is some wild news for anyone who, like me, cried at the end of Arrival, or perhaps fears that one day aliens will roll on through planet Earth and absolutely wreck our shit. The Pentagon quietly ran a $22 million program to study unidentified flying objects from…
This week, Mozilla slipped a browser extension that promoted Mr. Robot into Firefox. The goal was to give Firefox users access to an alternate reality game tied to the end of the show’s third season, but because Firefox didn’t initially offer any explanation for the sudden appearance of the extension, nicknamed Looking Glass, many users…
Snap Inc., the tech company behind Snapchat and a number of other smaller projects like Bitmoji, has not had a forgiving year beyond a really cool virtual reality hot dog. Here’s something to shed a little more perspective on its recent troubles: Their head of human resources is allegedly a bro who brags about gunfights…
Yesterday, a report from Bloomberg came out saying that Samsung will launch a Bixby-powered smart speaker sometime in the first half of 2018. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone since DJ Koh already told CNBC back in August that the company was indeed trying to put its digital assistant, which first debuted…
In a damning letter released today, a former Uber employee, Richard Jacobs, claims that the company engaged in several illegal practices, including hacking, trade secret theft, and surveillance—all in an effort to emerge at the top of the competitive ride-hailing market. The allegations, only some of which have been substantiated by an internal investigation at…
Imagine you are baking a cake. You use the same ingredients that you always use, and boom, cake. But now, imagine your surprise when you discover you can make the exact same cake—an identical cake—but with a whole new set of ingredients. That’s kind of what happened in the world of physics recently. Except rather…
After months spent in limbo and not a single new compatible device, Google is finally shutting its Tango augmented reality platform down for good, effective March 1st, 2018. While the announcement isn’t super surprising, the death of Tango adds another name to the list of abandoned Google ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects) endeavors, which once…
‘Tis the season for giving, and one Bitcoin investor claims to be giving away the majority of their cryptocurrency holdings after experiencing an incredible year. The unnamed donor has set up a fund to hand out $86 million worth of Bitcoin to various charities, and they’ve already started listing the donations and providing receipts. If…
Can you trust science based on teenage subjects? Let me ask you a different question: Can you trust teenagers not to prank scientists? A recent study, in which American teens shopped in a pretend convenience store, found that gruesome anti-smoking ads might actually encourage kids to buy cigarettes, since they make smoking seem more edgy.…
Most people are aware that algorithms control what you see on Facebook or Google, but automated decision-making is increasingly being used to determine real-life outcomes as well, influencing everything from how fire departments prevent fires to how police departments prevent crime. Given how much these (often secretive) systems have come to dominate our lives, it’s…
