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The search for an Argentine Navy submarine lost with some 44 souls on board has reached a “critical phase,” a naval spokesman told Reuters, as the length of the seven-day search indicates the vessel is likely not on the surface and could be reaching the limits of its air supply. Per Reuters, a search team…
Google, along with fellow tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter has drawn increasing scrutiny this year over concerns that its “concentrated authority resembles the divine right of kings,” as the New York Times put it. In recent months, it’s faced stumbling blocks when it returned misinformation and conspiracy theories during crises like mass shootings…
The Department of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been seeking the technology sector’s help to carry out President Trump’s proposed “extreme vetting” of visa holders by combing their social media information, a proposal that’s been percolating since January. As ProPublic reports, the only change in this plan from the most recent ICE presentation is…
To reduce energy consumption, many jurisdictions around the world are transitioning to outdoor LED lighting. But as new research shows, this solid-state solution hasn’t yielded the expected energy savings, and potentially worse, it’s resulted in more light pollution than ever before. Using satellite-based sensors, an international team of scientists sought to understand if our planet’s…
Lightning is nuts. It’s a supercharged bolt of electricity extending from the sky to the ground that can kill people. But it can also produce nuclear reactions, according to new research. Scientists have long known that thunderstorms can produce high-energy radiation, like this one from December, 2015 that blasted a Japanese beach town with some…
If we’re ever going to truly understand how our Universe works, we’ll need to take lots of different measurements, but measuring can be one of science’s most difficult tasks. How, for example, do scientists measure an invisible thing that passes directly through solid matter without stopping? The inventions scientists come up with to make this…
The FCC on Wednesday released a draft order that would effectively repeal landmark Obama-era regulations that ensure internet service providers offer consumers equal access to online content and services. The 210-page proposal spells the end of net neutrality—the principle that internet providers, or ISPs, should be restricted from blocking or slowing traffic to websites whenever…
Facebook is creating a tool that will allow users to check whether or not they followed Russian propaganda accounts on Facebook or Instagram during the 2016 election cycle, the company announced today. The tool, which is expected to launch by the end of this year, is a response to continued pressure from lawmakers who have…
Sir Robert Menzies was Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister, first holding office at the beginning of World War II from 1939 until 1941, and then again from 1949 until 1966. And thanks to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, we now know a bit about how the CIA viewed this legend of Australian…
On Tuesday, the FCC finally unveiled its plans to kill net neutrality, and on the same day, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman publicly excoriated the agency for refusing to cooperate with his office’s investigation into the hundreds of thousands of likely fake comments that were filed in support of ending the open web. In…
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to bioengineer plants so that the military can turn foliage into spies. DARPA calls the Black Mirror-esque effort the Advanced Plant Technologies (APT) program. The end goal doesn’t appear to be developing a ficus that narcs on you, but rather organic “discreet, self-sustaining sensors” that can monitor…
For 25 seconds in 1987, in the middle of WGN-TV anchor Dan Roan’s sportscast, thousands of Chicagoans’ feeds were replaced with a low analog whine and the eery image of a masked man nodding over and over as if in a state of mania. “If you’re wondering what’s happened, so am I,” Roan said to…
Toss a turkey in the oven and it cooks from the outside in, which can take hours of roasting before it’s done. But what if you cooked a turkey from the inside out? That’s what Allen Pan tried by filling a raw turkey with molten aluminum and then letting the whole thing cook, cool, and…
Long before robots like R2-D2 or the Terminator hit the silver screen, a 1956 movie called Forbidden Planet featured a humanoid automaton that, in all likelihood, blew your grandparents’ minds. Robby the Robot might be primitive by today’s movie prop standards, but the three-piece costume is so iconic that it recently sold at a Bonhams…
The ominous cloud of doom surrounding the ongoing U.S. investigations into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 federal elections got a little darker on Tuesday, with Russian state communications agency Roskomnadzor allegedly threatening retaliation against Google for suggesting it could lower government-funded outlets RT and Sputnik in search rankings. Per Reuters, Roskomnadzor chief Alexander Zharov…
Julian Assange—whose organization Wikileaks’ sad, thirsty Twitter DMs to Donald Trump Jr. recently leaked, revealing he sought to coordinate with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—appears to have had a moment of buyer’s regret on Tuesday evening. Upon hearing the Republican-controlled FCC had finally scheduled a vote to scrap Barack Obama-era net neutrality rules, potentially enriching massive…
Hackers accessed data belonging to 57 million Uber riders and drivers in late 2016, including email addresses, phone numbers, and drivers license numbers. Instead of disclosing the breach, Uber paid $100,000 to the hackers in exchange for their silence. The secret payment ultimately cost several Uber security executives their jobs. Joe Sullivan, Uber’s chief security…
Vine was an app that offered something new and only lived long enough to leave people with mostly good feelings about it. Now, Vine’s co-creator Rus Yusupov has a new trivia app that people like a lot, and he seems to be doing his best to tank it by acting like a raving maniac. HQ…
Imagine if someone came to your house to fix your pipes, then stumbled around your yard blindly with a pair of sticks. Now imagine if you called the company they worked for whose rep said “yep, sometimes that’s how we look for pipes.” The Guardian reports that ten of twelve United Kingdom water companies admit…
Last year, an explosive investigation by ProPublica revealed that Facebook was allowing advertisers to discriminate in housing ads by enabling landlords to filter out people who might view a given ad by their race. And today ProPublica released a follow-up to that investigation. Did Facebook fix its discrimination-enabling practices? Apparently not. ProPublica purchased a number…
