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The iPhone X is selling well, and Apple profits are just fine, but Tim Cook has been explicit in saying that augmented reality is the next big thing. And now we have a load of new details about the AR device that Apple is reportedly building. https://gizmodo.com/all-of-the-best-augmented-reality-tricks-your-iphone-ca-1805804012 According to Bloomberg’s reliable Apple leak machine, the…
Thanks to a string of screw-ups and bugs, an unsuspecting developer recently took possession of an estimated $300 million worth of the Ethereum cryptocurrency by accident. In an attempt to give back the money, however, the poor guy ended up locking up the funds permanently. In effect, that money is just gone. So, this sucks…
If you’re a fan of a simple oil and vinegar dressing for your salad, your days of having to shake the bottle for a few seconds to mix both ingredients could soon be over. Researchers at MIT have found a way to combine water and oil-based substances so that they stay mixed for months on…
Correction: This story originally overstated NASA’s relationship with the Uber project. It has been updated to better reflect the agency’s involvement. We regret the error. Since the world we are currently living in is very much not the future we all dreamed of, Uber is trying to at least make a sliver of our flying…
NASA engineers are currently hard at work developing Space Launch System 1—what will be the biggest, most powerful rocket ever built. The inaugural launch of this behemoth won’t happen any earlier than 2019, but NASA has released a spectacular simulation of the launch to whet our appetites. If we’re ever going to send humans and…
Shaun Bridges, the 35-year-old Secret Service agent from Baltimore who was sentenced to 71 months in prison in 2016 for stealing over $800,000 in Bitcoin during a government investigation into notorious deep-web market Silk Road, has been sentenced to an additional two years in jail for money-laundering charges, Reuters reported. Per Ars Technica, the second…
Facebook subsidiary Instagram, the Twitter for people who only want to tweet about how hot and rich they are, has long been overrun with paid product endorsements from both genuine celebrities and nebulously influential “influencers”—and so many of them have openly flaunted Federal Trade Commission rules requiring disclosures of paid endorsement deals that the FTC…
To make Snapchat more usable for olds, Snap is planning a “disruptive” redesign that could piss off the young. The social app’s parent company announced in an earnings report today that it’s “currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use,” because “one thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat…
The Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed today that it has been unable to decrypt a phone belonging to the gunman who killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas—an announcement that is likely to start another battle between law enforcement and technology companies over encryption. The phone was flown to Quantico for examination, Christopher Combs, an…
If you’re into physics making your brain leak out of your ears, you should familiarize yourself with Bose-Einstein condensates. These strange arrangements of atoms can be all the states of matter at once, can look like they have negative mass, and essentially bring the weirdness of quantum mechanics to larger scales. That means physicists sometimes…
Back in June, Verizon closed a $4.5 billion merger to swallow Yahoo, agglomerate its legacy AOL brands into the mix, and rename the big, mess of memorable (and not so memorable) brands to Oath. The transition has not been terribly smooth for some employees, as evidenced by an exchange during an “Oath: All-In” full company…
After several weeks of Twitter users tweeting about how much they hate the idea of expanded character limits, Twitter has officially announced that it’s doubling the previous 140-character limit for all users. Twitter has been considering increasing the limit since at least last year. In September, the company finally announced the plan and started giving…
Facebook wants you to know that it is committed to stopping the spread of internet hoaxes. But it requires some mental gymnastics to understand how signal-boosting comments with the word “fake” in them would help fight misinformation. In a recent test, however, that’s exactly what the social network did. As the BBC reports, Facebook conducted…
“Excess” Spectacles have cost Snapchat’s parent company Snap $39.9 million in the last three months. This news is not a great look for Snap, which reportedly had “hundreds of thousands” of pairs of the Spectacles camera sunglasses piling up in warehouses as of last month. We knew about the inventory; now we’re learning about the…
A Seattle-based startup has developed an innovative “skin closure device” that exhibits the anchoring strength of sutures and staples, but is nearly as easy to apply as a bandage. Called microMend, the device is performing well in clinical studies, and it may only be a matter of time before one gets stuck on you. The…
As part of its new nationwide reporting portal to combat revenge porn, Australia is partnering with Facebook to let users preemptively block uploads of “intimate” pictures and videos on the platform—by sending the images in question to Facebook. Australia is the first country to pilot the new program. A startling one in five Australians report…
An unsettling video went viral on Reddit late Monday night. It shows a young woman in an Uber who empties out the driver’s tip jar and then flees the scene with two friends. I have a few questions about what’s going on here. Update 2:52pm – The thief has apparently confessed on social media. Scroll…
Lost for hundreds of years, a recently recovered map of Australia dating back to the 17th century has finally been restored and put on display at a museum in Canberra. The document chronicles the mapping efforts of explorers a full 100 years before Captain James Cook set sail for the Pacific. It’s called Archipelagus Orientalis…
We are in the midst of a pretty historic moment. Leaping ahead of the competition, Waymo has announced that its self-driving cars will no longer use a human safety driver while they are tested on the roads of Phoenix. But the even bigger news is that the company is gearing up to launch the first…
Google does a lot of bad and creepy things that often seem to benefit Google more than users. But, dear reader, I have to say that I hate waiting in line so much that the site’s newly announced “wait times” feature has me feeling great about the fact that my every movement is being tracked…
