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On June 25, 2016 at 6pm ET, a flash of visible light appeared in the sky that, depending on your location, could have been visible with binoculars. It wasn’t a plane or a star: it was a gamma ray burst, one of the most violent kinds of explosions in the universe, from a source 9 billion…
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is being sued over its failure to adhere to a federal transparency law and for wrongfully withholding agency records about net neutrality from the public. American Oversight, a legal watchdog group formed this year to expose conflicts and fraud in the Trump’s administration’s executive departments, filed a lawsuit Tuesday morning…
Smartphone owners today have a plethora of ways to lock and unlock their phones: face scans, finger presses, PIN codes, location detection, and so on. Are some of these options more secure than others? And which one should you use? First, let’s recap of what’s actually available. iPhone owners have the option of Touch ID…
Facebook is sponsoring the efforts of former Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney campaign managers to combat hacking and disinformation campaigns designed to interfere with elections. Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos announced the company’s $500,000 investment in the effort, called Defending Digital Democracy, today during a keynote at the security conference Black Hat. The project…
When General Motors acquired Cruise Automation in a deal worth more than $1 billion, Cruise transferred its patents directly to GM. When Google spun out its self-driving car experiment into a full-fledged company, it transferred its patents directly to its new subsidiary, Waymo. But when Uber acquired the self-driving truck startup Otto for $680 million,…
On today’s date in 1948, President Harry Truman desegregated the American military with an executive order. On the same date almost 70 years later, President Donald Trump announced he was kicking transgender people out of the military on Twitter, the platform he usually uses to spew stream-of-conscious nonsense and bigoted vitriol. Why? Apparently, transgender healthcare…
It might seem like photographer Mike Olbinski is always at the right place at the right time to capture Mother Nature’s fury. But for his latest film, Pursuit, he says he actually spent three months driving across 10 states to capture this amazing timelapse footage, chasing storms and weather patterns for over 28,000 miles. Recorded…
Donald Trump loves a good deal. And sitting in Afghanistan, much of it in Taliban-controlled regions, there’s a doozy: deposits of rare-earth minerals once estimated to be worth $1 trillion. So the president is considering keeping troops in the country so that they can blaze the way to the country’s untapped natural resources and give…
The tiger shark patrols the seas alone at night, prepared to eat anything from a bird to a dolphin. The goblin shark live in the ocean’s canyons and abysses, grabbing prey by surprise with its extendable jaws. A great white shark can grow as large as a Mercedes. This new shark species is only a…
Rick Perry had a phone call with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman last week. Well, at least he thought it was the Prime Minister of Ukraine. It was actually two Russian pranksters known locally as the Jerky Boys of Russia. And Perry, as Secretary of Energy, wound up talking to them for a full 22…
President Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that Apple CEO Tim Cook had called him up and “promised me three big plants—big, big, big.” “I said you know, Tim, unless you start building your plants in this country, I won’t consider my administration an economic success,” Trump added. “He called me, and…
Tech giants Elon Musk and Mark Zuckeberg have been engaged in a very public, somewhat silly and self-indulgent battle over artificial intelligence lately. Musk has warned AI-powered robots could usher in some form of automated war to give humanity its richly deserved demise, while Zuckerberg responded by saying he is “really optimistic” it could usher…
This month, the American Psychoanalytic Association told its roughly 3,500 members a decades-old rule against speculating on the mental health of some public figures does not apply to their members—and yup, this rule change indeed has something to do with the aggressively Freudian president in the White House. According to Scientific American, one of the…
Lyft has partnered with Taco Bell to debut a new feature that allows passengers to tack on a trip to the pseudo-Mexican fast food restaurant. The “Taco Mode” option is clearly an effort to woo late-night riders with the munchies, but some Lyft drivers are unsurprisingly disgusted by the thought of sloppy drunks defiling their…
HIV transmission is a complex process with factors beyond just who you sleep with and how. The virus ultimately needs to find its way to the correct kinds of cells in order to wreak havoc. And some of the risk, at least for those with penises, may come from the kinds of bacteria on the…
If you’re tired of seeing headlines about Uber, know they wont dissipate anytime soon. Uber is working feverishly to reverse its bad image now that founder Travis Kalanick has one foot out of the company, so you’ll see a lot of new updates in the coming months. Uber recently announced its “180 Days of Change”…
It turns out the recognizable half-circle arch of a rainbow is a complete lie. When you’re standing on the ground looking up at a rainbow in the sky, the curvature of the Earth usually blocks its bottom half. But when viewed from a higher vantage point, like from a plane, or the top of a…
Verizon set off alarm bells among net neutrality advocates last week when customers reported that the ISP was throttling Netflix video. If true, that would likely be a violation of current FCC guidelines. Verizon responded that it was just testing throttling technology on all video. On Tuesday, it went a step further and laid out…
If you were one of the many, many sad people who missed out on snagging the NES Classic Edition before Nintendo inexplicably pulled the plug on it, there’s still a chance you can get one without spending hundreds on eBay as ThinkGeek has apparently stumbled onto a massive cache of the consoles. Update, 3:47 p.m.…
Among the many dangers firefighters face at work each day, those high-powered water hoses have enough pressure to cause some serious damage if they ever got loose. But they also make for an entertaining makeshift carnival ride that looks far more aggressive than any sketchy mechanical bull you’ll find at a Western-themed bar. At times this…
