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Earlier today, approximately 17 million Facebook Live users tuned in to an awe-inspiring video of nature at its fiercest: a massive, swirling supercell storm. In the sense that “live” means “actually happening right now,” however, this stream was 100 percent fake. As many commenters surmised, the “stream” was little more than a short, looping gif…
Elon Musk tweeted this morning that he has received “verbal” government approval for his Boring Company to build an underground Hyperloop tunnel connecting New York City and Washington, DC. According to Musk, a Hyperloop passenger would be able to travel between the two city centers in 29 minutes. His plans also include stops in Philadelphia…
Twitter claims it has become a safer site thanks to all its anti-abuse efforts, but there’s no way to tell if that’s true because the company didn’t share any hard numbers behind its data. In a closed-door meeting with reporters from several outlets this week this week, Twitter said it’s taking action against 10 times…
Two major dark web markets, AlphaBay and Hansa, have been shut down, US and European authorities announced. The marketplaces offered drugs, weapons, forged documents, and malware. AlphaBay, the larger of the two sites, hosted around 369,000 listings for various items at the time of its seizure, the US Department of Justice said. AlphaBay went down…
You’re staring at the sky on a sunny day when you notice, in the corner of your eye, a transparent squiggle floating slowly across the blue. You try and focus on it, but it eludes your glance, refusing to be resolved. No matter where you look, the squiggle knows. What you’ve got is a floater,…
You’ve probably called someone an asshat before. But do you know what an asshat literally is? It’s this. This Speakerhat is an asshat. It is a hat with two embedded speakers and a microphone that connects to your phone via Bluetooth. It’s for the casual hat-wearer who wants to bathe their face in music, but…
Wearables are out and augmented reality is in over at Intel. CNBC is reporting that Intel completely shuttered its wearables division just two weeks ago, and the New Technologies group that housed the division is now focused on augmented reality. From one fad to another, Intel is trying to chase the next big thing. AR…
When it comes to homebrew projects, Google is actually a pretty cool company. Unlike some of its rivals in Silicon Valley—particularly in Cupertino—the search giant sometimes likes to help people hack into its hardware and make it their own. The latest example of this fine tradition helped one crafty British man turn a vintage intercom…
Researchers at MIT have developed deep-learning algorithm that can compile a list of ingredients and even recommend recipes after looking at photos of food. The artificially intelligent system still needs some fine tuning, but this tool could eventually help us learn to cook, count calories, and track our eating habits. Imagine being able to snap…
Unknown hackers made off with an estimated $32 million in hot cryptocurrency Ether, one of the most popular of the innumerable successors to Bitcoin, this week. According to CyberScoop, hackers discovered a vulnerability in Parity Wallet, one of many services which offer bank account-like wallet services for users to park cryptocurrencies in. Exploiting the vulnerability…
The Federal Communications Commission intends to keep secret more than 200 pages of documents related to an alleged cyberattack that the agency says impaired its systems two months ago. The agency claims that it was bombarded in early May with traffic originating from a cloud service, which caused its website to crash temporarily while reportedly…
Following the laws of individual nations becomes a hell of a conundrum when your business fundamentally has no borders. But recent court cases are threatening to make the situation even more difficult by demanding that a country’s laws be honored by companies like Google all around the world. On Wednesday, an ongoing case with terrifying…
Things just don’t seem to die in the deep ocean (well, except for humans). While rockfish around 100 feet below the surface live about 12 years, those living closer to 2500 feet down can live for 200 years. There’s a deep water coral that can apparently live as long as 4,000 years. But there’s one…
Designing simpler spacecraft is what helped us finally put rovers on Mars and start exploring the Red Planet. Embracing simplicity might also give us simple, inexpensive robots that thrive doing very specific tasks, instead of multi-million dollar humanoids that have trouble just staying on their feet. Stanford University and University of California researchers are the…
The Indian government spent seven years compiling a national database that includes citizens’ iris scans, fingerprints, addresses, and phone numbers—and now Airbnb, Uber, and India ride-hailing service Ola are all interested in incorporating the system into their services, according to a report from BuzzFeed News. The national ID database, Aadhar, contains information on about 90…
In a parallel universe, there’s a planet where it rains only Italian cured meats. It appears that somehow, a wormhole has ripped through the space-time continuum and connected that world to ours, as evidenced by an assemblage of Italian sausage recently found on a family’s roof in Deerfield Beach, Florida. It’s a mystery meat whodunnit…
Since the Echo’s release in 2014, millions of people have given in to Amazon’s nonstop advertising and welcomed Alexa into their homes. Amazon’s original sell for the always-on, voice-activated device was that users could “ask Echo for information, music, news, sports scores, and weather from across the room and get results or answers instantly.” But…
It’s hot in Japan. Hot enough to melt a dashboard rubber duck into a forlorn pool of gooey plastic. And hot enough to make thousands of people intent on proving or disproving the authenticity of a now-viral tweet. The initial tweet, posted yesterday and already garnering close to 500,000 retweets, depicts a small green duck…
I’m listening to Lana Del Rey right now. Her first album dropped during an emotional phase of my life, and while I’m sometimes embarrassed to admit it, I really like Born to Die. But, until a week ago, I avoided listening to it because my listening activity flipped a switch with my friends who could…
Dogs have loved us for thousands of years, despite humanity’s many flaws and foibles. New research suggests dogs were domesticated from wolves just once—that’s all it might have taken for puppers and people to form an everlasting alliance. The study, which was published online yesterday in Nature Communications, analyzed the genomes of two ancient German…
