Technology news

 Facebook wants to be known as a place to search for mentions of current news in hopes of drawing more public chatter that normally ends up on Twitter. While Facebook stumbled with its natural language Graph Search, it refocused on keywords, and is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts. That’s compared to 1.5 billion searches per day in July 2015, and 1 billion… Read More

One of the best and darkest science fiction shows ever created is coming back — soon. Netflix announced today that it will be releasing a new, six-episode season of Black Mirror on October 21st.
Netflix announced the release date with a cryptic tweet from the show’s official Twitter account:
86 Days.
— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) July 27, 2016Variety has also confirmed that new episodes would arrive on October 31st.
Black Mirror is a Twilight Zone-esque anthology show originall

High-end audio company Beyerdynamic announced three new earbuds this week that it imagines will be affordable and reliable options for people who use their phones to listen to music. The cheapest pair in the Byron series will sell for $54, and the most expensive model — the BTA — will sell for $219. That's way more accessible than the company’s $1,299 T5p.2 headphones from earlier this year.
The cheapest pair connects through a traditional headphone jack, whereas the two more e

Facebook posted its second quarter earnings for investors today. The social media giant reported $6.44 billion in revenue and $2.05 billion in profit. That’s a 59 percent increase over the $4.04 billion in revenue during the same period last year. Its monthly active users now number 1.71 billion, a 15 percent increase from this same period last year. If Facebook continues growing at this pace, it will have over 2 billion monthly active users by the end of next year.
Since its IPO four year

Apple recently sold its billionth iPhone, the company announced today. During a meeting at Apple's Cupertino headquarters this morning, CEO Tim Cook made an appearance to celebrate the major milestone. "iPhone has become one of the most important, world-changing and successful products in history," Cook said. "It's become more than a constant companion. iPhone is truly an essential part of our daily life and enables much of what we do throughout the day." The iPhone debuted in 2007, so it t

Amazon is ordering its starry F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptation The Last Tycoon to series after a successful June pilot run, according to Deadline. The '30s period piece stars Matt Bomer as Monroe Stahl, a fictionalized version of the real-life precocious movie mogul Irving Thalberg. Kelsey Grammer plays his mentor and rival, Pat Brady; Rosemarie DeWitt plays Brady's wife. (It's not the first adaptation of Fitzgerald's final, unfinished novel — Elia Kazan and Harold Pinter headed up

Peep Show, the weird, cynical British comedy starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, will return in a new form on American TV. Variety reports that Starz is developing an American version of the show stateside. Like the US version of The Office, Starz's Peep Show will be an entirely different series than the one that ran for nine seasons on the UK's Channel 4. But the tone will likely be similar: Peep Show's original creators, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, will serve as consulting producers for

A group of researchers have identified a gene implicated in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that attacks neurons in the brain and spinal cord. They identified the gene using funds from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised $115 million to benefit research on the disorder — which may mean Bill Gates got doused in freezing water for more than entertainment value.The finding only applies to cases of ALS that are passed down through families; these are the minority of ALS cases,

The hardcore Pokémon Go players out there know that once you reach level 20 in the augmented reality mobile game, the difficulty curve starts getting much steeper. How steep? Well, to go from level 19 to 20 requires 25,000 experience points. To go from 20 to 21 requires twice as much — the first time the game doubles the requirement — and the number increases dramatically every few levels. In fact, one player was so curious about the level progression that they used a sof

Netflix has put out a first trailer for Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, the much-loved series' four-part revival. It's been almost a decade since Gilmore Girls ended its seven-season run, and this trailer offers the one thing fans want the most: more of the show's wonderfully snappy banter between Rory and Lorelai. Pretty much nothing's changed — except the references. Series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino co-directs all four 90-minute episodes; they'll premiere on November 25t

Now I’m no economist, nor do I have a business degree from a fancy college, but I assume a basic formula to be true. Lego + a popular intellectual property = cute meta-brand that makes yachts full of easy money.
Lego Star Wars. Lego Batman. Lego Harry Potter. The evidence is plentiful. An empire is built atop Lego-ized humans. But what of humanized Lego? Perhaps lifelike Lego is an untapped revenue stream?
No. No it is not.
The lifelike Lego minifig, a collaboration between tested and spec

The vapor from electronic cigarettes contains two previously unidentified chemicals that can cause cancer, according to a new study. The new research, published in Environmental Science & Technology, also shows that levels of harmful chemicals vary between e-cigs.
Researchers in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used two different electronic cigarettes and simulated vaping at different battery power settings. Then they analyzed the e-cigs’ vapor. They found that the vaporizers

If you made a Google search for "presidential candidates" this morning, you would have found an unusual result. As of this morning, the top bar of results displayed Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Green Party candidate Jill Stein — with Donald Trump and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson left off the top bar entirely. (Below the top section, both candidates still appeared in a number of Google News results.) Around noon ET today, Google pushed a fix that restored Trump and Johnson, but

Craftsman is planning to release a new Pro Series of tool storage units this October that’ll lock with a physical key, like most other toolboxes. They’ll also be modernized with a companion app and Bluetooth, so they can be unlocked remotely. The app lets you set up a proximity lock, too, so the box knows to unlock when you’re within a certain range. If you're paranoid someone's getting into your toolbox while you're away, the box will also send an alert if it’s someone's

Glow, a fertility-tracking app founded by a well-known Silicon Valley technologist, warned users today of a privacy loophole that may expose personal data. The company said its "connect a partner" feature, which lets the app user give access to a partner, might have made some of the shared data accessible to third parties.
Glow described it as a "low risk" of data exposure, potentially impacting less than 0.15 percent of the app's four million users. In a statement to The Verge, the company

SpaceX’s upcoming Red Dragon mission — the company’s plan to send one of its Dragon capsules on Mars in 2018 — is estimated to cost around $320 million, Space News reports. That’s according to NASA representative Jim Reuter, who spoke at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council in Cleveland yesterday. That’s a relatively cheap price tag, given that NASA’s missions to Mars usually cost billions to pull off (though they are much different in scope)

For anyone who has played Life is Strange, the game’s television influences are clear. It’s like a mash-up of Twin Peaks, Veronica Mars, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but with time travel. And now it will be getting a live-action series of its very own: publisher Square Enix has partnered with Legendary and DJ2 Entertainment to create a digital series based on the first season of the game.
Life is Strange follows the story of Max, a young photographer with the ability to rewind time.

 The team behind LaunchKit, a set of tools that helps developers launch their apps, is heading to Google and joining the Developer Product Group. It doesn’t look like LaunchKit’s products are moving over to Google, so the team decided to open-source its products and make them available on GitHub. LaunchKit’s hosted services will be available for the next 12 months. After… Read More

The upper atmosphere above Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — the huge storm that has been raging for centuries on the gas giant — is much hotter than anywhere else on the planet. New research published today in Nature suggests that movement of the massive storm in Jupiter’s lower atmosphere may be responsible for the extra high temperatures in the upper layer. And that means that the two atmospheres may be connected and influence each other. Continue reading…

Believe it or not, some of us are carrying drug-resistant bacteria around in our noses; these colonies make infection more likely. But scientists have discovered a new weapon to use against these bugs — and it also lives in your nose.
It may be years before the new compound comes to market, but its discovery, published in the journal Nature, points to the value of an untapped resource for antibiotics. That resource, of course, is the human body. And new antibiotics are crucial for fighting

Chinese tech firm LeEco made its biggest splash on American soil yet yesterday with the announcement that it's acquiring Vizio, the biggest US maker of TVs, for $2 billion. You might not be familiar with the name, but in LeEco's short history the ambitious company has achieved one of the fastest and most flamboyant rises to prominence so far in the Chinese tech space, going from streaming video site to aspiring self-driving car pioneer.
Although LeEco has had a whirlwind 18 months, its beginning

For 10 years the New York Botanical Garden has devoted time and resources to the Amorphophallus titanum, a single towering flower that when in bloom smells like a rotting corpse. Today garden guests may be able to catch a whiff of that rare stench, as the flower is expected to bloom at any moment. The rest of us can witness the fruits of the garden’s labor on its YouTube live stream. We won’t get that rotting dead body smell, but maybe that’s for the better.
According to The Ha

Donald Trump says that if Russians were behind the security breach that made tens of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails public, he hopes they’ve also hacked Hillary Clinton’s private email server. In a press conference, Trump responded to a question by saying that "it’s probably not [Russia], nobody knows who it is." But he gleefully expounded on the implications of a Russian hack. "If they hacked, they probably have [Clinton’s] 33,000 emails. I hope they d

Even if you’ve only seen an episode or two, it’s not hard to spot the influences of Netflix’s new show Stranger Things. It’s all so very 1980s: the tight-knit group of young boys pulled from Stand By Me, the synth-heavy soundtrack of a John Carpenter film, the suburbia-meets-sci-fi setting of E.T. It’s a potent mix that makes the show easy to binge. Maybe too easy. After a long marathon, you might wonder what’s next? The good news is many of Stranger Thing&rsq

Last year, visitors to a wide range of gambling sites started reporting unusual behavior. Strange text windows would pop up, offering users special access codes for third-party gambling sites. Links would appear with new affiliate tags, an almost unnoticeable difference that could still prove wildly lucrative for whoever got paid for the new referrals. The sites’ visitors were being hacked, but webmasters couldn’t figure out where the new scripts were coming from.
"We very carefully

HBO is ending Project Greenlight, the movie-making reality show spearheaded by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck that ran for four seasons across HBO and Bravo. Its first three seasons aired between 2001 and 2005, and the show laid dormant for a decade before being revived by HBO for a single season last year. Damon broke the news in an interview with The Associated Press while promoting his new movie Jason Bourne. "I really liked it and thought that the show went great," said Damon. "I'm not one to qu

We figured a red Nextbit would be announced sometime soon, and today we got our confirmation. The company behind the Robin phone (still so pretty!) confirmed that a red version of the phone will go on sale today on Nextbit.com. This summer "ember" edition will cost $299. The specs of the phone remain the same as the original device that came out earlier this year.NextbitNextbitNextbit is also releasing a software update to its beta users that will let them store videos in the cloud, just as

Two years after Apple launched its Family Sharing feature for iTunes apps and content, Google is finally doing the same thing with a feature it’s calling Google Play Family Library. Like Apple's plan, it's free, works with up to six different accounts, and lets you share movies, TV shows, purchased music, books, and apps across multiple devices — and anybody in the family plan has the option to pay with the main account’s credit card.
The rollout begins today in the US and it&r

Sennheiser has announced the PC 373D, its latest headset for PC gamers featuring 7.1 Dolby Surround Sound and a copious amount of velvet. The new flagship headset comes with a noise-canceling microphone and what Sennheiser is calling an "optional noise reduction algorithm." There are also plush velvet ear pads over the aluminum ear cups, and volume controls are embedded in the right ear cup. The company says the aluminum will help keep your ears cool, while the velvet will cover them in a luxuri

When longtime fans think of Star Trek, they conjure up creator Gene Roddenberry’s original utopian vision: a collectivist, multicultural future where money is no longer needed, and characters are happy to go on exploratory five-year missions for no reason other than their own need to bring good into the world.
As audiences discovered this past weekend, it’s basically everything director Justin Lin destroys in the first 20 minutes of Star Trek Beyond.
But for a 50-year-old franchise t

A few weeks before Halloween 2015, the IAmSteelberg account launched on Instagram with a bundle of photos a novel art form: the VHS box. Steelberg redesigns the grimy 1980s movie sleeves for recent genre films. The project is a charming cultural ouroboros, a nostalgic repackaging of modern films, many of which are sequels, reboots, or homages to the films of the VHS era.
Mad Max: Fury Road and J.J. Abram’s Star Trek look comfortable on a VHS boxes because their predecessors were print

At the very top of a tall glass building, in a room overlooking Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc, a group of entrepreneurs are working on new ways to get vaccines to the people who need them most. They’ve come here from all over the world, and they’ve all launched pilot projects in poor countries — everything from wearable health monitors and online mapping tools to vaccine refrigerators that plug into cell towers. Now, they’re looking for what some say could transform their co

It's almost time again for the official Mr. Robot Digital After Show hosted by The Verge, and we hope you'll join us tonight at 11:28PM ET as we recap episode 4 and chat with Mr. Robot writer and Technology Producer Kor Adana. In tonight's episode we'll see Elliot grow closer to Ray, hoping he can challenge Mr. Robot, Dom making a discovery, and Darlene trying to deal with both the FBI and the Dark Army.
Mr. Robot airs Wednesday night at 10PM ET, and you can watch the Mr. Robot Di

Nintendo has announced that it will release its Pokémon Go Plus wearable in September, not the end of July as originally planned. The news went out in a tweet this morning, and according to an email posted by Nintendo Life, Nintendo is contacting people who already ordered the device with an apology and a small discount on their next purchase.
Pokémon Go Plus is a $35 watch-sized device that lets Pokémon Go players perform some in-game actions without pulling out their phone