Technology news

A combination of motorized exoskeletons and virtual reality could help paraplegics regain some control of paralyzed limbs, according to a new study.New research published today in the journal Scientific Reports looked at how this therapy affected eight patients — all but one of whom were diagnosed as completely paralyzed from spinal cord injury. None of the patients had responded to previous types of rehab.
For 12 months, the patients participated in a training regimen that involved i

Rocko's Modern Life, one of the most beloved and bizarre Nickelodeon cartoons of the '90s, is coming back to the kid's network with a one-hour special, Nickelodeon announced today. Creator Joe Murray says he will return as executive producer and director of the special, which is being billed as a Rocko's Modern Life movie. There's no news on when the special will air or how much of the original cast will return.
The show features the titular character Rocko as an awkward talking wallaby who

When I look at the sky, I don’t see a sun. I see an opportunity — a chance at making solar power, and then harnessing that solar power to charge my phone. When a breeze brushes my face, I don’t think about how nice it feels. No, I think about how I can take that wind and turn it into energy for my cell phone. When I hear a babbling brook, I don’t appreciate the sound; I’m thinking about smartphone power, baby.
There are others who think like me. Like this guy,

Foxes are nature's greatest gift to us — not only are they cuter than dogs, they don't demand that we feed them and pay for their rabies shots. They are wild, but in a cool way. They probably won't eat your young child, like some other wild animals would. They are smart, and have been known to trick hounds into being their close personal friends, in order to avoid capture / certain death. They have excellent instincts for physical comedy.
I have known many foxes, because a mama f

It’s been almost a week since Frank Ocean opted out of releasing Boys Don’t Cry, a new LP with an impending arrival date that was reported by The New York Times and prefaced with hour after hour of meditative, Apple-sponsored woodworking. Fans around the world held their breath as Friday, August 5th came and went without a release; after months of similar false alarms, those same fans were looking at Ocean as the boy who cried "new music."
I’ve spent the bulk of the w

In a world filled with YouTube bend tests that can convince consumers to avoid a specific smartphone, manufacturers are stepping up their game and reinforcing their devices. Apple reinforced the iPhone 6S with stronger metal after bendgate became a "thing" and now Lenovo has reveled in a blog post that it designed the Moto Z with bendgate in mind:
We then moved on to the housing — aware that "bendgate" would be a potential issue with such a thin device, we utilized a unique,

Tesla’s next-generation Autopilot platform will have more radar and camera sensors according to a report from Electrek. It’s not known when the new suite will arrive, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk said recently that autonomous driving is coming "sooner than people think."
The new system is said to gain four more radar modules in addition to the current front-facing radar system, one in each corner of the car. It will also go from one front-facing camera to three. Electrek says Tesla’

The Algonquin Hotel in New York City is famed for hosting America’s celebrities, billionaires, and social elites. Many of these stars reappeared at last night's 10th annual Cat Fashion Show, albeit in feline form. The evening’s theme — "Through the Decades" — honored the "iconic looks of the hotel’s most famous guests and patrons, including Al Hirschfeld, Michael Feinstein, Marilyn Monroe, John Barrymore and many more."
Our video director Phil Esposito and I were lu

Scientists recently discovered that Greenland sharks could live for as long as 400 years, making them the longest-living vertebrates on record by a huge margin. The previous record holder was the bowhead whale, which can live up to two centuries.
Greenland sharks are world-renowned scavengers that will eat pretty much anything: whale, squid, fish, even a moose. Compared to other sharks, the Greenland is agonizingly slow, averaging a single mile per hour. It can grow to over 20 feet in length, gr

The CW, which has quickly become the home for DC superheroes on network TV, has yet another superhero series lined up. Deadline reports that Greg Berlanti, executive producer behind such shows like Arrow and The Flash, is currently working on an animated series starring a gay superhero. Titled Freedom Fighters: The Ray, the new show will premiere on the CW Seed website next year, with plans for the character to cross over into the live television universe later on.
Freedom Fighters: The Ray

Lots of tech companies think the future is going to involve flexible screens that we wear. So far, though, most of what we've seen is either impractical or ugly or both. Now researchers in Korea at Seoul National University have a different idea; in a report they plan to release in Science tomorrow, they’re showing off a flexible touchpad they created with a squishy, stretchy material called hydrogel. They stretched it into various positions and eventually were able to put i

Comics writer Grant Morrison and Crank co-director Brian Taylor have been chosen to turn dystopian novel Brave New World into a SyFy TV series, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The series was originally announced last year, with Dante’s Peak writer Les Bohem attached; he’s since been replaced by Morrison and Taylor, who will serve as writers and executive producers of the show. SyFy has also apparently commissioned a script for a series based on Morrison’s hardboiled graphi

CBS will be launching a new iteration of Star Trek next year. Discovery will premiere on the network’s All Access, and will take place about a decade before The Original Series. The show will also feature a female lieutenant commander on board Discovery, along with a cast that will include more aliens and a gay character. Needless to say, we have high hopes.
Star Trek: Discovery will be the first new Star Trek series since 2001’s Enterprise. That show lasted for four seasons and was

Gay and bisexual high schoolers are four times more likely to have attempted suicide in the past year than their straight classmates, according to the first nationally representative study of queer youth. The new Centers for Disease Control report confirms health differences between LGB and straight teens: far more of the former experience the negative health measures, the study tracks — from physical violence to poor mental health to injecting drugs.
It’s already been established th

Ah, the Massive Eye. Such a comforting symbol, and not all reminiscent of omnipresent surveillance or literal towers of evil from Lord of the Rings. Which must be why so many tech companies have chosen to adopt a huge eyeball as a central design aspect of their home robots.
Just this week, we've seen appearances from two new eyeball-focused bots: the Big-I (which looks like a felt trashcan with a bowling ball stuck on top), and Moorebot (a smaller device that boasts an "eyeball da

President Obama has tweeted out his summer playlists (one for daytime, one for nighttime) for the final time as commander in chief, and they are pretty much perfect. Last year, he deeply wounded me by leaving off One Direction's recently released "Drag Me Down," but since One Direction doesn't have any new music this year, or possibly ever again for the rest of my life god help me, I can't blame him for ignoring them. All I can do is rejoice in the knowledge that even the most powerful pers

Facebook's plan to stop ad blockers has already been foiled. Adblock Plus has found a way to strip ads from Facebook, even when they're served up in Facebook's new ad blocker-proof format. Anyone with a fully updated version of Adblock Plus should once again be able to avoid ads in Facebook's sidebar and News Feed.
The method may be flawed, however: Facebook says that in its attempt to remove ads, Adblock Plus is also removing regular posts. "We're disappointed that ad blocking compani

HP is expanding its Windows-based Stream PC lineup this month with a new 14-inch laptop and a revamp of its older offerings, including the Stream 11 and the x360. HP is branding its whole effort as delivering an "affordable cloud computing experience" that is tailored to how people use their computers today. They’re using cloud-based apps and storing photos online, HP says, and "they’re more concerned about the strength of the web connection rather than the power of the processor."
S

To promote the new animated film Pete's Dragon, Disney has teamed up with Google to develop an augmented reality experience in which you seek out a virtual dragon hiding near everyday objects. It's called "Dragon Spotting," and it uses Google's Cloud Vision technology to analyze your environment and blend the dragon Elliott into the scene as viewed through the phone's camera lens. "Dragon Spotting" is accessible via a mobile website starting today, with the film hitting theaters this F

Evan Booth, a man with an extensive amount of free time, turned a Keurig coffee machine into a fully operational bionic hand in just over eight days (199 hours, 56 minutes, and 36 seconds to be precise). He also named it Hedberg. It's really quite remarkable; the only materials that didn't come from the Keurig K350 were adhesives and a 12v external power supply to power the hand.Although the hand isn't strong enough to be a replacement appendage for the robot that Booth is likely building in his

This week in Walt's column, he reviews the Logitech Create keyboard for the iPad Pro, and finds that is a great alternative to the keyboard made by Apple. This sparks a conversation between Walt and Nilay about expanding the use of a tablet and replacing the laptop.We love your feedback on the topics of the show and suggestions on how to make our show better and more fun — you can tweet at Walt at @waltmossberg and Nilay at @reckless. And of course, we'd love it if you 

Deep Space Industries — a spaceflight company intent on mining asteroids for resources — announced its plans this week to conduct the first private mission to an asteroid before the end of the decade. For the inaugural trip, the company is developing a spacecraft called Prospector-1, a small 110-pound vehicle designed to travel to and then land on a near-Earth asteroid. If successful, it would be the first ever commercial vehicle to pull of such a feat. Continue reading…

Sources have told BuzzFeed that Twitter employees quietly filtered tweets with abusive language for a Q&A session with President Obama, and potentially in another session with celebrity Caitlyn Jenner. A "former senior Twitter employee" says that during a May 2015 #AskPOTUS event, then-CEO Dick Costolo told employees to use an algorithm to filter out abusive tweets, and another source says that a team also manually removed messages that slipped through.
The decision was allegedly made withou

What if DJ Khaled alone has the power to introduce Wave Race 64 to a new generation? No, no, no, please don’t leave. I have serious evidence to support my theory!
In December of last year, a jet skiing DJ Khaled became lost at sea, a near-tragedy documented on the musician’s Snapchat. Two weeks later, on December 31st, Nintendo released Wave Race 64, arguably the pinnacle of jet ski racing video games, on the Wii U in the European market. For some conspiracy theorists, that would be

I'm going to cut the preamble here and get straight to the chase: what the hell is going on in this GIF? How did it all happen? Did a troupe of butterflies flap their wings really hard on the other side of the planet, and through the Super Chaos Theory cause this everyman's Cirque du Soleil? I don't even know where this comes from (I saw it on Twitter), or who filmed it, but I want to know what is going on. I need to know. Let's Zapruder this GIF.
First, let's count the players: f

No Man’s Sky is an almost impossibly huge game, an entire virtual universe filled with 18 quintillion planets, each one different from the next thanks to the powers of procedural generation. Instead of a typical review, for the next week I’m going to be writing daily dispatches from No Man’s Sky, giving a firsthand account at what the experience is like, and what you can expect if you choose to dive in. You can find the first two entries here and here.
The blue planet is not at

Probably like you, I've been watching quite a lot of the Olympics. Possibly unlike you, I've been watching very little on my TV. Why would I, when an app from NHK — Japan's public broadcaster — is giving me such a better experience?What the NHK app, and other regional equivalents, do is untie themselves from the leash of traditional TV restrictions and offer video coverage of pretty much everything going on in Rio. This is usually just the raw footage provided to all official broadca

An exploit in the recently-released No Man's Sky is allowing players to quickly farm some of the game's most valuable resources. Eurogamer's Ian Higton tested the glitch, and was able to collect five Atlas Stones in thirty minutes — an achievement that would usually take hours. (These high-level items are also needed to complete the game's ending.) Here's how to work the exploit, courtesy of Eurogamer, if you're so inclined:"Upon death in your ship, No Man's Sky allows you to claim ba