Technology news

Hyperloop One, the once-promising futuristic transportation company, fell further into a legal morass with a new court filing that alleges one of the co-founders held a secret meeting in his garage to plot a takeover of the company.Former co-workers accuse Brogan BamBrogan, the ousted chief technology officer and co-founder of Hyperloop One, of drawing up a list of employees he wanted to poach, discussing how to raise money, including $2 to $3 million to cover anticipated legal costs, for a new

Hyperloop One, the once-promising futuristic transportation company, fell further into a legal morass with a new court filing that alleges one of the co-founders held a secret meeting in his garage to plot a takeover of the company.
Former co-workers accuse Brogan BamBrogan, the ousted chief technology officer and co-founder of Hyperloop One, of drawing up a list of employees he wanted to poach, discussing how to raise money, including $2 to $3 million to cover anticipated legal costs, for a new

The internet is full of tips on how to make cleaning fun, but I want more. I want an invention that would make the task nothing but pure joy: house-cleaning lasers. All of the mesmerizing visual effects of a laser light show! None of the backbreaking scrubbing of spring cleaning!
A small step toward my fantasy is available today. The process is called "laser ablation," which is a scientific term for using very focused lasers to remove one material from another. Laser ablation is typically used t

My big highlight from last year’s IFA 2015 was the Samsung Gear S2, a smartwatch that finally, truly felt like a normal watch. It was light, its wristband was supple and comfortable, and it had a rotating bezel and a software interface that both felt fresh, unique, and just fun to use. Today at IFA 2016, Samsung introduced the successor to that glorious little watch, and it’s a big old thing bearing the title of Gear S3. The new watch has GPS, LTE, a long-lasting battery, the latest

Australian geologists discovered some really weird and extremely old structures in Greenland: fossilized mounds made by microbes that are dated to about 3.6 billion years ago. That means life on Earth started early — shortly after our planet was formed, 4.5 billion years ago.
The structures — called stromatolites — were discovered in 2012, in a remote area of Greenland called Isua. The researchers noticed the weird formations that were once covered by snow and immediately under

Panasonic already has one 4K Blu-ray player on the market, but at $699 it's not exactly cheap. To help remedy that issue, the company has announced the UB-700 4K Blu-ray player, which will cost around €500 when released, Panasonic announced today at IFA.The UB700 will come with most of the same features as the more expensive DMP-UB900 — 60fps playback, HDR support, high-res audio playback (WAV, FLAC, DSD, ALAC), and the ability to stream 4K content — but it won't come

Earlier this summer, a tourism advocate named Durita Dahl Andreassen made a plea to Google. In a blog post, Andreassen explained how she'd spent the last few months using sheep equipped with 360-degree cameras to capture images of the Faroe Islands — an isolated North Atlantic archipelago that had yet to be documented by Google Street View. "My sheep are great for capturing the tracks and trails of the Faroe Islands," wrote Andreassen, who works for the Faroe Islands' tourism board, "but i

The Philadelphia Zoo welcomed a new baby gorilla to its sweet zoo family on Friday — its first in 20 years, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Like all nervous, expectant caregivers, the zookeepers baby-proofed the gorilla exhibit by removing nets, firehoses, and logs. Zoo leadership has so far displayed appropriate care for this miracle of life.
The baby gorilla will be named in a public contest. When I first heard this my instinct was to shoot a quick warning over to the Philly zoo team,

If you haven't heard, the biggest tech event in Europe is IFA, and this year typically sleepy tech categories like laptops, smartwatches, and tablets are seeing a big shakeup. A lot of that is thanks to new processors from both Intel and Qualcomm, but there's also some wild innovation coming direct from Lenovo. From ridiculously massive powerhouse laptops to surprisingly thin, Wacom-powered tablet computers, we're collecting the most important stories from IFA right here.
To see everything happe

Virality is a funny thing. Two weeks ago, the mad hackers at creative studio Nelson Cash cobbled together the single-purpose site makeitstranger.com as a way of capitalizing on Stranger Things' newfound popularity. The show is deeply influenced by the horror aesthetic of the 1970s and ‘80s, right down to the font. So the group gave people a way of writing anything they wanted in the style of the now-iconic title card. Naturally, people went crazy for it:#makeitstranger app not allowing me

JetBlue Airways Flight 387 from Fort Lauderdale, Florida just landed in Santa Clara, Cuba, marking the first scheduled flight between the US and Cuba in over half a century.Onboard was US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who said in a statement, “Transportation has a unique role in this historic initiative and we look forward to the benefits these new services will provide to those eligible for Cuba travel.”Next stop... #cuba #jetbluesofly Honor to be on the first commercial fl

Lenovo announced the new Yoga Book today, a different take on the tablet idea. The Yoga Book has tablet-standard features like a 10-inch touchscreen and thin design, but it also has a unique, permanently attached panel that can be used as both a keyboard and writing surface. Not only that, you can also put a pad of paper on top of the panel and write your notes with real ink, while having them captured digitally at the same time.The company says it spent three years working on the Yoga Book &mda

Lenovo is today adding a third smartphone to the company's Moto Z series: the Moto Z Play. Like the Moto Z and Moto Z Force before it, the Moto Z Play is coming to Verizon Wireless as a Droid in the United States, but it will also be sold unlocked. Lenovo and the Moto team designed the Z Play to accomplish two things. First, the company wanted it to be more affordable than its flagship siblings. At around $400 ($408 full retail on Verizon, $449 unlocked) you're getting a very decent if not bleed

At first there was the Yoga Tab 3 and Yoga Tab 3 Pro, and now Lenovo is adding a Yoga Tab 3 Plus into the mix. The latest addition is designed to be an Android-powered tablet for binge-watching TV shows and movies. Lenovo claims this Tab 3 Plus will last 18 hours for general use, and it has a 10.1-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600) display for viewing media content.
Unlike other Tab 3 models, the Plus doesn't have a projector to project your movies onto walls while you're mobile. Instead, you can cas

Dell first introduced its stunning edge-to-edge display with the XPS 13 last year, and now Lenovo is starting to bring a similar screen to its Yoga range. Lenovo's new Yoga 910, the successor to last year's Yoga 900, includes a "near edgeless display" that's just 5mm of bezel. That's slightly less than the XPS 13, and it's designed to make the screen bleed into the bezels around the display. Just like Dell, Lenovo has had to reposition its webcam as a result, but the Yoga 910 has the camera posi

Verizon Wireless is about to lose its exclusive grip on the Moto Z. Today Lenovo announced that on September 15th, customers will be able to order an unlocked version of what's billed as "the world's thinnest premium smartphone" for $699.99; it will begin shipping sometime in October. The unlocked Moto Z will operate on GSM networks such as AT&T and T-Mobile.
The just-announced Moto Z Play will also be available unlocked in October following its own brief window of exclusivity with Verizon;

Lenovo surprised everyone with a Surface clone last year that looked just like Microsoft's tablet. At IFA in Berlin this week, Lenovo is back with a slightly refined Surface clone, the Miix 510. It trades the Core M processor found in the Miix 700 for a 6th generation Core i7 chip (not Kaby Lake). That's going to make it a little more powerful than the Miix 700, and Lenovo is still promising around 7.5 hours of battery life.
The Miix 510 still looks very similar to the Miix 700, and it incl

A prestigious brand is joining Lenovo's MotoMod lineup today: it's Hasselblad. Confirming some recent leaks, both companies have just announced the new Hasselblad True Zoom. The True Zoom is a camera attachment that magnetically latches onto the back of the Moto Z and expands the phone's photography prowess by adding optical zoom up to 10x. It will launch in September for $250 when purchased from Verizon, or $299 if you buy it from Motorola.com. Continue reading…

A new gadget on Kickstarter is basically designed to make you feel like a secret agent. It's called Sgnl, and it lets you make phone calls just by wearing a wristband and touching your ear, with your fingers acting as the receiver.
There's no speaker on the device — instead, audio is directed into your ear through vibrations that are sent through your body, into your wrist and up to the fingers touching your ear; a mic is built into the band. It's not a new concept, but it's a neat tw

Back in July when the Zubia Z11 was released, it was unclear if Nubia would make its new flagship device available outside of China. Today during IFA, the company announced that it would in fact be rolled out internationally, and the device would make its way to Europe and North America starting next month. The specifications are pretty much identical to the Chinese version:
5.5-inch 1080p display
Snapdragon 820 SoC
Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 with Nubia UI 4.0
16MP rear camera, 8MP front cam

Bachelor in Paradise is a television show in which the discarded men and women from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette come to a place called "Paradise" (technically a resort in Mexico) for a second (or sometimes third, and occasionally fourth) shot at love. Each week, they pair off in a game of sexy musical chairs. Throughout the season, the surplus human beings are granted blissful reentry to the real world, and two more men or women are added to the cast as tribute. Who knows how long thi

When Google’s OnHub launched last year, it was marketed as a stylish wireless router that could be placed anywhere and would still look like it belonged there. It was also supposed to become a hub for the smart home. Well, that didn’t happen. Although OnHub works with IFTTT, the router itself doesn’t pair with any smart devices. Today that’s changing, though, with Google announcing a partnership with Philips Lighting. Anyone with OnHub can type "On.Here" into any browser

Logitech has announced its first silent mice, which will hopefully be enough to convince your boss to replace those aging mice that torment your ears on a daily basis. The company is releasing two versions of the quiet clicker: the M220 Silent and the M330 Silent Plus. Logitech says they reduce noise by 90 percent over standard mice. The mice have even received the Quiet Mark seal of approval from the Noise Abatement Society, so that's good.Logitech says you'll still get the familiar click feeli

Bill Nye, known as the Science Guy to practically every 20-something in America, is headed back to TV with a new talk show set to premiere on Netflix next spring. Called Bill Nye Saves the World, the show will revolve around different science topics, while attempting to dispel myths and false scientific claims made by politicians and religious leaders. Special guests will appear in the show’s episodes, too, and you can expect to see some cool experiments and lab demonstrations from Bi

Samsung hit on a good formula with last year's Gear S2 smartwatch. So for this year's model, it's making small changes and sticking with what already works.
That's the gist of the Gear S3, which Samsung is unveiling today in Berlin. It's basically a blown up version of the Gear S2 with a bit more tech inside, which should be good news for anyone who wants a big smartwatch.
And "big" is really one of the key changes here. Where the S2 was relatively small for a smartwatch, the S3 feels downright

Elon Musk just teased a major update for Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot system, which will be released in the next few weeks.
Major improvements to Autopilot coming with V8.0 and 8.1 software (std OTA update) primarily through advanced processing of radar signals— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 31, 2016The over-the-air software update will be available to Tesla customers following a “minor” revision to the upcoming 8.0 software is made, Musk says.
This is just a software

Instagram just announced an update to its iOS app that will let you pinch to zoom on photos or videos. The new feature will be available across the entire app, according to Instagram — pinch-to-zoom will work on the media that shows up in your standard feed as well as on people’s profiles and in the Explore tab. Instagram said the new feature will be rolling out to Android “in the coming weeks.”Zooming in on photos and videos in Instagram is a feature that has been reques

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance specializes in tastefully staged, evocatively lit suffering. His breakthrough film, 2010’s Blue Valentine, tracks a young couple (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) falling in love, getting married, raising a child, then slowly disintegrating as a family. His follow-up, 2012’s The Place Beyond The Pines, follows two generations of misery, as a stunt man (Gosling again) turns to crime to support his estranged lover and their child, with long-term pain

On Tuesday, Uber announced a “first-of-a-kind” partnership with WageWorks, a major administrator of employee benefits, that will allow commuters in New York City to use pretax dollars to pay for UberPool. It’s a major step for the ride-hailing company in its quest to position its carpooling service as a form of public transportation.Uber says commuters with WageWorks accounts could save up to 40 percent on their UberPool rides under the program. The benefit will be available fi

Acer and Starbreeze teamed up to launch their StarVR headsets for arcades and theme parks earlier this year. Today Acer announced that it successfully sold the first batch of those headsets and is in the process of shipping them to the IMAX Corporation. The company plans to install StarVR in a new VR Center in Los Angeles that’ll open later this year and would be the first of six VR locations IMAX hopes to open this year.
The headsets come with a wider field of vision than the Oculus

More than a decade after it first launched, sci-fi virtual world EVE Online is going free. Developer CCP Games announced the change today, which will see the game add a new free option as part of its next big update in November.
With the update, EVE Online players will essentially be separated into two different tiers: "Omega clones" and "Alpha clones." Omega clones will apply to accounts with existing subscriptions, and will give players access to the entire game, just as they always have. Alph

HTC sees a VR developer that it likes.
Steel Wool Studios, a virtual reality studio made up of veterans from Pixar, LucasFilm, and Telltale Games, announced today that it has received $5 million in Series A funding from HTC. Steel Wool will use the funds to support its game, simulation, and narrative VR experiences. HTC is the company behind the Vive, one of most prominent VR headsets. Market watchers are predicting that VR could generate $40 billion in revenues by 2020, but the sector

Gene Wilder is gone, and he will be sorely missed. He was an icon. As a fan, I always admired the air of whimsy and gentle weirdness he brought to his roles. The obvious example will forever be his defining performance in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, where he plays a kind, if gleefully unhinged, candy baron. But you saw it throughout his oeuvre, from his Mel Brooks days down to his work with Richard Pryor.
A central part of those performances, as wonderfully idiosyncratic as they are