Technology news

Star Trek's return to TV has been delayed. The premiere of Star Trek: Discovery, the new series heading to CBS's All Access streaming service, has been pushed back to next May. It was originally scheduled to debut in January.
This is a short delay, but the series' producers say it's necessary to "achieve a vision" they can "be proud of."
Details of the show's first season otherwise aren't changing. There are still plans for 13 episodes, with the first to premiere on CBS itself and the rest to go

Sony introduced its newest 4K HDR projector today, called the VPL-VW675ES. It’s an expensive device, priced at $14,999, but is also Sony’s (and the world’s) first to support Hybrid Log-Gamma, a standard which will eventually be used to air broadcasts in ultra HD. For now, it can stream content from most services, including Amazon and Netflix, works with 4K Blu-ray players, and uses HDCP 2.2 on its two inputs. The VPL-VW675ES displays in 1,800 lumens and has a contrast ratio of

We're already in the 4K era: it seems like the majority of new TVs, streaming services, and devices support the higher quality video format. The de facto physical format for 4K is off to a slow start, however. The UBP-X1000ES is Sony’s first to support Ultra HD Blu-ray playback, with full 4K and HDR support (although Sony has yet to specify whether it will be using the HDR10 or Dolby Vision standard.) Along with the new 4K Blu-ray discs, the UBP-X1000ES also supports CD, DVD, and Blu-

Thanks to the recent arrival of the iOS 10 update, iPhone users can use both Siri and Apple Maps to hail an Uber car. Uber announced back in June that these integrations would be available to customers soon, and now here they are.To get these latest features just download iOS 10, and then update your Uber app. Then you can either ask Siri to call you an Uber, or do it within Apple Maps under the "Ride" tab.
You can already hail an Uber from within Google Maps, after the search giant started addi

Oculus has added a vital component of gaming to its Rift and Gear VR headsets: achievements. An update featuring the change will be rolling out to all Oculus Home users between now and the next few weeks; they’ll see achievements from Minecraft, Anshar Wars 2, and Hitman Go right away, with more developers adding them in the future. By default, users will be able to see what achievements their friends have unlocked, although new privacy settings will let people opt out of sharing that info

Using sunlight to brighten a room sounds like a good idea. I love working from my bedroom because my room faces east and has the sun shining in during most of the day, and everyone knows more sunshine equals a yes, good situation. Lucy is a new product from a company called Solenica that tries to fill more spaces with sun. It just launched on Indiegogo and claims to be able to redirect sunlight in order to illuminate rooms.
Lucy is solar-powered (of course) and can be put inside or outside.

Back in June of 2013, I published my first piece on The Verge. Titled "Post Processing, why the smartphone camera changed photography forever," I argued that the launch of the iPhone in 2007 made as great an impact on the world of photography as the launch of the first Leica 35mm camera back in 1913. Clearly not everyone agreed, but let's not reopen that can of worms.
Instead, let's talk about just how terrible that first iPhone camera was! I mean really, while historically monumental, the camer

Apple’s new iOS 10 update adds a bunch of fun new features to iMessage, including effects, apps, and stickers that you can send to your friends. Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious how any of this actually works. Confused how to add stickers? Want to send messages with confetti? Read on!
iMessage Apps
The biggest change in iMessage is the addition of apps, which fall into roughly two buckets. There are more traditional app integrations, like Fandango or Venmo. These allow access to

Unlike in every other mass die-off of animal species, these days bigger marine animals are more likely to die out than smaller species, a new study suggests. Why is that? People, probably.
We may be entering a sixth mass extinction
Over the course of Earth’s history, there have been five mass extinction events. The largest killed off nearly 90 percent of marine species on Earth about 250 million years ago — and the most well-known event wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years a

Starting today, you won’t be able to browse the web on the tablets in New York’s LinkNYC hubs. In an announcement today, the LinkNYC team said that "unexpected challenges" had made it necessary to temporarily shut down the web function in the hubs' onboard tablets.
"Some users have been monopolizing the Link tablets and using them inappropriately, preventing others from being able to use them while frustrating the residents and businesses around them," the announcement reads. "T

Google today announced software updates to Fiber TV, its over-the-top streaming television offering for Google Fiber customers. They’ll be available right away for new Fiber TV customers once the necessary hardware has been set up, and current customers will see the updates in the next few weeks.
Now the system will recommend TV shows and movies.
“So if you regularly watch The Walking Dead on AMC, it might suggest a show you haven’t seen, like American Horror Story on FX,&rdquo

EurekAlert — a scientific news source that hosts embargoed journal articles — has suffered a serious security breach and is now temporarily offline.EurekAlert is the news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It holds science-related releases and papers from hundreds of institutions, including top journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Both these journals are major publishers for

My Little Pony’s motto is “friendship is magic.” In the real world, however, that motto translates to something like “private user data is money.”
Viacom, Mattel, Hasbro, and JumpStart — all companies that specialize in children’s toys and entertainment — have agreed to pay penalties relating to their violation of the privacy rights of minors, according to the office of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman. The A.G. ran a two-year investigat

Facebook says on a given day, the average user on the social network will read about 10 percent of all the stories that are surfaced. Adam Mosseri, the company’s vice president of product management for News Feed, revealed while it curates 2,000 stories daily for users, unless you’re spending every waking moment reading through the News Feed, most of the time you’ll read about 200 stories.
On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the social networking company’s exec

Microsoft today announced the first Win32 apps and games are now available in the Windows Store. You’ll need Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update released last month to get them.
At its Build 2016 developer conference, Microsoft unveiled the Desktop App Converter, which lets developers bring existing Windows applications to the Windows Universal Platform (UWP). The goal is to get as many of the 16 million existing Win32/.Net applications to the Windows Store as possible. In August, the c

Advocacy groups have petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration to restrict the use of certain antibiotics given to livestock. They claim that using these antibiotics contributes to the development of antibiotic-resistant bugs that are dangerous to humans, and that the FDA’s efforts to encourage farmers to stop haven’t been effective.
Three years ago, the FDA created a voluntary program that "disapproved" of the use of antibiotics to promote weight gain in livestock. But the prob

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has been hacked, according to a report by The New York Times. An archive of his personal emails were published late last night by the website DC Leaks, although the archive was protected by a password. Reached by the Times, an aide to Secretary Powell confirmed that the emails were authentic and had been made public as the result of a hack.
DCLeaks is the same site that first published emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, which many took as

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sapphire Ventures has closed a new $1 billion fund.
Founded initially as the VC arm of SAP back in 1996, SAP Ventures split from its software giant parent in 2011 and rebranded more than three years later as Sapphire Ventures. The firm focuses on a wide range of expansion-stage startups across the technology spectrum, while also plows money into other early-stage VC funds. This latest news represents Sapphire’s third fund, and takes its total managed ass

Early in American Honey, a teenage Texan named Star (Sasha Lane) gapes as a group of young people around her age take over the local superstore, hopping onto the bagging counters and clogging up the aisles as they gyrate to Rihanna's "We Found Love," which has just come on over the speakers. A security guard shows up to manhandle the kids out of the door, but no one seems to mind. It's just another spontaneous, temporary small-town moment of hilarity and celebration before the whole group loads

One of the great experiences of the Toronto International Film Festival so far was The Red Turtle, billed as the latest from Japanese animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli, producers of films like Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, and many other visually gorgeous films about spunky young characters discovering their place in the world. But as the trailer for The Red Turtle shows, the film doesn’t follow Ghibli’s house style at all, and it’s about a man a

In a press conference in midtown Manhattan today, Edward Snowden and his legal team officially launched their long-rumored campaign for a presidential pardon. The campaign includes an open letter to urging President Obama to enact the pardon, currently collecting signatures at PardonSnowden.org
"It is clear that America’s democracy has benefited from Snowden’s actions," the letter reads, "and I am confident he will be remembered as a whistleblower and patriot." Early signers include

In a press conference in midtown Manhattan today, Edward Snowden and his legal team officially launched their long-rumored campaign for a presidential pardon. The campaign includes an open letter to urging President Obama to enact the pardon, currently collecting signatures at PardonSnowden.org
"It is clear that America’s democracy has benefited from Snowden’s actions," the letter reads, "and I am confident he will be remembered as a whistleblower and patriot." Early signers include

There's nothing better in this life than a really good goofy dance video set to a song you already love. Except true love, the invention of the Fast Pass, and finding $10 in your winter coat. But you know what I mean. Anyway, I already love the song "Closer" by the Chainsmokers, despite the fact that it's the number one song in America and we're all therefore required to consider it uncool.
Recently, The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino wrote a really interesting piece about this great song's biz

Undertale was one of the biggest surprise hits last year, and this caught its creator off guard.
Toby Fox wrote about the reaction to his indie role-playing game on his blog almost one year after its release (it came out on September 15, 2015). Undertale won over fans and critics with its quirky humor and for giving players the ability to play the game without killing anything. But that success wasn’t all good for Fox.
“Not only did I not expect this level of popularity, but initiall

Don't expect to see any new smartwatches from LG, Lenovo, or Huawei before 2017. The three biggest Android Wear manufacturers have confirmed to CNET that they won't release new hardware in 2016, leaving LG as the only one of the three that has released a smartwatch this year.
IFA is usually the time when these companies have announced new smartphones, but the event came and went without a third generation Moto 360 or a follow-up to the Huawei Watch. So why the

MegaBots Inc. lit up the internet last July when it challenged Japanese rivals Suidobashi Heavy Industry to a giant robot duel. The team of US engineers and tinkerers promised that the fight would take place a year from the challenge, and although the deadline has come and gone, MegaBots wants fans to know it's still working hard to deliver the robot fight of a lifteime. To keep interest ticking over, the team is releasing a digital video series (announced last year) following them as they

While you’re probably familiar with Nintendo’s Zelda video games and their green tunic-wearing hero Link, you may have missed Majora’s Mask. Yes, the Nintendo 64 game sold fine. Yes, it was and still is critically adored. But Majora’s Mask is also debatably the weirdest and least accessible game in the series. That says a lot, considering another Zelda game is about the dream of a giant flying whale god.
I was reminded of Majora’s Mask by the footage above of a humo

Remind today announced that it has passed 20 million monthly active users and has named Brian Grey as CEO. The education app provides secure messaging for teachers, students, and parents at more than 50 percent of the approximately 100,000 public schools in America and recently added payments processing to its platform. Grey was formerly CEO of sports media site Bleacher Report.
Above: Remind cofounders David Kopf (left) and Brett Kopf (center), with CEO Brian Grey (right).Image Credit

German chemical company Bayer will fork over $57 billion to buy American seed seller Monsanto. The all-cash deal — the largest takeover ever by a German company — will create a firm that has control over more than a quarter of the world’s seeds and pesticides.
St. Louis-based Monsanto is infamous both for its genetically modified crops and for being the world’s largest seller of seeds. Bayer, though best known in the US for its aspirin, has a major pesticide division, and

Spotify has now passed 40 million paying subscribers, if this tweet by company cofounder Daniel Ek is anything to go by.The news comes three months after Spotify announced it had passed 100 million total users, though, at the time, the company provided no update to the 30 million paying subscribers figure it had announced back in March.
A few weeks back, however, the music-streaming giant did confirm that it was sitting on 39 million paying users, so it was only a matter of time before the magic

Apple CEO Tim Cook seems to be a much bigger fan of augmented reality than virtual reality. During an interview with Good Morning America that aired this morning, Cook took a question about VR and used it as an opportunity to bring up AR and why he thinks it's going to be much more interesting.
"My own view is that augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far, because this gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present talking to each other, but also have othe

Star Trek Online has some of the best-looking starships in the quadrant. But players have never been able to touch, feel, and display their customized Galaxy-class cruisers, Romulan Warbirds, or Klingon Bird of Prey scouts from the Cryptic Studios-developed online game. That’s changing thanks to a new partnership between publisher Perfect World and Eucl3d, a 3D-printing company.
Perfect World announced the news Friday in a blog post. Right now, the parties haven’t released any pricin

For months, Oculus has been arguing that ordinary console gamepads, not fancy motion controllers, have a real future in virtual reality. But so far, there haven’t been many VR-only projects that prove this theory true. The latest attempt — and one of the last before Oculus gears up to release its Touch controllers — is Feral Rites, a colorful brawler from Ratchet & Clank studio Insomniac. Feral Rites is supposed to help build the Oculus Rift’s catalog of long, complex

The crisp September air! Nature’s reminder to pillage the basement for the leaf blower and that college moving box you’re still using to store fall clothes.I love this ritual, because every year I leave it a little bit richer. I try on my fall jacket, you know, to make sure my belly hasn’t outgrown it, and inside the front pocket I find a familiar present: a crumpled $10 bill.I’m being honest when I say that I never purposefully plant the cash, it just sort of happens yea

Botness, the influential bot-maker group whose leaders include Amir Shevat of Slack, Chris Messina of Uber, Jon Bruner of O’Reilly, and Andy Mauro of Automat, has released preliminary results of its survey-in-progress. Even while the current sample size was small — just 130 respondents, the findings represent what is likely the first self-cataloging of the nascent bots ecosystem.
The survey’s initial results show that the overwhelming majority of bot companies ar

Full disclosure: it is just possible that La La Land is not for you. Damien Chazelle's follow-up to his Oscar-winning breakout film Whiplash is getting such rapturous responses in its festival releases at Venice and Toronto as to give the impression that this is a perfect movie, capable of winning over even the worst curmudgeons. But it's largely played to a select crowd of determined festivalgoers and industry professionals who've chosen careers in making, marketing, or just talking about the m