Technology news

As Elon Musk is wont to do, he took the stage in front of a rabid crowd this afternoon to lay out an extraordinarily ambitious vision of the future that at times felt inspiring, brilliant, and unbelievable, if not all at once. This time around, Musk was outlining the first details for how SpaceX planned to bring people to and from Mars and ultimately facilitate human colonization of the Red Planet. The full presentation lasted an hour — longer if you count the bizarro Q&A that fol

BlackBerry released its DTEK50 last month (pictured above) as a its second Android phone following the Priv.We heard rumors that the company would be launching more Android devices, possibly one for each quarter for the next two quarters. This might be true given that a new Android phone, the DTEK60, just passed through the FCC. The filing doesn’t give us many details, but does confirm the phone’s existence.
BlackBerry reportedly leaked the phone’s specs on its own website earl

Elon Musk's Mars event today, where he outlined plans to turn the human race into a multi-planetary species, was a serious affair. Using the language of explorers, and playing up the future of civilization that hangs in the balance, Musk used grandiose terms to convince viewers around the world that we must leave Earth and realize our destiny. This message, it turns out, brings out all of the weirdos.
During the Q&A session after Musk's presentation, a number of not-so-serious crowd mem

Today, Elon Musk revealed his ambitious multi-decade roadmap for human colonization of Mars, including the Interplanetary Transport System he believes will get us there. But while the event was full of technical detail on the new rocket and ship, it appears the crafts have yet to be named.
"We're thinking about names," Musk told the crowd. "The first ship that goes to Mars, my current favorite for it is Heart of Gold from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy." Continue reading…

During his hour-long announcement of the Space X Mars colonization plan, CEO Elon Musk didn't say where exactly Martian colonists will live once they arrive on the planet — and how exactly they'll survive given the harsh environment.
Musk seemed particularly unconcerned about solar radiation. "The radiation thing is often brought up, but it’s not too big of a deal," he says. There is a "slightly increased risk" of cancer, he says, and there will probably be some sort of shielding. He

SpaceX's plans for getting people to Mars are big and still a bit vague. Its plan for helping colonists actually live there for long periods of time is even more nebulous. But company founder Elon Musk suggests the latter part is by design — because SpaceX's job is to be the railroad of the space age, opening up the Martian frontier to people who will make the most of living there. "The goal of SpaceX is really to build the transport system. It's like building the Union-Pacific Railroad,"

I’m not surprised a luxury leather smart dog collar exists.
One of my most humbling life moments happened when I was leaving work on a rainy night and came across a dog dressed in a raincoat and wearing booties. He was dressed more appropriately for the weather than me, and that made me feel insufficient. Dog owners keep their pets at the top of their game, everyone. So a dog collar that works not only asa fitness tracker but also as a GPS and light isn’t surprising.
Link AKC’s

Elon Musk wants SpaceX to send people to Mars and then bring them back to Earth on the same rocket they came in on. Nothing has ever been launched from Mars before, and Musk didn't go into all that much detail about how SpaceX would accomplish it. But he did says that it would all hang on one thing: methane.
Rather than carrying fuel from Earth for use on Mars, Musk wants SpaceX to create fuel when it gets there. Musk says SpaceX would rely on methane — "deep cryo-methalox," to be specific

Elon Musk just wrapped up an intricate and thorough presentation that covered his and SpaceX's vision of humans building a city on the surface of Mars. But throughout that talk, he didn't actually address exactly who should go. During the Q&A session that followed, the question inevitably came up: what sort of person does Musk think will volunteer to get strapped to that big rocket and fired toward the Red Planet? "Who should these people be, carrying the light of humanity to Mars for all of

At the beginning of the 1993 film Jurassic Park, you are not meant to like Jeff Goldblum’s character. He embodies the type of aggressive intellectualism that kills fun and makes other people feel stupid. He comes off as snarky, where he would like to come off as charming. While the film’s other scientists are paleontologists and botanists — colorful, tangible sciences that children admire! — he is a chaos theorist, and his job is to drop philosophical bombs all over our p

How will Elon Musk and SpaceX fund its ambitious plan to go to Mars? The question was a big one coming into today's announcement, and Musk opted to suggest some kind of "public-private partnership" would generate the necessary cash. But first, he made a South Park joke.
When talk turned to funding, Musk moved along to a slide that started with "Steal Underpants" and ended with "Profit." (In between: "Kickstarter.") The slide was a reference to a season two episode of South Park, w

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has unveiled the design for the giant rocket booster he wants to build in order to colonize Mars. It is part of what SpaceX is referring to as the "Mars Vehicle" — the rocket booster and the Mars spaceship combined — and Musk announced it on stage in Guadalajara, Mexico at the 67th International Astronautical Conference.
SpaceX teased the rocket in a promo video released shortly before Musk's talk. The massive, single-core rocket will be responsible for laun

Today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Mars vehicle — the spaceship his company plans to build to transport the first colonists to Mars. The spaceship is meant to launch from Earth on top of the booster and then travel the rest of the way on its own to the Red Planet.
The company's interplanetary spaceship — informally know as the BFS, or "Big Fucking Spaceship” — will have a diameter of 17 meters. The plan is to send about 100 people per trip, though he hopes to ultima

Elon Musk thinks that it would take between 40 and 100 years for humanity to go from landing a ship full of colonists on Mars to establishing a self-sustaining civilization. At his company SpaceX's event today, Musk laid out how a fleet of ships that could carry a minimum of 100 people, flying every two years, could populate a Martian city:If we say the minimum threshold for a self-sustaining city on Mars, or civilization, would be a million people, and you can only go every two years, if you ha

Elon Musk's ambitious plan to turn the human race into a multi-planetary species, starting first with the colonization of Mars, will cost a lot of money. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who laid out his Mars plans today at a press conference, hopes to eventually make the cost of taking a trip to Mars equal that of the average US home, at around $200,000 per ticket. Still, there's a long road ahead to funding the complex architecture of a stable Earth-Mars transportation system.
To cement his

Elon Musk is holding a massive event today to reveal his plans to eventually travel to and colonize Mars, and while his real audience was NASA and the government, that didn’t stop him from going all-out in production value. Specifically, the similarities between Elon presenting his plans and the way Steve Jobs presented the technology decisions that went into various iconic Apple products was note-perfect — just look at how Elon compared the various options for propellants and h

We're just one week away from the unveiling of Google's newest smartphones and VentureBeat has got its hands on a clear image of the gadgets. Supposedly called the Pixel, the device is said to replace Google's Nexus line with two different sized devices and fresh brand names.
According to Android Police, one will be a 5-inch smartphone called the Pixel X, to replace last year's LG-made Nexus 5X (seemingly pictured above), while a 5.5-inch model called the Pixel XL &mdash

One day many, many years from now, Elon Musk believes the cost of taking a trip to Mars will be about the same as buying a house. During today's keynote, the SpaceX CEO said that visiting Mars should be equal to the median cost of a home in the United States, which is around $200,000. Musk said that reaching such a price through the use of "traditional methods" for space travel would be impossible. Using those established means, it would be closer to $10 billion per person, which is completely o

Google will now let you privately search the web in its core app on iOS. The ability to search in incognito mode is being added in an update to the Google app that's coming out today.
But the more interesting part of the update isn't incognito mode on its own — private searches are already available in both Chrome and Safari, so that's nothing new — it's how Google is making them even more secure. Google will let you lock up private searches using Touch ID, so that if someone el

 For iOS or Mac users interested in VR, there isn’t a lot you can do right now without migrating to the dark sides of Android or Windows. Occipital is aiming to get people on the iOS platform access to some more cool VR opportunities. Today, the company opened up a $500 development kit today that brings room-scale motion tracking to iOS (as well as Android) smartphones, Upload reports.… Read More

On September 27, Elon Musk announced a bold new plan to establish a permanent human habitation on Mars with his company SpaceX. It's one of the most ambitious schemes Musk — or humanity in general — has ever attempted, relying on huge advances in both rocketry and spaceship construction. Follow along here for the latest news about the project, and whether Musk can succeed in his longheld dream of bringing humanity to Mars.Developing. Check out our SpaceX Mars Colonization liveblog fo

 Solar company Cogenra is suing Elon Musk’s SolarCity over the use of shingling technology the company alleges SolarCity took from Cogenra and used to create a world-record breaking solar panel.
Cogenra says it shared its “most precious and confidential trade secrets, manufacturing processes, and other intellectual property with Silevo and SolarCity” between 2010 and… Read More

Google is one of the leading providers of artificial intelligence-assisted language translation, and the company now says a new technique for doing so is vastly improving the results. The company’s AI team calls it the Google Neural Machine Translation system, or GNMT, and it initially provided a less resource-intensive way to ingest a sentence in one language and produce that same sentence in another language. Instead of digesting each word or phrase as a standalone unit, as prior methods

Private spaceflight company SpaceX has released a video that details its long-awaited "Interplanetary Transport System." The video was published less than an hour before CEO Elon Musk was scheduled to detail the system at the International Astronautical Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The video appears to show SpaceX's new rocket — the BFR, or "Big Fucking Rocket" — as well as the company's interplanetary spaceship — the BFS, or "Big Fucking Spaceship."
The rocket appea

A group of record labels, including UMG, Sony Music, and Warner Bros., have filed a copyright infringement claim against a YouTube stream-ripping website, the BBC reports. The website, youtube-mp3.org, converts YouTube streams to mp3 audio files. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) calls the stream-ripping site the "world's largest," with more than 60 million users per month. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has given YouTube-mp3 "formal notice of intended legal acti

In case you haven’t heard, 2016 is the worst year ever.
That certainly sounds true, as far as manifestos that can be condensed down to five words and a number go. The evidence is certainly abundant in tragedies, election updates, a peppering of celebrity divorces and deaths. In our disturbingly polarized culture, all parties seem to share a general sense of impending doom.
Even America’s go-to dealer of sugar-coated escapism, the network television comedy, has been infected by our na

Honeywell introduced a new version of its Lyric smart thermostat at CES this year, and less than a year later it’s already bringing us another iteration. The new Lyric T5 Wi-Fi thermostat is similar to its CES brethren in that it’s controlled through Honeywell’s Lyric app, is compatible with Apple’s HomeKit and Amazon's Alexa, can use your phone to set up a geofence, and will send you notifications when there are changes in humidity or temperature. So you’ll be able