Technology news

We're in the homestretch, people.
It's finally November, which means this painful presidential election will be over in less than 10 days. Hallelujah, right? 
Wrong.
Though one might have assumed nearing Election Day would ease some of the unbearable tension we've endured during these ugly months of insult-driven campaigns and political scandals, that is unfortunately not the case.
SEE ALSO: Stressed out after the debates? You're not the only one
In fact, it seems as though these last few d

Adobe is working on a new piece of software that would act like a Photoshop for audio, according to Adobe developer Zeyu Jin, who spoke at the Adobe MAX conference in San Diego, California today. The software is codenamed Project VoCo, and it’s not clear at this time when it will materialize as a commercial product. The standout feature, however, is the ability to add words not originally found in the audio file.The Photoshop for audio is codenamed ProjecT VoCo
An Adobe representative conf

Beginning in December 2013, the Ebola virus spread like wildfire across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, killing an estimated 11,310 people over the course of three years. The outbreak moved with incredible speed because of a few factors, including lack of adequate healthcare, poverty, and dangerous burial practices. Now, scientists have identified an additional culprit: a mutation allowed the Ebola virus to better enter human cells and infect people.The findings are described in two studies p

In a race that’s predicted to be anything from close to a landslide victory for Clinton, Trump supporters are pulling out all the stops in the days leading up to the November 8 election. The new trick, and perhaps the dirtiest of them all, is a new form of voter suppression that appears to target African-American and Hispanic Clinton supporters. The tricksters are paying for ads on Twitter in an attempt to trick the Clinton faithful into voting via text. I can assure you; that’s not

Google just changed its policy for app subscriptions and Android developers now have more flexibility than their iOS counterparts.
In an effort to help bolster subscriptions, the company will soon allow developers to charge introductory rates for app subscriptions.
SEE ALSO: I ditched Android for an iPhone 7, and I'm not sorry
Here's how it works: Developers can set a temporary rate that will last for a predetermined period of time. Say you have a cloud storage app that typically costs $2.99 a m

 Out of the pill? Nurx is a web platform delivering birth control in less than a couple of hours, and it just raised $3.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures.
The startup launched in 2014 to bridge the gap between running out of birth control and waiting to get a new prescription. It added delivery of PrEP, an anti-HIV medication, to its services earlier this year and… Read More

It's been a little less than a day since the last out was recorded. I'm still not sure if the Chicago Cubs really won the World Series and I was there to see it, or if it was all some fever dream — and, at some moment, I'll wake up and it will all disappear. 
SEE ALSO: The Story Behind Chicago Cubs Fans' W Flags
The last two weeks have been one of the more surreal experiences of my life, a blur of tons of baseball, little sleep, and more emotional swings than I would ever care to have

Beyoncé’s surprise performance at the 50th Country Music Association Awards caused a tizzy on Twitter yesterday — both among Bey fans sitting down to watch their first country-music event, and some country-music fans who weren’t into the performance selection. But one voice has been surprisingly absent from the conversation: that of the Country Music Association itself.
Elle reports that no mentions of Beyoncé’s performance with the Dixie Chicks have appeare

If there's any time to get delightfully drunk, it's after winning the World Series and breaking a 108-year-old curse.
Cubs President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein didn't hesitate to get a good buzz going before doing a few TV interviews after the team's clinching Game 7 win.
SEE ALSO: Here are a bunch of grown men crying over the Cubs World Series win
"I'm going on a bender, so wake me up at the winter meetings," Epstein joked as he crashed an interview with Jed Hoyer, the Cubs' executive

Oh, Nintendo of America. You sweet summer child. I really appreciate your efforts for a cute Toad-centric Twitter question sesh to celebrate another Mario Party game, but things have taken a dark turn. As if you were the second coming of Andrew WK, you solicited fans for questions about parties. But your request has been manipulated into something else. Fans are going straight for the deep stuff; the hard, prying, existential questions that we all ask ourselves deep in the pits of despair.Come t

Dogs are man's best friend and toothbrushes worst enemy, apparently. 
This clip of what appears to be a very silly dog going berserk over a toothbrush, results in some priceless reactions. 
While the toothbrush never actually touches the giant pup, the canine clearly has very strong opinions. We can only imagine how this dog handles a trip to the vet. Jennifer Aniston's Uber driver steals the hilarious 'Office Christmas Party' trailer
Postmodern Jukebox's transformed The Chainsmo

After the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series since 1908 in dramatic fashion Wednesday, one reporter begged the question — is Theo Epstein a sorcerer?
Well, the Cubs president of baseball operations turned a franchise of perennial losers into world champions, snapping a historically long championship drought and breaking a famed curse that seemed destined to torture a city forever.
But here's the thing: Epstein just did all that for the second time. 
SEE ALSO: A Cubs fan's World

LOS ANGELES — Collins Key is using social media magic to find a mystery girl.
In a new series — called The Disappearing Girl — the social media star/magician utilizes his fanbase to help him find a girl he met at one of his meet-ups in Santa Monica. 
Each day, the digital influencer asks fans to find clues on his and her social media accounts. Key then follows the clues and documents his adventures across Los Angeles.
Mashable got an exclusive look at a teaser (above) of

V-Moda announced a new “Forza” line of headphones this week. The three Forza headphones are all in-ear models designed for fitness and sport use, which represents a bit of a departure from the over-ear style that the company is typically known for.
There’s the base model, the $100 Forza, which is a fairly standard pair of sports headphones with a sweat-proof plastic casing. Next, for a bit more money, there’s the $130 Forza Metallo, which are essentially the same headphon

The Great American Road Trip has almost always been fueled by gasoline.
But soon it will be possible to traverse the United States in vehicles running on electricity, hydrogen and other cleaner fuels. 
The Obama administration on Thursday unveiled 55 new highway corridors spanning 85,000 miles that indicate where drivers can stop to charge their electric cars or fill their tanks with compressed natural gas.
SEE ALSO: The world's first zero-emissions train could be running by 2017
New intera

After 108 painful years of constant loss, the Cubs finally won the World Series last night.
If you didn't know this, you probably weren't within a 100 mile radius of me. Because, apparently, I had some rather outrageous reactions to the victory. I'm just 
SEE ALSO: 'Parks and Rec' predicted the Cubs' win — and it wasn't a coincidence
In the light of day, I am faced with the reality of my actions. I am not sure why I did the following things beyond having the intent to celebrate the Cu

In January 2016, I wrote a column titled "Hey America, you may be sleepwalking into a Donald Trump presidency." A political lifetime later, it makes for interesting and prophetic reading.
This was before the Iowa caucuses, back when Trump was still widely treated as a joke. Many Democrats believed Trump would be an easier Republican presidential candidate to defeat than his chief rival in the polls, Ted Cruz. Trump was a buffoon, a loudmouth; if by some miracle he made it through the gauntlet of

The next roundtrip flight you take from New York to Europe means you will personally contribute to the melting of 32 square feet of Arctic sea ice by September in a given year, according to a groundbreaking new study published Thursday. 
Or to put it another way, in a given year, the average American melts about 538 square feet of Arctic sea ice at the end of the summer melt season. 
The study, published in the journal Science this week, for the first time makes the link between indivi

GoPro released its third quarter earnings today, and the company’s sales dropped to $240.5 million from $400 million in 2015, a 40 percent fall. The company’s stock price fell to $11.94 per share at the end of the day’s trading and was halted after hours — it had been as high as $17.15 per share shortly after the announcement of the new Hero 5 cameras and Karma drone back in September. (That was the company’s highest stock price since January.)
During a call with in

Updating Windows takes forever, and it seems like Windows 10 gets one every other day. But now Microsoft is going to make the update process much less painful with the new ‘Unified Update Platform‘ (UUP), starting by making downloads a lot smaller. Basically, Windows will now only download the portion the updates you need since your most recent build using something called differential downloads. By cutting out much of the bloat, Microsoft says you can expect download sizes to

Starship Troopers is one of the best-known and most divisive works of science fiction, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, a reboot is in the works from the writers behind the upcoming Baywatch movie.
THR reports that the film will be written by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, with the idea that it’ll be the start of a new franchise. While the film spawned several direct-to-DVD sequels (and there’s an animated series out there, The Roughnecks), there have been rumors of a remake

From robot cookie makers to lightbulbs that double as phone chargers, Silicon Valley is great at selling us random gadgets we didn’t know we need. And while it’s cool if you’re into automated pita bread warmers of the future, it’s what happens after you put these devices through the test of time that these startups are less helpful with.
New research by the engineering lab team at the University of California, San Diego is hoping to fix that by creating magnetic ink parti

Lenn “Gio” Fraraccio normally spends his days selling printers to schools, but today, the Florida-based sports fan is already on his 10th interview — a first for the 47-year-old father of two and husband for 20 years. You see, in 2014 Fraraccio correctly predicted the Cubs and Indians would be tied in extra innings in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. (He incorrectly predicted this would begin the apocalypse, but we’ll get to that later.)
Until last night, the Chicago Cubs

Google’s Android mobile operating system has long been the world’s most popular. In the third-quarter of 2016, however, Apple’s declining iPhone sales pushed it to new heights, according to new research. Android managed to capture 87.5 percent of global smartphone market share to end the month of September, according to analysts at Strategy Analytics. For those bad at math, that means nearly nine of every 10 smartphones on the planet is running Google’s mobile operating

Standalone virtual reality headsets tend to come in only one flavor. Typically, your smartphone slides into a pair of goggles, and from there the headset becomes a single unit relying on the phone’s display. This means there are no cords keeping you tethered to a computer, but it also makes the headset heavy. Pico VR, a Chinese hardware company, has come up with a unique solution to this problem.
The team designed a controller, not unlike a PlayStation Vita without the screen, that contain

At its Playtime event for Android developers today, Google announced that apps on the Play Store will soon gain a new option that could have huge implications for subscriptions: temporary promotional pricing. "Coming soon, you'll be able to create an introductory price for new subscribers for a set period of time," Google's Larissa Fontaine wrote in a blog post. "For example, you can offer a subscription for $1 per month for the first three months before the normal subscription price kicks

The NES Classic is coming out next week, and the early impressions of the diminutively packed collection of Nintendo history are extremely positive. But — as my colleague Andrew Webster noted in his initial hands-on — there’s one problem with the NES Classic. Along with the original NES-inspired design, the blocky retro controllers also have a 1980’s-era wired connection that, when used with today’s massive multi-foot screens, can put you a little too close to the T

The carbon dioxide emissions I produce as an average American destroy about 650 square feet of Arctic sea ice every year. That’s according to a new study that directly links the amount of annual CO2 released in the atmosphere to the amount of disappearing sea ice in the Arctic.“They’re going to have to be more aggressive in reducing CO2 emissions.”
The findings, published today in the journal Science, could help scientists make better predictions about when exactly we&rsq

If you were excited about the shrug, you’re going to piss yourself over Apple’s new ‘singer’ emoji — if you’re a David Bowie fan, anyway. Nobody is going on record to confirm this is a Bowie homage, but you’d be blind if you didn’t notice the similarities. The iconic lightning bolt half-hidden by the colored glam-rock hair has Bowie’s alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, written all over it. Of course, if this were a Bowie homage, it’d

Starting this month, the NFL is bringing a 9-part series filmed in 360-degree VR to YouTube. It’ll be available to watch with Google’s Daydream View headset sometime later this year. NFL Films is currently producing the series using Google Jump, the company’s 360-degree capture system.
The debut episode will launch on the NFL’s YouTube channel on Thanksgiving Day (November 24th) and will let viewers “spend a week with the Philadelphia Eagles defensive line as they p

Microsoft has been promising smaller updates to Windows 10, through various methods, for what feels like years, but the company is now starting to test a new Unified Update Platform (UUP) that will make a big difference. "One of the biggest community and customer benefits of UUP is the reduction you'll see in download size on PCs," explains Bill Karagounis, a Windows program manager, in a blog post on UUP today. "We have converged technologies in our build and publishing systems to enable differ

Not everyone likes nightclubs. They’re sweaty, dark and crowded places with loud music. If you recognize yourself in this, Giphy’s new experiment is for you. Boopy Club is a weird web tool by LA-based digital artist Andrew Benson, mixing GIFs with live webcam footage and a lot of bouncy lines. There are tons of different brushes, animations and colors to play around with… a great distraction from adulting. By putting layers of animated sprites over each other, you can create

If you thought FBI Director James Comey’s decision to re-open the Clinton email investigation a mere 10 days before the election was odd, hang on to your hats, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. According to a Think Progress report, the FBI has launched an internal investigation into, um, itself. The investigation stems from a dormant FBI Twitter account that sprang to life over the weekend. On October 30, @FBIRecordsValut began by posting info on Donald Trump’s father, Fred, b

When the PS4 Pro launches on Thursday, November 10th, it will support more than 30 different games. Before the year’s rapidly approaching end, that number is expected to jump to over 45.
PlayStation Blog Europe has the full list so far. Games like Final Fantasy 15, Killing Floor 2, The Last Guardian, and Watch Dogs 2 will join that lineup, as will 2017 releases such as For Honor, Nioh, and Resident Evil 7 Biohazard.The post notes that some games have updates that add Pro support; more rece

A new data report suggests that one of the things keeping Donald Trump in the presidential race against Hillary Clinton is his savvy use of social media – particularly Facebook. According to a recent study from Finnish content discovery firm EzyInsights, Trump’s social media crew has consistently outperformed Clinton’s own team throughout the entire presidential campaign. The findings of the study refer solely to Facebook engagement across all posts and tak

Samsung’s Gear S3 smartwatch will be released in the US two weeks from now, on November 18th, and will be available for preorder starting this Sunday, the 6th. It’s supposed to be available through Samsung’s website, as well as Amazon, Best Buy, and Macy’s. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile will announce pricing and availability for an LTE version of the watch at a later date.
The Gear S3 was announced two months ago, as the centerpiece of Samsung’s IFA presentation.

Vimeo is apparently getting ready to compete against Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu with the launch of its own subscription streaming service. As The Hollywood Reporter points out, interim CEO Joey Levin recently discussed the plans in a letter to Vimeo’s shareholders. "Vimeo has the once-in-a-generation opportunity to, following in Netflix's footsteps, deliver compelling subscription viewing experiences for consumers in the market for pay TV," he wrote.Following in Netflix’s footsteps, k

GLAAD’s annual “Where We Are on TV” report has just been released, and there are more LGBTQ characters on TV than there have been at any point in history.LGBTQ characters make up 4 percent of series regulars for scripted broadcast shows — a figure which, as Jezebel points out, is slightly higher than the most recent Gallup estimate of the LGBTQ population in America.
The number of LGBTQ characters also increased on both prime-time cable and online-only streaming services,