Technology news

Pirates and Shaman are the current kings of Hearthstone.
Hearthstone data site Viscous Syndicate has released a list of the digital card game behemoth’s most popular cards since the release of the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion in early December. The new set introduced over a hundred new spells, minions, and weapons, encouraging players to create new decks.
Viscous Syndicate took its data from 467,000 played games. You can see the results below.
Above: Hearthstone’s mo

GUEST: The bot land grab is officially under way and everyone is rushing to recreate successful app ideas in chat interfaces. Somehow the old pitch by analogy — we’re “AirBnB for pets” — has found a way to be even less original. Now any aspiring entrepreneur need only take the name of a successful app and add “as a chatbot” at the end.
Of course, this is nothing new. The exact same thing happened at the start of the mobile revolution. The top tech minds

The U.S. space program lost another towering figure today as astronaut Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last person to walk on the moon, died at the age of 82 on Monday.
SEE ALSO: NASA's first African-American Space Station crewmember is your new role model
"Even at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space and encouraged our nation's leaders and young people to not let him remain the last man to walk on the Moon," Cern

Double Robotics says there’s a big audience for its telepresence robots and thinks it has the numbers to prove it. In the past four years, the company said, more than 8,000 of its robots were sold worldwide, generating more than $20 million in sales revenue. With this traction, Double Robotics has plans to raise a series A round of funding this year along with introducing a software subscription plan to help customers get more out of their robots.
“We’ve learned a lot over the

Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the Moon, has died at the age of 82, according to NASA. He was a veteran of three spaceflights: as the pilot for Gemini 9A, the Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 10, and as the commander of Apollo 17.We are saddened by the loss of retired NASA astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon. https://t.co/Q9OSdRewI5 pic.twitter.com/gPdFTnXF2C— NASA (@NASA) January 16, 2017“Even at the age of 82,” His family said in a statement. “Gen

Gamers desperate for news on what Valve could be up to might want to keep an eye on Reddit
Valve cofounder and president Gabe Newell will answer questions in a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) at 3 p.m. Pacific on January 17, as PC Gamer first reported. It will take place on the The_Gaben subreddit, which is typically populated by memes deifying the public gaming figure.
AMAs are a popular form of question-and-answer sessions online. Reddit users will be able to reply to the

Performance reviews can be tough for anyone. But men take their annual evaluations particularly hard, a new study found. 
Adobe surveyed 1,500 U.S. office workers and found that most people think performance reviews are a waste of time. About two-thirds of employees and managers think formal reviews are an outdated way of measuring performance. 
But beyond annoyance, office employees are really troubled by the review process. Sixty-one percent of millennials would switch jobs if it mea

Justin Bieber is letting us love his selfies again. 
The Instagram-averse pop star, who quit the photo-sharing app last year because it is the devil's plaything, has chosen Twitter as his new selfie delivery system after a several-month-long drought. 
SEE ALSO: Justin Bieber will go on his first stadium tour in 2017My I love you face pic.twitter.com/FjDaOjinwE
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) January 16, 2017"My I love you face," captions the Biebs, certainly prompting a global wa

Last week the tech internet lit up with a collective nostalgia around the ten-year anniversary of the launch of Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone dramatically changed a lot of things, least of all the way we use phones. It changed the way we use apps, and maps, and cameras, and social media. To call it transformative is an understatement, despite how glitchy the original product actually was.But I think the more important iPhone launch was the launch of the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011. With the

It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day across the United States, but if you're searching Google Maps for businesses in three states, that's not the holiday that comes up.
SEE ALSO: The internet just can't believe what this Mississippi city calls MLK Day
Three southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi — combine the observed King holiday with a holiday honoring Confederate general Robert E. Lee. 
And some users have noticed that when searching for businesses in these three sta

The Young Pope, the already-weird-sounding television show that turned out to be a tad more bizarre than initial speculation, finally premiered on HBO on Sunday.
Jude Law, partially just by nature of being Jude Law, comes off like a dude in a romantic comedy trying to convince a girl that he's bad news. And that's sort of what an American orphan named Lenny, who goes on to become Pius XIII at an age that is certainly not old by pope standards, is doing to the Catholic church and even God himself

Plenty of individuals and organizations showed love to Martin Luther King Jr. on social media on Monday, including the FBI. 
The problem? Back in 1964, the agency tried to blackmail the Civil Rights icon into killing himself. Today, the FBI honors the Rev. Martin L. King Jr. and his incredible career fighting for civil rights#MLKDAY pic.twitter.com/9UEulHmL8a
— FBI (@FBI) January 16, 2017SEE ALSO: The 1958 stabbing that nearly killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Obviously, people

Less than a week before Inauguration Day, Eli Stein and his hackathon team spent their weekend poring over their laptops in hopes of coming up with something that might help improve American politics. 
Hunched in a circle of armchairs next to dozens of other teams, Stein and his group decided on a project they think might be useful: Waze, but for protests. 
"Moving forward, there's going to be a lot of protests, hopefully," Stein said of the impetus for his app, which would pull locati

It’s people that make your business operational, and it’s people who will make your business succeed or fail. However, the resources you provide for those people—even if you’re the only person in the business—will directly affect how much they’re able to get done, how efficiently they’re able to do it, and how organised they remain into the future.  To put it simply, if you want your business to run smoothly into the new year, you’ll need to m

VB LIVE: Want a lucrative app launch? Freemium is key — but tricky. Learn how to balance free versus paid features without pissing your users off in our latest interactive VB Live event, where industry leaders will take you for a deep dive into best practices for app monetization.
Register here for free.
The trickiest part of a successful app launch, says Eric Shashoua, CEO of Kiwi for Gmail, is nailing the pricing structure. Everyone knows that freemium is often the most lucrative pa

Nothing to see here, just a ginormous alligator casually sauntering across your path.
Kim Joiner, a visitor to Circle B Bar Reserve near Lakeland, Florida, took the video over the weekend, according to Storyful. She described the encounter as "very exciting."
SEE ALSO: Alligator seems to go for a little ride on a manatee
Joiner said the alligator was about 12 feel long and that while she took the photos from a safe distance, she was "close enough." According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Com

The Japanese probe Akatsuki has observed a massive gravity wave in the atmosphere of Venus. This is not the first time such a wave was observed on the Solar System’s second planet, but it is the largest ever recorded, stretching just over 6,000 miles from end to end. Its features also suggest that the dynamics of Venus’ atmosphere are more complex than previously thought.An atmospheric gravity wave is a ripple in the density of a planet’s atmosphere, according to the European S

Even Portlandia, “a city where young people go to retire,” must come to end.The critically acclaimed sketch comedy hit on IFC, was renewed for an eighth final season, Variety reports.Portlandia, starring co-creators and writers Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, debuted in 2011. It captured the essence of what it means to be DIY, off-kilter, and misdirected. Brownstein and Armisen’s portrayals depicted the more absurd aspects of gentrification and the creative class’s re

Caffeine may be able to tamp down the inflammation that worsens with age, according to a study that investigated caffeine’s effects on immune cells. It’s a correlational study, but it’s one that dives into how caffeine could be affecting the immune system. The findings could help explain why coffee has been purported to help ward off everything from type 2 diabetes, to cardiovascular disease, and even dementia.It’s comforting news for those of us who were already reaching

Some of the most striking business success stories of the last few years aren't about a new product or idea so much as they are about revamping something well-loved (or at least, well-used) and making it feel exciting again. Pokemon Go might be the most obvious example, but there are many others worth noting.
How do the best brands take nostalgia and familiarity and fuse them with modern technology to create a winning product or service? To find out, I asked 10 entrepreneurs from Young

One of gaming’s biggest trials in underway, with billions on the line.
ZeniMax, which owns Fallout publisher Bethesda and Doom developer id Software, is reiterating its claim in a statement released today that Oculus stole from it to create the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. ZeniMax is seeking $2 billion in damages. That’s the same amount that Facebook bought Oculus for in 2014. The new VR industry came alive in 2016 with the release of the Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR, b

One of gaming’s biggest trials in underway, with billions on the line.
ZeniMax, which owns Fallout publisher Bethesda and Doom developer id Software, is reiterating its claim in a statement released today that Oculus stole from it to create the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. ZeniMax is seeking $2 billion in damages. That’s the same amount that Facebook bought Oculus for in 2014. The new VR industry came alive in 2016 with the release of the Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR, b

Germany has taken a tough stance in the battle against fake news and now it's about to become the first country outside of the U.S. to get Facebook's new tools help combat the problem. 
It comes after German officials threatened to fine the social media platform for every fake story that populated the newsfeed as it goes against the country's strict defamation laws.
SEE ALSO: Can Facebook fix its fake news problem?
The tools — including an option for users to flag fake news and third

LONDON — Well, the bad news is that the final episode of Sherlock Season 4 has now been broadcast, and the adventures of everyone's favourite sardonic detective are wrapped for another year.
SEE ALSO: 'Sherlock' Season 4 finale weaves an exhausting, tangled web
But for every story that ends, a new one is just beginning.
Over the last week, sightings of Will Ferrell around the University of Greenwich in London have been at an all-time high.
According to the university, the actor is currentl

Bragi announced today that the company’s latest Headphone earbuds are finally available for immediate shipping. The news comes after a series of delays in shipping the Headphones, including a mid-December announcement where Bragi was forced to send out a PDF Christmas card for prospective Headphone gift givers to use in lieu of the actual product.The Headphone is a stripped-down version of the Bragi Dash, and eschews the fitness tracking, heart rate monitoring, gesture controls, and app to

A head on fire topped with a "Make America Great Again" hat haunts Green Day's lyric video for their Revolution Radio track, "Troubled Times." 
Releasing the song on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is no accident — the video features footage of the Civil Rights hero and the March on Washington in 1963 as well as images from the suffrage movement. Green Day wants to make it clear they're not going to stay silent while Donald Trump reverses the progress made by these people. 
“To

If you’re looking for a new fix after finishing The Hunger Games, The Last of Us, or any similar piece dark, post-apocalyptic media, then check out La Lisière (The Edge in English). Set in a future where vaguely describes wars and natural disasters have destroyed civilization,La Lisière tells the story of Hama (played by Ouidad Elma), a young woman who lives with her father Selim (Saïd Amadis, who in a neat bit of trivia did the voice dub for James Earl Jones in the Fren

Virtual reality may very well take us beyond such input devices as game controllers and joysticks. That’s where Hypersuit comes in.
The Hypersuit is like an exoskeleton, a suit that makes you feel like you’re flying in virtual reality. You lie on it in a flying position, and you can move your arms about in a variety of directions. I saw the Hypersuit at CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas earlier this month.
Hypersuit, which is in a prototype state, is being built by

After the fanfare of SpaceX’s return to flight, Japan attempted to launch a rocket of its own on Saturday — but the vehicle failed to achieve orbit. It was the launch of a tiny, experimental rocket called the SS-520-4, which was carrying a lone 6.6-pound satellite, called TRICOM-1, into orbit. While the first part of the launch went as planned, a communications failure during flight ultimately prompted flight controllers to abort the mission. As a result the rocket and the satellite

The January gloom continues, but there are a few things that can put a smile on our face. 
Bizarre phone calls are just one of these things. 
As part of a campaign urging the public to double check before raising the alarm, the RSPCA has released extracts from 10 of the most bizarre calls they received from people concerned about animal welfare last year. 
SEE ALSO: The disastrous phone calls we all want to avoid
In the string of calls, people seem to constantly mistake objects fo

A new bill in New York City would make it illegal for employers to ask potential hires about their salary histories, and NYC-based companies are slowly getting on board. 
Kickstarter is the first tech company to publicly back the legislation, which was proposed by the New York City public advocate's office. The law, which would apply to the private, governmental and nonprofit sectors, is intended to reduce the gender wage gap in New York. 
When women — or other minority groups &m

Fans anxiously awaiting the sequel to The Last of Us can instead look to Lego builder Tim Schwalfenberg. 
Schwalfenberg built a Lego diorama of the 2013 Playstation game, spotted by Kotaku, that covers an entire city block of the game's dystopia. 
The 100-hour, 20,000-brick project shows The Last of Us's Ellie and Joel surrounded by junk and overgrown grass. Image:Tim Schwalfenberg/Flickr
Image:Tim Schwalfenberg/flickr
Image:Tim Schwalfenberg/flickrPlaystation debuted a trailer fo

On Sunday night, while celebrating a big playoff win, Pittsburgh Steelers star Antonio Brown streamed the team's post-game celebration on Facebook Live but might have given their upcoming opponent, the New England Patriots, some bulletin board material.
SEE ALSO: Here's why fans hate Fox broadcaster Joe Buck so much
After the Steelers outlasted the Kansas City Chiefs in Sunday night's AFC Divisional playoff, earning a trip to next weekend's AFC Championship game against the Patriots, Brown start

LONDON — Arya and Sansa Stark may be total badasses these days, but it wasn't always that way.
Long before they were battle-hardened by the endless, freezing misery of Westeros, everybody's favourite Game of Thrones sisters were... well, they were just sort of small and adorable.
SEE ALSO: Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner just took friendship goals to a whole new level
On Monday afternoon, Maisie Williams tweeted the following request for old photos of herself and BFF Sophie Turner.Can u

Alert your Top 8 immediately — From First to Last is back. 
"Make War," the band's first new song in a decade  — and since frontman Sonny Moore transformed into EDM superstar Skrillex — is here. 
"Happy anniversary from the bottom of my credit card," wails Moore. Now try fighting the impulse to grab a Sharpie and scrawl that on your Converse. 
SEE ALSO: How Snapchat will change the music industry in 2017The band released the track to coincide with Moore's 29

The flying car remains among those technologies that has always remained about ten years away. 
Or maybe just a year, if you believe the CEO of Airbus. 
"One hundred years ago, urban transport went underground, now we have the technological wherewithal to go above ground," said Tom Enders, the chief executive of aerospace company Airbus, best known for making jet airliners.
Enders was speaking at the DLD tech conference in Munich on Monday, where he teased that his company foresees hav

It's telling that a show about a 47-year-old American pope with a fluctuating accent and troubling proclivity for Cherry Coke Zero was only the second weirdest episode to air on TV on Jan. 15.
The Season 4 finale of BBC's Sherlock opened with an abandoned plane, the ghost of a child and clowns in an old Victorian mansion. The latter, at least, turns out to be a melodramatic staging, but by the end of "The Final Problem" you long for the simplicity of a false hallucination.
SEE ALSO: 'Sherlock' c

Mobile game maker Nix Hydra has branched out by creating TyTyMoji, the official emoji sticker set of Tyra Banks.
The sticker pack is aimed at millennials and fans of America’s Next Top Model, which Banks hosted for 22 seasons until its cancellation in October 2015.
Normally, Nix Hydra makes games. But the company is “ultimately interested in making anything entertaining and tech-related for women, said Lina Chen, cofounder of Nix Hydra, in an email. “We became particularly

LONDON — Ah, fried chicken. It's greasy, it's fried, it's finger lickin' good. But it hasn't exactly been vegan friendly — until now. 
SEE ALSO: Tricked-out vegan milkshakes come to NYC this weekend only
A restaurant serving vegan fried "chicken" opened in London on Saturday, bringing joy and happiness to the lives of myriad city-dwelling vegansThe Temple of Seitan in Hackney, east London, is serving up vegan fried chicken made from seitan, a meat substitute made from gluten.&nb

We knew from the recent glut of information that the Nintendo Switch includes a set of Joy-Con controllers along with a Grip attachment in the box. But a report from Eurogamer today notes that unlike the $29.99 Joy-Con Charging Grip that Nintendo sells separately, the bundled Grip simply is a plastic shell that allows the Joy-Con controllers to be more easily held in a traditional form factor. As can be seen when visually comparing the two, the Joy-Con Charging Grip has a translucent shell &mdas

Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, the latest expansion for Blizzard digital card game leader Hearthstone, has now been out over a month, and it has brought big changes to what had been a rather stale late 2016.
Many of the 132 new cards have helped create new, powerful decks (hello Pirate Warrior) in the most popular mode, Standard  — the mode that bans cards from older expansions and adventures. But a few players are critical about of some of new cards, worried that they’re too powerf

On Sunday, what would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 88th birthday, his daughter, Bernice, tweeted a heart-felt tribute, honoring the civil rights icon and sharing an image of her standing with the monument to her father.
SEE ALSO: Thanks to Trump, Rep. John Lewis is dominating Amazon's bestsellers list
The memorial, located in downtown Washington, D.C., was opened in 2011. Happy birthday dad, I miss you! #MLK pic.twitter.com/VnOKRFsSBE
— Be A King (@BerniceKing) January 15, 2017

Even if you own a Tesla, you should still carry your car keys at all times. 
Tesla owner, Las Vegas investor and entrepreneur Ryan Negri learned that the hard way as he got stranded with his Tesla six miles from home near Red Rock Canyon, Nevada. Negri used the Tesla mobile app to start the car at home, and didn't bring his keys; but when he had to stop and restart the car to adjust a dog seat, there was no cell service, so the start-with-phone method was useless. 
SEE ALSO: Tesla's Gi

There have been a lot of questions around what the future of Alphabet-owned Nest will be now that Google has stepped firmly into the smart home market, but in the near term Nest continues to ship its home monitoring products. The company just said it would be selling its products in more European countries, expanding its footprint to Austria, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Nest product prices in the EU are comparable to US prices, but also don’t include monthly service
Nest says that the Nest

LONDON — We might be familiar with the signs of breast cancer, but when it comes to identifying visual symptoms in our own breasts, it's not quite so easy. 
SEE ALSO: A breast cancer survivor is using stunning body art to reclaim her body
Designer Corrine Ellsworth Beaumont has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the visual signs and symptoms of breast cancer using the unlikeliest of devices — lemons.According to the NHS, lumps are the most common sign of breast cancer, bu

LONDON — Cases of mistaken identity aren't exactly uncommon on Twitter — it's why we have those little blue ticks.
But little blue ticks only go so far.
SEE ALSO: Thanks to Trump, Rep. John Lewis is dominating Amazon's bestsellers list
John Lewis, a computer science educator from Blacksburg, Virginia, may be the best example of this.Meet John Lewis, owner of the world's most confusing Twitter handle.Image:twitter/@johnlewis/mashable compositeBasically, if you search for "John Lewis"

Nvidia announced a new, upgraded version of its Shield TV streaming box at CES 2017 that due to come out soon, but the company isn't leaving the original 2015 model out in the cold. As promised, the "Shield Experience Upgrade 5.0" update was released today for the older box, adding several of the new features that Nvidia announced for the upcoming 2017 version of the Shield TV. The update brings the 2015 Shield TV up to Android 7.0 Nougat, adds apps for Amazon Video, Twitter, NFL, and Comedy Cen

(Reuters) – Airbus Group plans to test a prototype for a self-piloted flying car as a way of avoiding gridlock on city roads by the end of the year, the aerospace group’s chief executive said on Monday.
Airbus last year formed a division called Urban Air Mobility that is exploring concepts such as a vehicle to transport individuals or a helicopter-style vehicle that can carry multiple riders. The aim would be for people to book the vehicle using an app, similar to car-sharing schemes