Technology news

Lately, I’m much more dubious about Kickstarters than I used to be — I’ve been burned too many times by delays, failures, or simply bad quality. But when I saw the Fidget Cube, a desk gadget designed to keep idle hands busy, I signed up immediately. “How can such a simple thing be delayed?” I thought. Well, it was — despite getting funded just shy of 6.5 million (!) dollars — and that gap was rapidly filled with knock-offs.In any case, my cube arrived to

The average cost of a movie ticket hit record highs in 2016, topping out at $8.73 a ticket. At prices like that, it might be time to start considering just skipping the multiplex all together and putting together your own home theater.
Of course, if you’re making your own movie theater, you’ll need a good projector, and that’s where BenQ’s new flagship HT8050 home theater projector comes in. The HT8050 offers 4K quality and has THX HD Display certification, something BenQ

When it comes to certain cancer-causing chemicals in tobacco, e-cigarettes may be a healthier option than regular cigarettes, new research says. But this latest study still can’t settle the ongoing controversy surrounding electronic cigarettes — which are alternately billed as a safer alternative to smoking or a dangerous gateway to even riskier tobacco use
By analyzing the urine of people who smoke cigarettes and people who vape, scientists found that those who vape have lower level

Congrats, Moto Z Play owners, you made it. It looks like Lenovo is giving you the update you’ve been waiting for while your Moto Z and Moto Z Force brethren have been enjoying it for months. Android Nougat is reportedly available on unlocked Moto Z Plays, as first spotted by TechDroider. Google doesn’t list the Play as Daydream compatible, so although you’re getting Nougat, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to access Daydream games. Sorry, but let’s focus on th

When Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that sales of the Apple Watch over the last quarter were record breaking, the only detail he would provide was that “the holiday demand was so strong we couldn’t make enough.” A recent report from Canalys, however, estimates that the wearable’s record-setting performance amounted to 6 million units sold, generating more than $2.6 billion in revenue. That would amount to nearly 80 percent of the total smartwatch market for the quart

Some people pee themselves in scary situations. This gecko sheds its skin and goes naked, instead. The new species, called Geckolepis megalepis, is originally from Madagascar, where other species of geckos are known to lose their scales when threatened. The animal is described in a study published today in PeerJ.
The little, nudist creature has really big scales, which are shed alongside a layer of skin cells whenever the gecko is under stress. It’s a defense mechanism: if a predator grabs

Today, severe thunderstorms and multiple tornadoes passed through New Orleans, Louisiana, causing significant damage to the area — including communities that were hit by Hurricane Katrina more than a decade ago. The storms also smashed through NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world that the space agency uses to create parts for its rockets and spacecraft.
“Only minor injuries have been reported and NASA employees and other tenants

Waze, the navigation app owned by Google, announced today that the carpooling service it launched last year is now available in the nine counties that comprise the Bay Area, as well as Sacramento and Monterey. That means that a growing number of Californians can use Waze, an app with 75 million active users, to locate strangers to fill the empty seats in their cars on their way to work.To be sure, what Waze is offering differs greatly from Uber and Lyft’s respective carpooling services. Dr

I think for many nerds like myself, Sony gear didn't just contribute to our interest in gadgets, it sort of defined it. I'm a little young to harken all the way back to Sony's classic hi-fi gear, but the Clie, the VAIO UX, MiniDisc, Discman, Memory Stick, and Mavica were all touchstones for me. Sony's devices of decades past were invariably distinctive, often proprietary, and just so darn memorable.
A strange parking lot concept store in Tokyo has started selling various items — mostly zip

Those hoping to get epic range out of Tesla’s new Model 3 sedan may be disappointed by a new revelation from Tesla CEO Elon Musk: it won’t have the 100kWh battery pack that’s currently available in the Model S and Model X.
The Tesla Model S 100D has an estimated range of 335 miles, while the Model X 100D can go 295 miles. Tesla announced at the reveal of the Model 3 that it would have a range of at least 215 miles in base trim.
The revelation was made in a tweet by Musk earlier

Smartphones nowadays look like a bunch of the same, glossy bricks with different megapixel cameras and processors. Yawn. I remember when having a different phone from your peers was actually cool and unique, and it’s that kind of throwback that Motorola seems to want to capitalize on with the new Moto Mod accessories for the Moto Z. The latest one to hit Indiegogo invokes a somewhat nostalgic feel: a Moto Mod concept that would build in an LED lighting system along the sides of the phone t

A new ordinance approved by the Milwaukee County Board will require developers of “location-based augmented reality games” like Pokémon Go to get a permit before including public county park locations in their games, per a report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.The news comes at the end of a process that began last summer, when the Milwaukee County Parks department filed a request to Niantic to follow local county ordinances and receive an event permit after an onrush of e

The road to trolldom is paved with frustration, according to a study published as part of the 2017 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing taking place later this month. A person is more likely to participate in abusive behavior or “trolling” based on their current mood and the context of the discussion they’re participating in.Harassment and associated trolling have become the collateral damage of time spent socializing online. In 2014, Pew Resea

Fret Zeppelin is going to tech you how to play guitar through fiber-optic LED lights. Instead of relying on an instructor or a specialized beginner’s guitar, Fret Zeppelin fits onto an already existent full-sized guitar of a player’s choosing. Once on the guitar, players can pick whatever song they want to learn through the Fret Zeppelin’s companion iOS / Android app. The lights will then blink to denote what notes to play while the app listens to hear if you’ve hit them.

Ahead of Google’s Android Wear 2.0 launch later this week, all sorts of details are spilling out about new hardware on the horizon. Today, VentureBeat got its hands on leaked marketing material for ZTE’s very first Android Wear smartwatch, called the Quartz. There’s not very many details about the device, but it’s likely it will support cellular connectivity to make use of Android Wear’s more robust standalone features.What we can clearly see is a more mid-range-loo

Apple’s “spaceship” campus was supposed to be ready in 2015, but it now isn’t expected to open until later this year. If you’re wondering why the project — which started back in 2011 — is still in the works, Reuters may have part of the answer: Apple is being ridiculously perfectionist about it.
Reuters spoke with about two dozen people who worked on the project to get a sense for Apple’s behavior. And the picture it paints is one of a company that

Twitter’s executive exodus marches on unabated. At the end of the month, diversity chief Jeffrey Siminoff is leaving the company, according to TechCrunch. Siminoff joined back in December 2015, having been the director of Worldwide Inclusion & Diversity at Apple. Yet the decision was initially criticized because Siminoff, a white male, was now in charge of helping Twitter improve its inclusivity and hire more employees from underrepresented minority groups.Also out at Twitter is HR chi

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has long had a keen interest in drones. The military’s research wing has worked on and sketched out ideas that range from turning drones into wireless hotspots to making drones hunt like wolves. One problem that persists, though, is safely landing drones in remote areas.This week DARPA published the first footage of an ongoing project called SideArm, which is all about creating a mobile crane setup to solve that issue. Instead of scr

Just a couple of days after a sea cliff collapsed and cut off a dramatic stream of lava in Hawaii, the so-called “fire hose” is back, pouring molten rock into the ocean.The stream of lava formed in January when the Kamokuna lava delta collapsed into the sea. A brilliant stream of angry red lava (named 61g) poured out, prompting officials with the US Geological Survey to warn visitors to keep their distance. The collapse left huge cracks in the cliff, which broke apart while geologist

Ballfinger is a German-based design group best known for its wristwatches and desk lamps, but at the Norddeutschen Hifi-Tagen 2017 audio show, the company showed off a pair of analog audio products that should make any serious audio gear fan sick with envy. The star of the show is definitely the Tonbandmaschine M 063 reel-to-reel tape player, which looks like it was transplanted from another era to the modern day. I’ve never even used a reel-to-reel tape and I want one just to be able to f

The House passed the Email Privacy Act in a voice vote yesterday, effectively sending the bill to the Senate for consideration. The law would require law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before requesting access to old emails and digital communications stored on tech companies' remote servers.
This isn’t the first time the House has passed the Email Privacy Act. In fact, the bill made it through the House less than a year ago, only to fail in the Senate. At the time, senators attempt

Vizio got in trouble with the FTC this week and had to pay $2.2 million to settle charges around having monitored the viewing habits on more than 11 million TVs without consent over the course of two years.
The main problem was that Vizio TVs had tracking features turned on by default, instead of an opt-in setting like many other manufacturers use (and, as you’ll see, sometimes hide or trick you into accepting). Newer Vizio TVs that run the company’s SmartCast system have the trackin

SpaceX has always had big ambitions of launching its Falcon 9 rockets as frequently as possible, and this year the company is hoping to reach its highest launch cadence yet. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell tells Reuters that the company “should be launching every two to three weeks” in 2017. If successful, it would be the fastest launch rate SpaceX has ever pulled off, launching the most rockets it has in one year.
It is a prediction that Shotwell has made for SpaceX before, though.

Moment is heading back to Kickstarter with two new cases and a new lens made for the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. The mobile photography startup is crowdfunding a new version of its wide-angle 18mm lens, a $99 battery case that you can attach the lens to, and a slim case with no electronics, with the aim of shipping the products in July.
The company got its start in 2014 by selling small, high-quality lenses that could augment your iPhone’s field of view. Initially these lenses attached to a metal

Razer’s three-screen Project Valerie prototype was one of the highlights of CES 2017, with a crazy design that offers a multi-monitor screen setup on an ostensibly portable laptop. But Project Valerie is just a proof-of-concept device, and like many of Razer’s wild concepts, it might never ship. Fortunately, there’s always the option to follow in the footsteps of YouTuber JerryRigEverything, who took Razer’s device and inspiration to build his own DIY version.
Break out y

Love’s a game and this year we’re playing. For the full rules and intellectual justification of The Verge Bachelor Fantasy League please see this explanatory post. For a little background on why this is poised to be the best-ever season of The Bachelor, see this essay by culture editor Chris Plante:
Kaitlyn Tiffany: Good morning and welcome back to The Bachelor, this week hosted in yet another Louisiana plantation and then a tacky art nouveau hotel on the island of St. Thomas. I hope

The new Robots exhibition at London's Science Museum begins with an arresting sight: a baby, pinned to a wall, gently grasping at the air around it. As you walk past this automata, though, you see a fat bunch of wires leading out of its back and into a compact engine of motors and actuators — quite literally pulling the strings. This theme of performance (and deception) is present throughout the exhibition, for although robots have always loomed large in our collective imagination, they've

Sony is showing off its latest smartphone camera sensor which it says can shoot 1080p slow-motion video at a blistering 1,000 frames per second. The new 3-layer CMOS sensor — an industry first — can capture slow motion video about eight times faster than its competition with minimal focal pane distortion, according to Sony.The sensor can also take 19.3MP images in 1/120th of a second, which Sony says is four times faster than other chips, thanks to high-capacity DRAM, and a 4-tier co

Re-creating a pixelated image is the holy grail of impossible CSI technology. And while zooming in on grainy footage, enhancing the image, and seeing the culprit reflected in the victim’s iris is still the stuff of fantasy, some new research from Google Brain may have done the next best thing, using a pair of neural networks to process a 8 pixel x 8 pixel image and generate an approximation of the original.To be clear right off the bat: this isn’t some magical sharpening of the image

Advertisers sink a great deal of time and money into ads for the Super Bowl, one of the most-watched events of the year. How they decide to draw consumers further in is important, because it signifies where they’re choosing to focus those resources, and what they consider the viable social media strategies of the moment. This year, Marketing Land reports that hashtags were only included in 30 percent of Super Bowl ads, as opposed to 45 percent last year.This year’s promotion tool of

Danny Rand is having a rough time in the latest trailer for Iron Fist, the next Marvel superhero series coming to Netflix. In the video above, we see Danny roaming the streets of New York looking like he’s fresh off a stint at Burning Man (read: K’un-Lun), and generally punching things with his big, glowing fists. Also featured in the trailer: an uncomfortable mashup of electronica, rap, and Asian appropriation.Iron Fist continues the current line of shows leading up to a Defenders m

Two New York City property managers were fined this past week after allegedly listing short-term apartment rentals on Airbnb, according to the New York Post. Property owner Hank Fried and real estate broker Tatiana Cames were collectively charged for 17 violations, each of which costs $1,000. The allegedly illegal properties were located on the Upper West Side in Manhattan and in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
The law under which they were charged fines people who rent out entire apartments for

Apple just announced that the previously-delayed Beats X earbuds will be available globally beginning February 10th. This comes a day after select Apple retail stores around the United States began receiving early stock of the Beats-branded neckbuds, which feature Apple’s W1 chip for quick, easy pairing with iOS devices and Macs. Beats X cost $149.95, and aside from the white and black color options that Apple already announced, today the company unveiled two other choices: gray and blue.B

After four and a half years of exploring Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover has made a new discovery that only deepens a long-standing mystery about the Red Planet — namely, how the world used to be so wet. Pretty much all Mars scientists agree that billions of years ago the planet had flowing rivers and lakes on its surface. But there’s a problem: no one can quite explain how ancient Mars was warm enough back then to support liquid water. And Curiosity is unearthing clues that only