Technology news

You climb into a Honda Civic and a motion detector sees that you are not wearing a seatbelt. Seems like a simple problem for AI to resolve. The car might know, based on previous driving patterns, that you always drive for a bit before clicking, but maybe you could set an option that the car won’t even start unless you (or one of your teen drivers) are all fastened up. Ford does have a system that works a bit like this and is related to seatbelts, but I’m talking about an AI that adap

I’ve never really thought about how garbage sometimes settles on power lines. I’ve also never thought about how that garbage is taken down from those power lines. I guess I figured someone went up there and grabbed it? That seemed obvious. This 100 percent isn’t the case in China. In China, they use fire-spewing drones to burn the garbage down. See here:Photo by Wang Hu / VCGPhoto by Wang Hu / VCGThis seems incredibly unsafe, right? Directing fire at power lines rubs me the wro

2016 was such a bad year that its terribleness became a meme unto itself. Mutating first on internet forums, the sentiment trickled into the real world through newspapers, magazines, mixtapes, merch — and from my personal experience at a fratty New Year’s Eve party I accidentally attended, a multi-thousand dollar light-up display reading “Fuck 2016.” So it’s not immediately clear why anyone thinks there’s a sizable audience clamoring to relive it.
Nevertheless

If you’re part of the Xbox Insider Program, formerly known as the Xbox Preview Program, you may have gotten access to Microsoft’s Beam app on Xbox One today. In addition to allowing users to broadcast streams, Beam also gives them the power to watch and chat with each other, similar to Twitch.The app, due out this spring, will also allow users to browse game streams and earn “Sparks” and experience points as they watch. Sparks are an in-app currency that viewers use to un

MPAA ratings have always been Wolverine’s arch-enemy. The character, played by Hugh Jackman over the course of 17 years and eight previous movies in Marvel Comics’ X-Men universe, is a mutant berserker whose most prominent weapons are razor-sharp metal claws, plus the feral drive necessary to use them. But the PG-13 ratings on the X-Men franchise installments have limited what directors were willing to show onscreen. Slashing weapons do horrible damage to human bodies, but the movies

Last year, SpaceX announced a bold plan to launch its Dragon spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018 — in what would be the first ever private mission to the Red Planet. But now it looks like the company is pushing back the mission by a couple years. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell confirmed today that SpaceX is now targeting the year 2020 for the Mars trip, a move that will allow the company to better focus on its other ambitious projects.
“We felt like we needed to put more resources a

Nintendo hasn’t shared any details about the user interface for its upcoming Switch console, but anxious fans learned a lot yesterday when someone leaked a video of the system in action after getting their preorder early. Now, I want to take a closer look.
Switch launches March 3 for $300, and that means that many of you are about to spend a whole lot of money on something that is still partially a mystery. And after the painfully slow Wii U interface, you should probably know wh

Another robot has died in the depths of one of Fukushima’s nuclear reactors, as attempts to locate and remove melted radioactive fuel continue. This is the second robot in two weeks to meet its end in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, the site of a major nuclear accident caused by the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami.The robot’s mission was to investigate the pedestal underneath the Unit 2 nuclear reactor, where melted nuclear fuel is suspected to have fallen

MuleSoft, a company selling application programming interface (API) management and application integration software, today submitted its regulatory filing to raise $100 million in an initial public offering (IPO). The company is aiming to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the appropriate symbol MULE.
The company has been in a position to go public for years and most recently raised money in 2015.
Most of MuleSoft’s revenue comes from subscriptions and support; the rest

GM is planning to build thousands of self-driving Chevy Bolts starting next year. Many will be rolling out in test fleets for the ride-sharing service Lyft, which GM invested in last year, according to a report from Reuters.
The report says it would be the largest self-driving car test by a major automaker before 2020, with Lyft deploying an autonomous ride-sharing fleet in a number of states. GM has been testing its self-driving Bolts in a several areas, sharing video of a test car — code

 This week, the CRISPR-Cas9 patent case came to a close, an encrypted messaging app went open source and Facebook announced some big changes to its video product. These are some of the notable stories in tech from this week. You can also receive this post as a weekly newsletter, delivered to your inbox on Saturday mornings. 1. A judge has determined that CRISPR-Cas9 patents belong to the… Read More

Neil Gaiman just released his spin on Norse myths (the aptly titled Norse Mythology), and the popular fantasy author mentioned at an event in London earlier this week that he had already begun work on his next novel. The follow-up to Neverwhere will be titled The Seven Sisters.The novelization of Neverwhere was released in 1996 as Gaiman’s first solo novel, based on the eponymous BBC Two series (also created by Gaiman, alongside producer Lenny Henry). In the years since, the Neverwhere wor

You can now stream to more services than just Twitch directly from your Xbox One.
Microsoft is releasing an app for its Beam livestreaming service to a subset of Xbox One owners who are in the company’s Insider program. This app will enable you to view Beam streams or to broadcast some of your own gameplay to the service. If you get into the preview, you can test it out by hitting the guide button on your Xbox One controller, selecting the broadcast icon at the bottom of the menu, and open

The first teaser for the fourth season of Silicon Valley has dropped. Here, Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) seems to be reacting a little poorly to the sudden and surprising success of the Pied Piper video chat app, leading him to want to quit the company. “I need to do something else,” he says. What that is is completely unclear, but it apparently involves a lot of primal screaming.
Silicon Valley is as critically beloved as ever as it enters its fourth year. It earned eight

We know we’re going to see LG’s G6 at Mobile World Congress on February 26th, and we’ve already gotten a pretty good idea of how the phone will look. Still, the leaks keep coming, and today we get another peek at the display and its thin bezels from 9to5Google. Check out those curved corners on the display:9to5Google9to5GoogleAs we’ve seen in the past, and confirmed again by these images, the phone is supposed to have a dual-camera system as well as a rear fingerprint sen

 Remember the unsecured Android handset that newly minted President Trump gave up, but then apparently didn’t actually give up? Things had seemingly gone silent on that front as the world took some time out to focus on the rest of the deluge of insanity that is politics in 2017.
Today, however, the story is rearing its head yet again, as California Congressman Ted Lieu has proposed an… Read More

Giphy recently released a collection of GIFs featuring words in American Sign Language, Mashable reports. The 2,000-GIF library is meant to serve as a resource for people who want to learn sign language and those who already rely on it to communicate.As Mashable points out, the GIFs are all pulled from an educational series called Sign With Robert, starring actor and ASL consultant Robert DeMayo. Rather than serve as a pithy reaction or a visual joke, the ASL GIFs are creating an educational exp

(Reuters) — General Motors plans to deploy thousands of self-driving electric cars in test fleets in partnership with ride-sharing affiliate Lyft Inc, beginning in 2018, two sources familiar with the automaker’s plans said this week.
It is expected to be the largest such test of fully autonomous vehicles by any major automaker before 2020, when several companies have said they plan to begin building and deploying such vehicles in higher volumes. Alphabet Inc’s Waymo subsidiary,

I had to get out and look for them.
On the 2017 Ford F-350 Super Duty truck I’m testing this week, there are 7 cameras. One is on the front grill, right next to the Ford logo, and another one is near the windshield close to the rearview mirror. There are two more close to the side mirrors (which have built-in flashlights). There’s one that points toward the truck bed. If you’re counting, that’s 5 so far. On the handle to the rear tailgate, there’s one that

I made this haiku in three minutes, and it perfectly describes the charm of The Magic iPod, a simple website with a few choice compatible songs from the iPod generation that lovers of mash-ups will enjoy.
Click on 50 Cent.
Drag on to Evanescence
Instantly mash-up.The site has 20 preselected rap songs on the left and 23 rock songs on the right; you can drag and drop from the left side to the right side to make your mash-up dreams come true.
The Magic iPod has gone viral over the last few weeks th

Here goes another round of will-they-or-won’t-they: Reuters is reporting that Sprint parent company SoftBank is again preparing to approach Deutsche Telekom about a T-Mobile merger. Rather than talks of acquiring T-Mobile, this time it appears SoftBank is willing to “give up control” of Sprint, preparing to sell most of the company to Deutsche Telekom in order to merge the two wireless carriers. Sources told Reuters that the two companies are expected to start negotiations arou

Bond is an smart home accessory meant to help you add some Internet of Things utility to older devices that don’t have internet access. How? By learning the signals from your various remotes and rebroadcasting them when prompted through an through Alexa or another smart device. In other words, the IR blaster is making yet another comeback (Hi, Nilay!)Bond works through Wi-Fi, and touts the ability to control both infrared and radio frequency devices (the company says that IR devices will n

Admit it, you’ve done it: you’ve checked the “sell by” date on your milk, noticed it had passed, and then drank the milk anyway. It’s okay! A lot of people are confused by what exactly the “sell by” dates on food packages mean. The grocery industry wants to make life easier for you, and every other American consumer — so they’re standardizing the labels.and then you drank the milk anyway
The two largest trade groups for grocery manufacturers

With headsets like the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR finally shipping out to customers, 2016 was supposed to be the year virtual reality finally went mainstream. But things haven’t exactly worked out that way, and in 2017, all eyes are now on location-based VR. Whether in movie theaters or custom arcades, VR installations are seen as an opportunity to will a functioning VR ecosystem into existence. Customers can try experiences in paid, bite-sized doses without investing in expensive hard

Our next speaker for our latest GamesBeat event is Richard Marks, a senior research engineer at Sony Interactive Entertainment. He will talk about a variety of subjects at our GamesBeat Summit 2017: How games, sci-fi, and tech create real-world magic.
Last year, Marks spoke on “What Works in VR and What Doesn’t” at our GamesBeat 2016 event in Los Angeles. Marks is one of the pioneers of virtual reality, as he was recently running the Sony PlayStation Magic Lab that ca

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 5,000-word letter yesterday titled “Building Global Community.” The essay clearly took a lot of time, effort, and resources to put together. There’s a ridiculous amount of content to go over, and yet at the same time there really isn’t much that is groundbreaking or even new. Still, I can’t help but conclude one thing: The company is done dipping its toes into politics and is now ready to dive in.
That’s not to say Face

Over the past two years, SpaceX has been working to make its rockets reusable by landing the vehicles upright after they launch to space. Many of those landing attempts have been successful, but since we live in a world where the word “fake” has seen a big resurgence in people’s vocabulary, a lot of skeptics think that all these landings were completely fabricated by the company. There’s a healthy contingent of truthers out there who pore over the footage of landings, poi

Apple has released a new series of iPad Pro commercials comparing its newest tablet to PCs. In the ads, Apple uses real tweets from Twitter users who have been replaced by actors in the ads (at least one of the account owners was contacted before the ad went live). The commercials point out features like the lack of PC viruses, Microsoft Word, LTE support, and the Apple Pencil.The four, 15-second ads harken back to Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign from the early 2000s, which featur

For as long as Donald Trump has been on Twitter, he’s been known for his outlandish statements and rhetoric. His words have been mocked and parodied in a number of places, like Saturday Night Live and by voiceover actors like Mark Hamill and Billy West. It’s low-hanging fruit, to be sure, but a new Twitter parody account called Pres. Supervillain is now putting Trump’s words in the mouths of comic book villains.The account, @presvillain, comes from D.M. Higgins, the mind behind

It’s been a weird week in the world of major cell providers. After years of moving away from offering unlimited plans after the rise of data-hungry smartphones, Verizon announced out of the blue on Sunday that it would be offering a new unlimited plan to customers again. T-Mobile, who had previously led the way by removing tiered data back in January, updated its own unlimited plan to match. The move was followed by Sprint and AT&T by the end of the week.Verizon’s unexpected move

During this year’s Super Bowl, Ford aired a commercial showing how it’s working on new ways to solve transportation problems. Many companies are engaged in similar efforts as they strive to remain one step ahead of market-changing startups like Uber, WhatsApp, Slack, and Snap. And when internal research and development efforts aren’t enough, companies turn to innovation programs, which can take many forms, depending on the area of focus.
In a new report entitled “The corp

Organic meal delivery service Sun Basket has raised $15 million in a series C round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from a number of other VC firms and angels including Baseline Ventures, PivotNorth Capital, Accolade Partners, Founders Circle Capital, Shea Ventures, Relevance Capital, Vulcan Capital, and Filter 14.
Founded out of San Francisco in 2014, Sun Basket delivers organic pre-measured ingredients and recipes to people’s homes, with options for vegetarian, paleo, and gl

Faraday Future, the troubled electric car startup, insists it is actually going to start building its proposed $1 billion factory in North Las Vegas, over six months after construction was halted amid the company’s ongoing financial woes. In a statement, the company says it has entered a competitive bidding process, soliciting five bids from “top US and international contractors.” This comes after reports that FF was $21 million behind in payments to AECOM, the global construct

Every Friday, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn present a new series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and fo

After President Donald Trump halted the flow of refugees coming into the US through an executive order last month, Airbnb came out with a strong response: the home-sharing startup committed to providing free short-term housing for 100,000 refugees and other displaced people over the next five years. Airbnb has begun asking volunteers to open their homes to refugees in need, and it says it will subsidize costs in cases where no hosts offer their properties for free.The program has drawn praise fr