Technology news

UPS has unveiled its plan for delivery drones: build them right into trucks, and launch them at various points along their route.
The delivery company ran an initial test on Monday, when it claims to have successfully launched a drone from the top of a truck, let it autonomously deliver a package, and then return to the truck at a different location.
While that test might have been successful, UPS’s system is still far from being ready for delivery. TechCrunch reports that a second test of

Before every episode of The Vergecast I sit down, read through a bunch of news, and take a bunch of notes. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my week, and I started thinking it might be fun to do every day on the site. So, I just sat down and wrote some notes on today’s news as though I’d be talking about it later. Are you into this? Am I into this? I don’t know. But it was fun to do! Give me some feedback and we’ll keep mutating this into something good.
Apple

Two self-driving racecars put the pedal to the metal this weekend in Buenos Aires. The prototype racers put in 20 laps, each topping 115 miles per hour at the Puerto Madero street circuit before one of their days came to an abrupt end. We’ve been stoked about Roborace since Formula E first made the announcement over a year ago. Unlike Formula E — an electronic vehicle racing circuit — Roborace vehicles have no driver. Instead, engineers focus on who can build the best AI.

Despite the fact that its first gigabit LTE modem isn’t available in a smartphone yet, Qualcomm has already announced the successor to the chip. The Snapdragon X20 modem will boost the theoretical download speeds to 1.2Gbps from the 1Gbps that the current Snapdragon X16 modem can theoretically reach.
Of course those speeds won’t be reached on a consistent basis once the chips make it into your phone. Last year, Qualcomm told The Verge that in simulations, average speeds ranged from 1

Want to remind everyone that America Online was a thing in the 90s? Urban Outfitters thinks you do. UO is selling an (admittedly comfy-looking) t-shirt emblazoned with the familiar AOL triangle logo for $45. That’s almost $20 more than you’d pay for AOL’s most expensive subscription service, and the latter comes with a Verizon discount. Not that the price is a big surprise – you go to Urban Outfitters when you want to disappoint Macklemore. As nostalgia goes, the AOL log

The Apple Pencil is a wonderful piece of technology. But for all its technical smarts, the design leaves something to be desired. The white plastic is cold and harsh, and the cap for the Lightning port is easy to lose.Fortunately, the excellent Apple accessory company Pad & Quill is here to save the day with its handcrafted leather goods. Specifically, the $49 Leather Apple Pencil Grip, which — in the company’s own words — “turns the Pencil from useful tool into a wor

Updated February 21st: The most recent update adds Horizon: Zero Dawn and Hidden Folks.
I’m a sucker for end-of-year lists. They’re positive, celebratory, and useful. But too often, lists are backloaded with fall releases. A book published in January? A video game released in March? They’ll need luck and a good publicist to score best-of list slots come December.
I empathize with annual curators. Given the constant deluge of new titles, each arriving with their own noisy hype,

We’re not expecting to see Samsung officially unveil its Galaxy S8 until late March, but as the big reveal gets closer, more leaks and details about the company’s next flagship smartphone continue to emerge. Today, a series of questionably-sourced images lend a bit more credence to Samsung getting rid of the S7’s physical home button and moving entirely to on-screen virtual buttons.
China protective film manufacturers exposure Galaxy S8 pic.twitter.com/8VOXpikUsc— Ice uni

Former Breitbart News senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos has resigned, after comments condoning pedophilia surfaced earlier this week. “Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a statement tweeted by The New York Times’ Michael Grynbaum. “I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately.” The news comes after Yiannopou

FCC chairman Ajit Pai has had a whirlwind first month, taking immediate action to scale back net neutrality, slow broadband subsidies for low-income households, and block efforts to reform the exorbitant calling rates to prisons.
But in the background of all of this, Pai has also made a series of changes at the commission in the name of transparency. He’s explored publishing FCC orders a month before they're voted on, alongside a one-page summary (instead of close to one month after they&r

 As our society continues to devalue facts and statistics, Data.world, a two year old data collaboration startup out of Austin, Texas, is fighting back with its passionate community of data nerds. Today the company is announcing a $18.7 million Series B led by Pat Ryan’s family investment group to further build out its platform for aggregating and analyzing data.
CEO Brett Hurt and… Read More

The world’s first self-driving robot racing series took a big step toward reality this weekend. For the first time ever, both of Roborace’s prototype autonomous racecars ran against each other on a track. Roborace — a self-driving racing series supported by Formula E that was announced in 2015 — plans to release a full video documenting the attempt on Friday. But we’ve got some exclusive footage of Saturday’s feat, which you can see above.The two Roborace prot

The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission has just issued a recall for select SodaStream bottles that may burst under pressure. Take a moment to make your “it me,” “Note 7,” “haha this bottle is basically Donald Trump” jokes, have a nice giggle, and let’s move forward.An estimated 51,000 units are part of the US recall, though an additional 7,600 bottles were also sold in Canada. The bottles hold one liter of liquid, are blue-tinted, and label

Today, Soundwall is updating its line of speaker artwork — spartwork, if you will — with the launch of its new Nova line. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Soundwall, the idea is that you can pick out a piece of art or upload your own, and Soundwall will ship you an aluminum piece that not only looks nice but also functions as a speaker. Yes, you read that right. The Soundwall is made of aluminum, and the art is transferred onto it using a process called dye sublimation. Two t

We’re quickly approaching the March 3rd launch of the Nintendo Switch. While you (hopefully) have your console’s preorder locked, there are a few other things you might want to grab for your Switch in advance.
Below, we’ve broken down our picks for microSD cards, Ethernet adapters, charging cables, and everything else we can think of that you might want on hand when your Switch arrives.
microSD cards
The Nintendo Switch can theoretically take use microSD cards up to 2TB (althou

Almost two months to the day after Uber loaded its fleet of self-driving SUVs into the trailer of a self-driving truck and stormed off to Arizona in a self-driving huff, the company is preparing to launch its second experiment (if you don’t count the aborted San Francisco pilot) in autonomous ride-hailing.
What’s different is that this time, Uber has the blessing from Arizona’s top politician, Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, who is expected to be “Rider Zero” on

This afternoon, monotonous online conversation about Katy Perry and our crumbling democracy cleared briefly to make room for a conversation about cows. Specifically one cow, which had escaped from a slaughterhouse in Jamaica, Queens and was charging through the streets with all the grace of, well, a giant cow on the run. Soon after the cow escaped, live streams of the chase appeared on NBC and CBS. “Loose in Queens” began trending on Twitter. And in the classic first step for any mod

Compelling others to feel emotions disproportionate to their experiences is called, as the terrible man T.S. Eliot used to say, messing around with the “objective correlative.” In his opinion, if you felt too much while reading a poem, it was because the language therein was Way Too Floral, and also you were probably a woman. If you weren’t feeling enough, it was because there weren’t enough Facts or Metaphors.This is why he hated the famous play Hamlet.
I’m simplif

It’s not just you: YouTube is down for many users. The outage appears to be mostly affecting European users. YouTube is working fine for TNW writers stateside (though we’ve seen some intermittent outage), but multiple European staff  members are getting a ‘500 Internal Server Error’ message. Youtube is dead pic.twitter.com/53dcydbLzt — where am i (@Bamanboi) February 21, 2017 YouTube is having issues… it’s not just you! #youtubedown pic.twitt

Tilt Brush, one of the most fun, immersive, and impressive virtual reality tech demos for the HTC Vive, has arrived on that other VR platform. Porting the app, which lets you paint and create artwork in 3D space inside the VR world, to Oculus Rift wasn’t practical until the company got around to shipping its Touch controllers. Now that you can buy the controllers (and everyone should), Google has released Tilt Brush in the Oculus Store for $29.99.Players should get an experience that&rsquo

Five years ago, James Therrien was browsing an indie gaming forum when he stumbled across an in-development title that he couldn’t stop thinking about. Called Rain World, the game starred a cute little creature called a slugcat, who is forced to survive a harsh, industrial alien landscape teeming with vicious predators. “I loved the visuals so much, that I soon as I saw it I had this complete audio picture in my head of what it should sound like,” he explains. “It was so

When it comes to innovation in the delivery space, nobody comes even remotely close to UPS. The iconic courier company has figured out several different ways to increase the fuel efficiency of its vehicles, while simultaneously lowering delivery times. For example, did you know that UPS routes drivers using the least-possible left turns? It sounds counterintuitive, but the move has saved 20.4 million miles, and allowed it to deliver 350,000 more packages. It’s for this reason why I’

Remember Etch A Sketch? Remember spending hours honing your fine motor skills in turning the knobs and dials, trying to perfect tracing over the lines? Remember never letting anyone into your room again after your neighbor’s kid accidentally kicked your Etch A Sketch across the floor and destroyed your masterpiece?The Etch A Sketch was an exercise in patience, character-building, and hand-eye coordination. Today’s kids won’t get to experience any of that with the latest collabo

 Skurt, the Los Angeles-based rental car delivery startup, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Upfront Ventures (which also led a $1.3 million seed round), and included a strategic investment from BMW, as well as funding from Troy Carter’s Cross Culture Ventures, Expansion VC, Greycroft and Magic Johnson.
Skurt has an interesting take on the rental car… Read More

Startups, take note: Rapper and businessman Shawn “Jay Z” Carter is launching his own venture capital fund. He’s starting the fund with business partner Jay Brown, president of Jay Z’s entertainment company Roc Nation. They are currently looking for a third partner. Both Jays are allegedly partnering with startup foundry Sherpa, though Sherpa staff might not be heavily involved. No one knows the target fund size, but Axios reports that the focus is on seed-stage tec

A Cadillac can’t take the place of your smartphone — and as GM computer engineers tell it, they don’t want it to. But what they are trying to do over time is make the act of using your phone in relation to the car an experience that gets better.Cadillac will begin selling its next-generation user experience system in the CTS next month, and it will soon be added to the 2018 XTS and ATS models. Last week I traveled to Detroit, deep into the windowless basement operations of GM&r

The Japanese town of Oji is going to lure in tourists with the help of its new doggy drone. In a short film / commercial released earlier this month, the Yukimaru quadcopter flies to the main Oji attractions, like a scenic photo op, a temple, and the Bell of Eternal Lovers. Oji isn’t Tokyo but it still has a lot to offer visitors, like a doggo drone!The film is endearing for both drone fans and people naturally inclined to enjoy views of the Japanese countryside. We’re unclear on whe

A series of storms have inundated California over the past few weeks, and the latest deluge is currently swelling rivers and reservoirs that are already spilling over. Vast swathes of California continue to be at risk for flooding as the storm runoff makes its way through river systems, the National Weather Service warns. Across California, residents were evacuated when local rivers flooded, including a small Northern California town that experienced a levee breach Monday night.“So it appe

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: *Sportscaster voice* Welcome to the final four! It’s hard to believe that we’ve made it this far or that we’ll ever make it to the end. This week on The

The first time a breast cancer survivor asked David Allen to tattoo her chest, he refused. He knew the skin had gone through a lot during the surgery to remove the breasts, called a mastectomy, and he was hesitant about using needles on such a sensitive area. But the woman stayed on him for six months, until he finally caved.“It was transformative,” Allen, a tattoo artist in Chicago, tells The Verge. “It was pretty overwhelming.” The woman started weeping after the tattoo

I haven’t lusted for a product in recent memory as much as I have for the Here One. As someone who is overly optimistic about the idea of truly wireless earbuds, and as someone who was genuinely impressed by the technology behind (and social implications of) Here Active Listening — Doppler Labs’ first pair of earbuds, which let you augment the audio around you but didn’t feature audio streaming — this seemed like the perfect product for me. Here One looked like it w

The New York Times has been in circulation since 1851, making it 166 years old this September. In that time, its front page has evolved considerably, going from a text-heavy broadsheet to one that features high-quality color images. Digital artist Josh Begley has managed to cram almost every front page from the Times into a one-minute-long video, showing the evolution in action.
What’s most fascinating about this video is seeing how experiments eventually become standard practice. The firs

Remember Katy Perry’s video for “Chained to the Rhythm,” with the hamster eating tiny food? The singer has returned with another version of the video, this time featuring Perry romping around an amusement park in a space dress.“Chained to the Rhythm” has a much harder political bent than Perry’s typical fare; it’s loaded with lyrics about living in a comfy little bubble and time ticking down for “the empire.” This video better reflects the so

Imagine if every Android smartphone could transform into a PC just by connecting a display, keyboard, and mouse. It’s what Microsoft has been trying with Windows 10 and Continuum, and it’s the dream of Beijing-based startup Jide Technologies, which today announces a new version of its Android-based software, Remix OS, that will live on smartphones but be capable of powering Android-based PCs.The feature is called Remix Singularity and the new operating system is Remix OS on Mobile (o

Halo Wars 2 is a game that very visibly straddles the divide between console and PC. It’s a real-time strategy game, a genre that — along with the MOBA and the MMORPG — has traditionally confined itself to the home computer. It’s also a Halo game, representing a series that drove the original success of Microsoft’s Xbox consoles, and became responsible for rehoming first-person shooters on TVs after Doom, Quake, and Half-Life started the genre on the PC. But these t