Technology news

GUEST: News of Bitcoin and Ethereum is everywhere these days. The two cryptocurrencies have had returns over the past year that make a big-time hedge fund manager look like he’s running a lemonade stand in front of his parents house.
Since last year, Bitcoin is up (at the time of this writing) 390.55 percent and Ethereum’s currency, Ether, is up a mind-blowing 1,896.13 percent.
New money is pouring into the cryptocurrency space, with one investment fund announcing a raise of $400 mil

 Yesterday, Amazon and Whole Foods ruined a perfectly slow news day on a Friday in June with the announcement that Amazon intends to buy Whole Foods for almost $14 billion.
The most obvious victim of the deal was Instacart, in which Whole Foods invested and with whom Whole Foods has a five-year contract.
But after talking to a few Instacart investors and other sources close to the company… Read More

Batman star Adam West passed away at the age of 88 last weekend, resulting in a flood of tributes from his co-stars, other Batman actors, and the city of Los Angles. Yesterday, NBC released an unaired episode of its recently canceled DC-universe show Powerless, which features the late actor in one of his final roles.
“Win, Luthor, Draw” would have been the penultimate episode of the season had it not been canceled. In it, West plays Wayne Enterprise chairman Dean West, who admits tha

We really liked Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop: it’s got the right balance of power, portability, and design. It’s also apparently impossible to repair on your own, according to teardown specialists at iFixit.There’s no screws holding the case together, so the technicians were forced to try and pry apart the Alcantara fabric, noting that it was difficult to do without tearing it. Underneath, the individual components are also difficult to remove: the keyboard is glued dow

GUEST: Last month, The Kauffman Institute released its annual Index of Startup Activity, which analyzes entrepreneurship across the country. The report assigns every state a Startup Activity Index number based on the rate of new entrepreneurs, their opportunity share, and startup density.
California, home to Silicon Valley ranks, of course, at #1, while booming Texas came in at #2.
The bottom of the list was is familiar. For the third straight year, Wisconsin sits at #50.
I love Wisconsin. I&rsq

One of the highlights of Microsoft’s E3 press conference last week was the reveal of an all-new fighting game for the Dragon Ball Z universe. Now, there’s been quite a few DBZ fighting and action games over the years — nearly 150 titles in all. The long-running anime hasn’t always had a stellar reputation for quality, but Dragon Ball FighterZ, as the newest title in the franchise is called, should change that.In the reveal video, we saw an explosive and disorienting fight

2K’s Firaxis Games made a lot of changes to the basic design of its turn-based combat game XCOM 2 with its new expansion XCOM 2: War of the Chosen.
The tactical combat title’s expansion launches on August 29, the same day as turn-based Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. War of the Chosen will debut on the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. In this experience, players will take on a new class of aliens, dubbed the Chosen. The aliens will give the game more personality and cinematic st

There's something inherently creepy and annoying about drones buzzing over our heads — a frequent backyard irritation in cities like New York. But it turns out, a drone’s spying abilities can be useful: an uncrewed drone discovered a super-rare plant on a steep cliff on the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi. The discovery wowed botanists — and shows how technology can help conservationists in their fight against extinction.
“We were really excited,” says Ben Nyberg, a

Nintendo announced last year that it is planning to generate more money from its world-famous characters by licensing them out to other companies, and that has led to one of the most bizarre crossover mashups at the influential Electronic Entertainment Expo game industry event in Los Angeles with Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. But the tactical role-playing game was also one of the best playable demos on the show floor.
Ubisoft announced Mario + Rabbids on Monday during its recorded media

 It takes a lot of money to launch stuff into space — even by NASA terms. The cost ranges from around $9,000 to more than $40,000 per pound. With that sort of price tag, weight and space are at a major premium with shuttle missions, causing NASA to look for innovative new ways to create more compact payloads. A team at Georgia Institute of Technology is exploring a method that uses 3D… Read More

A Navy veteran accidentally stumbled upon a number of rare documents and images from the height of the space age —in the trash outside of a home in Florida.Former aviation electrician Yvette Quinn discovered the documents several weeks ago, and turned them over to WKMG News 6, concerned about the information left on the curb. The documents contained notes and images from a variety of projects, including early drones, early renders of lunar modules, the space shuttle, and a Martian spacecra

A man exits a home, walks down the front steps, and stops dead in his tracks. He looks  shook, and takes no time running back up the porch steps to the front door.
"What's up?" another man asks with a slight fear is his voice.
Thankfully, the terror was caused by a pretty adorable family of skunks that were barreling through the neighborhood and minding their own business. The skunks quickly passed the house without a care for the man on the porch, and sneeaked under the neighbor's porch.

The beauty of virtual reality is that it allows you to become anyone or anything you can dream of, and in this case the technology is letting you become the amazing Spider-Man. 
In the run-up to the release of the film Spider-Man: Homecoming in July, Sony has released a VR version of Spider-Man that lets you don the superhero's costume, swing through the New York City using web shooters, and even battle Spider-Man's movie rival, The Vulture. 
The experience is currently available to m

Uber's been too busy dealing with the fallout of its corporate culture in the United States to make too many headlines about its presence abroad recently. 
But a major regional rival got a significant batch of funding this week — upping the game for Uber in the Middle East. 
Careem, Uber's biggest rival in 80 cities across 12 countries in the region, reportedly raised another $150 million, finishing up a $500 million Series E funding round the company confirmed in December. 

It has been almost 15 years since the launch of the original Beyond Good & Evil and the re-announcement of its sequel this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles. That might be a record for the time lapsed between an original and a sequel.
But Ubisoft’s upcoming Beyond Good & Evil 2, a prequel to the original, is ambitious beyond most games. The French video game publisher showed the title this week, and I also attended a tech demo ho

Just about any account you own on the internet is prone to being hacked — and one of the easiest ways to add an extra layer of security is to enable two-factor authentication. Also known as two-step verification or 2FA, the process gives web services a secondary access to the account owner (you!) in order to verify a login attempt. Typically, this involves phone number and / or an email address.
While 2FA doesn’t totally cloak you from potential hackers, it is an important step in pr

Girl Scouts will soon be ready to take over your IT department. 
The organization is teaming up with Palo Alto Networks, an internet security company, to introduce a set of new badges to promote computer and internet literacy and cybersecurity. The initiative aims to foster educational programs across all ages of the Girl Scouts, with a major emphasis on providing access to girls who might otherwise never be exposed to the field.
The 18 new badges will be available to Girl Scouts across the

You’re probably reading this post with a fidget spinner in your hands, aren’t you? Relieving stress and anxiety is almost a full-time job in itself, which has fueled a host of app services aimed at helping you relax and de-clutter your thoughts. Aura Premium packs a litany of top-notch credentials and has quickly become one of the rising stars in the app meditation market, scoring a coveted #1 New App designation from Apple last February. And right now, you can get a lifetime subscr

Jeff Vandermeer is known for his surreal and unsettling stories. Look no further than his Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), which told the story of a region of the country cut off from civilization, where nature is left to reclaim the space in strange and otherworldly ways. In his new novel Borne, Vandermeer revisits some of the environmental themes of those books, but he turns out an impressive, post-apocalyptic tale about a young woman and a bizarre, intelligent

GUEST: This is an exciting time for those of us in computer vision — we’re seeing it merge with AI to enable all kinds of new possibilities. At the LDV Vision Summit in New York a few weeks ago, I came away with five key insights about where computer vision will impact AI:
1. Smart assistants will battle it out over vision
AI needs data with which to learn and process, and as we move closer to more “human”-like AI, it will increasingly need visual data. “This is one

Remember when everyone was panicking for last-minute Mother’s Day gifts back in May? Well, it’s time to do that all over again for Father’s Day — which, in case you forgot, is tomorrow, June 18th. It’s probably too late to order something that’ll arrive in time, but maybe you can try wrapping a photo of the gift? Or a receipt with a tracking number?
Our favorite deals this week include discounts on two smart speakers: $40 off Amazon Echo and $20 off Google Hom

Space startup Planetary Resources is killing its nascent Earth observation system, Ceres, opting to focus on its core mission of asteroid mining.Planetary Resources announced its the project in May 2016, saying that it would spend $21.1 million to equip 10 Arkyd satellites with sensors to observe the Earth’s surface. The company hoped to use the network to monitor water quality, locate new mineral sources, or find other uses that weren’t easily served by existing satellite services.

Rhode Island's best teacher didn't turn down his opportunity to meet the president of the United States — but he did make a statement about his values. 
Nikos Giannopoulos, voted teacher of the year for 2017 in Rhode Island, visited the White House back in April. When the official White House photo of Giannopoulos, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump came out this week, it quickly went viral and resonated with the LGBTQ community during Pride Month. 
Gianoppoulos

Bill Cosby remains free on bail after a Pennsylvania jury on Saturday convinced the judge that they were hopelessly deadlocked, but the district attorney took the unusual step of immediately announcing that a new trial date would be set.
The jury of seven men and five women spent a week shuffling between deliberations and the courtroom, telling the judge multiple times along the way that they were stuck. Each time they were sent back, reviewing and re-reviewing evidence and testimony, at one poi

One California woman is living out all your wildest unicorn and mermaid fantasies by turning her downtown Los Angeles apartment into a rainbow, bubblegum dream.
Social media queen, decor designer, and the brain behind Studio Mucci, Amina Mucciolo lives her life in color. From her hair, to her clothes, to her bubbly personality, she lives her life on full volume. In order to bring more color and vibrancy into her life, Mucciolo and her husband, Salvatore, transformed their 650-square-foot apartme

The love for Leonard Nimoy lives long and prospers, but does the world really need two Nimoy documentaries, one from each of his biological children?
Logically speaking, yes it does.
“Our films are very different,” said Julie Nimoy, referring to her new documentary, Remembering Leonard Nimoy, and For the Love of Spock, the 2016 crowd-funded documentary by her brother Adam. 
SEE ALSO: Star Trek fans will finally get a 'Deep Space 9' sequel, but there's a catch
The latter film foc

GUEST: Blockchain startup Bancor closed a $150 million ICO raise this week — a landmark event, both in the speed and the magnitude of the raise.
What is Bancor doing that got investors so excited? It’s trying to hit the blockchain domain at its very heart with the promise that it can enable smart tokens to serve as legitimate currency.
Cryptocurrencies, or smart tokens, are new forms of digital currency (akin to bitcoin), that aim to serve as cash equivalents for various online servi

Youth is a high stakes game, and no one captures the perils and euphoria of growing up quite like the oldest adolescent that ever lived shedding her teenage skin. 
On Pure Heroine, Lorde was a dedicated outsider who'd never been on a plane, but imagined endlessly what it must be like with a cool, criticial distance. On Melodrama, she's skydiving, terrified but self-assured. Do you think you love onion rings? Lorde loves onion rings so much that she made an Instagram account devoted to them

Military Aircraft Aboard U.S.S. Yorktown with Sailors Performing Exercises, 1943.Image: Fons Iannelli, Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New YorkShortly after the entry of the United States into World War II, the Navy established the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit to create images for pilot recruitment campaigns.The Navy was competing with the Army Air Corps for a limited pool of skilled airmen, and needed top-rate images to give them an edge in attracting talent.They asked Edward Steichen, one

I'm not usually a fan of horror movies. But every once and a while there are films like The Witch that, instead of going for straight-up horror, are just dark and tense through and through — and that I kind of love. The latest is It Comes at Night, and I'll just point you to my colleague Bryan Bishop's review, which I think nails the film's creepy strengths and thematic shortcomings.
What I actually want to talk about very quickly is how It Comes at Night uses multiple aspect ratios to tel

Two engineers of Hacker House created an autonomous 'Follow Me Cooler' that you can DIY. It uses Bluetooth to create GPS coordinates so it can follow you around or make its way to a friend across the park. If you're up for the challenge, you can build one of these yourself. It requires an Arduino Uno, some off-the-shelf hardware, and a bit of engineering background.  Read more...More about Tech, Tech Innovators, Technology, Smartphone, and Smartphones

It's possible that you couldn't keep up with the latest and greatest app updates this week considering all the internet buzz around Jeff Session's testimony. If that's the case, take a chill pill. We've kept up for you.
SEE ALSO: 10 classic apps Apple is killing with iOS 11
Each week we round up the most important app news along with some of the coolest new and updated apps to help you stay in the loop with everything you need on your phone.
Here's what caught our eye this week. If you're lookin

My dog spends a lot of time sniffing the ground with her adorable little nose. She doesn’t care what she finds: grass, cement, flowers, fire hydrants, poop, trash cans, fences, buildings — it’s all an exciting adventure of scents to her.And when you see that kind of behavior — not just from dogs, but plenty of other mammals — it’s easy to assume that those species must have a better sense of smell than people. After all, I don’t spend my mornings walking

Space. It's the final frontier. 
We all know that NASA and other space agencies around the world want us to boldly adventure into the solar system, and send people and robotic explorers deep into our cosmic neighborhood. 
But what about fidget spinners? 
SEE ALSO: Somebody made a giant rocket-powered fidget spinner so you don't have to
The Earthly fad — popular among teens and adults alike — hasn't made it to space yet, but if it did and astronauts started twirling the

Perhaps the most dystopian thing I’ve heard this year — and AI reporters hear a lot of dystopian things — came from Facebook executive Regina Dugan, head of the social media giant’s Building 8 research lab. During the F8 developer conference in April, where she unveiled next-gen tech being developed to feel words and type with your brain, she paused to say nobody has the right to read your mind.
“Now, to be clear, we are not talking about decoding your random though

In Katy Perry's haphazard and controversial rebranding as a woke pop star, she seems ready to admit she's often out of her depth. These days only three words now comprise her Twitter bio: "i know nothing."
It's a refreshing dose of humility from a celebrity who seems constantly torn between her good intentions and ego. Most of us are, of course, but Perry is staging that struggle before millions of people. The resulting spectacle isn't about what's righteous. Perry's gestures of solidarity inste

Deborah is a computer-generated human who needs to get from the Hotel de Anza in San Jose to Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, post haste. Traffic on the 101 is a nightmare, so rather than spending hours in traffic, she whips out her smartphone and hails an electric, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft through Vahana, the on-demand, aviation project. Total fare: $77. Total flight time: 18 minutes.This is the future envisioned by Airbus, which operates Vahana through its A³ sub

The hot new name in tech is France, a centuries-old startup that provides security, healthcare, and education in exchange for taxes. 
Newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that the country needs to "think and move more like a startup" and, presumably, less like a stodgy social democracy.
SEE ALSO: Trump's treasury secretary is 'not worried at all' about job-killing AI
"When an entrepreneur has too much success, he gets stigmatized and, in general, he gets taxed. Th