Technology news

Blossom is supposed to be a family-friendly robot. Its soft, knitted outside and wooden ears are supposed to make kids feel comfortable. Blossom is synonymous with flowers, which are beautiful, but I don't think Blossom is beautiful.
Researchers at Cornell and Google Zoo's creative technology team designed Blossom to "reject almost all of [the] common wisdom of domestic robot design," including "white shiny plastic with metal or black accents,glass screens and smooth, rounded lines and edges." U

Tropical Storm Harvey has set a record for rainfall in the continental US, according to the National Weather Service. The storm has poured 51.88 inches of rain into Cedar Bayou, Texas.The previous record for rainfall in the continental US was 48 inches, also in Texas, during cyclone Amelia in 1978. However, the all-time record of 52 inches happened near Hawaii in 1950 — and it’s still possible for the storm to exceed the all-time record.Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane

Game of Thrones’ season 7 finale was the most-watched episode in the show’s history. While it had its satisfying sequences, the consensus across social media was mixed. In typical Game of Thrones fashion, the finale left a lot of unanswered questions to set up a final season a year or two from now. But there were also rushed, predictable plot points that left the fans frustrated, and sparked a good deal of online debate.Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones season 7
1. A justification f

The next Walking Dead game is bringing walkers into the real world. Called The Walking Dead: Our World, the upcoming mobile release will be a location-based augmented reality experience, similar to Pokémon Go — only a lot more gruesome. AMC says that the game “will enable players to fully immerse themselves into the action of the hit TV show by blending digital objects, such as characters and other game elements, with the players’ own environment.”
Much like Pok&ea

Ever since Apple announced ARKit at its annual developers conference earlier this summer, the app-making community has enthusiastically shown off what it has been able to make with the new framework for augmented reality apps. ARKit hasn’t even officially launched yet, and already we’ve seen demos of AR fidget spinners, floating cats, and fancy car configurators on iPhones.Serious, groundbreaking stuff, right?But it’s sometimes the fun, toy-like technologies that give way to mo

We’re still a few months away from the October 6th release of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Until then, though, fans will be able to tide themselves over with a series of three short films looking to fill in the 30-year gap between the original Blade Runner — set in 2019 — and the sequel.The first is 2036: Nexus Dawn, posted over at Collider, which takes place 13 years before Villeneuve’s film kicks off. In the world of Blade Runner, the government institute

If you’re a flexible kind of traveler, Google is releasing an update to search that might help save some money the next time you’re flying somewhere. A new tab under Google’s Flights search, called Flight Insights, now shows you tips to make your travel a little more cost-efficient, such as flying on a different day, landing in a different airport, or checking to see how airfares vary over time on a graph. These are features similar to what you’d find on aggregator sites

After making landfall on Friday, Tropical Storm Harvey is still ravaging southeast Texas five days later — and pictures from space show just how massive this storm has remained since then. NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik snapped the above photo of Harvey from the International Space Station at 2:27PM ET yesterday, showing that the storm is still a monster. It’s a poignant reminder as Houston area residents continue to battle flood waters, and emergency crews rescue people stranded in th

Elgato has a whole new line of HomeKit products at IFA this week. The company teamed up with "leading suppliers" for specific home automation purposes, including a self-locking door lock, Eve Lock; a smoke detector called Eve Smoke; and a tamper-detecting window sensor called Eve Window Guard. Elgato also has a new version of Thermo, its HomeKit radiator valve, which adds touch controls and an integrated temperature display.But my favorite new product is the Eve Aqua, which turns your hose on an

Amazon’s Echo is out of stock online, as noted by TechCrunch earlier today. And given that the Echo is such a core part of Amazon’s hardware business, and that the company has been running near-constant sales on that for the last few months, there are two ways to take this news:
Amazon is planning to update the Echo — whose hardware hasn’t really changed in the years since it was first released back in 2015 — with a new model, explaining the last few months of fire

As southeast Texas has been hit by heavy rains and record-setting flooding, fake photos of an underwater Houston airport and of a shark swimming down a highway have gone viral. There are also old images of former President Barack Obama serving hot meals to evacuees, and viral posts sharing the wrong National Guard number to call if people find themselves in emergency situations. (The Washington Post is keeping a useful tally of all hoaxes.) But after seeing all these hoaxes, it’s worth won

Should we be worried about the dangerous potential of artificial intelligence?Sort of, says Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tegmark is a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a Boston-based research organization that studies global catastrophic risk, with an especial focus on AI. He’s also the author of Life 3.0, which is out today. Life 3.0 outlines the current state of AI safety research and the questions we’ll need to answer as a societ

 Skype recently introduced a feature designed to cement its place among business users who aren’t as interested in things like emoji reactions or “Stories.” It now supports conducting technical interviews via its service through a new Skype Interviews feature. From a dedicated website, interviewers can test candidates in seven programing languages over Skype using a… Read More

 A day after making its Whole Foods debut, the original Echo is no longer for sale from Amazon’s site, a move that could indicate the imminent arrival of a new device. The timing is certainly right. The original Echo is long, long overdue for an upgrade. The smart assistant has gone mostly untouched since entering the market two years ago — even as other devices like the Dot have… Read More

If you haven’t upgraded your smartphone before making a return to college, OnePlus is now willing to shave 10 percent off the price of its latest flagship, the OnePlus 5. You’ll have to verify that you’re actually a student to receive the coupon code, but it seems like that’s really all there is to it. Once that step’s done, you can save a bit of money and get yourself a device that very few people on campus will have.But it’s worth giving some thought to whet

Amazon has finally added multi-room audio support to its Echo devices, allowing users to simultaneously stream music over multiple speakers in their homes. It’s a long-awaited move that has been expected since the low-cost Echo Dot launched and made it feasible for people to outfit their entire homes with Amazon’s smart speaker.The new feature will let you play audio from Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Pandora over multiple speakers today. Spotify is the glaring omission here

When the Yakuza series made its Western debut, it did so with a big marketing splash. The gritty crime epic featured a celebrity-filled voice cast — including the ingenious casting of Mark Hamill as the wild yakuza Majima — and a deluge of print and TV ads. It didn’t really work, though. Despite eventually turning into a franchise with multiple sequels, the Yakuza games largely remained a niche outside of Japan. Hamill never reprised his role — later games all featured Ja

Taylor Swift’s video for her most recent single “Look What You Made Me Do,” might not have earned her any renewed critical respect, but it feels like nearly everyone watched it. YouTube just announced that the video had the biggest 24-hour debut in YouTube history. In its first day, the clip earned 43.2 million views, toppling the previous record holder — Psy’s 2013 video for “Gentleman,” with 36 million views.
The video, in which Taylor Swift plays a vi

Tumblr’s latest update brings several new features for mobile users, some of which desktop users already enjoy. Now users can react to things they reblog with photos, which opens up a range of possibilities like attaching reaction gifs to everything or engaging in a collaborative photo essay. Tumblr also added more text styles for text posts, so that users can now add headers, make lists, and use serif fonts, a Courier-like typewriter font, and cursive.
Both of these features — letti

YouTube bundled together a bunch of big changes to its look and feel in a release today. From design tweaks to features, both the desktop and mobile app got significant upgrades. Here’s a quick rundown of everything new.A new logo that loses the emphasis on Tube and adds the now-iconic play button. Notice the new font and color.A new look for the desktop that emphasizes Google’s Material design aesthetic. Less red, more white space and extra room for video thumbnails.The desktop vers

Last week in San Francisco, Google showed me an app called Oz. Oz is a kind of augmented reality picture book: it places animated characters from The Wizard of Oz into the physical world, as viewed through a smartphone camera. I’d tried it a few months earlier at Google I/O, running on the Tango AR platform, and the content hadn’t changed. But the experience was far more interesting — because for the first time, it could run on a phone that I use every day.
This version of Oz w

Tinder Gold, a paid tier of the dating app, is coming to the US after months of testing in limited markets including Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, and Germany. In the US, the paid subscription will be available for select iOS users starting today. Tinder claims its paid service, which goes for $4.99 a month, has helped users receive 60 percent more likes than its free version.
Tinder Gold gives users access to extra features like rewind (which undos swipes you might mistakenly make), unlimited

WhatsApp is giving business accounts verified green badges if their contact information checks out. So far, business verification is limited to the small number of businesses that are participating in the pilot program. If the phone number of a contact belongs to a business account, it earns a green check.
WhatsApp is also going to let you know if you’re talking to a business by showing a yellow text bubble in the chat. These texts can’t be deleted, according to WhatsApp. In general,