Technology news

Apple just released its own Animoji karaoke video today, weeks after Twitter users uploaded their own versions by combining the Animoji feature on the iPhone X with their favorite songs.
Apple did briefly hint at Animoji karaoke in its iPhone X launch video in September, where at 0:30 into the video, a monkey lip syncs the words, “Do you want to meet me on the floor?” However, the trend picked up on Twitter in November when Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken tweeted a fox Animo

Google has released the final preview build of Android 8.1, a small update to Android Oreo due out next month. There isn’t a ton of new stuff in 8.1, but there is one big update coming for Pixel 2 owners: support for the phone’s “Visual Core,” an imaging chip Google included but wasn’t ready to activate at launch.
The chip has been sitting dormant, but as of today, developers can start to try it out. The Visual Core is enabled in the final 8.1 preview, allowing came

The White House is reportedly considering a ban on personal mobile phones for staff at work, according to Bloomberg.
The Trump administration has been beset by leaks — in February, then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer was reportedly coordinating unplanned “phone checks,” as staffers turned to encrypted messaging apps — and a ban could be used to curb contact with the press, but the ban would also cause technical hurdles for staff: Bloomberg reports that staff aren’t abl

2018 is set to be a big year for Marvel, with Black Panther — Marvel’s first superhero film with a black actor in the lead role — and the almost overwhelming star-studded Avengers: Infinity War on the docket. But it also marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Iron Man, which kicked off Marvel Studios’ grand cinematic universe experiment. A decade later, the MCU’s success is unmatched by any other franchise in Hollywood.
The company’s superhero stories ar

The Walking Dead is back, and for us here at The Verge that’s an opportunity to examine just how effective the show can be in creating a complex villain. As played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, big bad Negan has always been violent. But thanks to his man-baby antics, he’s stubbornly remained a comic book thug, never becoming the nuanced character the show so sorely needs.
Each week, I’ll be analyzing the show through its presentation of Negan: how he acts, how he delivers his jokes a

Soft robotics has been a promising field of research for years, but these squidgy and flexible creations have been held back by the absence of one important characteristic: strength. Now, scientists from MIT CSAIL and Harvard’s Wyss Institute have come up with a way to give soft robots some power — by outfitting them with rigid origami skeletons.
In a paper published today in the journal PNAS, researchers describe a new type of soft artificial muscle that could be used to build soft

Tumblr CEO and founder David Karp, who created the blogging site more than 10 years ago at the age of 20, is resigning from the company. The news, first reported by The New York Times, was confirmed to The Verge in a statement from Verizon-owned media conglomerate Oath, to which Tumblr belongs, following a dizzying string of mergers and acquisitions over the last four years.“David Karp will depart Oath by the end of the year,” the statement reads. “David founded Tumblr 10 years

Black Friday has come and gone, but there’s still plenty of deals for the taking today for Cyber Monday. We’ve already gone and rounded up the best deals from a bunch of the top retailers like Amazon and Walmart, but if you’re looking for the best of the best discounts around, you’ve come to the right place.Best overall dealsEssential Phone and 360-degree camera attachment for $399 (usually $499)DJI Spark drone for $339 (usually $499)Microsoft Surface Laptop starting at $

Microsoft is back for Cyber Monday with one last round of deals. Many of them are a continuation of the company’s Black Friday deals, like a significant cut on the Surface Pro and on Xbox Live subscriptions. Others, like its MSI and Huawei discounts, are new.
We’ve picked out the best deals Microsoft is dishing out. There are a lot of variations of Xbox One S console bundle deals, depending on whether you want Shadow of War, Assassin’s Creed, Halo Wars 2, Battlefield 1, or Mine

For as long as SodaStream devices have been around, people have been trying to carbonate booze in them, to varying degrees of success. But it looks like SodaStream has heard your prayers, with the company’s newly announced 'Sparkling Gold' drink mix, an alcoholic concentrate that you can add to your freshly carbonated SodaStream bottles.Turn your water into wine
Unlike SodaStream’s other mixes, which turn your seltzer into soda or lemonade, Sparkling Gold lets you turn your water int

More than 200 businesses and trade organizations have signed a letter to the FCC asking that the agency reconsider its plan to end net neutrality. The letter is signed by an array of big and recognizable tech and web companies: that includes Airbnb, Automattic (which owns WordPress), Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, Pinterest, Reddit, Shutterstock, Sonos, Square, Squarespace, Tumblr (certainly to the displeasure of its owner, Verizon), Twitter, and Vimeo, among quite a few others.
The letter is being r

The post-Thanksgiving deals period is winding down, with the last hurrah being Cyber Monday. If you were too busy reuniting with family and friends over the long weekend to do any bargain hunting online or in stores, today is a great opportunity to catch some good savings. If you’re hoping to save big on Apple gadgets, there are some Cyber Monday deals available — just not from the company itself. Thankfully, other online retailers carrying Apple goods have got you covered.
Apple dea

Google has updated its trio of office apps — Docs, Slides, and Sheets — for the iPhone X and iOS 11 today, via MacStories. The updates add support for the larger display of Apple’s latest phone as well as for iOS 11’s drag and drop functions on the iPad.
It’s good to see Google playing nice with Apple and supporting the features of the Cupertino company’s latest hardware and software, especially given that unlike Apple’s own word processing, slide show,

It’s Cyber Monday, and that means deals, deals, deals! But if we’re being honest with each other, all these deals can get pretty overwhelming. And that’s where our experts come in!
We had a very special episode of Circuit Breaker Live today, with Ashley and Paul taking calls from real-life viewers like you to help them through their Cyber Monday dilemmas! Our resident Deals Expert Chaim was around too, to school us on all the deals he’s been tracking since the beginning o

Moleskine introduced its Smart Writing Set last year, which let users jot down their notes in a specially textured Moleskine notebook and transfer them to an iOS and Android app. Now the company is collaborating with Microsoft to bring the Moleskine Notes app directly to Windows 10, so you can see your notes in real-time on your Surface device. The app is free, but the Paper Tablet notebook and Pen+ will cost you $199. Replacement Smart Planners cost $29.90.
In addition to the transcribing your

Black Friday has come and gone, but there’s still plenty of deals for the taking today for Cyber Monday. We’ve already gone and rounded up the best deals from a bunch of the top retailers like Amazon and Walmart, but if you’re looking for the best of the best discounts around, you’ve come to the right place.Best overall dealsEssential Phone and 360-degree camera attachment for $399 (usually $499)Philips Hue 4-bulb pack and hub for $59.99 (usually $99.99)Roku Streaming Sti

Good news for (some) Android users! Those with an unlocked HTC U11 will be able to update their device to the latest major Android release, Oreo, starting today. Mo Versi, the company’s VP of product management, announced the news in a tweet over the weekend. In a follow-up, he said HTC is working with Sprint to get Oreo on the carrier model “as quickly as possible” and that it’s “coming soon.”HTC’s rollout comes as welcome news given that finding device

Scientific disputes traditionally have been settled by time and experiment, but lately researchers are using the judicial system to resolve what appear to be fundamentally scientific issues, or to defend themselves against critiques of their work. The latest such case was filed by Mark Jacobson, a climatologist at Stanford University, who wants $10 million from the first author and publisher of a recent critique of his work.
Jacobson’s paper, which he co-wrote with colleagues, was called &

If you’ve been eying an Essential Phone, today is probably the day to pick one up: the bezel-free smartphone has dropped down to an all-time low of $399 for Cyber Monday, a price that also includes the 360-degree camera attachment that remains the only modular accessory currently available for the device.The $399 price is available on Amazon for the unlocked version of the device, and is an even more dramatic sale than the $499 price drop that the Essential Phone saw in October.The deal se

It feels like “quadcopter pilot” has only just became a job for humans, and already AI is gunning to take it away. Well, it’s not able to quite yet, if a recent experiment from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is anything to go by. The agency has been testing autonomous drones for a while, and last week released the results of a race pitting computers against a professional human pilot. The good news is that the human won — but only after some practice.
In a press r

Do you use a laptop or tablet to take notes during school lectures or meetings? If so then maybe you should reconsider pen and paper because there’s increasing evidence that using laptops during lectures decreases learning which can result in lower grades, reports The New York Times.
A study at Princeton University and the University of California, investigated this by asking some students to take notes at a lecture using pen and paper, while another group used laptops. The experiment foun

Microsoft has been testing out its Office apps on Chromebooks for the past year, but they’ve been mainly limited to Google’s latest PixelBook device. It now appears that testing has concluded, and a number of Chromebooks are now reliably seeing the Office apps in the Google Play Store for Chromebooks. Chrome Unboxed reports that the apps are showing up on Samsung’s Chromebook Pro, Acer’s Chromebook 15, and Acer’s C771.The apps are Android versions of Office which in

Snapchat is now using object recognition to identify what’s in users’ photos and serve them relevant filters. So, if you take a picture of some food, Snapchat will suggest filters with slogans like “get in my belly” and “what diet?”
Snap, the company behind Snapchat, confirmed to Mashable that the filters had started rolling out to users last week, but it didn’t provide an exhaustive list of what objects trigger the mechanism. Pets, food, and holiday des

GUEST: In a world with limited doctors, emerging diseases and superbugs, and sharply rising healthcare costs, how can we successfully tackle healthcare problems at scale?This is just one of the critical challenges India’s explosive startup community hopes to solve by implementing AI in new and innovative ways to serve the needs of 1.324 billion citizens. This is a feat that carries huge implications for the US and other healthcare ecosystems around the globe.
To understand how dire th

Nvidia and Nuance announced a partnership today that’s aimed at helping healthcare institutions tap into artificial intelligence. The Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging is, as the name suggests, designed to provide a hub for medical professionals to pick up new tools for analyzing the results of x-ray imaging and other radiology tools.
AI developers will be able to release the models that they’ve trained through Nuance’s PowerShare network, which will then allow parti

While Europe’s startup ecosystem has changed dramatically over the past decade, venture capitalists are warning that entrepreneurs must do more to encourage and reward risk if they want to create the next generation of tech giants.
“One of the things holding [these entrepreneurs] back, and holding Europe back, from really building the companies the size of Amazons is attracting and retaining the right talent,” said Martin Mignot, partner at Index Ventures. “And one o