Technology news

Excited for Black Panther? So are we. Which is why we're rolling out obsessive coverage with Black Panther Week. Spoilers ahead for Black Panther.One of the most unexpected joys of Black Panther is how it leaves you with the sudden, overwhelming, impossible urge to get a pet war rhino. And we need to talk about it.
There's a lot to love, analyze, and discuss about Ryan Coogler's monumental Marvel feat, so we  understand why this particular aspect of the film's magic has gone criminally

Bigelow Aerospace — which currently has an inflatable capsule attached to the International Space Station (ISS) — announced bold plans to populate low-Earth orbit with inflatable space capsules. The announcement on Tuesday comes soon after the Trump administration proposed a NASA budget that would cease funding the Space Station after the year 2024.
The company's CEO, Robert Bigelow — who is convinced aliens have visited Earth — announced the creation of a new company cal

As of today, Flixster Video is officially gone. Fandango bought the site in 2016, and has been sending users regular emails over the past several months about the shutdown, as reported by Android Police. The website is no longer operational, and now only points people to its mobile app, which can still be used for getting movie reviews and tickets.
Flixster first announced it was closing in 2016, after being acquired by Fandango along with subsidiary Rotten Tomatoes. That year, Fandango also bo

Bill Gates, the man Dennis Feinstein once famously referred to as "like a super-nerd," is reportedly set to appear on TV's nerdiest sitcom: The Big Bang Theory.
The Microsoft founder-turned-billionaire philanthropist will play himself in a March episode of the series, EW reports. He pops up when he visits the pharmaceutical company where Penny works, and of course the guys want to meet him.
SEE ALSO: The cast of 'Queer Eye' gives us their take on millennial trends
Gates has been mentioned on the

Reality shows, on the whole, have never been particularly ethical endeavors. From beauty pageants where women got plastic surgery makeovers to substance abuse intervention shows that allowed participants to drive under the influence of drugs and alcohol, their interest has always been less in exploring the human condition and more in producing the most outlandish, desperate, and provocative behavior possible for the entertainment of the audience.But Netflix is poised to take this shameless impu

More than six months after Citymapper launched its own officially licensed bus route in East London, the transportation app is shutting down the project in favor of becoming a private taxi operator, according to the Financial Times. London’s transportation authority, Transport for London (TfL), confirmed to the outlet earlier today that it has granted Citymapper a license to operate a taxi service, though there are no details about the forthcoming service.
The Citymapper team has explaine

Bigelow Aerospace — the Las Vegas-based company manufacturing space habitats — is starting a spinoff venture aimed at managing any modules that the company deploys into space. Called Bigelow Space Operations (BSO), the new company will be responsible for selling Bigelow’s habitats to customers, such as NASA, foreign countries, and other private companies. But first, BSO will try to figure out what kind of business exists exactly in lower Earth orbit, the area of space where th

With a new Doctor Who series comes not just a new Doctor but also a new logo.
BCC revealed the new logo for Doctor Who's upcoming 11th series, which is set to premiere on BBC in the fall. The logo, colored yellow and orange, is a more modern take on the last logo with a little extra flair.
SEE ALSO: Doctor Who jumped out of her TARDIS to meet some young fans and it sounded awesome
The extra flair — that line through the middle — is shown in a short animation to be the trail of the TA

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According to a survey by Microsoft, people worldwide spend an average of 45 hours a week working, but only consider about 17 hours productive. A separate survey by the company found that 93 percent of respondents of all ages consider productivity important to achieving ultimate happiness. 
SEE ALSO: Le

At this point, Black Panther as shattered records and made it's mark as a historic film — so it's no surprise that in its short lifespan it's already spawned a few great memes. 
The film has its fair share of online-specific jokes, so the internet has had a field day with the film — and these won't even ruin the move for those who are leisurely in making their way to Wakanda.
SEE ALSO: 'Black Panther' just had the biggest box office debut ever for a Marvel solo movie
One of the

My favorite part of an Assassin’s Creed game isn’t the epic story, or the thrill of running across the rooftops of a huge, bustling city. It’s definitely not all of the neck stabbing. Instead, the moments that really stick with me are the quieter ones, where I have the chance to really appreciate the detail that’s gone into creating these historical settings, whether it’s ancient Rome or industrial era London. Unfortunately, often those moments are disrupted when I

Samsung is reportedly planning to cut OLED panel production, following Apple’s decision to start making fewer iPhone X phones, according to the Nikkei Asian Review. Instead of supplying panels for 45 to 50 million iPhones, Samsung will now only make organic light-emitting diode panels for 20 million or fewer iPhones this quarter.The company hasn’t decided its April to June quarter production target, but Nikkei reports that “a further cutback may be in store,” without cit

In an important early decision in the case, the judge presiding over the Justice Department’s attempt to block the AT&T–Time Warner merger has ruled that the White House’s private communications on the merger will not be released.
Judge said companies fell “far short” of the legal bar
When the department said in November that it would sue to block the mega-merger, thoughts immediately turned to the White House. President Trump has made no secret of his disdain

Last year a couple of Stanford researchers created an algorithm to determine whether Caucasians are gay or not with better accuracy than humans. The algorithm, trained with human bias, is better at determining whether or not other humans will think a face is gay. Unfortunately the researchers don’t present their work that way. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology recently published the final version of the white paper that details the work, essentially giving it full credence

French company Archos has made everything from tablets to drones, and now it’s adding another product to its roster: the world’s first Android-powered scooter. Named Citee Connect, the scooter has a multimedia dashboard that embeds all the functions of a phone in a housing that protects against shocks and bad weather.
Citee Connect’s screen is a 5-inch display that sits between the handlebars. It’s powered by a quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of flash memory, run

AT&T has expanded its “sponsored data” program to cover customers on its prepaid wireless plans, offering them the ability to stream content from select partners without counting toward their data cap. The program was previously available to postpaid customers, but it now seems to apply to most AT&T wireless users.
While the program is in some ways a benefit to AT&T’s subscribers, the policy flies in the face of basic tenets of net neutrality. By offering some serv

Mobile World Congress is coming up quickly, and the latest leak is a device that might be a prototype for Sony’s Xperia XZ2 Compact, via Xperia Blog.The photo comes from a commenter on Xperia Blog, who claims that the image shows Sony’s existing Xperia X5 compact next to the upcoming X2 Compact. The device is said to have a 3.5mm headphone jack and a rear fingerprint scanner, which Sony finally began including on its devices in the US earlier this year. Image: Xperia Blog
Little els

Black Panther earned $241.96 million in North America over its four-day opening weekend, making it the second-highest grossing opening of all time, Disney confirmed to Deadline. The Marvel tentpole defied earlier estimates and beat out Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which earned $241.6 million in its debut last year. After yesterday, the film trails only The Force Awakens’ massive $288 million four-day total.
This is just the latest of several records broken by Black Panther. The movie, direct

Tesla’s cloud account was hacked and used to mine cryptocurrency, according to a security research firm. Hackers gained access to the electric car company’s Amazon cloud account, where they were able to view “sensitive data” such as vehicle telemetry.The researchers, who work for cybersecurity firm RedLock, discovered the breach last month while searching for which organization left credentials for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account open to the public internet. The own

Fox News is planning to launch a paid video streaming service later this year, the company announced today. Actually, Fox News describes it as an “over-the-top opinion platform” called Fox Nation. The popular network is being careful not to advertise this as a live stream of Fox News Channel — because it’s very much not that.Fox Nation won’t feature current FNC programming. It won’t even have reruns, according to The New York Times. The platform “will t

US public officials are blaming a Salmonella outbreak on an unlikely source: kratom, a plant known for its opiate-like effects. The outbreak began in October, and by the end of January, infections cropped up from California to Massachusetts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.So far, no one has died from this latest outbreak, but 11 people have been hospitalized. The CDC reports that it’s confirmed 28 people in 20 states have contracted the strain of Salmonella, w

The official Twitter app for Mac is as good as dead. Twitter no longer offers the app for download, and it will no longer be supported in March.So, what’s a Twitter user on a Mac to do? Here are your best options going forward.
Tweetbot ($9.99)
Tweetbot is probably the best Twitter app out there to begin with, so if you were using the service’s official app, consider Twitter pulling support a sign that you should be making the jump to Tweetbot anyway. It has a clean interface (with

Snapchat today announced it was bringing a few new features to its app, including gif stickers courtesy of GIPHY. Because social media is a tawdry pile of copied homework, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Snapchat is finally doing unto others what has been done unto it — Instagram just introduced this exact feature last month. In order to use the feature, select the sticker icon from the Snap editing screen — check our guide if you need a primer on how that works. Then tap

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has released its nominees for the 2017 Nebula Awards, and it’s an impressive reading list that is once again dominated by women writers.
The Nebula awards are issued annually by SFWA, to the best works in genre novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories published in the last year, alongside the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation. The N

Editor’s note: The following column is written as intentional satire and may or may not have deliberate or undeliberate errors. Hey everyone, looks like you get two newsletters today, not because the last one was published late but because I’m the most generous, beautiful person to walk this horrible earth. The coins are doing even better than usual After sacrificing a goat on top of a volcano, Lord Satoshi has made the Bitcoin return to $11,560 as of writing this, which is quite in

Tuesday… two-day… you-day… me-day… my day… fri-day… Happy Friday!!! (I don’t know. Let’s pretend.) Top trending tech news: 🚕 Sony Corp. to launch AI taxi service in Japan (TechCrunch)😮 Coinbase and Visa deny fault in last week’s crypto overcharging disaster (TNW) 🚁 A drone reportedly caused a helicopter crash (BBC) What we’re talking about: Google can now predict heart di

The EU’s massive General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect on May 25, which introduces harsher restrictions on how businesses can use and store the personal data of their customers. This will greatly affect foreign tech companies that operate within the EU, since they cannot use personal data as freely and as lucratively as they used to. Facebook is one of those companies and it will have to completely change its approach to personal data — at least for their Eur

Nokia’s health tech business is in trouble — more than the company will publicly admit.Last week, the Finnish telecoms launched a “strategic review” into the health division, stressing that no firm decision about its future had been made. But, in a company memo seen by The Verge along with screenshots of the internal work chat, Nokia’s chief strategy officer Kathrin Buvac told employees that “our digital health business has struggled to scale and meet its gro

Venezuela launched the presale of its own cryptocurrency, the petro, today. There are currently 82 million tokens available, which the government plans to follow with an initial coin offering (ICO) launch in a month. It’s the world’s first sovereign cryptocurrency, built on the Ethereum blockchain and intended in part to save the country from wild inflation. The bolivar has reached quadruple-figure inflation recently, and one bolivar is currently worth 0.00004 USD.Venezuelan preside

Today’s Circuit Breaker Live is going to be a good time. As a reminder, we’re on every Tuesday starting at 4PM ET, and the archived version lives on our YouTube page until the end of time. (That’s today at 4PM ET!) Today’s show has everything you could want: iPods, connected toothbrushes, and lots of iPad adjacent accessories, like a geiger counter that connects to your headphone jack. Yes!
We might even update our firmware or struggle to pair a gadget over Bluetooth. It

“Silicon Valley has developed an echo-chamber. It doesn’t require a lot of research to clearly see that the majority of people working there are very similar when it comes to race, gender, socioeconomic background, and education. And that is a huge diversity problem.” These blunt words were spoken by Y-Vonne Hutchinson, an American diversity activist who recently spoke at the TechChill conference hosted in Riga, Latvia. Hutchinson is a former international human-rights lawyer

When Indonesia’s Mount Sinabung erupted on Monday morning, the volcano spewed a roiling cloud of ash and gases more than 23,000 feet into the air. The eruption prompted a “red notice” for the aviation industry, alerting pilots to the ash cloud so they could steer clear of it. But could tiny particles of volcanic ash really bring down an airplane?Absolutely. In fact, the mixture of crushed rocks, gases, and tiny shards of glass in a volcanic ash cloud can sandblast the plane&rs

Google has cooked up an interesting new strategy to lure talent in to its university recruitment events: talking to students about cryptocurrency and blockchain. The search engine titan will be hosting a talk on the “Fundamentals and Some Recent Innovations in Crypto-Currencies” at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy. The lecture is scheduled to take place on March 8 and will preface the company’s two-day recruitment event, where Googlers will share details about

Installation has finally begun on Jeff Bezos’ 10,000-year clock, a project that the Amazon CEO has invested $42 million in (along with a hollowed-out mountain in Texas that Bezos intends for a Blue Origin spaceport), with the goal of building a mechanical clock that will run for 10 millennia.
The actual idea for the clock comes from Danny Hillis, who originally proposed a 10,000-year clock in 1995 in Wired as a way to think about the long-term future of humanity and the planet. That idea

Asus is the last of Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality launch partners to actually launch a headset, but finally the day has come. Asus’ dryly named Windows Mixed Reality Headset HC102 is now available in the US for $429 — a price that makes it among the more expensive options. Other companies’ headsets get as low as $299; although Asus’ option comes with two motion controllers, which make up for the higher price.
Asus’ headset is mostly set apart by its, uh,

Conferences are the perfect place to meet potential partners, clients, and investors at the same time – but not all startups can afford to rent a booth for thousands of euros. To make it easier for startups to build relationships with those who can help shape your company’s future, we’ve decided to slash the prices for TNW Conference 2018. For just €199 per person, startups can enjoy access to our best-in-class matchmaking platform, participate in curated meetings with in