Technology news

Slovakian engineering company AeroMobil saw its dreams of launching a flying car literally crash almost three years ago, but the company is back at it again. They've got a new electric four-seater vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) concept vehicle that also serves as a traditional road vehicle when not in the sky.
The flying car, the AeroMobil 5.0, was revealed this week with motors on the wing tips and an improved suspension system for a smooth landing. Unlike other VTOLs in development, this

Days after news dropped that Facebook data was once again used for a shady electioneering plot, people are turning to Google. Their ask? How to delete their profiles.
Searches for "delete Facebook" spiked this week, when information about Cambridge Analytica's data harvesting scheme hit the mainstream. New information from Google Trends, which tracks how popular a given search is relative to other moments in time, shows that, in the United States, there are more searches for "delete Facebook" no

Getting fair wages for an internship can be difficult. Whether you're interning "for school credit" or "for experience," many work places just don't pay their interns. 
If you interned for the Weinstein Company, and were promised money, well, good luck. 
SEE ALSO: The Weinstein Company voids Harvey's nondisclosure deals in bankruptcy filing
The Weinstein Company filed for bankruptcy on Monday night, and files obtained by Deadline include an extensive 394-page list of people, organizati

Bye, bye, Humanity Star. We hardly knew you. 
On Thursday, Rocket Lab's Humanity Star satellite — effectively a disco ball flying through a low orbit around Earth — re-entered Earth's atmosphere, burning up in the process. 
According to U.S. Strategic Command, the satellite, which was designed to occasionally flash, becoming the brightest object in the night sky, de-orbited at about 9:30 a.m. ET.
SEE ALSO: Astronomers really hate that bright disco ball satellite secretly la

China's Tiangong-1 space station is falling to Earth.
According to the most recent estimates from the European Space Agency (ESA), Tiangong-1 — which translates to "Heavenly Palace" — should fall back through the atmosphere, mostly burning up in the process, between March 30 and April 3.
SEE ALSO: China's Tiangong-1 space station is falling to Earth, but it probably won't crush you
Trackers have been keeping a close eye on Tiangong-1's whereabouts for a while now. 
Earlier in th

Remember The Sims? It's that game where you lived, laughed, loved, and lost across multiple generations and lifetimes — but in reality were just sitting in front of a computer screen for 14 hours.
Yeah, well, now all of that has been streamlined into a mobile game. And if you're thinking, "Dear god, but I have a life now, I cannot go down this path again," you are correct. An on-the-go version of The Sims is exactly as diabolically addicting as it sounds.
Not to be confused with The Sims F

Taking pictures in front of mirrors in this day and age of selfies is nothing new. But is there a way to take a picture of just the mirror?
There's not really a neat way to take a picture of a mirror without awkwardly capturing your reflection or using an extreme angle. But, as pointed out by @SilviuMajor on Twitter, when the object of your photograph is actually the mirror itself—like in a  sales posting on craigslist—the results can be a bit awkward and a bit hilarious. L

Early Monday morning, an Uber-owned Volvo in autonomous mode struck and killed a pedestrian. The vehicle had a human driver behind the wheel when the tragedy occurred. 
This incident brings a sudden urgency to the moral quandary that ethicists have been discussing since before self-driving cars were a reality: Whose fault was this death? 
SEE ALSO: The future of self-driving taxis may be closer than you think
This is believed to be the first time a self-driving car has caused an accide

Dropboxtoday said it is pricing above the range it originally set ahead of its public listing tomorrow, handing the company a valuation inching ever-closer to its original $10 billion valuation.
Dropbox earlier this week said it would price its initial public offering in a range between $18 and $20 per share, settling on a valuation near $8 billion at the high end of the range (or closer to $8.75 billion, based on its fully-diluted share count). With the new pricing, Dropbox will be valuing itse

Kuvée, the startup that makes a Wi-Fi-connected wine bottle complete with touchscreen, has announced it is shutting down, as reported by Business Insider.
The system, which The Verge tested (and called gloriously dumb) in March 2016, is basically a sleeve with a touchscreen that fits over proprietary wine cartridges. Once a cartridge is put into the sleeve, the touchscreen displays information about the wine, like the grape it’s made from and pairing notes. The initial purchase of

Walmart filed a host of patents today related to how it keeps track of inventory — and the technologies could change the way its customers shop, as reported by Gizmodo.
One of the patents is clearly for the in-store experience, and proposes a sensing device to make shopping carts smart and communicate with a mobile device (presumably to help you navigate to where items are). There’s also a patent that tracks users through wearables, and several for managing / sensing inventory level

It's difficult to keep kids occupied, and so whomever had the idea to put crayons in restaurants was a total genius. 
Yep, just give 'em the crayons and the back of a placemat and that'll keep 'em busy and quiet for at least five minutes while you try and eat. But, while you're too busy filling your empty stomach, servers are taking note of all the messed up stuff your children are putting to paper. And they're ready to share.
On Reddit this week, restaurant staff shared the weirdest things

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a massive area of floating plastic debris that is more than twice the size of Texas, contains about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. This is between 4 and 16 times the mass of plastic that scientists previously estimated. 
What's worse is that the amount of plastic within this area is growing "exponentially," according to a comprehensive three-year-long study using 30 vessels and a high-tech reconnaissance aircraft. 
The study, published Thursday

If you’ve wanted PC-like storage in your pocket, a new Huawei phone with a rumored 512GB of space could make that happen. That’s an insane amount of storage, up from the usual 256GB that phones like the iPhone X can offer. That amount of storage is bigger than most models of the MacBook Pro, and it would allow you to download the Facebook app (400MB) more than 1,200 times (although, maybe you’d rather not).
The upcoming Huawei phone appeared on the Chinese regulatory agency TE

You're going down, Face ID. Researchers from Fudan University in China, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Indiana University, and Alibaba Inc. have created a baseball cap that can reliably fool facial recognition software into thinking that you're, well, not you. 
The researchers laced the inside of the cap with tiny LEDs that projected infrared dots onto "strategic spots" on the wearer's face to subtly alter their features, in a technique known as "adversarial learning." 
The devic

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, and has been updated to coincide with the film’s theatrical and streaming release.In 2009, comics writer Joe Kelly and artist J.M. Ken Niimura produced one of the year’s best graphic novels: I Kill Giants, the action-packed story of a defiant, troubled 5th grader obsessed with

Lyft's co-founders believe in the gun control message the student organizers behind the March for Our Lives rallies this weekend will be chanting in marches in Washington, D.C and beyond. 
To support students and others speaking up for stricter gun laws a month after the deadly Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, the ride-hailing app is offering attendees in 50 cities throughout the U.S. free rides on Saturday.
SEE ALSO: Lyft offers free rides to March For Ou

Is your state yelling the most about Peeps or Reese's eggs? Now's your chance to find out.
A new map from product review website Influenster uses the site's review data to discover which seasonal Easter candy is the most "buzzed-about" in each state. This doesn't necessarily equate to the most popular candy in each state, just the one with the most reviews — meaning the states that went Peeps could have done so because people really, really hate them. (If they have souls, that is. Peeps ar

As students, parents, and concerned citizens across the United States prepare to march in protest of gun violence on March 24, they can also take part in a virtual and educational journey towards Washington.
To raise awareness for March For Our Lives — an upcoming march on Washington organized by survivors of the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Flordia — art director Martins Zelcs and his friends created a video game called Game For Our Lives.
The

You may have heard of the #DeleteFacebook campaign, but you, like me, are probably among the vast majority of Facebook’s nearly 2 billion users who probably won’t actually follow through. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even has the data to prove it, telling The New York Times yesterday that he hasn’t seen a “meaningful number of people” deleting their accounts.
Amid the ongoing data privacy scandal surrounding the Trump-connected firm Cambridge Analytica, tech critics and use

Mark Zuckerberg has 40 billion reasons to be mad at Cambridge Analytica, but he should save at least some of that anger for Facebook board member Peter Thiel. 
That's because Thiel, who infamously supported the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, also happened to donate $1,000,000 in October of 2016 to the Super PAC Make America Number 1 — an organization that paid Cambridge Analytica $231,352 toward the end of the same year, an FEC filing shows.
SEE ALSO: Escaping Facebook takes m

YouTube has released the first trailer for Impulse, a new original series from The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman. A spinoff to his 2008 film Jumper, the show will debut sometime this summer, with a 10-episode series order.
Jumper was based on a 1992 novel by Steven Gould, and followed a young man named David Rice (played by Star Wars prequel star Hayden Christensen) who discovers he has the ability to teleport. At the time of the film’s release, Liman hinted at

Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet loves people. That’s unusual for a zombie narrative. Most zombie narratives present people as lurching, decaying, cannibalistic monsters. Misanthropy, paranoia, and loathing have been central to the modern zombie genre since George Romero first gleefully showed humans leaping for each other’s throats, even before they got turned into zombies. “They’re us, that’s all,” Peter (Ken Foree) says mournfully, watching brainless gho

Can any one appliance really replace seven? Yep, sure can.
People rave about Instant Pots and swear they work like a dream. Lucky for you, Sur La Table has them on sale right now.
SEE ALSO: Wondering which Instant Pot to buy? Discover why this is one of the best kitchen tech items you'll ever own.
In case you've been living under a rock and missed the whole Instant Pot phenomenon, you may be wondering what exactly these little beauties do. An Instant Pot is a multi-cooker that does the job of a

Venmo’s ability to instantly transfer money to the bank account linked to your debit card is excellent. Over the last couple months, I’ve routinely moved cash over from my Venmo balance, and it usually shows up in my checking account within seconds after initiating the transfer — all for a measly fee of 25 cents.But something seems to have gone awry with Venmo’s convenient, near-immediate money transfers. For now, the company is completely removing the feature as it work

Political strategy in the Trump era is apparently two grandfathers threatening to fight each other. 
On Tuesday, Joe Biden got heated during a rally to fight campus sexual assault and went off on President Trump's misogynistic history. According to ABC News, Biden said, "If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him" .
"I've been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life," Biden bragged, "I'm a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way w

If you've been curious about how Alexa can improve your life, then today is the day to give her a shot. Amazon is currently holding a sale, knocking 20% off select Alexa-enabled Amazon devices to get you started.
SEE ALSO: Amazon daily deals for March 22: Logitech universal remotes, wireless headphones, and so many sunglasses
From tablets to the Echo Show to the ever-popular Echo Plus, take your pick of awesome Alexa devices to help make your day-to-day a little bit better. 
Here's what's o

Apple surprised everyone when it announced an education-focused event about “creative new ideas for teachers and students” in Chicago on March 27th at 10am ET. But in traditional Apple form, the company isn’t giving many hints as to what to expect aside from the phrase “let’s take a field trip.”
But even if Apple won’t give us any clues, we’ve still got a few ideas as to what could happen during the event on Tuesday. Here’s everything to exp

Raise your hand if you enjoy getting out of bed.
...
Yeah, no. Thankfully, today's deals are all about not getting out of bed for as long as possible.
Alexa is here to help with almost any request you have, from ordering food to playing baby making music so you don't have to ruin the moment by finding a remote. Select Amazon products are 20% off today, including the Echo Spot, Echo Show, and Echo Plus (with smart lightbulb included), as well as the Amazon Fire HD 8 and 10 Tablets. Snag these sma

GoPro has entered into a licensing partnership with Jabil, a manufacturing services company known for its electronics design, the action camera company announced today. Jabil is going to use GoPro’s design and intellectual property to make camera lenses and sensors for third-party products. GoPro and Jabil collaborated on the Hero4 and have continued to work together since.
The products will include digital imaging and consumer-facing gear, but not any cameras that would directly compete

Following its wider availability on TVs last year, Tidal announced Thursday it was releasing an app on Amazon’s Fire TV devices, as well as for Android Auto.Jay-Z’s music service will now work on Amazon’s Fire TV and the Fire Stick with, “a custom Fire TV interface that emphasizes TIDAL’s visual ecosystem and is designed to provide the best experience for large screen devices,” the company said. Tidal’s catalog of music is said to include more than 50 m

The term “AI” has been used in video games since their inception, but it rarely means true artificial intelligence. Instead, it’s a generic term to describe a preprogrammed opponent or character that feigns intelligence but is really just following a narrow set of instructions. This is slowly changing, though — and the people who build video games are helping out.
At GDC today, EA announced that it’s been training AI agents in 2016’s WWI shooter Battlefield 1

Can Facebook’s algorithms control our population and politics? Yes, and it is uniquely bad, says François Chollet, an artificial intelligence researcher at Google and author of the well-known machine learning library Keras. But in hyping up the power of AI, he is underestimating how hard it is to change our minds, and the distinction he makes between Facebook and other tech companies is weak.
In a widely shared Twitter thread, Chollet argues that Facebook is capable of “mass

The downside of sequels is that they so rarely have anything new to offer. Unless they’re part of a planned, ongoing storyline, like the Star Wars or Harry Potter movies, sequels are usually about mechanically reproducing the most popular parts of the original film, and making them bigger, louder, and faster. But the “faster” part can be one of the upsides of sequels. Once a franchise-launching film gets all the roadblocks of world-building, exposition, and character developme

Unless you have one of those super fancy, full-body shower systems, we're gonna bet that your daily scrub up is a pretty boring task. Increase your a.m. excitement with one of these funky shower heads by Zooheads ($29.95), which have just hit the market.
SEE ALSO: This shower loofah was fully funded on Kickstarter in less than 24 hours
These 3D-printed bathroom fixtures could inject a bit of fun into anyone's morning. They're animal heads designed to fit over any shower head with a 1/2-inch pipe

It's time to start getting excited, David Mitchell fans — a new novel is on well on its way.
SEE ALSO: 'Bone Clocks' Author David Mitchell Talks Literary Fiction and 'Game of Thrones'
The Cloud Atlas author dropped some hints about the story during a Facebook Live interview with Mashable on Thursday, while promoting his new book Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A young man's voice from the silence of autism — a translation of a book by the Japanese author Naoki Higashida which acts as a f