Technology news

YouTube has added support for HDR video playback on Apple’s iPhone X, 8, and 8 Plus. The iPad Pro also has a display that’s bright and vibrant enough for high dynamic range content, but MacRumors notes that YouTube hasn’t flipped the switch to enable it on there yet. HDR video is more colorful and more radiant than traditional content. It’s a little closer to looking through a window than watching video on a screen. But you’ve got to have a display that’s cap

Connected exercise equipment company Peloton is expanding sales of its stationary bike to the UK and Canada, as reported earlier today by Engadget. Peloton’s bikes, which cost $1,995 along with a $39-per-month subscription to Peloton’s live and on-demand classes, have a tablet affixed to the front along with a camera and built-in microphone.Classes are streamed through the touchscreen, and if you can’t make the live sessions, over 5,000 classes can be viewed on demand. The scr

After years of teasing and testing, Rolls-Royce has unveiled its first SUV, a boat of a vehicle called the Cullinan that’s named after the largest diamond ever discovered. “The most anticipated car of 2018 and, quite possibly, the most anticipated Rolls-Royce of all time,” according to Rolls-Royce, the Cullinan goes on sale later this year for around $325,000 — roughly 1/100th of the estimated value of the diamond.The all-wheel drive Cullinan will be plenty powerful &mda

Boston Dynamics’ robots look more natural and more amazing with each video, and today the company posted two more clips to its YouTube channel showing the latest progress of its Atlas and SpotMini robots.
The clips don’t reveal much we haven’t seen before, but they both show how naturally these robots are able to move around. In one video, Atlas, the humanoid robot, goes for a jog in a grassy yard that appears to be sloped here and there.It pauses at one point to jump over a l

Dropboxmade its debut as a public company earlier this year and today passed through its first milestone of reporting its results to public investors, and it more or less beat expectations set for Wall Street on the top and bottom line.
The company reported more revenue and beat expectations for earnings that Wall Street set, bringing in $316.3 million in revenue and appearing to pick up momentum among its paying user base. It also said it had 11.5 million paying users, a jump from last year. Ho

Despite the title of Avengers: Infinity War, the lead character isn’t Iron Man, Captain America, or any of the other Avengers who protect the world from evil. From beginning to end, Joe and Anthony Russo’s blockbuster is about the eight-foot intergalactic big bad Thanos, played by Josh Brolin. Thanos is every bit as dominating and destructive as fans of the series could hope, but he isn’t the one-dimensional villain he so easily could have been.
His maniacal plan to restore ba

Klout is out and there’s nary a pout. Lithium Technologies, which purchased Klout in 2014 for reportedly $200 million, has announced it’s going to shut down the site by May 25th.May 25th is, coincidentally, also the deadline for companies to comply with the new European data privacy rules. And although it’s not explicitly stated, GDPR might have played a role in Klout’s downfall. “Klout as a standalone service is not aligned with our long-term strategy,” Lith

The White House has set up a new task force dedicated to US artificial intelligence efforts, the Trump administration announced today during an event with technology executives, government leaders, and AI experts. The news and the event, which was organized by the federal government, are both moves to further the country’s AI development, as other regions like Europe and Asia ramp up AI investment and R&D as well.The administration will be further investing in AI, deputy CTO of the Wh

Monday afternoon, workers at a treatment plant in Augusta, Georgia found something unusual traveling through the city’s wastewater. A mass of fetal remains had lodged in a piece of equipment, apparently flushed down a drain somewhere within city limits. City coroner Mark Bowen identified the remains as roughly 20 weeks into pregnancy, halfway through the second trimester. That also placed the remains right on the lip of Georgia’s abortion law, which outlaws abortions after 20 weeks.

Using artificial intelligence, scientists have created a tool that lets anyone visualize what the structures inside a cell look like — even when you only have images of the outside. The Allen Integrated Cell, available for free online, creates 3D visualizations that could help researchers better understand disease.This cell tool focuses on human stem cells, or cells that haven’t yet turned into, say, muscle cells or heart cells. If we better understand the inner workings of a health

In the keynote talk at this week’s Google I/O developer conference, executives announced new system-level features in Android to help people understand and manage their smartphone usage. “Great technology should improve life, not distract from it,” declared a banner headline on a new site from the company, wellbeing.google. The site continues: “We’re creating tools and features that help people better understand their tech usage, focus on what matters most, disconn

Since it debuted in 2013, Adult Swim’s show Rick and Morty has become a massive hit. Earlier today, Cartoon Network and series co-creator Justin Roiland announced that they’re making another 70 — that’s right, 70 — episodes.
The animated science fiction show is a staple of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim; it follows Rick, a brilliant-but-cynical alcoholic scientist and his impressionable grandson, Morty, as they embark on a variety of zany adventures across the

The underground nuclear explosion in North Korea on September 3rd, 2017 was so powerful that it moved a mountain, according to new research.The blast was North Korea’s sixth and largest nuclear test, conducted in an underground tunnel beneath Mount Mantap about 400 miles northeast of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un claimed the explosion was the successful test of a hydrogen bomb. But it’s hard to get accurate information in or out of No

As the world’s temperatures go up, the Arctic keeps losing its ice. This winter, the area covered by sea ice was the second smallest on record — after last year. And many experts believe that this summer, the Arctic ice cap will shrink to record lows. Why should I care, you ask?
“The Arctic is a natural freezer,” says Michael Mann, a climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, in an email to The Verge. “Just like

Google shocked the crowd at its I/O developer conference on Tuesday when it kicked off a fascinating discussion about AI ethics with Duplex, a human-like voice system for its Assistant product that makes phone calls on behalf of users. But while Duplex remains a more experimental and far-off effort — one we’ll likely be debating in the weeks and months to come — Google’s more measured approach to artificial intelligence as it pertains to legacy product development didn&r

The fifth numbered entry in the broad series of nature-and-tourism themed open-world shooters, Far Cry 5 is a mess. Its story doesn’t make sense, its themes don’t cohere, and it fails to do any justice to its real-world setting, Montana, or the politics and people that comprise it. It does not, in any sense, represent progress for the world of big, expensive video games.Except for one moment. There’s a single mission that is everything Far Cry 5 isn’t — warm, human

Android P brings a whole bunch of new updates to Google’s operating system, and one of the biggest is the new, gesture-based interface system. A system that many (including us) have noted is pretty similar on the surface to the one that Apple introduced on the iPhone X last year. Which of course begs the question: who’s doing gestures better?
(Before we begin: yes, I am well aware that companies like Palm have had extremely similar systems like this first, but unless you’re st

Instagram has announced a new variation of its polling sticker for Stories: now there’s an emoji slider that lets you ask and answer questions with an animated emoji on a sliding scale.
The sliding scale allows users to ask people “how” instead of simply picking between two options, using an emoji of choices to add context to the question. For example, you could have a slider to ask how an artist’s new single is or how️ friends like their food. The emoji will anim

The entire time I played Monster Hunter World on the PS4 back in January, I wished I could have a similar experience on the Nintendo Switch. Now, Capcom is making that happen... sort of. Today, the developer announced the series’s debut on Nintendo’s tablet in North America, but it isn’t a port of World. Instead, it’s a follow-up to the 2016 Nintendo 3DS game Monster Hunter Generations; the sequel already launched in Japan last year under the name Monster Hunter XX. It w

Apple is preparing to release a credit card in partnership with investment bank Goldman Sachs, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The new credit card — which marks the end of Apple’s credit card partnership with Barclays — would use the Apple Pay branding, and it’s expected to be released early next year. Goldman Sachs will also offer in-store loans to Apple customers, according to the report.
The move comes just months after Goldman Sachs acquired t

Material Design launched in 2014, and it was mostly thought of as a new design language for Android — though it later came to the web and iOS. It had a bold idea: there should be a physicality to software design not unlike the physicality of paper. It should follow some rules that are almost physical, with layers of magic paper and strictures for how different software elements like buttons and drawers should behave.
“We went out with the original Material Design with what was a ver

Microsoft hasn’t disclosed sales numbers for its Xbox One console since 2015, but an EA executive let slip a solid data point for the publisher’s current install base — and it’s not hard to do the math and calculate the breakdown based on what he said. As Variety reports, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said that the company had a “current generation” install base of 103 million at the end of 2017.At the start of this year, Sony said “the PS4 has now cumulativel

20th Century Fox has released its first teaser trailer for Shane Black’s upcoming installment of the Predator franchise, The Predator.The film takes the action back to Earth at some point between 1990’s Predator 2, and 2010’s Predators. In the trailer, we see one of the alien’s spaceships crash on Earth, apparently triggered by a boy (Jacob Tremblay) playing with a Predator helmet and armor that he finds in a delivered package. What happens is predictable for a Predator

LANDR, an AI-driven platform that masters tracks for musicians, has launched Samples, a free curated samples service for members. The sample packs featured on the platform are collections created and curated by artists across a variety of genres, from pop to funk to techno.
At launch, Samples has packs from notable artists like The Dirty Projectors, Pan-Pot, Marc Houle, Mike & Keys, as well as a variety of collections created by people in the service’s own user base. In the future, LA

Musicians that either perform “hate content” or demonstrate hateful conduct will no longer be welcome on Spotify. The company announced today that it will refrain from promoting or remove content that it deems hateful. “It’s important to us that our values are reflected in all the work that we do, whether it’s distribution, promotion, or content creation,” the company said.
Spotify defines hateful content as music that “expressly and principally promote