Technology news

We’ve been seeing rumblings of Xiaomi’s next flagship smartphone, which would be a regular development, until a video uploaded to YouTube teased that the upcoming device — dubbed the Mi 8 — will have an in-display fingerprint sensor.The Mi 8 is supposed to be the sequel to last year’s Mi 6 — it’s not totally clear why, but the rumor is Xiaomi will skip the Mi 7. Xiaomi has had two other high-end phones since then, the Mi Mix 2 and Mi Mix 2S, which both

The Arevo bicycle looks and feels like a high-end commuter bike, but it was made using 3D-printing technology and software. It's being hailed as the first truly 3D-printed bicycle.
The Bay Area-based "additive manufacturing" company (that's what engineering-level 3D printing is called these days) made the fully functional bicycle as a proof-of-concept to show that the thermoplastic material, laser-heating, and robotic 3D-printing process can be used to replace metal parts for defense companies,

Have you ever watched The Muppets and thought "This, but more murder?" 
If you have – and even if you haven't – The Happytime Murders is here to scratch a very bizarre itch. Muppets are getting murdered, and those that are living have answers, and plenty of demons.
SEE ALSO: The new 'Ocean's 8' trailer is here and it's everything we dreamed
Melissa McCarthy plays Connie Edwards, a law enforcement officer asked to investigate the mysterious deaths of Hollywood puppet personalitie

Elon Musk and Grimes are being the world’s nerdiest couple, again.
SEE ALSO: Of course Elon Musk and Grimes spawned a beautiful new meme
Originally born Claire Boucher, Grimes announced on Thursday that she’s legally changing her name to just c, which is the measurement for the speed of light in a vacuum. She tweeted a screenshot of the Wikipedia article about it, adding “this will be much better.” Grimes also specified the name c will be lowercase and italicized. i&

If you haven’t taken part in the yanny/laurel controversy over the last couple of days, allow me to sincerely congratulate you. But your time is up. The viral speech synth clip has met the AI hype train and the result is, like everything in this mortal world, disappointing.
Sonix, a company that produces AI-based speech recognition software, ran the ambiguous sound clip through Google, Amazon and Watson’s transcription tools, and of course its own.
Google and Sonix managed to get it

Ahh, tech industry hubris. It never ceases to inspire.
On Thursday, Elon Musk held an information session to discuss the progress of his Boring Company, and share his vision for the future of transportation in Los Angeles. What that amounts to is ... wait for it .... a series of tunnels! That pedestrians can access through a magnitude of street-level stations, no larger than — hang on — a parking spot!
SEE ALSO: Elon Musk's ultra-high-speed hyperloop will cost just $1 to ride
Sound f

Afraid your life is going to fall apart after the Royal Wedding tomorrow with nothing sweet and cheesy left to look forward to as our world continues its descent into a hellscape?
WORRY NO MORE. Netflix announced Friday that its 2017 surprise feel-good hit, A Christmas Prince, is getting a sequel.
SEE ALSO: Here's which Netflix original Christmas movie you should watch
Yes, it's called A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding, duh. It's going to be trope city and I personally can't wait for our klu

If you’re a PC gamer like myself, you appreciate high refresh rates, resolutions, and color accuracy. 4K “gaming monitors” have been on the market for years, but none of them were truly fulfilling those needs. But now, here is Acer’s Predator X27 4K monitor — the first to have the 4K, HDR, and G-Sync trifecta.A 4K display with Nvidia’s G-Sync — a graphics card and screen synchronization technology — would be sublime, and this is exactly what the P

This post contains spoilers for the Season 4 finale of Gotham, "No Man's Land."
Gotham arrived in 2014 with a ballsy premise: tell the story of how DC Comics' most famous city became a place that needed, and perhaps deserved, the Batman. 
In the course of setting up the presumably series-ending bat-reveal, the show has tossed in almost too many proto-versions of famous villains, future allies, and other comic book personalities. But smack in the middle of its ever-spooling web of Mad Hatter

A coalition of House Democrats has begun proceedings to force a vote to restore net neutrality protections. The discharge petition, introduced by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), allows the House to force a vote if half the representatives sign on, giving activists until the end of the session in January to collect the necessary signatures. They currently have 90, all from Democrats.
The resolution would roll back FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s recent internet order under the Congressional Review Act, ef

In a press conference today, a coalition of activists from Myanmar, Syria, and six other countries called on Facebook to take a more consistent and transparent approach to moderation. Facebook has come under fire for its role in fueling a genocide in Myanmar as well as enabling broader political manipulation around the world.
“Many of the countries here have been engaged with Facebook for years to try to receive justice in our communities,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive di

I've never quite got round to throwing myself out of a plane. Somehow, I wake up every day and find something marginally less terrifying to do with my waking hours and here we are. Jumping out of a virtual plane while floating three feet from the ground and being held by someone standing up, however? That I can get behind.
Which is how I ended up at iFly's new VR experience near Universal Studios in LA this week, dressed in a jump suit, strapped into a Samsung Gear, and floating over Hawaii whil

The complexity and cost of packing an array of sensors and power inside a small amount of space has opened the door to a wider and wider variety of use cases for internet-connected devices beyond just smart thermostats or cameras — and also exposed a hole for getting those ideas into an actual piece of hardware.
So there are some startups that are looking to address this hole by providing developers a path to creating the customized chipsets they need to power those devices. zGlue is one o

Somehow, Silicon Valley hasn’t learned from the train wreck that was Theranos. The latest rumors are that Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences, is developing a painless blood-collection gadget “using a system of exploding micro-needles and magnets,” CNBC’s Christina Farr reports. So Silicon Valley is back at trying to fix blood tests again — one of the few parts of health care that doesn’t need fixing.The device is a prototype, Farr says, and the Verily team

The new season of 13 Reasons Why picks up where the show's debut left off and tries to tackle several painful subjects, including suicide, depression, bullying, sexual assault, and the threat of school violence. 
That's intense content even for adult viewers. But for adolescents and teens, particularly those who've already endured some type of trauma, these storylines can feel all too real. 
SEE ALSO: '13 Reasons Why' Season 2 bites off way more than it can chew
A new toolkit created b

According to new reporting from The Washington Post, President Trump personally pushed United States Postal Service head Megan Brennan to jack up shipping prices on Amazon and other firms.The story comes from unnamed sources, who suggest that, thus far, the postmaster general has held out against pressure from the president. If enacted, the new pricing structure would likely cost the online retailer and others billions. 
Amazon has been in Trump’s crosshairs from some time, of course.

There’s confusion about whether a meeting between Facebookfounder Mark Zuckerberg and the European Union’s parliament — which is due to take place next Tuesday — will go ahead as planned or not.
The meeting was confirmed by the EU parliament’s president this week, and is the latest stop on Zuckerberg’s contrition tour, following the Cambridge Analytics data misuse story that blew up into a major public scandal in mid March. 
However, the discuss

April 2019 is just too damn long to wait for the eight and final season of Game of Thrones. I mean, you can only rewatch the Lannister Drogon BBQ episode from Season 7 so many times while holding out for another full year.
But don't worry. A hero has emerged from the flames to cast a light and end our long, dark night. And it's an algorithm.
SEE ALSO: Fan images from set of 'Game of Thrones' Season 8 possibly reveal devastating spoiler
The folks at Botnik Studios, a team of artists and developer

AWS is adding a new kind of virtual machine to its growing list of EC2 options. These new machines feature local NVMe storage, which offers significantly faster throughput than standard SSDs.
These new so-called C5d instances join the existing lineup of compute-optimized C5 instances the service already offered. AWS cites high-performance computing workloads, real-time analytics, multiplayer gaming and video encoding as potential use cases for its regular C5 machines and with the addition o

People have tried to trademark a lot of weird stuff over the years, from celebratory poses to the Tarzan yell to, literally, the word “cocky.” So it’s actually kind of surprising that it took Hasbro 27 years of owning the Play-Doh brand before the company attempted to corner the market on that weird, yeasty, almost-food smell that has compelled generations of children to tentatively lick their (non-toxic!) mush toy over the years. That’s right: the smell of Play-Doh is n

Jennifer Aniston will play the U.S. President in Netflix's upcoming First Ladies, co-starring comedian Tig Notaro as her wife. Notaro and Stephanie Allynne wrote the script.
SEE ALSO: 'Stranger Things 3' adds this 'Princess Bride' star
"First Ladies is a political comedy about America’s first female President and her wife, The First Lady," Netflix wrote in a press release. "When Beverly and Kasey Nicholson move into the White House, they’ll prove that behind every great woman... is a

Does Facebook know something about blockchain that we don't?
Probably. If there's one thing we can all agree on about blockchain tech and cryptocurrency, it's that most people don't understand them. Facebook, which recently re-organized itself to make blockchain one of its major focuses, clearly has something up its sleeve with regard to crypto. But even if Facebook revealed what it is, users would likely react with a head scratch.
The financial world is already a mystery to many. Add to that a

President Donald Trump has personally asked the Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate the US Postal Service charges companies like Amazon to use its services, according to a report from The Washington Post today. The move is just the latest, and perhaps most dramatic, turn in the ongoing feud between the sitting president and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world and owner of The Washington Post. Trump has often criticized the newspaper for its coverage of his admini

There are a lot of theories and counter-theories passed around by climate change deniers in government in an attempt to explain away the inconvenient truths around climate change.
And this week, a Republican congressman presented quite a doozy of an explanation.
GOP Representative Mo Brooks, who represents Alabama's 5th district, was questioning Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts during a House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing this week when

Graphene and gold could lead the way to better health by helping us test new drugs, deliver drugs more accurately, and even monitor cancer.In one study published today in the journal Science Advances, scientists figured out how to control the beating of human heart cells in a dish using just light and graphene. Right now, all potential drugs are tested on heart cells to make sure that, say, pain medication won’t give you a heart attack. These heart cells in question are grown on glass or

All around the world, hip young people are competing to see who can live in the tiniest, quirkiest, twee-est house. But this one has them all beat. Assembled by a combination of origami and nanometer-precise robot wielding an ion beam, this tiniest of houses measures about 20 micrometers across. For comparison, that’s almost as small as a studio in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
It’s from the Femto-ST Institute in France, where the tiny house trend has clearly become an obsession.

A number of people are complaining about Sinemianot delivering them their movie membership cards within the seven-day timeframe the company said it would. Although Sinemia has charged people for their memberships, the company has not been able to deliver the membership cards in a timely manner.
“We have seen strong demand for our new Sinemia membership plans and, while our processing operations have increased production, delivery times can be expected to be longer than usual,” Sinemi

It’s almost the middle of 2018 and we’ve been living with phones without headphone jacks for nearly two years now. And it still sucks as much as ever. But while Apple may have brought the idea to the mainstream, living with an Android phone without a headphone jack is even worse than dealing with it on an iPhone.
While Apple’s decision to remove the headphone jack remains user hostile and stupid, there are accessories available to help the situation. Beyond the basic adapter A

Thirty-five iOS developers have formed a group to call on Apple for better treatment of app developers, starting with an expansion of its free trial policy by the time the company celebrates the 10th anniversary of the mobile software marketplace this July. Eventually, the coalition says it wants to demand Apple negotiate better terms for App Store revenue cuts, which have remained at a 70-30 split since the advent of the store in 2008.
The group, which calls itself the Developers Union, is not

Baidu’s stocks took a hit earlier today after the company announced that its Qi Lu is stepping down from his job as president/COO after just a year and a half. In a press release tied to the news, the executive cited personal reasons for his decision to “transition” to a lesser role.“Baidu is a great company with strong talent and deep technologies,” Lu said in the statement. “I am highly optimistic on Baidu’s future and will continue to support Baidu, w

A new NASA telescope, sailing toward its assigned orbit, took a moment to look around before it starts its ultimate mission: searching the galaxy for alien planets. 
NASA's TESS spacecraft — short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — beamed home one of its first photos taken from space, and it's a doozy. 
SEE ALSO: Here's how NASA's TESS will hunt for alien planets
The photo, which effectively amounts to a test of one of the satellite's four cameras, contains more th

This post is part of Mashable's You're Old Week. Break through the haze of nostalgia with us and see what holds up, what disappoints, and what got better with time.
If you had a cable plan in the '90s or early 2000s, then there was a point at which you stumbled upon your first Disney Channel Original Movie. We might not all remember every DCOM – there's over 100 now – or even our first, but the ones that stand out, years later, are the weird ones. 
Mashable ranked the weirdest D

This post is part of Mashable's You're Old Week. Break through the haze of nostalgia with us and see what holds up, what disappoints, and what got better with time.
If you want to watch a young millennial get real nostalgic real fast, simply say the following four words: Disney Channel Original Movie.
Since the late '90s, Disney's cable channel offered dozens of original feature films, often with bizarre and outlandish premises. Whatever they were smoking or throwing at a wall to see if it stuck

As far as corporate allyship goes, Apple has been one of the most consistent friends to the LGBTQ community. 
Some advocates fear that may be shifting since Apple is reportedly now considering opening a campus in North Carolina, home to some of the region's toughest anti-LGBTQ laws. While some believe that Apple's move could bring change to the state, others aren't as confident.
SEE ALSO: Apple's upcoming iPhone X Plus to be the same size as iPhone 8 Plus, report says
In 2016, 68 companies,

The highlight of Google’sI/O keynote earlier this month was the reveal of Duplex, a system that can make calls to set up a salon appointment or a restaurant reservation for you by calling those places, chatting with a human and getting the job done. That demo drew lots of laughs at the keynote, but after the dust settled, plenty of ethical questions popped up because of how Duplex tries to fake being human. Over the course of the last few days, those were joined by questions about whether

There are so many streaming options available these days and so many conflicting recommendations that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to watch
“I Sing the Body Electric,” a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone, from late

Deadpool 2 is now in theaters, and to herald its arrival, its marketing team has clearly pulled out all the stops. The stunts for Deadpool two years ago were wild enough, with wacky mock rom-com posters, a fake Tinder profile, and more. Now, the team has outdone itself with promotion for the sequel.
The Deadpool franchise is an eclectic mashup of genres and a meta-parody of the superhero genre, so the very weird tone set by its marketing stunts matches its product perfectly. I majored in market

There’s so much streaming entertainment these days that picking one perfect thing to watch feels impossible, and what’s supposed to be fun can feel downright intimidating. So our weekly streaming recommendation column, Cut the Crap, is here to simplify the decision. Each Friday, we look at what’s going on in the entertainment world, and we pick something to go with it — one perfect film, show, or episode available on VOD or on major streaming services like Netflix, Hulu,

Facebook wants all your data, and, when it comes to Android users, it's not afraid to ask for it. 
Several users of the social media service posted on Twitter early Friday morning to report that their Android Facebook apps were requesting "superuser access" to their devices. That's right, Facebook apparently wants "full access" to the phones, for that little period of time known as "forever."
SEE ALSO: Go download your Instagram history now (then delete your account)
As Bleeping Computer re