Technology news

While surveying whales and dolphins off the Hawaiian Islands, scientists spotted a creature they've never seen before: a peculiar hybrid between a dolphin and a small whale. 
In 2017, before future naval officers trained on submarines in the waters around Kauai — a place called the Pacific Missile Range Facility — the U.S. Navy hired marine researchers from the Cascadia Research Collective to study the native animals in these seas. After encountering a large pod of melon-headed

There's been an exciting, new development in the action-packed world of geometric shapes.
Researchers from the the University of Seville and Seville Institute of Biomedicine have discovered a new shape that's been dubbed the "scutoid." And what a wonderful little discovery it is.
SEE ALSO: The science behind Star Trek technobabble
Scutoid is the shape adopted by epithelial cells — the cells that line the inside and outside of your body, helping to define its shape — to allow tissue t

Help us, Carrie Fisher. You're our only hope.
The recent cast announcement for Star Wars Episode IX contained a wonderful surprise: Carrie Fisher will reprise her role as Princess-turned-General Leia Organa one last time, despite the fact that she died in 2016. Fans are weeping in both mourning and celebration at the prospect of once again seeing the legend who made "Princess" synonymous with "unstoppable badass."
SEE ALSO: See the emotional Carrie Fisher tribute from Star Wars Celebration
Direc

Taylor Swift is trying to do her part to ease the grief of a Massachusetts town mourning a recently fallen police officer. 
The Patriot Ledger reported that the pop star donated hundreds of complimentary tickets to Weymouth, Mass. for her Foxborough concert on Thursday, which is part of her Reputation Tour.
Swift gave the tickets in response to the death of Weymouth's Sgt. Michael Chesna, who was killed earlier this month while responding to a car crash. The suspect is also believed to be r

In America, even fame can't protect black people from the life-threatening dangers of white fragility.
While promoting Mission: Impossible: Fallout on Sirius XM's radio show The Clay Cane Show, actor Ving Rhames revealed that he himself was the victim in a terrifying encounter with the police, after a neighbor mistook him for a robber.
Rhames has of course been a part of the core Mission: Impossible crew since the series began in 1996. He's also taken on notable roles in such classics as Pulp Fi

Print news is alive. 
After California's violent Carr Fire jumped over the Sacramento River Thursday night and entered the west part of Redding, home to over 90,000 inhabitants, the tempestuous fire took out a significant portion's of the city's electrical grid — even toppling transmission towers. 
But the local newspaper, the Redding Record Searchlight, was able to get its paper out — amid approaching flames and without power. 
"I think what they did was hugely heroic

Twitter's live video-streaming app Periscope is about to become a much less appealing place for trolls to ply their hate.
In a new Medium post bearing the title "A Safer Conversation," the Periscope Trust & Safety Team pledges to more actively root out problematic commenters starting on Aug. 10. Accounts that repeatedly violate the service's community guidelines will be suspended.
SEE ALSO: Twitter's earning more money than ever, but new users just aren't coming
"The Periscope Community Guid

Amazon servers make up so much of the internet that it can be hard to separate the two. As of last year, Amazon Web Services controlled roughly 40 percent of the cloud market, running the backend for Netflix, Pinterest, Slack and dozens of other services with no visible connection to the company. Because the Amazon partnership is rarely explicit, AWS becomes a kind of invisible infrastructure, like water mains, submarine cables, or any of the other hidden pipes we rely on without seeing.
When A

What has six legs, four wheels, and two karate-chopping hands? Why, it’s Centauro — a new search-and-rescue robot built by researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia.Centauro is the latest experiment by scientists to find the most adaptable and useful body-shape for robots designed to help in disasters. Usually, these machines are built like humans, with two arms and two legs, but researchers are increasingly finding that hybrid designs offer more flexibility. With its fou

A new report from Japanese supply chain site Macotakara (via 9to5Mac) suggests that Apple could be refreshing its line of iPad Pro models by shrinking them down a bit, and eliminating the 3.5mm headphone jack, much like recent iPhone models.The site notes that it’s possible that next year’s lineup could see their dimensions shrink a bit —the 10.5 inch models could be 247.5 mm high, 178.7 mm wide, and 6 mm thick (it’s currently 250.6 mm high, 174.1 mm tall and 6.1 mm thic

Twitter says that it will launch “more aggressive enforcement of our guidelines related to chats sent during live broadcasts,” for Periscope beginning on August 10th. It will begin to “review and suspend accounts” that continually send abusive comments in chats during live broadcasts in an effort to crack down on abusive users.Like many social media platforms, Twitter and Periscope have been forced to reckon with abusive behavior. In recent months, Twitter has unveiled a

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributorWhile tech waffles on going public, biotech IPOs boom Shoe startups aren’t dragging their feet
Startup exit tallies commonly underestimate biotech returns. Unlike most tech deals, the biggest profits in bio often come long after an IPO or acquisition.
Take Juno Therapeutics, a publicly traded cancer immunology company that sold to pharma giant Celgene this year for $9 billion. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like a deal

It's been said many times before that what looks cool in the comics doesn't always translate on film. Here today with an object lesson in that idea is Netflix's latest teaser for Iron Fist Season 2, which also confirms (again) that the Marvel series will return on Sept. 7.
Brace yourself. Here it is.Image:netflixJust for the sake of comparison, the comic book version looks like this. So as you can see, the Netflix version isn't too far off, style-wise. But it also reads very differently here.
Ir

At San Diego Comic-Con last week, Marvel announced that the second season of Iron Fist will begin streaming on Netflix on September 7th. Netflix released a new teaser for the season today, hinting that we’ll get to see a bit more of Danny Rand’s past — and the classic costume his character is known for.The teaser shows off Rand (Finn Jones) walking down a street in New York City with Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), which dredges up old memories of his time at K’un-L&rsqu

Wild critters are having a rough time under the Trump Administration.
After the administration proposed dramatic changes to the decades-old Endangered Species Act last week, on Friday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) canceled an Obama-era rule that made industries pay for damages inflicted onto refuge lands. 
In short, the "Mitigation Policy" allowed a company, say a mining operation, to damage certain resources as long as the company committed to improving nearby land — to co

This week’s best deals loop in gear that’s good to get before going back to school. We’re seeing the biggest discounts for various tech from Best Buy, discounted mobile accessories from Amazon, and LG’s flagship Android smartphones at B&H.Students (or parents of students) can sign up to access exclusive, one-time coupons at Best Buy that include:
JBL Flip 3 Bluetooth speaker for 40 percent off
$30 off select Chromebook models
$150 off of a MacBook or MacBook ProTCL 4

Thursday night's outage for MoviePass stemmed from money troubles.
That is a fact, proven by a regulatory filing (h/t CBS News). And yet, CEO Mitch Lowe's lengthy apology letter reframes the Thursday incident that prevented subscribers from using the service in the most vague way possible.
SEE ALSO: Facebook is getting in on the movie ticket battle royale
"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused from the temporary outage in the app over the past day," the publicly posted letter, shar

Forget Shark Week, it’s Bark Week on Mashable. Join us as we celebrate all the good dogs, which we humans do not deserve.
"Ask not what you can do for a senior dog, but what a senior dog can do for you," JFK (not really, but the sentiment is true).
Senior dogs are adopted at a rate lower rate than dogs of all other ages combined, according to a study from the ASPCA. But older dogs make for loyal and calm companions for anyone who wants to skip the energetic, messy puppy stage.   

Americans have favorable beliefs about medical marijuana that aren’t yet supported by the scientific research, according to a new study from the Annuals of Internal Medicine.Medical marijuana, and cannabis more broadly, is growing in popularity and approval. Business is booming (especially in California) and the US Food and Drug Administration just approved the first cannabis-derived drug. For the study, the authors surveyed about 16,000 Americans about their attitudes toward marijuana. T

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If you're still using a regular router, the Plume SuperPods will be a big upgrade... as long as you're willing to subscribe to your own WiFi.
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Come this new school year, consider taking time to help teachers in underfunded schools meet their students' needs.
In the past decade, U.S. public education has undergone massive budget cuts, leaving many classrooms without fundamental resources. A recent study published by the American Federation of Teachers, a nationally organized union, cites a decrease in teacher's salaries and an increase in teacher-to-student ratios.
And yet, the vast majority of teachers still spend their own money on cl

If blocks upon blocks of vacant storefronts are any indication, the retail industry is going digital.
Today, you can buy (or sell!) just about anything on sites like eBay and Etsy, social media, and, yes, your own website. The only problem is everyone and their mother is selling their stuff online, which makes it hard for your listings to stand out.
SEE ALSO: How to learn coding online at a rock-bottom price
Fortunately, Ethercycle’s “E-Commerce Bootcamp: The Complete Bundle” i

Two weeks ago, CNN’s Oliver Darcy put a question to Facebook executives during an event in New York: how can Facebook say it’s serious about fighting misinformation while also allowing the notorious conspiracy site Infowars to host a page there, where it has collected nearly 1 million followers? The tension Darcy identified wasn’t new. But it crystallized the a contradiction at the heart of Facebook’s efforts to clean up its platform. And we’ve been talking about i

You spend a third of your life in bed — seriously, there's research to back it up — so you might as well decorate your bedroom with a good night's sleep in mind. Sounds easy, right? So why do we wind up buying cheap, scratchy sheets and lumpy pillows that do nothing for our spinal alignment?
Sure, investing in a quality mattress is a no-brainer, but there are a couple other things you'll want to pick up to secure your beauty sleep. 
New reports suggest the fabric of your sheets

This is One Good Thing, a weekly column where we tell you about the only nice thing that happened on the internet this week.
A lot of great movies are still slated to come out this year, but there's one that stands out from them all: Bohemian Rhapsody. Despite the drama on set, the trailers have been thrilling, Queen's timeless music is (as always) flawless, and by the looks of it, Rami Malek seems to make an impeccable Freddie Mercury.  
SEE ALSO: Spectacular 'Bohemian Rhapsody' trailer wi

GDPR — no other four letters are giving tech companies a bigger headache this year. So many articles have been written about it, you might wonder why you should read this one. It’s simple, really, you shouldn’t unless you are one of the 92 percent of marketers who according to a recent study by Evergage Inc use digital personalization. Instead of boring you with yet another generic explanation of what the GDPR is, I’d like to address the new regulations through the looki

Inspiring stories of social activism, such as the Civil Rights movement and the fight against climate change, abound in history. And it is generally thought that the new social media era has helped cases of activism to succeed. But our research has revealed some major threats which activists need to understand if they are to be successful in getting their message across to the masses. Social activism refers to a broad range of activities which are beneficial to society or particular interest gr

Congress wants to spend $95 million to study how gadgets and social media affects children. 
The proposal for the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, or CAMRA Act, was introduced Thursday in the U.S. Senate. A bipartisan group is behind the bill, so it might actually have a chance of passing. 
SEE ALSO: We don't give kids free access to junk food. We shouldn't give them free access to the iPhone.
The bill is not new. Back in 2004, then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman wanted to study the

At this point, the sexual harassment allegations against CBS head Les Moonves sound sickeningly, depressingly familiar.
Four women who spoke with The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow, including actress/writer Ileana Douglas, writer Janet Jones, and producer Christine Peters, recounted Moonves touching or kissing them without their consent during work meetings. 
Two more, including writer Dinah Kirgo, said they verbally rebuffed his advances, only to see their careers suffer as a result. The six in

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been suspended from Facebook for bullying and hate speech. It’s about damn time. Just this week, Jones ran afoul of YouTube guidelines, getting himself a slap on the wrist and finding four of his more egregious videos deleted. We wondered why Facebook didn’t do the same thing. In fact, not only had Facebook not taken meaningful action, the four videos that YouTube felt were severe enough to warrant action were still active, and visible, on Jones&rs

One thing we know: the Star Wars must end. Well, the Star Wars as we know them, at least. 
Buried in the official announcement of the Star Wars Episode IX cast — masked by fan euphoria over the confirmed return of Mark Hamill (presumably as Luke Skywalker's Force ghost) and Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, behind the heart-rending detail that unseen footage of Carrie Fisher will be used to help send off General Leia Organa — was this all-important detail. 
The Skywal

A new investigation from journalist Ronan Farrow tracks sexual misconduct accusations against Les Moonves, the influential 68-year-old chief executive officer of CBS, by six women. Farrow’s articles detailing extensive sexual assault and harassment from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein won him a Pulitzer Prize for public service, and kickstarted the backlash against sexual harassment and abuse that later spawned the #MeToo movement.The investigation was published in The New Yorker this

Subscription movie service MoviePass offered anyone willing to shell out $10 a month — less than the price of a single movie ticket in some parts of the country — the chance to see (almost) unlimited movies at any participating theater. For the consumer, it was the deal of a lifetime. But for parent company Helios and Matheson, it was nothing more than a grand experiment, and one even it knew had little chance of succeeding — at least not in the ways you’d traditionally

A recent study published by a team of researchers from Lancaster University and The University of Lisbon indicates long-term cannabis use could result in damage to the human brain. We’re not sure how they managed to come to that conclusion however, because the study was conducted using neither cannabis nor humans. While the study was widely reported, with news sites in several languages declaring that scientists had potentially determined the harmful side effects of habitual cannabis use,

Southwest and ride-hailing app Lyft inked a deal last month, but after the airline put out an email Friday about the partnership, people seemed confused about what it entails.
Instead of a mile-earning opportunity, the partnership just means you can order Lyft rides in the Southwest mobile app — if you keep location services on.So @SouthwestAir and @lyft have a partnership does this mean my Lyft rides earn me Southwest points?!? CC: @AskLyft
— Robert Sirchia (@robertsirc) July 27, 20