Technology news

It might not be flying taxis, but self-driving taxis on the road started test runs in Dubai on Sunday.
At the annual consumer electronics trade show Gitex, Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority, or RTA, showed off its autonomous taxi service.Launching the test run of the first ‘Autonomous Taxi’ in #GITEX2018. For more details about our initiatives, visit our stand S2C1 at Sheikh Saeed Hall in the Dubai World Trade Centrepic.twitter.com/GjNqmcFL2n
— RTA (@RTA_Dubai) October 13,

Giant pigs aren't exactly a common sight on the streets of southern California. But when one started tromping around in San Bernadino, local police came up with a solution that was equal parts ingenious and delicious.
Doritos.
The popular flavored tortilla chips turned out to be a very effective lure when it came to convincing the pig that it was time to return home. The San Bernadino County sheriff's office even documented the extremely scientific pig wrangling on Instagram. View this post on I

French car maker Peugeot doesn't think the future of self-driving cars has to look like sci-fi-inspired pods. 
Instead, a design executive said this week he thinks car design could even be pleasant and alluring, since "there’s a danger the future might be very robotic and might lack soul."
SEE ALSO: Here's the electric Jaguar that Waymo wants to turn into a self-driving car
Peugeot introduced its own vision of future car design at the Paris Auto Show, which wraps up Sunday. The e-Lege

By now it’s obvious the internet is a chaotic place. The world has been connected, and now that a global population has come online — via cheap broadband and cheaper cellular data — there is so much more noise online than ever. That, combined with the proliferation of instant global news and social media, has made online a uniquely exhausting place to be. It’s hard to find a quiet place in the din.Recently, I ran across one of those quiet spaces where I least expected it

Tesla is catching up.
The electric car maker has been long struggling to keep up with car orders for its newest electric sedan, the Model 3, but this week it hit a major milestone: 100,000 of the cars produced.
That number came in after barely a year and a half after Tesla started producing the car. Its sedan Model S and SUV Model X didn't come close to that type of production number in that amount of time.
SEE ALSO: Tesla's first safety report claims drivers on Autopilot are safer, but lacks de

Google will update the camera app on its Pixel smartphones to work with external microphones when shooting video, an employee from the app’s engineering team has confirmed. Android Police reported on the upcoming feature on Friday.
The Pixel is known for producing terrific still photos, and Google developed impressive stabilization for the video end of things. But the Pixel’s microphones only capture so-so audio. External mics that plug into the USB-C port (or headphone jack in the

Dave Grohl and friends are up to their usual tricks and treats, this time inviting 10-year-old Collier Cash Rule on stage in Kansas City, Missouri to jam out with the band and, whatdoyaknow, Collier just so happens to be a Metallica expert.
Answering Grohl's challenge, Collier jumps into the familiar riff that opens Metallica's "Enter Sandman." After some chit-chat with Grohl, Collier than ripped out the opening lines of “Welcome Home (Sanitarium).” 
SEE ALSO: Dave Grohl trolls

Hey, PlayStation 4 people. Lock down messaging on your account, pronto.
A new kind of malicious message is reportedly floating around on the PlayStation Network that makes the whole console crash. Recovery is possible, but it's not as simple as power cycling the machine. There are steps that need to be taken.
SEE ALSO: 12 years later, PlayStation Network finally lets you change your online name
Word of the problematic appears to have surfaced first on Reddit. In a post titled "WARNING: Set your

As part of Red Bull Music Academy’s 20th edition, the company has built the world’s largest step sequencer, and placed it outside of iconic Berlin club Tresor for anyone to try out.
Called the RBMA-20, the sequencer was designed and built by the Berlin-based creative studio Neulant van Exel, and took 30 technicians five weeks to assemble. Red Bull says it is the largest drum machine ever built and is fully functional. It’s physically massive, at about 33 feet long, 7.2 feet hi

On Friday evening, Natalie Portman delivered a stirring speech at Variety's "Power of Women" event that resonated beyond the audience as video of the speech spread across the internet, delivering the message of "Time's Up." Beginning with a blistering condemnation of Harvey Weinstein — "Harvey Weinstein, the man whose name has become synonymous with 'serial rapist,' might never suffer any legal consequences" — Portman transitioned to a discussion on the lack of gender parity in

In John Scalzi’s space opera novel The Collapsing Empire, he introduced a world where a vast, planetary empire grew throughout the galaxy by way of the Flow, a faster-than-light network that allows for interstellar trade. At the end of that book, the network was beginning to collapse, setting up a perilous situation for the next book in the series, The Consuming Fire, which is out next week.The book will be out in hardcover and audio, and as is the case with most of Scalzi’s audiobo

Sure, Ohio State's marching band may be more on top of current trends with the backpack kid homage, but Iowa State's marching band knows that the inflatable dinosaur suits can elevate any performance of the Jurassic Park theme. 
During halftime of the Iowa State-West Virginia game, the ISU marching band performed John Williams' classic theme from Steven Spielberg's blockbuster dinosaur hit to honor the film's 25th anniversary and added the dancing dinos as a spectacular flourish.Now, to be

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.
One of the best things about video games is being able to experience things from a different person’s point of view. Even better is when you are given the opportunity to play out different scenarios from that person’s perspective. It allows you to not only learn about w

Whatever's going to happen in 2019's follow-up to Avengers: Infinity War, it's locked now. Filming has officially wrapped.
But as with most things Marvel, it's not quite so simple. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo announced the completion of their work on Twitter with a hashtag and an image.
SEE ALSO: There may be some hidden 'Avengers 4' clues in this Russo brothers set photo
It's the image that has people talking. What is it? What's it supposed to be teasing? Why are you like this, Marvel?#wrap

There's always, always a tweet. 
Donald Trump tweets incessantly, a habit he began well before he became president and one that opponents are now using against him. 
Whether it's in response to something Trump says, one of the many moments of chaos that occur every week of the Trump presidency, or just an old tweet that aged poorly, people are happy to throw old tweets back at Trump. 
SEE ALSO: Trump claims his loss of Twitter followers proves anti-conservative bias
It's surprisin

I could start this post by trying to write some eloquent thing about how life imitates art, and vice versa, but here’s the truth: what’s happening in 2018 feels increasingly unfathomable, and so I, like many others, have found comfort in drawing parallels to popular culture. Like the #resistance tweeters who tie red string between every new development in the horror show of modern day America and the world of Harry Potter, my new obsession is picking out all the similarities between

You might think it's hard to wring any humor out of the Bill Cosby saga but Saturday Night Live gave it a go, turning some entertainment prison tropes on their head.
SEE ALSO: Watch Seth Meyers return to his old Weekend Update haunt on 'SNL'
The sketch gets a lot of fuel from the reveal and then Kenan Thompson's always on-point Cosby impersonation, but his cellmate (play by Seth Meyers) gets laughs with some dead-panned deliveries like, "On behalf of every one of your fans, it is so disappointin

You knew Seth Meyers couldn't visit his old home at Saturday Night Live without swinging by the Weekend Update desk where he lobbed zingers with pal Amy Poehler for many seasons. 
SEE ALSO: Kanye West just accidentally revealed his iPhone passcode and it's so bad
Poehler wasn't there but current Weekend Update hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che were for an iteration of the time-honored segment, "Really!?!," this one focused on that meeting-of-the-minds that happened between Kanye West and Don

Kanye West came back to Saturday Night Live this week. Sort of.
The latest episode's cold open sketch imagined what the scene must have been like inside the White House on Thursday when West sat for lunch with Donald Trump and NFL hall of famer Jim Brown. Like most of IRL West's rants, it's not very funny. The only all right moment is the bit about Kanye's phone password which really, actually went down like this.
The cold open does bring back Alec Baldwin-as-Trump for the first time this season

In our monthly Rise and Fall column we look back at crowdfunded gadgets that reached their funding goal. Months or year later, how are they doing? If they’ve shipped to backers, are they still supporting the gadget? If they haven’t shipped, why haven’t they met their shipping deadline? We hope this column will give us all a place to understand.
What’s today’s gadget and what does it do?
Vue is a pair of smart glasses that launched on Kickstarter in October 2016 wit

There are few millennials who can utter the words "Potion Seller" without bursting into giggles.
"Potion Seller" is a 3 minute, 8 second video depicting an unnamed knight's determined quest to obtain the eponymous Potion Seller's strongest potion. Published in 2011, the short depicts the knight, played by Justin Kuritzkes, continually getting rebuffed by the Potion Seller, also played by Kuritzkes. He pulls off playing drastically different characters with the help of a distorting Photo Booth fi

As the world is becoming more problematic by the day, there's also a growing interest in wellness. In case you haven't noticed, mindfulness apps, collagen-infused items, and customized vitamin regimes are booming. Kombucha, acupuncture, and the KonMari method are having their moment, too. And so are essential oil diffusers.
If you're a wellness cynic, then you must think of diffusers as glorified air perfumes or placebo machines invented by capitalist goons to further extort money from people. A

When someone tells you to "smile more," you can do one of two things:  Politely ask them to mind their own business, or scorch their pupils with the blinding glare off your impossibly white teeth.  
If you choose the latter option (and who could blame you), you need to get your hands on a Platinum Sonic Toothbrush. At 40,000 brush strokes per minute, this baby is designed to help boost your smile. 
With a compact design and rechargeable battery that lasts up to two weeks

Numerous PS4 owners on Reddit and across social media are warning of a message containing a string of characters that can reportedly cause Sony’s console to seize up and crash. In some cases, the console gets so mixed up from this glitch that users are performing a factory reset on the hardware to get it working normally again.
We’ve seen bugs just like this on mobile platforms, where a certain message or strange character can wreak havoc and cause unstable behavior. If the reports