Technology news

Your next Samsung phone could come in recycled and bio-based paper and plastic wrapping.
The company's electronics division announced its new sustainability policy Sunday and it involves changing product packaging for its phones, tablets, and wearables.
SEE ALSO: Apple says the iPhone will be very useful after the climate apocalypse
Now, instead of plastic, pulp molds will form holder trays. Accessories will be wrapped in eco-friendly materials. Samsung phone chargers will even change from a glo

Anthem looks like a promising step in a new direction for BioWare, the studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect. But it's not there yet, clearly.
Publisher Electronic Arts picked the final weekend in January to serve as the timeframe for Anthem's "VIP Demo," ahead of a Feb. 22 release. Unfortunately, it's been a bit of a mess.
SEE ALSO: 10 video games we can't wait for in 2019
Anthem is an online-focused game with "live" features that shift and evolve according to a schedule, not unlike recent f

Vizio has announced (via Engadget) that smart TV owners can sign up for a beta for its SmartCast 3.0 update, which it will roll out this spring, bringing with it Apple Airplay 2 and HomeKit support to eligible smart TVs.The company has opened up signups for the beta, which will be made available in “Q1 2019,” and will be made more widely available in an update for SmartCast TVs and Displays during the second quarter of the year.
At CES this year, Apple made a splash by integrating w

It took hours, but Germany finally agreed on a plan to close its coal power plants and rely heavily on renewable energy sources.
The country will shut down 84 coal-based power plants — that's all of them — by 2038 a government group decided on Saturday. The commission convened in Berlin to map out how to move away from coal. 
Fossil fuels still account for about 40 percent of Germany's power, according to The Guardian, despite recent gains in renewable energy sources. The countr

Samsung says that it will begin replacing its plastic packaging used with a variety of products with “environmentally sustainable elements” beginning this year.The company announced today that it will replace the plastic used in phones, tablets and wearables for molds and accessory bags made with “eco-friendly materials.” The company also says that it will also change the design for its phone chargers to reduce the use of plastics, “swapping the glossy exterior wit

Samsung Electronicssaid Sunday it will replace plastic packaging used for its bevy of products from mobile phones and tablets to home appliances and wearables with paper and other environmentally sustainable materials like recycled/bio-based plastics.
Samsung will start making the switch in the first half of the year. The company aims to only use paper packaging materials certified by forestry initiatives by next year. By 2030, Samsung says it plans to use 500,000 tons of recycled plas

A dog show is already a magical land where dreams come true, but one innovative attendee made a good thing even better.
Sally Kuchar arrived at the Golden Gate Kennel Club Dog Show on Saturday with one goal: Pet 100 dogs. It was an optimal place for such an undertaking. The Golden Gate show is a bench show, which means that the dogs hang on on assigned benches (and are available for meet and greets) while they're not being shown.
"Folks are encouraged to walk around and familiarize themselves wi

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has fired his Chinese ambassador, John McCallum, after the ambassador made several comments regarding the controversial arrest of a Huawei executive in December, saying that she has a strong case to oppose extradition.Back in December, Canadian authorities arrested Huawei CFO (and daughter of the company’s founder), Meng Wanzhou, who also served on the board of a Hong Kong company, Skycom. That company allegedly did business with Iran, and prosecutor

Nothing keeps out thieves and ne'er-do-wells more effectively than a D Minor musical composition.
That's the latest idea Tesla CEO Elon Musk proposed for his 360-camera theft prevention "Sentry Mode" that he plans to bring to electric Tesla cars with Enhanced Autopilot. He says a "rough" beta will be released sometime in February.
The latest details of the car monitoring system — that sound like a joke, but knowing Musk are possibly real(??) — were introduced on his Twitter page Satu

Daniel Radcliffe, who will one day be introduced as something other than the star of the Harry Potter series (but today isn't that day), is ready for the Super Bowl.
He revealed as much in an interview with Variety at the Sundance Film Festival, which Radcliffe is attending to promote his upcoming TBS series Miracle Workers. Asked who he's rooting for in the Feb. 3 showdown between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Ram, he responded with a succinct, matter-of-fact answer: "Rams."
SEE ALSO

A new trailer for The Wandering Earth — described as China’s biggest science fiction movie ever — landed earlier this week, showing off an ambitious adventure that follows the efforts to save Earth after scientists discover that the sun is about to go out.The movie is based on a story by Chinese author Cixin Liu — who’s best known for his Three-Body Problem trilogy and last year’s Ball Lightning. While those books are huge, epic stories, The Wandering Earth i

Urgently, the roadside assistance startup that connects car owners who need help with tow truck and other services, has raised $21 million in a Series B round that includes the venture arms of BMW, Porscheand Jaguar Land Rover.
BMW has also signed Urgently as a vendor partner for its own roadside assistance platform (known as BMW Assist) to provide roadside assistance and extended mobility services to owners of all four of its brands in the U.S, including BMW, BMW Motorrad, MINI and Rolls-R

Broke English majors, take your places. A homeowner in Alberta, Canada is selling her $1.7 million (CAD) home via essay contest.
Alla Wagner is searching for a new owner for her 5,000 square foot home, which, according to a report from CNN, has "three bedrooms, three full baths and two half baths, in addition to a wine cellar, panoramic views of the surrounding mountains and a pond." Not bad.
Here's how it works: Entrants must write a short letter (maximum 350 words) explaining why they should g

A recently released developer’s beta for iOS 12.2 shows that Apple will allow some customization for its Downtime feature. Users will now be able to adjust the Screen Time feature to account for days of the week, according to 9to5Mac.Apple introduced the feature with iOS12 last year, which allows users to set some imposed limits for their apps based on the time of day, something that’s useful if they want to cut back. their usage. The feature essentially turns off apps (you can whit

A young man named Charles Dexter Ward goes missing from his locked room in a Rhode Island institution, while his psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathon Willett later travels to Britain to murder a woman. That’s the start of a new podcast series from BBC Radio 4, based on an H.P. Lovecraft novel called The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which follows a pair of investigative reporters working on a fictional true-crime podcast, Mystery Machine.
Set in 1928 in Providence, Rhode Island, the original novel a

Jackson Maine — er, uh, Bradley Cooper — joined Lady Gaga onstage Saturday night for a surprise performance of "Shallow," the duo's hit song from A Star Is Born.
Cooper was in the audience for Gaga's Enigma residency in Las Vegas, and the crowd enjoyed a nice surprise when he popped onstage for the duet. (There could be 100 people in a room, but only one Bradley Cooper was in A Star Is Born.) SEE ALSO: Lady Gaga's Golden Globes dress was a beautiful homage to the 1954 version of

It was a big week in U.S. politics. Donald Trump's temper tantrum-fueled partial shutdown of the government came to an end, for one. And Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally and adviser, because the latest figure in the president's orbit to be indicted.
I'm starting to think this Trump guy might have done some crimes at some point. But I digress.
Those two nuclear news items — the government re-opening and the fall of Stone — dominated an entire Weekend Update segment on Saturday Night

Harvey Weinstein and Sundance have a history.
The producer had long been a fixture, picking up future hits and hobnobbing with talent. It was also, we learned in 2017, where he perpetrated some terrible crimes. In 2018, Weinstein sat out the festival for the first time since the '80s.
In 2019, Weinstein had a presence at the fest yet again – but not as a power player on the ground. This year, he is the subject of Untouchable, Ursula Macfarlane's 98-minute documentary about the abuses he's

If Ted Bundy's real secret weapon was his charm, which helped him reassure people who should've been suspicious of him and win over people who should've hated him, count Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile as just another to fall under his spell.
Directed by Joe Berlinger, who also helmed the upcoming Netflix docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Extremely Wicked starts out looking like a fresh perspective on the notorious serial killer, with his girlfriend Liz Kend

Like dogs? Of course you do. You will also love this digital short from the latest Saturday Night Live, which features Pete Davidson, Chris Redd, Kenan Thompson, and host James McAvoy rapping the praises of their main bitches: their dogs.
Has the "dogs/bitches" joke been made before? Absolutely. Has it been made while Pete Davidson is wearing tiny sunglasses and an enormous fur coat? No. So we will accept it, and we will enjoy it, and we will go perform this track for our own dogs after watching

Robert Ackerman Jr. Contributor Robert Ackerman Jr. is the founder and a managing director of AllegisCyber, an early-stage cybersecurity venture firm, and a founder of DataTribe, a cybersecurity startup “studio” in metropolitan Washington, D.C. More posts by this contributorCyber breaches abound in 2019 The healthcare industry is in a world of cybersecurity hurt
As the new year begins gaining steam, there is ostensibly a piece of good news on the cyber front. Major cyber attacks hav

Ken Miller ContributorShare on Twitter Ken Miller Ken Miller is a Technology Partner at the Omidyar Network. Previously he was an Executive at PayPal and Intuit, and early Board Advisor to Square. More posts by this contributorAs hyper-conservative media surged, Republicans’ trust in news cratered Data shows a downward demographic spiral for Republicans
Sometimes the end justifies the means. Other times it clearly doesn’t. But in the new bizarro world that is the modern day U.S. pol

The latest season of The Bachelor kicked off on Jan. 7, featuring former NFL linebacker and self-admitted virgin Colton Underwood as the object of the 30 contestants' desires. (Or whatever, The Bachelor is weird.)
This Saturday Night Live sketch recasts the show as Virgin Hunk and completely shreds it, taking potshots at the awkward speed dating vibe, the conniving and manipulative behavior it takes to win, and the IRL show's struggles with diversity. 
The whole thing only works as a comedy

In Binged, Mashable breaks down why we binge-watch, how we binge-watch, and what it does to us. Because binge-watching is the new normal.If you were born a working-class kid near the English city of Leicester before Queen Victoria's reign, then you may have been one of the first people in the world to use the word "binge." Which, back then, meant "soaking wood so it swells and won't leak in the rain."
The first writer to record the word, in 1848, also mentioned Leicestershire locals had started

You see it first on Facebook or Twitter. Something contemptible: an image, or a video, or a tweet. One accompanied by a furious, snarky caption, highlighting just how awful and unacceptable it is, a dunk fueled by rage. The outrage rises within you. How can it not? You’re primed for outrage. We all are, now. Outrage grenades just waiting for our pins to be pulled.
Usually, if you dig down behind the outrage to its fuel, it’s because our most cherished beliefs, the ones with which we

Over at Harvard University, the department of psychology has opened a new lab to study the science of music. While this is sure to lead to plenty of interesting research in the future, the important takeaway from this news is that the Music Lab has created a citizen science platform where the general public can take various music quizzes and contribute to research.Currently, the site has four tests, which we can all take to figure out how well we truly understand music.
How tone-deaf are you?Li

One thing is increasingly clear anytime Saturday Night Live uses Fox News as a platform for laughs: the Rupert Murdoch network's pro-Trump, anti-progressive approach is so dogmatic and over the top, it's virtually impossible to parody. A jokey news package featuring Fake Tucker Carlson and Fake Jeanine Pirro is just as overrun with half-truths and outright lies as the real thing.
Then Steve Martin shows up. The frequent SNL guest host (he was never a cast member, as an earlier version of this po

In the age of Photoshop, you never know what photos have been edited beyond belief.  
But sometimes, weird optical illusions can occur. These photographic tricks leave our brain filling in the gaps in hilarious, weird, and sometimes raunchy ways. 
SEE ALSO: 23 Pictures That You Have to Look at Twice
Let yourself do a double take, because not everything is as it seems. 
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2.3.4.5.6. 7. 8.9. 10. 11.12.13.14.15.
WATCH: Jay-Z and Meek Mill start group for cr

February 10th, 2019 will mark five years since Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen pulled the beloved game from the App Store and Google Play, causing worldwide hysteria. Devices with the game pre-installed were even put up for sale for hundreds and thousands of dollars.
Fast forward to 2017, the game has effectively become extinct. iOS 11's shift to 64-bit meant it could no longer support the 32-bit apps. Flappy Bird, as we know it, is now gone...but it will never ever be forgotten.
Convinced you c

Fun fact: Microsoft Office's Clippy was among the first smart assistants made widely available to consumers. That same technology has since meandered over into the world of audio, where internet-connected speakers are now capable of pairing with other devices and being controlled by a listener's voice. 
With more and more electronics companies dipping their toes into the smart speaker marketplace to meet surging public demand, there are a lot of options for consumers to consider. There's to