Technology news

Climate change is a pressing issue, but it can often feel distant and abstract. To make it resonate in people’s minds, one scientist turned dry data points into achingly beautiful music, making the frightening changes to our planet audible.
The short piece, In Nomine Terra Calens, translates to “In the Name of a Warming Earth.” It’s by seismologist Lucy Jones, who turned temperature data from 1880 to the present into music to illustrate the speed at which the world is wa

SanDisk’s 1TB Extreme microSD card is the biggest capacity that it’s ever sold, and you can buy one... for $449.99.As for where you can buy it right now, it’s available on SanDisk’s store. B&H Photo is also accepting orders for the memory card. Amazon has a product listing, though it’s currently unavailable in the US. You can purchase it through Amazon if you live in Spain, Germany, or the UK. Per Tom’s Guide, though, depending on where you live, deliveri

After months of speculation, President Trump has signed an executive order giving the federal government the power to ban US companies from buying foreign-made telecommunications equipment deemed a national security risk.Under the order, which gives the secretary of commerce power to determine which transactions may be potential risks, no single company is immediately marked as a threat. But the plan is largely seen as a move against China-based Huawei, which some US lawmakers have deemed a sec

On Wednesday, the White House launched a new tool for people to use if they feel they’ve been wrongly censored, banned, or suspended on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
“No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump,” the site reads.Over the past few months, Republicans have taken aim at social media networks, citing claims that conservatives have been wrongly censored o

One of the earliest and most influential meme culture websites, You’re The Man Now Dog, went dark over the weekend. It’s since returned with a maintenance page, but the near-death experience has been enough to bring visitors into a site-run Discord chat to briefly relive the internet as it was — a wild, overgrown garden of things that were entertaining and horrifying in just about equal measure.
The site’s apparent demise was inevitable, even if it’s not quite fina

I, Jeff Bezos, super rich adult man and definite Big Boy, like trucks! And construction equipment! And moving dirt! VROOOOOOM! BEEP BEEP!
But you already know this! I told you so! When, yesterday, I hopped into a large front loader (can you believe they let me do this stuff?!) and, in front of a bunch of cameras, picked up some dirt and then DUMPED IT right back onto the same spot!We’re investing $1.5 billion in our new air hub to get you your packages faster. Three million square feet, an

Taylor Swift loves pushing people's buttons, especially Ellen DeGeneres'. 
The "ME!" singer made a much anticipated return to The Ellen Show on Wednesday, making it her first appearance in two years. Swift commented on everything from her new kitten, Benjamin, to whether or not she washes her legs (she does). 
During the show's "Burning Questions" segment, Swift is put on the spot plenty of times. 
When Ellen asks, "If you can't sleep in the middle of the night, what do you do?" S

A helicopter operated by Blade, an on-demand short-distance flight service, crashed into the Hudson River in New York City this afternoon. The aircraft’s pilot was the only person onboard and suffered non-life-threatening injuries, the New York Fire Department reports.“Earlier today, a helicopter made a safe emergency landing on floats in the Hudson River near the heliport,” a Blade representative confirmed to The Verge. “The pilot was not injured and immediately exited

Rumors of Google working on adding an option to dual-boot Windows 10 on its Chromebooks have been around for almost a year, but it appears that the dream may be dead. Google is reportedly deprecating all of its “Alt OS” code for the dual-booting feature, as spotted by Reddit user crosfrog (via Android Police).Chromebooks are sticking to Chrome OS for now
Word of the dual-boot feature — said to be called “Project Campfire” internally — was reported by XDA Deve

You can't keep a streaming Beto down.
If you didn't think livestreaming a dental appointment was mundane enough, wait til you see 2020 Democratic hopeful Beto O'Rourke stream a haircut. All 17 minutes of it. O'Rourke has begun something of a "reboot" of his campaign, including an appearance on The View where he did a lot of apologizing, and now he's back to doing what he does best: streaming average, everyday events like they're political rallies. 
SEE ALSO: Beto O'Rourke announces $5

Some of the largest tech companies in the world have signed on to a new agreement to fight terrorism and violent extremism on their platforms, following the attack on a Christchurch mosque that was live streamed on Facebook. 
Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all joined the Christchurch Call, an effort between world leaders and tech companies to fight the spread of violent extremism online. The agreement was announced following a meeting in Paris, organized by French Presiden

Google has issued a security advisory for its Bluetooth Titan Security Keys that is serious enough for it to replace them for free. The company says that there is a “misconfiguration in the Titan Security Keys’ Bluetooth pairing protocols” that could potentially allow an attacker to get access to your account or device — though only in a couple of specific (and specifically difficult to pull off) circumstances.
The company tells us that the news today is a coordinated di

The online spectacle surrounding YouTube celebrity James Charles started out as a spat between friends. The hundreds of reaction and commentary videos that have sprung up in the last week, however, collecting millions of views and generating thousands of dollars in ad revenue, show how drama becomes everyone’s business on YouTube.
In the days since beauty vlogger Tati Westbrook published a 43-minute video condemning Charles’ behavior over the past few months, Charles has lost more t

May is National Masturbation Month, and we're celebrating with Feeling Yourself, a series exploring the finer points of self-pleasure.There's something inherently a little silly about using tiny cartoon images to simulate sexual acts. 
But we all know the usual sexting suspects by now — eggplant emoji, peach emoji, pointing finger at OK hand symbol emoji. Yawn. Where are the quality masturbation emoji? 
SEE ALSO: Instagram's thirst memes can open up healthy conversations about se

Back in 2018, Disney fired director James Gunn, who was at the time working on the second sequel to his Marvel Cinematic Universe film Guardians of the Galaxy. The firing came in response to a smear campaign by a noted alt-right media personality, who resurfaced some bad-taste jokes about pedophilia that Gunn had tweeted, in some cases more than a decade ago. The public firing resulted in several weeks of internet uproar, with fan petitions calling for Gunn’s reinstatement, and the Guardi

Well, it was nice while it lasted. 
For a while there, we really had something, didn't we? What with Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and even the more recent additions of Black Mirror and Star Trek: Discovery, it was starting to look like the Golden Age of TV was here to stay. 
The trailer for Fox's new "event series," neXt, disabuses us of that tragically naive notion. The premise of the show? Looks like a barely disguised Alexa — dubbed "Iliza" — becomes self-aware and sta

A NASA spacecraft in orbit around the Moon spotted the crash site of an Israeli robotic lander named Beresheet, which slammed into the lunar surface during a botched landing attempt in April. New pictures from the spacecraft show that the lander left a dark, 10-meter-long smudge across the Moon where it hit and then disintegrated.
The ill-fated lander was the creation of an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL, which launched Beresheet on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February. Before the cras

It's 2019, and rather than making every effort to fight for the equality, freedom, and basic human rights of Americans, several states are currently attempting to criminalize abortion. 
Though anti-abortion bills have been introduced throughout the country for years, in states like Arkansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, and more, on Tuesday night Alabama lawmakers voted in favor of the nation's most restrictive abortion ban, one that would essentially prohibit all abo

Memory is a tricky thing. Some of us are great at attaching names to faces, while others (and here I raise my hand) have always had a problem with remembering names, especially when you meet someone out of context. For example, imagine the embarrassment when someone you know from work suddenly shows up at a friend’s party, and you spend the next hour trying to remember their name.
As a result, I’m always looking for a way to be able to put a name with a face. While there are some mo

In the wake of the Christchurch shootings, social media platforms and governments alike have been struggling with how to deal with terrorist content online, and this week saw their first concrete response. On Sunday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a new commitment called the “Christchurch Call,” which calls on tech platforms and governments to adopt and enforce laws for removing extremist content.The call is already attracting support from countries like France,

VMware announced today that it’s acquiring Bitnami, the package application company that was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2013 class. The companies didn’t share the purchase price.
With Bitnami,the company can now deliver more than 130 popular software packages in a variety of formats, such as Docker containers or virtual machine, an approach that should be attractive for VMwareas it makes its transformation to be more of a cloud services company.
“Upon close, Bitnami wi

Once considered to be bougie luxury appliances, 4K TVs are borderline mainstream at this point. In fact, one analytics firm estimated that almost 50 percent of all American households will own one by next year. 
That's a pretty big deal, considering 4K TV ownership in the U.S. was only 1 percent five years ago.
As more and more people look into upgrading their home theater setups with 4K displays, retailers are of course competing to win us over with great bargains and markdowns. Walmart's

Kylie Jenner announced her new skincare line, Kylie Skin, on Tuesday. The collection includes six products — a foaming face wash, a vitamin C serum, a toner, a moisturizer, an eye cream, and a walnut face scrub — but really only one of them is getting any attention. Guess what? It is not the good kind.
Walnut scrubs have long been a source of controversy in the skincare community, with pretty much all enthusiasts agreeing that they're not a healthy way to exfoliate the face. In fact,

One of the internet’s earliest meme pioneers is no more. 
“You’re the Man Now, Dog!,” more commonly known as YTMND has shut down. Twitter users first noticed the site was no longer accessible on Monday and word quickly spread to forums and other corners of the web populated by those who were heavily influenced by the meme site.
YTMND was most well known for its user generated standalone pages filled with a single, tiled image or animated GIF, embedded with large text

Who said adults can’t have toys too?
Not us. We actually think that you should just enjoy whatever the hell you want to enjoy, and if giant superhero movie replicas are your cup of tea, we support you wholeheartedly. In fact, we have a really great recommendation for your next purchase, especially if you were a fan of Avengers: Endgame (then again, who wasn’t?). 
Though this isn’t a deal per se, we just couldn’t help ourselves when we saw this Avengers Infinity Gaunt

We've all been there by now: Phone numbers similar to your own call you multiple times a day, only to reveal themselves as scam operations. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) knows that rampant robocalls are a problem in this country and made a proposal this week that could help out.
FCC chairman Ajit Pai proposed a new rule that, if adopted, would encourage phone carriers to turn anti-robocall technology on by default. Carriers like Verizon have anti-robocall tools for subscribers, but

Mattresses are an investment — they’re meant to stick around for five to 10 years — so you want to make sure you get a good one. Because you can purchase mattresses online and have them delivered right to your door, you have tons of options. But that also means you don’t get to lie on the bed to test it out.
Luckily, Purple mattresses are designed to be comfortable for everyone, regardless of sleeping position. Purple has your comfort and your budget in mind as it’s

May is National Masturbation Month, and we're celebrating with Feeling Yourself, a series exploring the finer points of self-pleasure.Everyone has a slightly different ritual when it comes to self-love, but for many people that adventure involves a visit to Pornhub.
We asked the folks at the adult entertainment behemoth to give us a look into what people are searching for when it comes to masturbation videos — and they've provided some very interesting insights.All the ways we search for m

Deepfakes might be the endgame of objective truth, but at least the tech behind the dystopian phenomenon can let us have some fun with our pets!
Researchers at Nvidia have created an algorithm called PetSwap that lets you see what your pet would look like as a different species. As reported by Vice, the tool uses similar technology to what has enabled the creation of deepfakes, which are realistic images and videos generated by an algorithm — not based on an actual person or other IRL imag

Rick and Morty is back, baby.
Warner Media revealed Wednesday that one of the internet's favorite TV shows will be returning to TV in November with the premiere of Season 4.The last episode of Adult Swim's animated giant premiered in October 2017, making the gap between Season 3 and Season 4 more than two years long. Fans have long awaited any word about the next season of the show and immediately began celebrating the exciting news.pic.twitter.com/QzjYqOFqoB
— MrJ (@OllieMrJQueen) May 15,

It's truly not fair that not all yards are made equal.
If you find yourself scrolling through Instagram and being more jealous of a friend's massive patio and bonfire than their AirPods, you should know that you're $30 away from a makeshift dream yard: Walmart has a really well-reviewed portable fire pit on sale for just $29.97. 
All you need now is a gas grill and Bluetooth speaker and you can turn even the dinkiest little space into a cozy entertaining area. If you're more of a camping or

Motorola is introducing a new member to its lineup of Motorola One handsets today, but it won’t come to the United States. Still, the new One Vision deviates from Motorola’s current smartphone family to such a degree that it’s worth highlighting.
Its 6.3-inch LCD screen has a 21:9 aspect ratio that’s perfect for movies, a trend that Sony recently joined in on. Motorola calls the display CinemaVision. It’s not the sharpest panel in the world (1080 x 2520), especiall

You often don't realize just how important it is to have a decent WiFi router at home 'til yours goes AWOL. 
Without a reliable wireless internet connection, your smartphone, laptop, and other electronic devices are rendered virtually useless unless you decide to dip into your pricey data plan. 
What's that one Joni Mitchell lyric — "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"? Yeah, that's basically what we're getting at here.
You can check o

Amazon Prime members get perks every day with two-day shipping, access to Prime Video and Music, and more. Outside of those consistent benefits, Prime members also get to take advantage of special deals and discounts.
If you like watching TV but don’t like paying for cable, you’ve got to jump on the Fire TV train. And if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can save up to $50 on Fire TV devices right now.The Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Cube turn your TV into a smart device and basi