Technology news

After a recent earthquake in Los Angeles, some residents were left wondering why their ShakeAlert LA app hadn’t notified them. After all, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake rocked Ridgecrest, California, about 150 miles away, and that quake was the first test of ShakeAlert since the app was released in 2018.
The system was working exactly as it was designed to, as the Los Angeles Times reported in the aftermath of the quake. While the shaking was intense in Ridgecrest, it wasn’t strong enoug

It’s Friday, so why not watch some good old-fashioned drone-powered graffiti? A design firm in Italy has put together a lovely little show that collected sketches from the art community and put them all together in a giant mural, painted over 12 hours by a team of drones.
We’ve seen spray-painting drones before, of course, but this is far better than the crude vandalism of a fashion billboard or even Disney’s more structured wall drawings. These drones actually put together som

The US Army wants its soldiers to begin listening to its training materials, which, surprisingly, has never been an option before. In recent weeks, the Training and Doctrine Command’s Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate (CADD) has released audiobook versions of a pair of training manuals for the first time as part of an experiment to see if it’s an effective medium to spread information to soldiers across the force.It’s part of a wider effort to overhaul and modernize how the Ar

The above video, the creation of motion graphics designer Tom Coben, is mind-blowing for multiple reasons: the terrifyingly good bowling robot and the fact that the entire video is completely computer-generated.
When Coben shared it to Twitter, the video went hugely viral, garnering over 70,000 retweets and 14.5 million video views as of Friday afternoon. 
It also had a lot of people fooled into thinking that the bowling robot was completely real. So much so that Coben had to make clear tha

Today, BuzzFeed News posted a reminder of exactly how enormous and inescapable Amazon is. In a single list, reporter Leticia Miranda went through all of Amazon’s various subsidiaries and sub-brands, many of which you probably haven’t heard of. The usual suspects are all there — Mechanical Turk, Twitch, Audible — but there are also dozens of different clothing brands, most of which have no obvious connection to Amazon. They’re the equivalent of store brands like Fade

Lego’s official Apollo 11 anniversary set is pretty slick already, but aerospace engineer Adam Woodworth has made it even cooler by adding a set of propellers so that the lunar lander can actually fly, as spotted by Gizmodo.Woodworth detailed the build in an Imgur gallery, and it’s seriously impressive. He hollowed out the inside of the set to make room for a battery and flight controller. (The battery is hidden inside the ascent stage half of the set, while the electronics are in th

This summer's challenge has everyone kicking the caps off bottles in the wildest way possible.
While just being flexible and coordinated enough to knock out a tiny cap is impressive enough, the internet thrives on people outdoing everyone else. 
Here are 11 of the wildest attempts at the bottle cap challenge.
1. With a soccer ball View this post on Instagram▼ 2TOP #bottlecapchallenge 🌪 @iamzlatanibrahimovic / @jasonstatham - Football Every Day. @the_2top X @umbrokorea - Thank

Next Ventures, an investment firm led by Lance Armstrong, has filed to raise $75 million for its debut venture capital fund.
According to paperwork submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this morning, Armstrong and Next Ventures general partner Lionel Conacher have so far attracted $24.5 million from limited partners to back startups in the sports, fitness, nutrition and wellness markets.
Both Armstrong and Conacher are long-time athletes, with Armstrong, of course, known for h

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, National Geographichas plans for an entire Space Week of programming, kicking off Sunday night with the premiere of a new documentary called “Apollo: Missions to the Moon.”
It’s a story that’s been told many times, including in last year’s Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man.” And of course, there’s a whole slate of new documentaries and specials airing in the next few weeks — some

From Alaska to Europe, the world has spent the past few weeks roasting under temperatures never before seen in recorded history.
In Alaska, all-time-high record temperatures were set across the state on July 4th, according to the National Weather Service. In Anchorage, the mercury soared to highs of 90 degrees, the highest temperature since recording began in 1952.
Temperatures in Alaska have reached 90 degrees in other cities around the state before, but this is the first time the thermometer h

Jeff Miller ContributorShare on Twitter Jeff Miller is the retired executive vice president of marketing at Aerion Supersonic and an aerospace marketing consultant.Personal air vehicles — those nifty electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft — have become one of the hottest aviation concepts since the Wright Flyer inspired a flood of competitors.
Touted as quieter, cleaner and cheaper than commercial helicopters, these electric air taxis promise to address city-dwellers

The Pentagon last week unveiled a long-range laser device capable of detecting a person’s unique heart-signature. It was designed to thwart terrorism, but could lead to the Holy Grail of civilian surveillance: an ethical, non-invasive method of conducting biometric identification from afar. Science fiction has long told us that wars in the future would be fought with lasers, we just assumed they’d be weapons. The Pentagon’s heartbeat-detecting laser, called Jetson, is entirely

If you’ve been watching Microsoft’s social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram this week, you probably noticed a teaser campaign for Microsoft’s original Windows 1.0 operating system, which was first released in 1985.
It starts out like a one-off joke or maybe a poor attempt at a nostalgic throwback for an OS that never really got much love in the first place:
Introducing the all-new Windows 1.0, with MS-Dos Executive, Clock, and more!! pic.twitter.com/guU4QxwsGG— Win

Most people who spend money on car-sharing services do so because they have a destination in mind. They need transportation, and driving a car is an incredibly popular and efficient method of travel between two locations. (It’s true!) But occasionally, a car is not a mode of travel, but an indoor space in a world where indoor spaces are increasingly privatized and inaccessible to many people.Japanese car-sharing service Orix discovered this recently after finding out that many of its custo

A team of German researchers has created an automatic landing system for small aircraft that lets them touch down not only without a pilot, but without any of the tech on the ground that lets other planes do it. It could open up a new era of autonomous flight — and make ordinary landings safer, to boot.
Now it would be natural to think that with the sophisticated autopilot systems that we have today, a plane could land itself quite easily. And that’s kind of true — but the auto

Big changes are always scary, and that’s especially true for Netflix’s Stranger Things. After showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer created an instant hit in 2016 with their focus on the “kids on bikes” aesthetic of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg, the question was: how long they could sustain the formula before it became stale or transformed into something unrecognizable?
It’s appropriate that the fear of change is the focus of season 3, which was released on July 4th

The groundbreaking 1988 science fiction film Akira is getting a 4K remaster next year, and director Katsuhiro Otomo has announced a new anime series based on his original Akira manga as well as an unrelated new feature film called Orbital Era.
Anime News Network reported the news out of the Anime Expo yesterday, and studio Sunrise has released a couple of short, related teaser trailers. The Akira 4K remaster will launch in Japan on April 24th, 2020, and it’s coming to the US at an unknown

Google has already shown that its upcoming Pixel 4 will have two rear cameras, but there was an open mystery as to whether the second lens would be a telephoto shooter or optimized for super-wide angle photos. A new version of the Google Camera app might have spilled the answer: according to XDA Developers, the build of the app contained in a leaked version of Android Q contains code references that specifically mention “telephoto,” making that the likely function of the Pixel 4&rsqu

The latest heat wave to bake a part of the globe is underway in Alaska where several locations, including Anchorage, broke single-day records for high temperatures. 
According to the National Weather Service (NWS), Anchorage had its first-ever recorded temperature of at least 90 degrees on Thursday, breaking the previous record of 85 degrees, which was set 50 years ago. The #4thofjuly2019 was one for the books. Several ALL-TIME high temperature records were set at official observation

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1. HQ Trivia lays off ~20% as it preps subscriptions
The cuts hit HQ’s HR, marketing and product engineering teams, according to LinkedIn profiles of employees let go. The cuts could further hamper morale at the startup following a tough first half of the year.
It also could leave the compa

The Volkswagen I.D. R electric racecar just broke a 20-year-old record at the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed hill climb. Driven by Romain Dumas, the I.D. R made the climb on Friday in just 41.18 seconds, which is a half-second clear of former F1 driver Nick Heidfeld’s hairy 41.6-second run all the way back in 1999.The record-breaking performance comes just one month after Dumas smashed the electric vehicle record at Germany’s famous Nürburgring in the 680-horsepower I.D. R, t

Way back in February, Mozilla announced an upcoming collaboration with Scroll aimed at finding a way to help fund news outlets. The organization appears ready to finally launch to the service, sending users a survey, along with invites to an upcoming beta launch of what it calls “Firefox Ad-free Internet.”
The service is one of countless third-party platforms aimed at helping ailing publications find a way to better monetize in an an era of defunding, when journalistic voices are mor

Pepper Potts and Bucky Barnes may have saved the world together on multiple occasions, but Gwenyth Paltrow can't seem to remember Sebastian Stan. 
Both actors have starred in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and even appeared in the same Avengers crossovers — but Paltrow appears to have forgotten Stan already. In an Instagram post on Thursday, he posted with fashion legends Pierpaolo Piccioli and Valentino Garavani after a couture show in Paris. 
"Also glad I got to reintrod

If these past few weeks felt like the sky was falling, you weren’t alone.
In the past month there were several major internet outages affecting millions of users across the world. Sites buckled, services broke, images wouldn’t load, direct messages ground to a halt and calendars and email were unavailable for hours at a time.
It’s not believed any single event tied the outages together, more so just terrible luck for all involved.
It started on June 2 — a quiet Sunday &md

Dell’s Alienware brand focuses on gaming computers. They’re typically quite expensive, but thanks to a deal, you can now get $530 off a new Alienware Aurora desktop computer, bringing the price down to $1,599.99. Here’s what you get for your money: Six-core Intel i7-8700 Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 8GB 12GB DDR4 RAM 1TB M.2 PVIe NVMe SSD It’s a decently souped-up bit of kit, and that comes with the usual accoutrements, including a Qualcomm DW1810 Wi-Fi. You can also get a ke

Programming robots to walk on flat, even ground is difficult enough, but Florida’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) is tackling the grander challenge of making sure bipedal robots can successfully navigate rough terrain. The research organization has been demonstrating its work in this area since 2016, but its latest video (via Engadget) shows the progress it has made.
In the new video, IHMC’s autonomous footstep planning program is at work on both Boston Dynamics&rsq

Foxconn’s plan to build an LCD factory in Wisconsin — subsidized by up to $4 billion in tax credits, infrastructure investment, and direct cash payments from the state — isn’t going so well. Over the past year, the company has tried to cancel the plan, restarted it at behest of President Trump, and then scaled it down and pushed it back repeatedly, all while buying empty buildings across the state.
All of that is certainly a problem for the Wisconsin taxpayers footing the

Alex Morgan sounded off on critics of her now-famous "tea-sipping" celebration, accusing them of holding her to a "double standard."
Speaking to the press on Friday ahead of the U.S. team's World Cup final match-up with the Netherlands, Morgan said, via ESPN, "I feel that there is some sort of double standard for females in sports, to feel like we have to be humble in our successes and have to celebrate, but not too much or in a limited fashion."She added, to drive the point home, "You see men c

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
Cop Car, an offbeat crime film directed by Jon Watts and co-written by Watts and Chri

Drone delivery service Project Wing (or just Wing as it’s now called) graduated from Google X last year to become an independent Alphabet business, and recently won governmental approval to operate in the suburbs outside the Australian capital, Canberra. There, its service delivers food, coffee, pet supplies and more to area residents. Related to these efforts, Wing this week launched a new app for drone flyers, OpenSky, to help them find safe places and times to fly their drones or drone

MoviePass, the long-embattled film subscription service, has shut down for “several weeks” in order to complete work on an updated version of its app and to recapitalize for when the service relaunches. “There’s never a good time to have to do this,” MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said in a statement, “but to complete the improved version of our app, one that we believe will provide a much better experience for our subscribers, it has to be done.” Lowe’s

The Planetary Society has launched a new mission control dashboard for LightSail 2, a crowdfunded spacecraft currently in orbit that’s going to test the performance of a true solar sail that’s moved only by the force of photons from the sun bouncing off its fabric. The dashboard provides the most up-to-date information available for anyone to check, and even download for whatever use they might have for this kind of info.
It’s definitely in keeping with the spirit of LightSail

Nothing ruins the mood like making the wrong Netflix choice when what you're watching inevitably becomes the background noise to getting hot and heavy with your bae. 
Do not, we repeat, do not just go for "what people are talking about right now" because that's how you end up bumping uglies to Chernobyl, with a soundtrack of innocent lives dying from radiation poisoning. Another rookie mistake is horror movies, which seems like a good date movie in concept, until your make out sesh is punct

You probably saw some pretty great fireworks on the Fourth of July but you probably didn't see anything quite like this custom-made giant fireworks tank of glory.
Genius Peter Sripol, who's powered up NERF guns before, turned his attention to those little fireworks tanks, but decided it was time for a super-duper-sized example. 
In the above video, via Gizmodo, Sripol and his pals put together a giant, life-sized version of the famous little tank that operates exactly like the smaller versi

Proving there is no end to the life of some memes, especially the legendary Simpsons meme about "steamed hams," which made the jump to video games thanks to a brilliant mind and Super Mario Maker 2. 
Behold, the work of genius."Ah, Super Mario, welcome! I hope you're prepared for an unforgettable luncheon!"#SuperMarioMaker2 #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/7COesOeTXv
— J Fresh (@JFreshSplat) July 3, 2019Super Mario Maker 2 just hit Nintendo Switches everywhere last week — spoiler