Technology news

Scientists may have found a potential cure for anxiety after isolating and boosting a molecule in the brains of rhesus monkeys. Andrew Fox, a researcher at UC Davis, and co-author Tade Souaiaia from SUNY lead a team of researchers in an experimental study to determine if behaviors related to anxiety and depression could be mitigated by manipulating the amygdala, the part of the brain that controls memory and emotions linked to memory. In order to land on a specific molecule – in this case

WireImage Pitchfork published a terrific profile of Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, aka the guy who writes songs so mournful that he turned a generation of sad boys into sad men. Jeremy D. Larson’s piece is rich with details about the Eau Claire County crooner, but the best one is in the first sentence:
“Justin Vernon lights a blunt as he charges his Tesla, which is affectionately named John Teshla.”
It’s hilarious imagining that the man, famous for writing sad tunes alone

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has unveiled a new program today in the US and UK that will donate unwanted products from third-party Marketplace sellers instead of sending them to the garbage dump.The new program, called Fulfilled by Amazon Donations, will see hundreds of thousands of products third-party vendors were unable to sell go to US nonprofits and a series of UK charities like Barnardo’s, Newlife, and the Salvation Army. Previously, Amazon reportedly trashed produ

Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings show might be getting most of the attention around the streaming service’s big-budget fantasy adaptations, but the company has just announced casting for nearly all the key characters in its other doorstop fantasy novel show: Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time.The show announced its cast for the books’ five central characters: Madeleine Madden as Egwene al’Vere, Marcus Rutherford as Perrin Aybara, Barney Harris as Mat Cauthon, Zo&e

U.S. stock markets plummeted today as recession fears continue to grow.
Yesterday’s good news about a reprieve on tariffs for U.S. consumer imports was undone by increasing concerns over economic indicators pointing to a potential global recession coming within the next year.Phones, laptops and game consoles get tariff reprieve until DecemberThe Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 800 points on Wednesday — its largest decline of the year — while the S&P 500 fell

Sleeper is looking to take on fantasy league apps from major players like ESPN and has amassed venture funding from Silicon Valley investors to take them down.
The Bay Area startup is aiming to treat a fantasy football league more like a social platform than a loose jumble of league mechanics, distinguishing itself as a simple and free, ad-free option.
Sleeperhas done limited press as it has been ramping up its app over the past two seasons, but the team has been courting the interest of investo

Photo by Gabriella Demczuk/Getty Images The House Homeland Security Committee subpoenaed the owner of 8chan, Jim Watkins, on Wednesday in an attempt to force the Philippines-based entrepreneur to testify before lawmakers next month. The subpoena follows a series of white supremacist-inspired attacks across the world this year, many of which were linked to 8chan.
“We have questions on what is being done to counter this trend so we can be sure it is being properly addressed,” Reps. Be

Photo: DoorDash A group of Caviar employees has banded together to request a good faith renegotiation from DoorDash and Square, claiming mistreatment in the job transition process as DoorDash finalizes its plans to acquire Caviar from the payment company.
In a letter provided to The Verge, anonymous Caviar employees say DoorDash and Square did not offer them fair compensation packages in regard to unvested shares and upcoming promotions that were formerly on the Caviar financial cycle. The work

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a mysterious new strain of cryptocurrency mining (cryptomining) malware that employs powerful techniques to avoid detection and analysis. Software firm Varonis determined the malware is based on Monero mining software XMRig, which is open source and hosted on GitHub. Hard Fork has previously reported on other notable instances of cryptomining malware that utilize XMRig. To date, Norman has hit at least one “mid-size” company, having infected

Facebook announced today that it’s updating its group privacy settings and working to better moderate bad content breaking the platform’s rules. The platform is renaming its confusing public, closed, and secret group settings to the slightly more straightforward public and private settings, with the option to make private groups visible or hidden to non-members. The new settings will also provide more control for admins and members, giving admins more moderation tools and members the

The 2019 Audie-tron has become the first battery-electric vehicle to earn a top safety rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an achievement that Tesla and other electric models like the Chevy Bolt have not been able to capture.
Scoring an IIHS top safety award isn’t easy. A vehicle has to earn good ratings in six crashworthiness evaluations, as well as an advanced or superior rating for front crash prevention and a good headlight rating.
IIHS said Wednesday that

Image: Disney Disney just released a trailer for the second and final season of its animated series Star Wars Resistance. We knew a second season was coming, but today’s big reveal is that the second season will be the show’s last, hinting that it has some big things in store — like the appearance of Kylo Ren, the volatile leader of the imperialist First Order from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.
Star Wars Resistance follows a young Resistance pilot named Kazuda Xiono and

Researchers from antivirus developer ESET recently discovered a new form of spam-delivered malware that threatens to steal unsuspecting users’ passwords and financial information, and record their screens if they watch pornography. The virus is called Varenyky and it’s a doozy. It’s apparently been designed to target customers of French ISP Orange SA, but the researchers indicate there’s nothing stopping someone from using the same malware on other ISPs or in other areas

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge The latest version of Chrome OS is rolling out to Chromebooks now and it comes with a lot more new features than usual. The biggest one, as noted by Android Police, is the addition of virtual desktops. You’ll be able to switch between up to four different desktops with their own window layouts.When you swipe up to view all windows in the overview mode, you should see a new button in the upper right corner labeled “New Desk,” which will create

Kurbo Health, a mobile weight loss solution designed to tackle childhood obesity which was acquired for $3 million by WW (the rebranded Weight Watchers), has now relaunched as Kurbo by WW — and not without some controversy. Pre-acquisition, the startup was focused on democratizing access to research, behavior modification techniques and other tools that were previously only available through expensive programs run by hospitals or other centers.
As a WW product, however, there are concerns

Shout out to all the savvy enterprise software startuppers. Here’s a quick, two-part money-saving reminder. Part one: TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 is right around the corner on September 5, and you have only two days left to buy an early-bird ticket and save yourself $100. Part two: for every Session ticket you buy, you get one free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019.
Save money and increase your ROI by completing one simple task: buy your early-bird ticket today.
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Users of credit monitoring site Credit Karmahave complained that they were served other people’s account information when they logged in.
Many took to a Reddit thread and complained on Twitter about the apparent security lapse.
“First time logging in it gave me my information, but as soon as I refreshed the screen, it gave me someone else’s info,” said one Reddit user. “Refreshed again and bam! someone else’s info — it’s like roulette.” Anoth

Marvel and Stitcher have announced their next superhero podcast partnership: a radio drama adaptation of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’ limited Marvels series, which sees news photographer Phil Sheldon trying to get by in the chaos of a superhero world. The podcast marks the third collaboration between Marvel and Stitcher, following Wolverine: The Long Night and its sequel Wolverine: The Lost Trail.The scripted Marvels series is meant to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the comics series,

Matt Ocko ContributorShare on Twitter Matt Ocko is co-Managing Partner and co-founder of DCVC (Data Collective). Alan Cohen ContributorShare on Twitter Alan Cohen is an operating partner at DCVC.
We all see the headlines nearly every day. A drone disrupting the airspace in one of the world’s busiest airports, putting aircraft at risk (and inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of passengers) or attacks on critical infrastructure. Or a shooting in a place of worship, a school, a courth

Until today, Facebook has given you three options for creating a user group: Open, closed, or ‘secret.’ While the first is pretty obvious, the other two were occasional sources of confusion – an admin might set a group to ‘closed’ without realizing it was still searchable, for instance. Instead there are now just two main types of groups: Public and Private. Public groups can be joined by anyone and are searchable by anyone. Private groups require permission to acc

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Sega’s miniature Genesis console, the Genesis Mini, will come out on September 19th, but it’s available for preorder now at Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and Walmart.Preorders have actually been open for a few months, but there’s more incentive to put your money down. Today, August 14th, is the 30th anniversary of the console’s original launch in the US, and The Verge’s Andrew Webster posted everything you’d want to know about t

Misfit Misfit has launched the Vapor X, which it claims is its lightest and most efficient Wear OS smartwatch. The Vapor X has a 1.19-inch AMOLED display, and its 42mm case is built with a lightweight aluminum alloy that weighs in at 43 grams. (The weight of previous Vapor watches isn’t listed on their respective spec sheets for comparison; we’ve reached out to Misfit for a more complete rundown.)
The Vapor X features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 3100 processor. Misfit asserts that you c

Just like every other tech company that got caught with its hand in the cookie jar this year — hey there, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook — we recently learned that Microsoft had been quietly letting human contractors listen to your Skype translations and Cortana voice recordings. That’s right: they’re not just AI.But unlike Apple and Google, each of which halted listening to some of these recordings after the revelations, Microsoft appears to be merely updating its p

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge At least three smart June Ovens have turned on in the middle of the night and heated up to 400 degrees or higher. The ovens’ owners aren’t sure why this happened, and June tells The Verge that user error is at fault. The company is planning an update that’ll hopefully remedy the situation and prevent it from happening again, but that change isn’t coming until next month.
One owner’s oven turned on around 2:30AM and broile

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Today is our promised Equity Shot (a short-form, single-topic episode) on the WeWork S-1. You can read Kate’s notes here, or Alex’s here as a place to start.
Given that we didn’t know when the WeWork S-1 filing was going to make itself known, we put together this episode from TechCrunch’s SF HQ, Alex’s home office and Kate ins

Image: CBS CBS and Viacom are set to become a potential powerhouse in streaming, rivaling Netflix. But where Netflix focuses on building a universal library of originals, ViacomCBS is set to overwhelm rivals with content drawn from dozens of smaller channels, many of which have years’ worth of content in the bank.
Viacom and CBS executives announced yesterday that they had come to a unanimous agreement to merge both companies, reuniting the brands for the first time since they split in 20

SNC’s Dream Chaser. | Image: NASA / SNC Private space company Sierra Nevada Corporation announced today that its mini-spaceplane, the Dream Chaser, will launch into orbit on top of the United Launch Alliance’s future Vulcan Centaur rocket. The Dream Chaser has yet to see space, but once it’s operational, it will help ferry cargo and science experiments to the astronauts on board the International Space Station between 2021 and 2024.
The Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is one o

In two years, Voyagehas gone from a tiny self-driving car upstart spun out of Udacity to a company able to operate on 200 miles of roads in retirement communities.
Now, Voyage is on the verge of introducing a new vehicle that is critical to its mission of launching a truly driverless ride-hailing service. (Human safety drivers not included.)
This internal milestone, which Voyage CEO Oliver Cameronhinted at in a recent Medium post, went largely unnoticed. Voyage, after all, is just a 55-person sp

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Responding to criticism that it's trying to steer consumers toward more expensive battery replacements, Apple today claimed that the “important battery message” added to iOS is there in the name of customer safety. It was recently discovered that when an iPhone’s battery is swapped out by a third-party repair shop that isn't one of Apple's authorized partners, the device’s battery health menu will show an ominous warning about

A group of LGBTQ+ YouTubers this week filed a federal lawsuit against Google, claiming the site has engaged in discriminatory practices that deliberately suppress their ability to make money. Part of the problem is that YouTube has kept its algorithms so mysterious, there’s no way to know if it’s deliberately discriminating against any particular group, or if it’s just an offshoot of its recurring problems with ad revenue According to the vid creators, both YouTube‘s alg

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Engineer.ai, an Indian startup claiming to have built an artificial intelligence-assisted app development platform, is not in fact using AI to literally build apps, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the company, which has attracted nearly $30 million in funding from a SoftBank-owned firm and others, is reportedly relying mostly on human engineers, while using hype around AI to attract customers and investment that will last it u

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1. Facebook is losing its last Oculus co-founder
Nate Mitchell, the final Oculusco-founder remaining at Facebook,announced in an internal memo that he’s leaving the company and “taking time to travel, be with family, and recharge.” His role within the company has shifted several

What happens when two former spies meet the startup world? We’re about to find out.
We’re pleased to announce former National Security Agency director Adm. Mike Rogers will be at Disrupt SF on October 2-4. The former U.S. intelligence head oversaw the shadowy agency during one of its most tumultuous times in its history in the aftermath of the massive leak of classified documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden. He also oversaw the Pentagon’s cyberwar-fighting division, U.S. Cy

A new report from The Wall Street Journal could be another damning piece of evidence for a company already under a good deal of international scrutiny. The paper is reporting that technicians working for Huawei helped members of government in Uganda and Zambia spy on political opponents.The report cites unnamed senior surveillance officers. The paper adds that an investigation didn’t confirm a direct tie between the Chinese government or Huawei executives. It did, however, appear to confir

Audi’s first all-electric car, the E-Tron SUV, has been named a top safety pick by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). It’s the first battery-electric car to earn that distinction, beating out previous ones that fell short, like Tesla’s Model S or the Chevy Bolt. The agency released a handful of videos of the E-Tron being smashed up at its test facility, which you can see above and below.The E-Tron earned “good” ratings across the board in the IIHS&rs