The texts would come at all hours of the night, numbering in the thousands. “Have you been with an older guy?” “You’re really hot, so it’s worth the risk of getting in trouble.” “Has your daddy fucked you today?” | Continue reading
When a user chooses to pause Google’s collection of location data with the “Location History” option, the search giant continues to collect and store that information. It’s a sleight of hand that’s enough to make someone shut off everything just to be safe. | Continue reading
High-temperature electricity without resistance could revolutionize electronics. It could take less energy to move electric charge, meaning better-performing, more-efficient electronics that are cheaper to run. It could cut down on energy costs, and might even help researchers re … | Continue reading
Travelers features an icky, insidiously clever form of going undercover: agents from 100 years in the future take up residence in people living in the present’s bodies. It makes things morally complicated. Like when a heroin junkie watches a man die from a heart attack and tearfu … | Continue reading
No one but defense contractors and their accountants knows why America needs a Space Force. But moments after announcing the new U.S. military branch, the Trump campaign gave us a hint at this arguably idiotic idea’s true purpose: Lining the campaign’s pockets. | Continue reading
Many prehistoric mass graves located along coastlines around the world may be linked to ancient tsunamis, new research suggests. | Continue reading
There’s an ongoing debate among archaeologists as to which route the first settlers of North America took to reach the continent. Some say these migrants travelled along an interior passage between two massive ice sheets, while others say they traversed along a coastal route. New … | Continue reading
Anti-government conspiracy theorist turned pro-Trump mouthpiece Alex Jones found his hard-won followings on the web’s biggest platforms stripped away this week. In this day and age, there’s just nowhere left online for a red-blooded patriot to speak his mind. Nowhere, it seems, e … | Continue reading
Given their current popularity, you might assume that probiotics—capsules containing a mix of “good” bacteria that are said to rebalance our gut’s bacterial content—would be perfectly harmless. But a team of gastroenterologists from Augusta University in Georgia is challenging th … | Continue reading
You just can’t trust a little dog. | Continue reading
Last year, we launched an investigation into how Facebook’s People You May Know tool makes its creepily accurate recommendations. By November, we had it mostly figured out: Facebook has nearly limitless access to all the phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and social … | Continue reading
Amazon may have sold millions of Echoes and other devices equipped with its voice-controlled Alexa smart assistant partially in the hopes that it could nudge users into letting an upbeat voice convince them to buy more crap. But it doesn’t appear to be working, according to a rep … | Continue reading
I’ve always had a frustrating relationship with the Internet thanks to where I lived. Long hallways or brick walls were in the way of a strong connection, requiring me to get inventive with Ethernet cables, antenna extenders, and SSID names. Mesh networks, which use multiple rout … | Continue reading
Buying a robotic vacuum cleaner probably sounds like a great idea. Who the hell likes to vacuum? But if it was marketed as an internet-connected device with a microphone and camera that wanders your house at all hours of the day, you should probably skip out. | Continue reading
Apple is just one little bump away from being the world’s first trillion-dollar public company and following another solid earnings report, it’s announced that it will punish some of the people who helped build its success. Affiliates who’ve promoted apps and taken a small cut of … | Continue reading
Facebook on Tuesday announced its banning of eight pages, 17 profiles, and seven Instagram accounts that engaged in what it described as online political activity that was both “inauthentic” and ultimately an “abuse” of its platform. While the activity was not attributed to anybo … | Continue reading
Space, as we all know, is the final frontier. It’s the star-spangled playground in which our imaginations run amok, and the setting for stories that made us fall in love with sci-fi. Some of us spent hours pretending we were the Doctor’s companions, helping him find Gallifrey fro … | Continue reading
China has an army of internet censors who comb through the web and block information that the government doesn’t want its people to see. But the job of the censors is about to get easer if Google has its way. The tech giant is planning to release a new censored version of its sea … | Continue reading
A team of Russian scientists is lining themselves up to be the opening cast of a John Carpenter film. Earlier this month, in the journal Doklady Biological Sciences, they announced they had apparently discovered ancient nematode worms that were able to resurrect themselves after … | Continue reading
Scientists have just defined a new shape called the scutoid (SCOO-toid) while studying epithelial cells, the building blocks of embryos that eventually end up forming our skin and lining our organs and blood vessels. They think the scutoid shape is extremely efficient at keeping … | Continue reading
Monika Glennon has lived in Huntsville, Alabama, for the last 12 years. Other than a strong Polish accent, she fits a certain stereotype of the All-American life. She’s blonde. Her husband is a veteran Marine. Her two children, a boy and a girl, joined the military as adults. She … | Continue reading
The world of the Expanse novels is getting a whole new tabletop RPG early next year. In many ways, it’s a return to the roots Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham’s award-winning book series actually began as, well before the beloved television show. | Continue reading
“Threshold” is one of the most infamous Star Trek episodes ever. You know what’ we’re talking about—the one with Warp 10 and the weird evolved amphibians. Well, it was also the recent subject of a fake scientific research paper submitted in a test to expose the ever-growing probl … | Continue reading
Monika Glennon has lived in Huntsville, Alabama, for the last 12 years. Other than a strong Polish accent, she fits a certain stereotype of the All-American life. She’s blonde. Her husband is a veteran Marine. Her two children, a boy and a girl, joined the military as adults. She … | Continue reading
Internal company documents from IBM show that medical experts working with the company’s Watson supercomputer found “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations” when using the software, according to a report from Stat News. | Continue reading
Amazon’s controversial face recognition software, called Rekognition, misidentified more than two dozen members of Congress as people arrested for crimes. The false identifications were made when the ACLU of Northern California tasked Rekognition with matching photos of all 535 m … | Continue reading
Windows 10, Microsoft’s current version of its operating has long tormented users with a hard-to-bypass policy of forced updates. It will soon try to take the edge off by using machine learning to determine whether a user is actually using a computer when it updates. | Continue reading
The Moon today is not habitable. It’s covered in potentially killer dust and seemingly dry as a bone. But though it seems wild to think, a new perspective wonders: What if the Moon used to be friendly to life? | Continue reading
The Black Hills mountain range, which stretches from South Dakota to Wyoming, is known for its lush forests, scenic waterfalls, and dense, intricate cave systems. But 150 million years ago, humongous, long-necked dinosaurs called sauropods roamed there—and scientists just identif … | Continue reading
As an Uber driver, you have to deal with low wages, an uncertain future, and the possibility of getting yelled at by the company’s billionaire founder. There’s also the more common issue of drunk people puking in your back seat. But a news report claims passengers in Miami are ge … | Continue reading
Dozens of defendants were sentenced to prison on a wealth of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy charges relating to a complex call center scheme operating from India, the Department of Justice announced on Monday. A ring of scammers operating both in India and the U.S. coerc … | Continue reading
Professional astronomers are busy people. Some are mapping distant galaxies, others are listening for aliens, and more still are searching for habitable planets—which, it seems, we might one day need. But on occasion, they’re also called upon to do something that shouldn’t requir … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, scientists from Stanford University concluded that a strange skeleton known as the Atacama Mummy belonged to a human girl whose physical malformations were the result of several severe genetic mutations. A team of international experts is now questioning these … | Continue reading
Scientists made nanoparticles that spin around each other a billion times per second, the fastest mechanical rotation on record. They want to use these spinning particles to study the very fabric of spacetime. | Continue reading
Scientists are scrambling to find painkillers that can ease suffering without the addictive potential of opioids. One potential solution, a new study out Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine suggests, might involve creating modified versions of the common wrinkle treatment … | Continue reading
Many of us enjoy the odd glass of wine or beer, but every once in a while we like to throw down and get completely wasted. But for many Americans, these binge-drinking sessions aren’t as “every once in a while” as we’d like to believe. New research shows that nearly 20 percent of … | Continue reading
Over the past few years, there’s been a steady rise in the rate of Americans who die by suicide and drugs each year. But while much of the attention surrounding these deaths has focused on the opioid crisis, a new study out Wednesday in the BMJ highlights a different aspect of th … | Continue reading
In a new interview published today, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg goes long on a wide range of topics including selling data, taking holocaust deniers at their word, fake news, and one simple idea that’s crazy enough, it just might work. | Continue reading
Considering Android’s massive mobile market share, this was pretty much an inevitability. But today it finally happened for real: The EU slapped Google’s parent company Alphabet with a record fine of nearly $5.1 billion for violating European antitrust regulations. | Continue reading
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was anointed as the richest man in modern history this week, and he’s just a hair’s breadth away from being worth more than the entire Walmart dynasty. The original big-box retailer is feeling the pressure and is reportedly looking into launching it own … | Continue reading
Looks like Amazon Studios is getting into the role-playing business. It’s developing a sci-fi series based on Tales From The Loop, the crowd-funded art project from Simon Stålenhag that was also turned into a role-playing game. | Continue reading
The second day of a three-day strike by Amazon warehouse workers near Madrid coinciding with the e-commerce giant’s Prime Day promotion escalated significantly on Tuesday, with trade unions telling Spanish newspaper Público that police in riot gear had charged the strikers multip … | Continue reading
Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, called for federal regulation of face recognition in a new blog post on Friday. Half of all adults already have their face in a federal database, and vendors are supplying face recognition technology to schools, airports, … | Continue reading
The Herpetologists’ League rescinded its annual Distinguished Herpetologist award after winner Dick Vogt showed racy photos during his acceptance address. | Continue reading
To help us grok the immensity of the cosmos, the European Space Agency has released a remarkable image of space in which every point is an entire galaxy. If you didn’t feel insignificant before seeing this, you sure as hell will now. | Continue reading