Tech News Feed

Yep, there are a total of five different Deadpool 2 post-credits scenes, and they're all wonderful. Spoilers ahead!

The Swedish payments company was preparing to IPO when PayPal swooped in and snapped it up.

There's now one more place on the internet you can watch Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tie the knot.

Some folks believe that 8K TV is overkill, but cinematographer Phil Holland just flaunted video of New York City captured in sweeping 12K. He used three RED Monstro 8K VistaVision cameras (turned sideways) mounted on a special rig called the Shotover...

Technology developed for urban crimes can help localize blasts that destroy coral reefs

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. Friday has arrived. Take a minute and find out what's going on in Fortnite this weekend, plus some new details about Elon Musk's Hyperloop plan.

Microsoft is treating Xbox One owners to another firmware update today. The headline addition is Discord integration, allowing players to link their Xbox Live and third-party chat accounts. The process is a little convoluted — you have to start...

The U.S. government may begin charging users for access to five decades of satellite images of Earth. Quartz reports: Nature reports that the Department of Interior has asked an advisory board to consider the consequences of charging for the data generated by the Landsat program, which is the largest continuously collected set of Earth images taken in space and has been freely available to the public since 2008. Since 1972, Landsat has used eight different satellites to gather images of the Earth, with a ninth currently slated for a December 2020 launch. The data are widely used by government agencies, and since it became free, by an increasing number of academics, private companies and journalists. "As of March 31, 2018, more than 75 million Landsat scenes have been downloaded from the USGS-managed archive!" the agency noted on the 10th anniversary of the program. Now, the government says the cost of sharing the data has grown as more people access it. Advocates for open data say the public benefit produced through research and business activity far outweigh those costs. A 2013 survey cited by Nature found that the dataset generated $2 billion in economic activity, compared to an $80 million budget for the program.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Uber division working on flying taxis has just lost its chief: according to The Wall Street Journal and The Information, unit head Jeff Holden has stepped down and left the company. Holden's departure came as a surprise, considering the ride-shar...

A new electric scooter-sharing service called Skip has launched in Washington DC, promising sturdier and safer boards than its competitors'. It was formed by the founder of Boosted Boards, which is known for making electric skateboards. Shareable ele...

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days, you've probably heard about the controversy over "Yanny" and "Laurel." The internet has been abuzz over an audio clip in which the name being said depends on the listener. Some hear "Laurel" while others hear "Yanny." Ian Vargo, an audio enthusiast who spends most of his working hours of the day listening to and editing audio, helps explain why we hear the name that we do: Human speech is actually composed of many frequencies, in part because we have a resonant chest cavity which creates lower frequencies, and the throat and mouth which creates higher frequencies. The word "laurel" contains a combination of both which are therefore present in the original recording at vocabulary.com, but the clip that you most likely heard has accentuated higher frequencies due to imperfections in the audio that were created by data compression. To make it worse, the playback device that many people first heard the audio clip playing out of was probably a speaker system built into a cellular phone, which is too small to accurately recreate low frequencies. This helpful interactive tool from The New York Times allows you to use a slider to more clearly hear one or the other. Pitch shifting the audio clip up seems to accentuate "laurel" whereas shifting it down accentuates "yanny." In summary, this perfect storm of the human voice creating both low and high frequencies, the audio clip having been subject to data compression used to create smaller, more convenient files, and our tendency to listen out of devices with subpar playback components lead to an apparent near-even split of the population hearing "laurel" or "yanny."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Chrome browser's upcoming versions will focus on highlighting its negative security indicators, even going as far as sunsetting its positive ones. Chrome Security Product Manager Emily Schechter has announced that Chrome 69, which will be availab...

Tonight at The Boring Company Information Session not all of the talk centered on flamethrowers. Elon Musk and project leader Steve Davis described many details of their visions for an underground network that could alleviate traffic problems in big...

The White House, much like the world, is split on the whole "Laurel or Yanny" fiasco.

Also: They feature spiders who hunt on water. Great stuff. Amazing news. Sleep tight everyone!

Getting from Dodger Stadium to LAX in 10 minutes? Sold.

The company starts delivering in two weeks.

Service sought to incorporate viral meme into tweet about killing Taliban militants.

Tonight at an event to explain the details of his tunneling project, The Boring Company, Elon Musk was asked about the 20,000 flamethrowers it sold a few months ago. Musk said that they "encountered some delivery challenges" when it came to shipping...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The birthrate fell for nearly every group of women of reproductive age in the U.S. in 2017, reflecting a sharp drop that saw the fewest newborns since 1978, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 3,853,472 births in the U.S. in 2017 -- "down 2 percent from 2016 and the lowest number in 30 years," the CDC said. The general fertility rate sank to a record low of 60.2 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 -- a 3 percent drop from 2016, the CDC said in its tally of provisional data for the year. The results put the U.S. further away from a viable replacement rate -- the standard for a generation being able to replicate its numbers. "The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971," according to the report from CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. "The decline in the rate from 2016 to 2017 was the largest single-year decline since 2010," the CDC said. The 2017 numbers also represent a 10-year fall from 2007, when the U.S. finally broke its post-World War baby boom record, with more than 4.3 million births.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.