The most valuable public company in the world has been on a hiring spree. As of Dec. 31, headcount at Alphabet, the new parent company for Google, stood at 61,814, up from 53,600 a year earlier.
Forget racing drones, or fighting drones: The sport of the future is strapping yourself onto a snowboard, and being dragged around by drone. It’s sort of like kitesurfing or wakeboarding, but for the 21st century.
At 11pm UK time (6pm ET) today, the window for transferring players into and out of the English Premier League will close. After all the paperwork has been filed, and every player has stood smiling while holding up their new team’s jersey, a new record will have been hit: Between the winter and summer transfer windows for this season, the 20 teams in the Premier League will have spent a combined £1 billion ($1.44 billion) on new players.
The robots are starting to open their eyes.
In the future, self-driving cars, trains and buses will carry us all wherever we need to go. And while companies like Alphabet and Ford reach for that distant dream, it seems that French company EasyMile is already there: Reuters reported today, Jan. 28, that EasyMile’s first driverless bus is now shuttling passengers on public roads in the Dutch town of Wageningen.
“How are we going to get there—Uber?”
Computers have slowly started to encroach on activities we previously believed only the brilliantly sophisticated human brain could handle. IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat Grand Master Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, and in 2011 IBM’s Watson beat former human winners at the quiz game Jeopardy. But the ancient board game Go has long been one of the major goals of artificial intelligence research. It’s understood to be one of the most difficult games for computers to handle due to the sheer number of possible moves a player can make at any given point. Until now, that is.
Apple just reported its first-quarter earnings results, and although sales of iPhones, iPads, and Macs were either flat or lower than the same quarter last year, there was one bright spot in the company’s revenue: its services business.
This is an article from 2016. Read our most recent coverage of the Doomsday Clock: In 2022, the Doomsday Clock didn’t change for the second year running
Hurtling at 70 mph around tight corners and narrow straightaways, jostling for position against other racers, your favorite racer closes in on the finish line. You watch him round the final turn, but he cuts it a little too tightly and crashes into a concrete wall, smashing into a million pieces.
In December, the US Federal Aviation Administration mandated that anyone owning a consumer drone weighing more than half a pound would have to pay $5 to register in a government database. But even though Americans were expected to purchase between 700,000 and 1 million drones during the Christmas season, the FAA said today (Jan. 22) that only 295,306 owners have used its new portal to register drones since it went live Dec. 21, 2015.
Each January, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas allows companies to showcase for industry insiders, manufacturers, suppliers, and the press what they believe the future will look like. There are see-through computer displays, bendable TV screens, fridges with computers in them, cars that drive themselves. All are meant to be a glimpse at the technology that’s just around the corner.
After 300 days of floating around the International Space Station, you, too, would probably be looking for new things to do. And NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, whose year in space ends soon, has found just the thing to entertain himself while also educating those of us back on planet Earth: space ping-pong.
A new line of Star Wars-branded infant bodysuits seems to be taking the actions of the Sith lord a little too seriously. Walt Disney Parks and Resorts has issued a recall for about 10,000 of the items, saying that the snaps that hold the bodysuit together can come detached, “posing a choking hazard to young children.”
We’ve got a bad feeling about this: Disney announced today that the next in third trilogy of Star Wars films, Episode VIII, will be postponed until Dec. 15, 2017. The film had originally been slated to be released in May, 2017.
Back in the day, those who dreamed of playing Carnegie Hall or going on international stadium tours had to start their quest by buying time at expensive recording studios to make demos. There were home-recording setups, but if you wanted something that sounded professional, you had to pay the price. Then came desktop software like ProTools that let anyone make decent recordings at home. After that, Apple launched GarageBand, a free program that shipped on every Mac, opening up music making to anyone who could afford a laptop. Now, Apple appears to be upending the recording industry again with Music Memos, a new app that lets anyone with an iPhone easily record songs wherever they are.
Writing pithy posts that people will like on social media is hard: Every company in the world hires social media experts for that very reason. But a new patent from Google might have the answer for those of us who need help crafting our posts about the latest online trends.
It’s 3am and you just need to print out one piece of paper. Your day depends on printing out that piece of paper. Predictably, the printer says it’s out of ink—a warning you hadn’t heeded earlier, because it wasn’t urgent. Now it’s an emergency.
Humanity seems to be intent on teaching robots how to destroy us. We’ve taught them to keep steady when they get knocked and to keep going when they get damaged. Now scientists are teaching them how to stay upright when we jump kick them in the back.
In the future, we’ll come home to find our dishes clean, our floors vacuumed, and our surfaces dusted, all thanks to our dutiful servant bots. But until then, there’s the multimillion-dollar Atlas robot, created by Google corporate sibling Boston Dynamics.
Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street? It seems to have moved. The legendary children’s educational program debuted Saturday (Jan. 16) on the premium cable network HBO, after spending its first 45 seasons on US public television.
Matt Groening, who created the genre-defining adult animation comedy The Simpsons, may be on the verge of a new creation. But instead of working with Fox, as he did with The Simpsons and Futurama, Groening is in talks with Netflix, according to Variety.
There are so many simple activities we take for granted thanks to gravity. Things like going to the bathroom, eating dinner, and getting some sleep don’t require an undue amount of strategic planning. But in space, even the most basic activities are a challenge.
Weighed down, fumbling through the world with tunnel vision, unable to shake the ringing in my ears, I aged about 50 years in five minutes at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
