Jane Hu

With 137 million subscribers, Netflix is a giant in video streaming. But while it dominates in the US, it’s less commanding in Asia, where it competes with cheaper alternatives. Netflix subscriptions cost between $8-$10 a month worldwide, but YouTube, for instance, is free, and services like Viu ($2-$5/month), India’s Hotstar (~$3/month), and HOOQ ($1.40/week) charge significantly less. In hopes of attracting new subscribers, Netflix has quietly begun testing a mobile-only streaming option in Malaysia.

If you have a smartphone, you probably have at least one Google app on your phone. Up until this summer, Android phones came preloaded with bundled Google apps like YouTube, Google Maps, and Gmail, which consistently rank among the most popular in Apple’s App Store store as well.

One of president Trump’s first actions after taking office in 2017 was declaring a travel ban on citizens from several countries with majority-Muslim populations, such as Iran, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, from traveling to the US. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in June that Trump does indeed have the authority to declare such a ban. The ban is especially difficult for students studying in the US or citizens with family in those countries, but also has other far-reaching consequences, like stifling academics’ work.

After last month’s shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky, reports revealed that in both cases, the shooters espoused radical, white-supremacist ideologies. According to the Anti-Defamation League, violence by white supremacists is on the rise in the US.

NASA’s logos and images are public domain, so companies like Urban Outfitters, Vans, and even Coach have taken full advantage with space-themed apparel. Now, there’s a new product based on NASA images for true nerds: an uber-complex Earth puzzle.

President Trump says that his proposed wall between Mexico and the US is to “secure the border” from illegal immigrants, but its effects would go far beyond dividing humans. In a letter sent to secretary of homeland security Kirstjen M. Nielsen on Nov. 6, over 170 environment and conservation groups voiced their concerns (pdf) about how building the wall would affect “environmentally sensitive conservation areas.”

Though it’s known as one of the original car manufacturers, Ford’s been trying to shed that image and step into a more modern role. Today (Nov. 8), it announced that it’s tapping into the biggest new trend in transportation: electric scooters.

In October, an astronaut on the International Space Station snapped a photo of what looks like another world, glowing yellow and orange. But that photo, taken from 250 miles over Australia, is just Earth with a strange tint due to an atmospheric phenomenon called airglow.

If you’ve had the misfortune of getting food poisoning, you don’t soon forget it. The good news is that epidemiologists, scientists that study diseases, are working on how to find sources of food-borne illnesses faster, and the key may be your Google search history.

Twenty-nine years ago, as the architect behind the web’s first browser and server, Tim Berners-Lee built the internet. ”I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries,” he wrote in a 2017 open letter. But, he says, he’s become “increasingly worried” about new online trends, like lack of privacy, the spread of misinformation, and lack of transparency in online political advertising. Over the last decade, Berners-Lee’s focus has become saving the internet from itself, and now he’s recruiting companies, governments, and citizens to join his cause.

When Apple unveiled the new iPad Pro last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the tablet a computer. With an 11-inch iPad Pro starting at $799 and a 12.9-inch model at $999, the prices are certainly in line with laptops, but do its new features live up to being an entry-level laptop? Here’s what reviewers have to say about the iPad Pro.

This morning, employees streamed out of Google’s Seattle campus and into a nearby plaza overlooking the Lake Washington ship canal, nervously milling around. Some wore hoodies representing Google teams—such as Android, Cloud, and YouTube—while others tucked their Google badges away so their names were not visible. Several carried cardboard signs: “Not OK, Google,” one read. “Protect victims, not harassers, don’t be evil,” said another, using Google’s own slogan. Others read, simply, “WTF.”

Apple released an update to its Apple Watch software yesterday (Oct. 30). But just a day later, the company removed the option to update amid various reports from users that the update “bricked” their watches, leaving the device stuck in an endless reboot loop.

It lights our sky day after day, so the sun feels familiar to us. But there’s a lot we still don’t know about it. That’s why NASA launched its Parker Solar Probe—to learn more about how the sun works. This week, the spacecraft broke two records: It flew closer to the sun than any other manmade object, and moved faster than any other manmade object, according to a NASA press release.

If you have a smart phone, you’ve seen the icon at the top of your screen that shows you the type network you’re on, like 3G, Edge, or LTE. Now, 5G is on the way—but what does that actually mean? Here’s a quick primer.

Since its launch in March 2009, NASA’s Kepler telescope has identified new worlds far, far away. But today, its work comes to an end; NASA announced this afternoon (Oct. 30) that the telescope is out of fuel and will retire.

There are few things that emulate the instantaneous feedback of a Facebook thumbs up, a Twitter like, or a Reddit upvote. They’re the digital equivalent of a gold star on your homework, a pat on the back, or a room full of applauding fans, but they arrive much more quickly and consistently than in-person affirmation.

On Oct. 26, US authorities charged Florida resident Cesar Sayoc with sending 13 explosive devices to prominent public figures, including former president Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The internet immediately uncovered Sayoc’s social media accounts, which were promptly suspended.

Electric bikes are enjoying a moment. Companies such as Lime and Jump have introduced e-bikes to cities across the US, and e-bike sales in the US jumped 25% between 2016 and 2017. Now, even UPS is getting in on the trend: On Thursday (Oct. 25), the global logistics company announced that it’ll be piloting an e-bike delivery system in downtown Seattle, Washington.

When I was a graduate student, I met with a professor I was collaborating with to talk about our shared project. “I know there was a paper at NIPS about this,” he said. My brain whirred. Nips as in… nipples? He couldn’t have said ”nips,” right? The moment passed, so I went home and googled it. Sure enough, there’s a conference called Neural Information Processing Systems, or NIPS for short. And just yesterday (Oct. 24), NIPS announced that after “extensive discussions,” they were not going to change their name.

In the grand scheme of human history, the baby photo is a pretty new invention, but now that smart phones are ubiquitous, the first years of today’s children are better documented than any other generation’s. Since social media is ubiquitous as well, many of those photos end up online, shared to parents’ Facebook and Instagram accounts. In a 2016 study, parents shared an average of 116 photos of their kids (pdf, p. 5), and the Child Rescue Coalition, a Florida-based nonprofit dedicated to shielding children from predators, estimates that 90% of children have photos on social media by the age of 2. As kids grow up, they resent their lack of control over what their parents post.

In 1962, US president John F. Kennedy famously offered up an explanation about why NASA was setting its sights on the moon.

As a rash of suspicious packages have been found across the US today (Oct. 24), bomb squads have had their hands full with investigating packages’ contents.

This morning, the Secret Service intercepted suspicious packages sent to the homes of Hillary Clinton in Westchester County, New York, and Barack Obama in Washington, DC.