In celebration of World Emoji Day, which takes place tomorrow, Apple today updated its Apple Leadership site to introduce Memoji avatars for all of the key executives listed on the page. Tim Cook, Angela Ahrendts, Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, Luca Maestri, Phil Schiller, and the rest of the leadership team are now represented […]
Category: Technology
Instapaper buys itself back from Pinterest
Back in 2013, developer Marco Arment sold his popular read-it-later app Instapaper to Betaworks, the company that had previously acquired Digg. Two years ago, Pinterest bought the little company to “accelerate discovering and saving articles on Pinterest.” Now, the very same team that’s been working on it for the past five years is taking Instapaper […]
Hybrid device harvests both mechanical and magnetic energy
A new hybrid energy-harvesting device may one day replace the need for batteries in certain low-power electronics devices. The new device collects ambient wasted energy from both mechanical vibrations and magnetic fields to generate sustainable electricity, which could potentially provide enough power to run wireless sensors, cardio pacemakers, and other applications. The researchers, led by […]
Chinese Researchers Achieve Stunning Quantum-Entanglement Record
Scientists have just packed 18 qubits — the most basic units of quantum computing — into just six weirdly connected photons. That’s an unprecedented three qubits per photon, and a record for the number of qubits linked to one another via quantum entanglement. So why is this exciting? All the work that goes on in […]
Apple Says Third-Generation Keyboards Exclusive to 2018 MacBook Pro
Last month, Apple initiated a Keyboard Service Program for MacBook and MacBook Pro, after determining that a “small percentage” of the keyboards in 2015-2017 MacBook and 2016-2017 MacBook Pro models may experience keys that feel “sticky,” repeat, or do not respond in a consistent manner. Apple did not identify a cause for the issues, which […]
Watch a self-driving car complete Goodwood’s legendary hill climb
Want a hint of how the automotive zeitgeist is changing? You only need to look at the just-ended Goodwood Festival of Speed. Roborace has carved out a small niche in history with the first self-driving vehicle to successfully complete Goodwood’s famous hill climb, where vehicles have to tackle a gradual 300-foot ascent that includes narrow […]
Cygnus cargo ship released from space station, heads for extended mission
Closing out 52 days at the International Space Station, an automated Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo craft left the research outpost Sunday to climb into a higher orbit for deployment of six CubeSats and further engineering experiments, before de-orbiting over Pacific Ocean later this month. European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, at the controls of the […]
Ultra-sensitive radio telescope debuts in South Africa
Another piece of the Square Kilometer Array’s puzzle just fell into place. South Africa has officially switched on MeerKAT, billed as the most sensitive radio telescope of its type on the planet. Some parts of the array have been gathering data, but it’s now nearly ready to use interferometry from all 64 dishes to map […]
Apple’s new MacBook Pro keyboard may avoid sticky keys after all
Apple explicitly told CNET that though its 2018 MacBook Pro comes with a new third-generation “butterfly switch” keyboard, it didn’t do any new engineering or tweaks to prevent the dreaded “sticky key” issue that’s sparked multiple lawsuits and a free Apple repair program over the past few months. But gadget repair and teardown site iFixit […]
Smartphones are down, PCs are up, and yes, it’s still 2018
The PC market has posted a surprise growth in shipments this year, the first such increase in 2012 — and the reason why probably won’t come as a surprise. Market research firms Gartner and IDC are both out with fresh numbers showing a year-over-year bump for the second quarter — Gartner pegging it at 1.4 […]
MeerKAT radio telescope captures clearest image of galaxy’s center
A 64-dish radio telescope called MeerKAT has been fired up in Carnarvon, South Africa. In the future, MeerKAT will be part of a larger instrument called Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a massive multi-radio telescope project expected to span about one square kilometer, which is what the SKA name refers to. The project won’t be fully […]
Neutrino From Supermassive Black Hole in Another Galaxy Detected in Antarctica
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, uncountable trillions of neutrinos have passed through your body. These ghostly particles rain down on us from the sun, but also from sources outside our solar system. Just a tiny fraction of neutrinos will run into anything on Earth, but scientists just detected one from […]