Apple disclosed on Friday that “a very small percentage” of iPhone 8 smartphones have a “manufacturing defect” that can freeze the screen, make the device restart unexpectedly, or even cause it to not turn on. If you own an iPhone 8, you can check whether or not you’re affected by putting your phone’s serial number […]
It has its directive: seek and destroy. And the underwater drone RangerBot is ready to put its lethal skills to work on Australia’s horrifically threatened Great Barrier Reef. But it’s not the coral that’s the target of its deadly focus. RangerBot is more like a bodyguard, trying to protect the reef from one of its […]
NASA on Thursday (Aug. 30) announced a deadline for its recovery of the Mars rover Opportunity, which has been silent for months while battling a dust storm, and some scientists intimately familiar with the project say that new timeline doesn’t do the grizzled robot justice. The rover, which launched in 2003 and landed on Mars […]
Astronauts on the International Space Station worked swiftly today (Aug. 30) to repair a minor air leak in the Russian segment of the orbiting laboratory. Although they managed to stabilize the slowly dropping air pressure inside the station, the repair job was not yet complete. Astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station learned of […]
The Earth’s magnetic field extends from pole to pole and is strongly affected by solar wind from the sun. This “wind” is a stream of charged particles constantly ejected from the sun’s surface. Occasional sudden flashes of brightness known as solar flares release even more particles into the wind. Sometimes, the flares are followed by […]
A new Google product for securely logging into web services is made by a company based in China called Feitian, CNBC has learned. The arrangement is somewhat unusual given Google’s continuing hardware push in recent years, as the company has sought to compete more directly with device makers like LG and Samsung. Google doubled down […]
Google on Thursday took the wraps off a great new Google Assistant trick, one that isn’t available on competing devices from Amazon and which could turn out to be a must-have feature for smart speaker buyers. Going forward, Google Assistant will work with two different languages at the same time, which must be great news […]
Early in the morning on Saturday, 26 May 2018, the AWAKE collaboration at CERN successfully accelerated electrons for the first time using a wakefield generated by protons zipping through a plasma. A paper describing this important result was published in the journal Nature today. The electrons were accelerated by a factor of around 100 over […]
Who needs a desk when you can just sit back in a recliner and surround yourself with monitors? That’s the basic idea behind Acer’s Predator Thronos gaming chair. It looks less like a piece of furniture and more like something you’d find in an arcade. The chair measures 1.5 meters tall, has an ergonomic seat […]
Samsung will be announcing its first-ever 8K television for commercial release, the Q900R, at IFA 2018 this week, according to a press release. It’s a QLED device that comes in four big screen sizes (65”, 75”, 82” and 85”). Samsung wrote that the Q900R has a very impressive 4,000 nit peak brightness and supports a […]
Six years after discovering the Higgs boson, physicists have observed how the particle decays — a monumental contribution to scientists’ understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics and the universe at large, study researchers said. Excitement swirled in the physics community when, in 2012, physicists discovered the Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted by […]
Intel is introducing six new CPUs to its mobile lineup today. They’re not something you should ditch your old laptop for, but they do bring some welcome improvements for upcoming mainstream devices. The new processors are part of the U and Y-series of mobile chips, and are codenamed Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake, respectively. The […]
