Новости за 25.01.2018

The Doomsday Clock is now two minutes to midnight, as close as it’s ever been to the hour standing in for the apocalypse because of threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, and fake news. So, should we take the Doomsday Clock seriously?

SpaceX, Tesla, and Boring Company CEO Elon Musk is known for making bold promises on deadlines he often can’t keep. That’s why this one from last December sounded more like an Onion headline than anything: “After [we sell] 50k [Boring Company] hats, we will start selling The Boring Company flamethrower.” On Christmas Eve, after selling said 50,000 hats, he tweeted that the flamethrowers were coming “soon!”

Ford Motor Company announced today that it was acquiring two transportation software companies, Autonomic and TransLoc. It also announced it would be reorganizing its mobility subsidiary in a bid to accelerate the delivery of new products, like microtransit services and self-driving cars. The news comes as the automaker’s stocks remained stagnant despite a raft of high-profile announcements during CES and the Detroit Auto Show about its investment in mobility services and electric cars.

The debate of nature versus nurture is never simple, and one reason is because nature influences nurture. A father’s genetically predisposed anxiety will affect the environment he creates for his daughter, even if he doesn’t pass down the trait itself to his happy-go-lucky child. Scientists are now quantifying these effects in humans, and showing how the genes your parents don’t pass on can still influence you.

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop is one of the best laptops on the market, but until now, customers have only been able to pick it up with the more limited Windows 10 S operating system. Now, though, Microsoft is selling the Surface Laptop through its commercial store, and for the first time the company is giving users the option to buy a device with Windows 10 Pro already installed, via Neowin.

On a good day, my phone battery never drops below 35 percent. A dead phone is a useless one, and the spike of anxiety that accompanies that fear is enough to send me scurrying for the nearest outlet. But when my charger is home in bed, and I’m out at a bar, there’s nothing I can do but embrace the inevitable: my battery is on its way to its own funeral. At the very least, I’ve found a conversation app that turns that feeling of desperation into anticipation. Welcome to Die With Me, the chatroom... Читать дальше...

Amazon just released an ad for the Echo Spot on YouTube. The ad called, “Be Together More,” is only a minute long, and it’s full of feels. The commercial tells a heartfelt story about a grandma who is left home alone with her cat after a visit from her family. She’s gifted an Amazon Echo Spot that comes with an instruction, “Just ask: ‘Alexa, Call Home.’” She studies the gadget curiously, which looks like a futuristic alarm clock, before realizing she can use it to video call her loved ones. To her awe... Читать дальше...

We know plastic trash in the oceans kills birds, turtles, and whales, but now, scientists have found it’s making corals sick, too. In reefs in Asia and Australia, corals tangled in plastic are about 90 percent more likely to get a disease, according to new research. And that can cause corals, which are already stressed by warming ocean waters, to die.

Apple gifted us with new Animoji, more insight into battery health, and an update for ARKit yesterday with its release of iOS 11.3. Buried in its update notes, the company also says it now supports Advanced Mobile Location, which automatically sends a user's location to emergency services when someone calls.

Snapchat has always prided itself on real-time sharing. That’s why the app opens to the camera: it’s designed to get you sharing whatever is happening in the moment. That’s why, until today, snaps posted from your camera roll got a white border around them. It was a subtle cue from the app that older photos and videos are considered second-class citizens inside Snapchat. But as of today, that’s going away.

Amazon is eliminating the frustration of having to constantly re-enter your cable credentials whenever you install certain apps on its Fire TV streaming gadgets. Like Apple before it, Amazon has now introduced a Single Sign-On feature that remembers your account information across TV Everywhere apps from the likes of A&E, AMC, HGTV, and more. (Supported networks and participating cable operators vary between the two.)

The former Uber CEO has one less thing to worry about

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Damien Chazelle, the filmmaker known for award-winning films La La Land and Whiplash, will be making a new TV series for none other than Apple. Variety reports that Chazelle will write and direct every episode of the new drama, with the plot and other details being kept secret for the time being. The currently untitled series will also be executive produced by Jordan Horowitz and Fred Berger — two more La La Land production alums.

The “eating Tide Pods” meme continues to be one of the more baffling parts of 2018 — which is impressive since we’re just four weeks into the year — but the ramifications of the meme continue to rise. Earlier this week, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) released another alert warning consumers not to eat the pods. The number of reported cases of teenagers intentionally eating the laundry detergent-filled gel capsules this year has more than doubled, from 39 incidents on January 16th to 86 as of January 22nd. Читать дальше...

Does your boyfriend text you back? Does your boyfriend like your selfies on Instagram? Does your boyfriend know you exist?

Last year, the FCC, under Trump-appointed chairman Ajit Pai, launched an advisory committee on high-speed internet access, saying it planned to bring broadband to more people. But according to San Jose’s mayor, who quit the committee in protest today, the telecommunications industry has taken hold of the initiative, advancing its own interests at the expense of consumers.

Apple has expanded its fleet of self-driving cars in California, registering an additional two dozen vehicles with the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s a significant expansion for a company that has been seen as lagging in the race to build self-driving cars.

CNN has shut down Casey Neistat’s Beme after buying the company for $25 million in November 2016, reports BuzzFeed News. CNN bought Beme in a bid to harness Neistat’s (at the time) 6 million viewers, with the hopes of turning the company into an independently operated daily online news show and a core part of CNN’s offerings that would appeal to a younger demographic. Neistat, however, was unable to figure out a viable strategy because of creative differences and sluggish process. Instead, he will be departing from CNN. Читать дальше...

Apple’s HomePod hasn’t started shipping yet, but Sonos is already making moves to protect its rule over the multi-room audio market. Today the company announced that for a limited time, you’ll be able to buy two Sonos One smart speakers for $349 — the price of a single HomePod. Sonos isn’t specifying how long the promotion, which officially kicks off tomorrow, will last. After an initial delay, the HomePod is set to launch on February 9th.

Dell is introducing a new Chromebook line called the 5000 series that’s meant to bring ever-so-slightly higher-end features to its education-focused lineup of Chrome OS laptops.

Twitter is working on a new tool that will make it easier for users to post videos to the social networking site, according to Bloomberg. Currently, to upload videos with tweets or broadcast live from the app, users have to tap on the compose tweet icon then select the camera or live button. The process requires several taps, and Bloomberg says the new camera product will address this by reducing the number of steps. The move falls in line with rival apps like Snapchat, which opens right to the camera... Читать дальше...

For the last decade or so, I’ve looked to my friends in Japan with considerable envy. They would go off on grand adventures together, seeking out huge, wonderful creatures, which they’d then take down through the power of teamwork. These conflicts were epic in scale, and I’d often hear stories about how satisfying it was to hunt a massive dragon and succeed at just the last second, with your health almost entirely depleted.

Google is releasing a new version of Chrome to users this week, and it includes a number of new interesting features. The best addition is the ability to mute entire sites that autoplay videos. There are a number of sites on the web that have decided to annoy users by playing videos that follow you while you scroll a page with the sound on. Instead of frantically closing the tab (or muting it) and swearing at your monitor, you can now just simply right-click the offending tab and mute the entire site for good. Читать дальше...

Exactly one month from now, Samsung will unveil its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S9. It will be the biggest attraction at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and it will set the bar for Android flagships for the rest of the year. It will also be Samsung’s first opportunity to respond to Apple’s radically redesigned iPhone X. And, inevitably for being the latest and best product from the world’s most prolific smartphone vendor, the S9 will sell in the millions.

The lure of machine learning isn’t always about big new features; often, what it does best are small tweaks that subtly improve user experience. So it is with Twitter’s use of neural networks to automatically crop picture previews to their most interesting part.