Geek News

Netflix is determined to cement its place in the talk show landscape . The streaming service has unveiled plans for a weekly late-night show hosted by Michelle Wolf, a contributor to the Daily Show and a veteran comedienne. While the half-hour program doesn't even have a title yet, it won't be limited to politics and will include the risqué humor "we couldn't do on TV," according to Wolf. The series will debut sometime later in 2018. This definitely isn't Netflix's first fling with talk shows -- it launched Chelsea Handler's series in May 2016, and it's hard to escape the marketing blitz for David Letterman's show. However, it illustrates Netflix's desire to compete directly with the conventional talk show circuit by recruiting its stars. It also highlights a potential weak point for TV networks like Comedy Central. While it's nothing new for comedy contributors to jump at chances to host their own shows (see John Oliver and Saman...

Facebook may be downplaying news in your actual News Feed , but its Watch team is headed in the opposite direction. The social network has announced that it's creating a section in Watch that will feature breaking news stories. News partnership lead Campbell Brown didn't say when it would launch or which outlets would show up, but it recently said the News Feed would prioritize local stories . The Watch tab could easily follow suit. There are a few reasons why Facebook might push news videos even as it reduces its emphasis on shared articles. First and foremost, of course, is money. While you may not see many original news pieces on Watch (which would give Facebook a 45 percent cut of ad revenue), this could keep many people on Facebook and thus viewing ads. When Snapchat and YouTube are big news sources for some users, Facebook might not want to risk ceding any ground. There's also a chance that this could filter out some fake news, although bogus videos certainly aren...

LG will unveil a new version of its flagship phone, the V30 , at the annual Mobile World Congress this year -- and as the rumors said , it'll have an AI-powered camera. The Korean company has developed "Vision AI" to make the phone's camera smarter and easier to use. Vision AI can automatically analyze what you're taking a photo of and can recommend the best shooting mode among the eight (portrait, food, pet, landscape, city, flower, sunrise and sunset) available. It can take the object's angle and color, any reflection in the surroundings, as well as the lighting and saturation levels into account to conjure up the best image possible. The AI also has a handful of shopping capabilities. It can do an image search or scan QR codes to show you where you can purchase the item you're taking a picture of (along with similar products) for the lowest price. In addition, Vision AI will measure the brightness of the actual image you're capturing with your ph...

Twitter is continuing to act on its promise to fight hate speech , however imperfectly. The site has banned Wisconsin Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen after he posted a racist image that placed the face of Cheddar Man (a dark-skinned British ancestor) over actress and soon-to-be-royal Meghan Markle, who's mixed race. The company said it didn't normally comment on individual accounts, but said the permanent suspension was due to "repeated violations" of its terms of service. Nehlen, who's hoping to unseat Paul Ryan in the 2018 mid-term elections, has a long history of overtly expressing his racist views. Twitter suspended him for a week in January over anti-Semitic comments, and he has regularly promoted white supremacist ideology. In private, he used direct message groups to coordinate harassment campaigns. Breitbart supported Nehlen's ultimately unsuccessful run against Ryan in 2016, but distanced itself from him in December 2017. The candidate hadn...

After introducing Keurig-like pods for brewing beer at home, PicoBrew is back with a more traditional all-grain setup. The new Z Series allows brewers to use their own loose grains and hops instead of the company's own pre-packed ingredients. There are also four models, from 2.5 gallons up to 10 gallons -- each one increases brew capacity by 2.5 gallons. Like the Zymatic these units replace, PicoBrew designed these devices for pros, especially since a 5, 7.5 or 10 gallon batch would be enough to put on tap in a tasting room -- for pilot batches, at least. However, experienced homebrewers can also use their expertise for the Z Series. Like all of PicoBrew's devices, the Z Series centers on a clear drawer that holds all of your grains and hops. Add your ingredients, select the recipe and hit start. The machine does all the heavy lifting with a connected brew keg that acts as both boil kettle and fermentation vessel. As long as you've input your recipe correctly (or select...

We hope you weren't planning on sleeping tonight. Boston Dynamics has posted a video showing that its SpotMini robot can hold the door open for its fellow automatons. If one bot needs a helping hand, it'll signal to another machine nearby that can pry the door open and let it through. It's very polite... and more than a little unsettling, especially since it's not clear they'll extend the same courtesy to humans. At least the robots will have manners when they take over. If you're a tad more trusting, this is good news. Robots have typically only had limited cooperation with each other, and this hints at more advanced team-ups where robots can supplement each others' abilities and accomplish more than they would by themselves. That could be helpful for search and rescue missions, or any situation where it would be impractical to equip every robot with the same features. It's a positive move -- so long as the robots remain friendly. Source: Bost...

Our current methods of fighting malignant tumors are wildly inadequate. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments, while sometimes successful, come with massive side effects, mainly because every other cell in the body is also getting bombarded with chemicals and radiation even though the main targets are the tumor cells. Finding a way to specifically target tumor cells while leaving healthy cells alone is something that many researchers are working towards and a new study out today demonstrates that nanorobots made out of DNA could be an effective option. The research team took DNA from a virus and turned it into a sort of DNA sheet. That sheet was then loaded with an enzyme called thrombin -- a chemical that can clot blood -- and the sheet was then rolled into a tube, with the thrombin kept protected inside. To the ends of that DNA tube, the researchers attached small bits of DNA that specifically bind to a molecule found in tumor cells, and they served as a kind of guide for the DN...

Almost a year ago, Blumhouse Productions -- the studio that followed the wild success of Paranormal Activity with hits like Insidious , Whiplash , Split and Get Out -- secured the film rights for the video game Five Nights At Freddy's . Today, the company announced who'd be helming the movie adaptation, and it's...Chris Columbus, best known for directing Home Alone , Home Alone 2 , Mrs. Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potter films. Five Nights At Freddy's is a horror game franchise following nighttime employees trying to survive Chuck E. Cheese-style enterprises where animatronic robots run amok trying to murder the player. It's a weird fit for Columbus, who's most known for tame films about families and magic. True, Columbus has had a broad career in Hollywood beyond just kid-friendly films: He wrote Gremlins and The Goonies , directed Adventures in Babysitting and the film version of the Broadway hit Rent , and produced The Help and The Witch ...

When you send an emoji to a friend, you want it to convey the same information. For example, if you sent a "rolling eyes" emoji to a buddy using a Samsung phone, they might not pick up what you're laying down. That's because 2017's "rolling eyes" emoji looks more like a happy face with eyebrows and a smirk. Luckily, the new Samsung Experience 9.0 (set to release as part of the Android Oreo update for Galaxy S8 users) has tweaked quite a few emoji, including the eye-rolling one, to bring them all more in line with other platform's representations of the Unicode characters. As noted on the Emojipedia blog, the Face Screaming in Fear will now look more like the painting by Edvard Munch instead of the weird anime-thing that Samsung had last year. In addition, the dancing woman emoji will look more like a woman doing the tango than a kid stomping in her sneakers. The man dancing emoji also loses the sneaker outfit and gains a purple disco-style jum...

Instagram is borrowing another feature from Snapchat , although this is one you'll definitely appreciate if you value your privacy. The social site has confirmed to TechCrunch that it's testing a screenshot warning system for Stories. If you're in, you'll get a notice that Story creators can see the screenshots you take. You won't get an alert with each screenshot when you're the creator, but you will see that people took screenshots when looking at your viewer list. There's no word on whether or not this will be a widely available feature. That likely depends on how the warnings affect habits. It might back away if it notices that many users stop watching, for example. If this does roll out, however, it could encourage Story creation among those who'd otherwise hesitate to hit the record button. Stories on services like Instagram or Snapchat are alluring in part because you can share moments from your day without leaving a permanent public record....

Blizzard has a habit of seasonally opening up its hero shooter Overwatch for everyone to try every couple months, typically just after it announces a new hero , event or map . Fittingly, the publisher announced that new PC, PS4 and Xbox One players can try out the game for free next weekend to get a taste of the just- launched Lunar New Year seasonal event. HEROES WANTED! Play Overwatch FREE Feb 16–19 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. 💻 🎮 https://t.co/Pq264DygsZ pic.twitter.com/dw31d2Z2Do — Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) February 12, 2018 In addition to snagging the event's temporarily-available skins, new players can try out the newly-tweaked Capture The Flag the Thailand-inspired map made for the mode. They'll also get to toy with the still-fresh amusement park-themed Blizzard World. Those who are coming back to Overwatch can scan the game's patch notes to skim hero changes (e.g. Junkrat and Mercy both got slight ability nerfs on January 30th). And fina...

Netflix might make headlines for securing its latest show, but its documentaries have been powerhouses in their own right; Last year, The White Helmets won the streaming service its first Academy Award. But the company is just as open to securing non-fiction content from other providers. On March 23rd, Netflix subscribers outside the US and Canada can watch The Defiant Ones , the HBO documentary miniseries chronicling Dr. Dre's and Jimmy Iovine's decades-long partnership. Yes, excluding the US and Canada: Netflix's announcement made it clear that it's launching the miniseries everywhere else next month. The four-episode series originally aired on HBO last July as an epic chronicle of both men's careers and collaboration amid the rise of gangsta rap in the late 80s, the growth of the music industry in the 90s and its fall to Napster-style internet sharing, and finally, Apple's multibillion-dollar acquisition of Beats by Dre in 2014. Whether Netflix will a...

Andy Rubin's Essential Phone found its way into our best-of lists this holiday season and had a couple of great price drops , including a $399 Cyber Monday deal. Still, the phone doesn't seem to be doing very well. According to a tweet from IDC research director Francisco Jeronimo, the phone sold less than 90,000 units in the first six months after it launched. . @Arubin 's @essential smartphone is still a long way from becoming a successful venture. In 2017, it shipped less than 90K units (first six months after launch) pic.twitter.com/NHVlA2Gjzr — Francisco Jeronimo (@fjeronimo) February 12, 2018 Even if Essential had sold twice or three times as many phones, it would still be a long way off from disrupting Samsung or Apple dominance in the market, with the latter company selling over 1 million iPhone 8s and Xs per day according to Forbes . Of course, this is a startup and Essential Phone is its first product. No one expects Apple-level shipments right away. St...

Scientists dream of prosthetics and robots with electronic skin that can convey heat and pressure just like the real thing, but there's a big problem getting in the way: the outside world. Bumps and scrapes can damage these sensors, and it's not really practical to toss these skins in the trash when they're no longer useful. UC Boulder researchers hope to fix that. They've developed an e-skin that can communicate temperature and pressure, but is both self-healing and fully recyclable. You could take a cut on a synthetic arm without panicking, and reuse any damaged 'tissue' to make replacements. The trick is the use of a unique polymer (polyimine) laced with silver nanoparticles. It can still conduct electricity and withstand stress, but its covalent atomic bonds make it both self-healing and recyclable at room temperatures. It just has to use widely available ethanol compounds to patch itself up, and you can degrade the polymers using a recycling solution t...

Last November, Intel and TNT announced a partnership to bring 360-degree, 3D broadcasts of NBA games to GearVR and Daydream VR headsets. Now Turner Sports and Intel have officially launched the app that brings an immersive basketball experience via TNT's VR app and powered by Intel's True VR technology. While the current VR app is mainly a Turner Broadcasting initiative, it can only help the NBA expand its audience via the technology. The app puts inside TNT's Studio J, recreated for VR, which will serve as your portal to the NBA programming. You can watch game highlights and recaps along with live NBA games on TNT, provided you've logged in with your cable subscription. You'll get at least four camera angles to explore, as well, letting you choose a court side or bird's eye view of all the action. The NBA All-Star 2018 festivities start on February 16th in Los Angeles, with the actual game streaming live to the NBA on TNT VR app on the 18th. One NBA game...

Researchers from MI T and Stanford University found that that three different facial analysis programs demonstrate both gender and skin color biases. The full article will be presented at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency later this month. Specifically, the team looked at the accuracy rates of facial recognition as broken down by gender and race. "Researchers at a major U.S. technology company claimed an accuracy rate of more than 97 percent for a face-recognition system they'd designed. But the data set used to assess its performance was more than 77 percent male and more than 83 percent white." This narrow test base results in a higher error rate for anyone who isn't white or male. In order to test these systems, MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini collected over 1,200 images that contained a greater proportion of women and people of color and coded skin color based on the Fitzpatrick scale of skin tones, in consultation with a dermatologic...

Art is often about making you look at regular, day-to-day objects in ways you haven't before. Artist and UNBAG co-founder American Artist has certainly done that with Black Gooey Universe , showing at Brooklyn's HOUSING studio until February 16th. The exhibition features pieces like "Mother of All Demos," named after the famous XeroxPARC GUI demo, and "No State," a 12-by-12 grid of shattered iPhones. The idea with the exhibition and accompanying essay is to show how the evolution of such devices relates to the African American experience. Early computers were developed by and for programmers to do a variety of specific tasks and featured black screens with white or green text. All of that changed following the "mother of all demos" that introduced the mouse and graphics user interface, aka the GUI or "gooey." "Between the Xerox Alto and Apple Lisa, the negative space of the screen began to appear white, replacing the black comm...

You may not like the thought of paying Apple a pretty penny to fix the HomePod , but you might have to -- it definitely isn't meant for DIY repairs. An iFixit teardown has revealed a clever design that makes good use of a tiny space, but is also nigh-on inaccessible. It appears that you can pull the fabric mesh off with a drawstring, but almost everything else requires tearing things apart. Many parts are glued on (including the top and bottom), and there's one seam so thoroughly sealed that iFixit needed a hacksaw and ultrasonic cutter to get in. If there's a non-destructive way to get in, it's not obvious. The upshot: there are plenty of interesting design decisions. Apple uses conductive screw posts to transfer power across the speaker instead of messy wires. And since it didn't have room for a large-diameter cone in the woofer to help pump out bass, it relied on a deeper-travel voice coil with a large magnet. A microphone inside the speaker calibrates the w...

Apple's biggest software updates are always scheduled for a single fall release and today Bloomberg reports on some new features that we can look forward to later this year. First up, third-party apps will be able to work across iPhones, iPads and Mac computers -- a feature we've heard talk of before and will involve both iOS 12 and macOS 10.14. Additionally, the iPhone X's Animojis will be getting an upgrade, with new characters and a better menu reportedly on the way as well as the ability to use them in FaceTime. And they won't be relegated to the iPhone X for much longer. Bloomberg says Apple is working on a new iPad that will have the Face ID camera, allowing iPad users to play with Animojis as well. Some other updates include a redesigned Stocks app, more options in the Do Not Disturb setting and changes to the iPad's photo import interface. We can also expect to see Siri become more integrated into the iPhone's search function and a Digital Health...