Geek News

The Boston public access station WGBH has partnered with PBS for another short series in its long-running Nova family of programs. Nova Wonder will follow three researchers exploring big scientific mysteries. The first of the miniseries' six episodes airs on PBS on Wednesday, April 28th, with a new one every week. Each episode tackles a different complex question: Do animals have a secret language? Which AI technologies could surpass human abilities? How ethical is it to grow life in a lab? The show will go deep in the sea and peer into outer space to find answers. But more notable is the refreshingly young and diverse trio of hosts who practice leading scientific methods and technologies. mathematician and statistician Talithia Williams uses data models to analyze environmental and human biological info, while computer scientist Rana el Kaliouby specializes in emotion recognition tech and neuroscientist André Fenton specializes in the biology of memory. "What is so uniq...

A nonprofit is bringing local broadcast television to the online masses for free, but who knows how long that will last. The organization, Sports Fans Coalition, launched the streaming site Locast.org on January 11th, letting anyone in New York City's five boroughs watch content from 15 local channels without paying a dime -- at least until the lawsuits start flying. That's because a similar service, Aereo, tried to snag over-the-air TV broadcasts and stream them as their own $8 per month subscription service. The Supreme Court deemed that illegal for violating copyright law back in 2014, and Aereo shut down. Locast may run afoul of that argument since it's technically live-broadcasting other channels' content without their approval. But it's otherwise different, only providing local channels to users in New York City, streaming content for free (though they encourage minimal donations to cover costs) and operating as a nonprofit. The Locast team believes the s...

Stylized fighting game Skullgirls came out for mobile in May of last year. It was developed by Autumn Games and initially published by Line. Now, the developer has decided to part ways with the publisher and go back to being independent. As a result of this transition, the developer launched a new version (basically Skullgirls 2.0 ) and shut down the old one (now called LINE Skullgirls ) on the App Store and Google Play. The title's relaunch brings a bunch of new updates, including extra Daily Log In loot, double fighters and moves for single gacha-style hero acquisitions, official ultra widescreen support for iPhone X and select Android phones like the Samsung S8, improved Relic coloring (so you know how rare a fighter is) and several bug fixes. In addition, the developer has promised a greater transparency around loot drop rates, along with a guaranteed random generation of loot itself. "While other games may 'cook the books' to create the illusion that loot r...

Last week, Twitter missed the deadline Congress set to turn over information on Russia-backed meddling in the 2016 election. Today, the social media company posted a public update on their internal investigation. First, they found thousands of additional accounts associated with the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA). But most importantly, Twitter is emailing notifications to everyone in the US who inadvertently followed one or retweeted or liked one of their messages -- which is some 677,775 people. In effect, that's a simple measure of the impact that the IRA's accounts had. Twitter identified 1,062 additional accounts, bringing the total to 3,814; In the ten-week period before the 2016 election that the company studied, those IRA accounts posted 175,993 tweets. Only 8.4% were related to the upcoming elections, but that's still a wide impact that the Twitter platform unwittingly amplified. Twitter also identified 13,512 more automated Russian-l...

Blast Motion is known for making sports sensors aimed at improving your golf, baseball or softball performance and now they've teamed up with TaylorMade on a putter that can analyze your putting strokes. The Spider Interactive Powered by Blast putter marries TaylorMade's most popular putter with Blast Motion's motion capture sensors and can measure and report your backstroke time, forward stroke time, tempo, impact stroke speed and face rotation. With the accompanying app, users will be able to track their progress, access training modules and view videos of their strokes. Other companies including Garmin and Zepp , the latter of which just agreed to stop selling one of its sensors in the US as part of a patent dispute settlement with Blast Motion , also offer golf swing sensors. But, like Blast Motion's Blast Golf setup, they're external sensors that attach to a golfer's glove or club. The Spider Interactive putter, however, houses the sensor within the gr...

Last week Mark Zuckerberg kicked off his year of making sure your time on Facebook is "well spent" by announcing that feeds will refocus on items shared by friends , instead of news. Today the CEO followed up with an announcement that the site will try to identify and highlight "trusted sources" based on community feedback. While the combination of these changes is apparently only going to change the mix of news in feeds from five percent to four percent, its stated claim is to avoid " sensationalism, misinformation and polarization." Source: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2DqovD9"

We spend a lot of time trying to eke out a few more minutes from our smart phones. Apple is offering cheap battery replacements and apologizing for iPhone slowdowns , while Android may update to show you which apps drain your battery the most. It's not too surprising, then, that a developer might take a darkly humorous approach to the impending loss of battery power. Called Die With Me , this new app offers users a chat room when their phone has less than 5 percent battery left. As Motherboard reports, the app was developed by Dries Depoorter and David Surprenant, Belgium-based app developers. "We wanted to do something positive with a low battery," he told the site. "And now we see people happy with a low battery having low battery conversations. We had so much fun creating this." The app has been in development since 2016, says Motherboard, and is now available (after some delays on the iOS side due to Apple's struggle with it's own battery issu...

Netflix has snagged several former show hosts to head their own programs, from Chelsea Handler to David Letterman. Next on the list is Joel McHale, who notably starred in the priceless sitcom Community but got big helming E! channel's unscripted pop culture-gouging talk show The Soup . For Netflix, he'll host The Joel McHale Show Starring Joel McHale ...an unscripted pop culture-gouging talk show. Hey @Netflix : I think you misunderstood when I demanded "a lot of green" for my new show. #JoelMcHaleShow pic.twitter.com/SICdubeL1m — Joel McHale (@joelmchale) January 19, 2018 In fact, Netflix's other star-hosted shows are similarly patterned after the programs that got them famous: Letterman interviewed President Obama on his show's first episode with a list of high-profile celebrities to follow, while Chelsea Handler helmed her own talk show for two seasons. Like The Soup , which McHale hosted from 2004 to 2015, his new show will feature him talkin...

It's hard watching Facebook struggle. Like how for the past two years it's alternated between looking like it's doing something about fake news, and actually doing something about fake news. The company's latest stab at the problem is saying it will change what people see in their News Feeds. The goal is to show users less posts from companies or brands, and more shares (or posts) from friends, in particular ones its algorithm thinks will get you excited. They're not specifically saying this has anything to do with stopping the spread of fake news from virulent racists, politically active conspiracy theorists, or propaganda farms successfully goading our country into tearing itself apart. No, because that would indicate they've identified the problem. Instead, Facebook says this notable change to the News Feed -- its cash cow fed by your attention -- is to make Facebook feel more positive for users. To bring people closer together. Wink. At this stage,...

The list of streaming holdouts just got shorter. British rock outfit Def Leppard has made its catalog of older albums available on streaming services for the first time. Until now, only the band's more recent releases were on the likes of Spotify and others. In other words, the material from the band's glory days -- like Pyromania and Hysteria -- weren't included in music services' catalogs. Of course, it's also a nice bit of promotion ahead of the group's summer tour with Journey . Def Leppard's situation was unique compared to some other bands (or the people who owned the rights) who were just cautious to opt in. As Billboard notes , the band was at odds with its former label over licensing, so it was hesitant to even make its older music available for download -- let alone streaming. In fact, the rift led Joe Elliot & Co. to re-record some of its older material just to get it on iTunes. It would appear Def Leppard resolved its dispute with U...

Duncan Jones' next movie won't be coming to theaters -- it's going straight to streaming. The Moon and Warcraft director has revealed that his long-in-the-making sci-fi film noire, Mute , will premiere on Netflix February 23rd. The movie is set in a future Berlin where a mute bartender (played by Alexander Skarsgård) has to trust a pair of American surgeons (led by Paul Rudd) as he tracks down a disappeared woman. Justin Theroux also stars. There's no trailer yet, but in many ways the effort taken to release the movie is the hook -- Netflix is giving Jones a chance that might not have come up through conventional formats. As Jones noted , Mute is his " Don Quixote ." It was supposed to be his first movie (he had a first draft in 2003), but it got pushed back for a number of reasons. Sam Rockwell was supposed to play a role, but Jones' insistence on different casting led him to write Moon to give Rockwell a lead ( Mute is a sort of spiritual follo...

Amazon added voice commands to its Music and Shopping apps a while back, but if you wanted to use your phone as an Echo-style speaker, you were out of luck. Now, though, an Alexa app update adds support for Alexa voice interaction on your Android phone. Just like using an Echo or Echo Dot , you can use ask your phone's Alexa to find nearby restaurants, order gadgets from Best Buy or find out what movies are playing in your town. Better yet, the updated Alexa app can show responses on-screen, too, giving you visual details about the upcoming weather, sports updates, calendar appointments and more. The update should roll out to Android customers in the coming days; the company promises an iOS update "soon." via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2rmfchM"

The Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird is one of the most recognizable aircraft designs in history. Few other planes have captured the public's attention and imagination in quite the same way as the SR-71 has since it was declassified in 1990 (nearly 30 years after it entered service). And though we're now two decades on from the Blackbird's retirement, America's need for supersonic, high-altitude surveillance has not diminished. That's why Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works team has been developing the SR-72, dubbed " Son of Blackbird ", since at least 2007. This next generation spy plane will reportedly exceed its predecessor in nearly every way. Rumored to be powered by an air-breathing scramjet engine, the SR-72 will conceivably be capable of topping Mach 6 (4,000MPH), granting the hypersonic aircraft an ability to streak through enemy air defenses before anyone knows it's even there. But drafting a design proposal and building an unmanned air...

We've been excited about We Happy Few , the paranoia-fueled horror survival game set in a small English town, for awhile now . But it looks like we're going to have to wait a bit longer to play it. While the game was originally scheduled to be released in April 2018, it's been pushed back to sometimes this summer. The game's developers, Compulsion Games, took to YouTube to explain why exactly that's happening, as well as reveal information about a new character named Sally. You can see their video below. Upon play through, the team realized that the beginning of the story, which follows a man named Arthur, wasn't quite where they wanted it to be. It didn't live up to what the game eventually delivered. "The game didn't start as well as it should. So we went back to the drawing board and made a couple of big decisions: we brought forward a number of story moments, to get into the action faster, and also rebuilt the whole first island for Arthur...

MoviePass' pseudo-unlimited subscription theater service is increasingly popular , but that doesn't mean it's profitable -- it currently has to subsidize tickets, which isn't exactly sustainable in the long run. The company's solution? Secure a stake in the movies themselves. It's launching a MoviePass Ventures subsidiary that will "co-acquire" films alongside distributors. While the details aren't entirely clear, MoviePass expects to benefit from the entire pipeline, whether it's the initial theatrical release, streaming services or in-flight viewing. The company is betting that its impact on movie performance will convince companies to hop aboard. MoviePass normally accounts for roughly 3 percent of US box office sales, but that figure has jumped to 10 percent or more when it uses its app and overall platform to influence viewing, such as The Post and The Shape of Water . In short: if MoviePass takes a share, it could do more to promote...

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded during liftoff. Onboard were seven astronauts, one of which was teacher Christa McAuliffe. She was selected from over 11,000 applicants for the position of NASA's Teacher in Space. McAuliffe had plans to conduct lessons from Challenger; now those lessons will finally take place from the International Space Station . Over the next few months, astronauts Joe Acaba and Ricky Arnold will conduct four of McAuliffe's six planned lessons, focusing on liquids, effervescence, chromatography and Newton's laws. They will be filmed and then posted online by The Challenger Center , which focuses on outreach to students about STEM topics in memory of the Shuttle and her crew. Acaba is a part of Expedition 53/54, which launched in September 2017 and is currently aboard the ISS. Arnold's mission to the space station will launch in March. Both Acaba and Arnold have teaching backgrounds and were chosen as educator-astronaut...

By John Higgins This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter , reviews for the real world. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here . After researching more than 80 digital console pianos and testing nine with a panel of professionals and amateurs, we think the Yamaha Arius YDP-181 is the best digital console piano for a student who doesn't want an acoustic piano because of space or budget considerations. Its action has a good feel, the piano sounds are excellent, the control panel is well laid out and easy to navigate, and the piano comes with a bench. It's an excellent choice for a beginning or intermediate student and should ease the transition to an acoustic instrument as they progress. Who this is for If someone in the household is showing an interest in the piano and wants to begin taking lessons, a digital piano is a great option. Unlik...