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...

Twitter this evening released a new set of statistics related to its investigation on Russia propaganda efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election, including that 677,775 people were exposed to social media posts from more than 50,000 automated accounts with links to the Russian government. Many of the new accounts uncovered have been traced back to an organization called the the Internet Research Agency, or IRA, with known ties to the Kremlin. The data was first presented in an incomplete form to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last November, which held hearings to question Facebook, Google, and Twitter on the role the respective platforms and products played in the Russian effort to help elect President Donald... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2FWM7wN"

Fat Month Fat, I wish I knew how to quit you. One of my most vivid childhood memories revolves around willfully subjecting myself to stomach cramps and explosive diarrhea. via Popular Science "http://ift.tt/2DSeJqa"

Technology The video game company has a history of making consoles about more than just a controller. Nintendo's new STEM toy looks continues its tradition of trying to make console gaming more creative. via Popular Science "http://ift.tt/2FYYSH5"

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...

If you had the chance to ask your favorite vlogger what they want in a camera, you’ll probably get a laundry list of feature requests. It should have the ability to record 4K video in a variety of framerates. It should be small and unobtrusive, so it can be carried around at arms length for hours at a time. It needs a display that flips around so they can see their framing when they are asking for their audience to smash that like button. And importantly, it needs an external microphone input so they can record clean, crisp audio to the same device they are filming with. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there aren’t really any cameras that fully fit this description. Even Sony’s super popular RX100 lineup lacks the microphone input that larger... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2EZp5Eh"

Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded today to the firing of employee James Damore over his controversial memo on workplace diversity , stating that while he does not regret the decision, he regrets that people misunderstood it as a politically motivated event. Speaking in a live conversation with journalist and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher, MSNBC host Ari Melber, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in San Francisco, Pichai said that the decision to fire Damore was about ensuring women at Google felt like the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment. “I regret that people misunderstand that we may have made this for a political belief one way or another,” Pichai said. “It’s important for the women at Google, and all the people... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2EXwdB4"

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, speaking at a taped television event hosted by MSNBC and The Verge ’s sister site Recode , said artificial intelligence is one of the most profound things that humanity is working on right now and compared it to basic utilities in terms of its importance. Speaking to Recode ’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Ari Melber, Pichai said AI is “one of the most important things that humanity is working on. It’s more profound than, I don’t know, electricity or fire,” adding that people learned to harness fire for the benefits of humanity but also needed to overcome its downsides, too. Pichai also said that AI could be used to help solve climate change issues, or to cure cancer. The remarks from the chief executive of Google,... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2DPvdiS"

Last summer, Disney announced it was ending its licensing deal with Netflix , and it would be launching its own streaming service in 2019. Variety is now reporting that the company has hired Apple veteran Kevin Swint to build and run that new service. Swint will be the senior VP and general manager of the unnamed service, the report states. He’s no stranger to the world of content streaming: he was an early member of Walmart’s e-commerce team in the early 2000s, and helped launch its music downloads site in 2003, according to his employment history via LinkedIn . From there, he joined Apple’s iTunes team, where he helped expand the store internationally and launch its HD movies and iTunes Extras features. In 2013, Samsung also hired... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2mQwe28"

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"