Larry Page’s air taxi outfit Kitty Hawk showed off its latest concept Thursday, an eight-motor prototype that uses an unconventional forward-swept wing and is purportedly 100 times quieter than a conventional helicopter. The Mountain View, California-based company calls it Heaviside, after noted physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, who advanced a variety of theories and…

As America hurtles toward another presidential election, the threat of Russian hacking, meddling, and general deleterious behavior has occupied the minds of US government officials and average voters alike. But on Friday, Microsoft sounded an alarm that serves as a timely reminder that Russia doesn't have a monopoly on election hacking. In an aggressive new…

Odds are, if you’re like most Americans, you probably first came across the most significant scientific discovery of the 21st century in a passing moment onscreen. Perhaps you saw a mutagenic bioweapon unleash a trio of monsters on the city of Chicago in last year’s Rampage. Or you watched as a scientist made a man…

The federal government seems increasingly likely to take action on platform giants such as Facebook and Google. Antitrust intervention has emerged as the likely focal point of such efforts. Just listen to Mark Zuckerberg.But is antitrust enforcement able to address the range of concerns that these platforms present? How does antitrust address the problem of…

We can start with the honorifics. HP calls the Omen X 2S the “world’s first dual-screen gaming laptop”—presumably with no apologies whatsoever to the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo (not a gaming machine) nor to Razer’s Blade R2 or its Project Valerie (technically triple-screen and not really in existence).With that out of the way, we can…

Microsoft surprised just about everyone this week by showing off a pair of new mobile devices with two screens apiece. The pocketable Surface Duo and the tablet-like Surface Neo won't actually go on sale for at least one year, but Microsoft trotted the devices out anyway to signal how it's positioning its future in the…

The storm formerly known as Hurricane Lorenzo is blasting Ireland and the United Kingdom today with winds up to 80 miles per hour, heavy rain, and flooding. Lorenzo meandered in a comma-shaped path from the Azores to the British Isles as it grew to Category 4 strength before weakening slightly on Wednesday (and losing its…

Remember when e-cigarettes were supposed to be the safer way to smoke? With cases of a mysterious, sometimes lethal respiratory illness on the rise, that myth has gone up in a cloud of … vapor. Fearful of being reduced to wheezing, bed-ridden hospital patients, a growing number of users are trying to kick their vaping…

Friday, October 4, 2019. By Lars Kenseth, with cartooncollections.com. Seriously, though, don’t write your passwords down—use one of these password managers instead. Thursday, October 3, 2019. By Ellis Rosen, with cartooncollections.com. Deepfakes are getting better, but for now experts say they remain relatively easy to spot. Wednesday, October 2, 2019. By Tom Chitty, with cartooncollections.com.…

This past spring, on one of those LA nights where anything seems possible and the hours unzip with no concrete end, as if the night might actually go on forever, I ambled down Sunset Boulevard in a sticky hallucinogenic trance. Hours earlier I’d eaten a small corner of a chocolate edible given to me by…