Visitors landing at Rio de Janeiro’s Galeão International Airport are greeted by a spectacular skyline that includes two gondolas. One is for tourists headed to the top of the iconic Sugarloaf Mountain. The other is for public transit, connecting one of the city’s sprawling favelas to the rest of the city. Only one of them…

It sounds amazing. You sign up for an app that tracks your robust heart rate, your 10,000 daily steps, and other minute-by-minute data, and then, with a few short clicks, you can also download the years of medical records that show your struggles with cholesterol and the procedures you’ve had with a variety of specialists.…

Stipulated: A nuclear war would be real bad. But, like, how bad, exactly? What if it wasn’t all-out, the United States and Russia throwing thousands of warheads at each other, but instead something more limited? Longtime adversaries India and Pakistan have a couple hundred bombs each, tops, according to the best intelligence. Obviously it’d still…

No matter what you do, do not call the new Surface phone a phone. You can call it a Surface, a mobile product, a dual-screen device, a new kind of 2-in-1, a pathway to the all-important cloud. But Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, doesn’t want you to call it a phone.Never mind that the…

“It’s not just that you learned; it’s not just that you failed. It’s did you take the learnings and apply them?” Panay says. “I think when you look at Pro X today—yup, you’re looking at an ARM- based architecture, a mobile chipset. But ultimately we transformed that part and made it a full PC architecture…

Perhaps as a nod to growing concerns about digital behavior tracking, particularly location tracking, Google has introduced a raft of privacy improvements. Among them: a new Incognito Mode for Maps, which prevents Google from saving certain types of data and removes personalization touches from its Maps app. Just don't assume it makes your movements untraceable.Incognito…

Scientists have made it clear: To prevent calamitous climate change fallout in our lifetimes, we have to take bold action. With the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent proposed rollback on the regulation of methane emissions, it’s also clear that states can’t rely on the federal government right now to act responsibly. It’s up to us. Fortunately,…

In lots of ways, Tesla’s new Smart Summon feature is classic Tesla. Rolled out last week as part of an extensive software update—which also included updates for Automatic Lane Change; an in-car, 360-degree view while behind the wheel; a new game dashboard to use while waiting for the car to charge; and something called Caraoke—Smart…

Last week Google released several thousand deepfake videos to help researchers build tools that use artificial intelligence to spot altered videos that could spawn political misinformation, corporate sabotage, or cyberbullying.Google’s videos could be used to create technology that offers hope of catching deepfakes in much the way spam filters catch email spam. In reality, though,…

Life online is rife with interruptions: Ads, auto-playing videos, paywalls (sorry!), requests to enable browser notifications, chat bubbles, extraneous toolbars, and interstitials all muddy the quotidian quest for content.In recent years—thanks in part to last year’s rollout of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation—users have witnessed a surge in another type of digital distraction:…