Phonak Virto Black hands-on: A hearing aid that gives you super powers

You might not have heard of Phonak, but the Swiss company's been around for decades. It makes a range of hearing aids, but the Virto Black is its latest and greatest. Unless you suffer from hearing loss, hearing aids are probably not that interesting, but there's enough going on in the Virto Black that it…

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Presenting the Best of CES 2020 finalists!

If you want your voice heard too, no worries! There's an additional category for the People's Choice, where you can vote for your favorite entry from our compilation of finalists. Head on over to our poll to vote, and the one with the most votes will win our special People's Choice award. All award winners…

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This in-home water recycler is meant to help the planet, and your wallet

Hydraloop's namesake product is about the size of a refrigerator (except much flatter) and hooks into your home's existing water system. Once installed, it'll take in outgoing waste water and process it in multiple ways: Think sedimentation, flotation, dissolved air flotation and foam fractionation. That treated water is then processed by an aerobic bioreactor, and…

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Quibi’s secret weapon: Videos that work in portrait and landscape mode

Quibi creators can also use the different orientations for interactivity. While watching a brief clip from the thriller Wireless, Conrad viewed it traditionally in landscape mode -- but when he flipped over to portrait, Quibi switched over to the main character's iPhone screen, where I watched him flip through texts, Instagram and Snapchat messages. It's…

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CES 2020 recap: Day two

The question is no longer "where's my flying car," but "am I willing to get in one?" Uber and Hyundai certainly hope so, as they unveiled the S-A1 flying taxi concept could one day shuttle you at up to 180 MPH from one hub to another. Speaking of a company going outside its wheelhouse, Sony…

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8 More of the Smartest Things We’ve Seen This Week at CES 2020

1 / 10Photograph: Amy Lombard Sarcos Guardian XO It looks like the exosuit from *Edge of Tomorrow*, but this exoskeleton from Sarcos is not science fiction. A human operator can just pop inside and suddenly lift 200 pounds without breaking a sweat—no really, you’ll barely feel anything, even the machine’s weight. It’s easy to operate, doesn’t…

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TikTok Overhauls Community Guidelines to Ban ‘Underage Delinquent Behavior’

As TikTok ballooned in size and cultural influence over the past few years, the social video platform remained noticeably dinky compared to its Silicon Valley competitors in one area: its Community Guidelines. Whereas Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have developed lengthy policies covering hundreds of circumstances, TikTok provided a short list of bullet points addressing only…

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TikTok Bugs Could Have Allowed Account Takeovers

The social video app TikTok has been branded a potential security threat for its ties to China—the app is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance—but like any piece of software it also has the potential for more immediate security concerns. Recently patched vulnerabilities in the app could have allowed an attacker to take over TikTok…

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Facebook’s Deepfake Ban Is a Solution to a Distant Problem

Wait—did Facebook just address a problem before it became a colossal nightmare?That’s one way of looking at the company’s new policy on deepfake videos. In a blog post published Monday, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management, announced that deepfakes will be joining nudity, hate speech, and graphic violence on the list of…

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Bell and Hyundai Soar into the Air Taxi Race

So far, development of the electric vertical-lift aircraft that will enable our dreams of future urban air taxis has largely been the purview of small aviation startups. The "bigs," Boeing and Airbus, have acquired or partnered with smaller firms, while automakers – who bring expertise in mass-production if not flying – have mainly stayed on…

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