Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, Dead Astronauts, has the feeling of a mosaic. Up close, you can marvel at the deft selection of each element, each word and sentence, and appreciate how it interacts with its immediate neighbors. From much further back, taking in the book as a whole, scenes and themes snap together. Seen from…

In the US, more than 15 million Americans will spend a few seconds every day locating and swallowing a birth control pill. If the tablet—a cordial of contraceptive hormones that trick the body into thinking it’s pregnant—is swallowed during the same three-hour window each day, the method is pretty close to ironclad. But get off-schedule…

As climate delegates discuss the planet’s future at the COP25 meeting in Madrid this week, a new study finds the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet. That’s forcing polar bears and walruses to crowd onto shrinking beaches, starving reindeer and caribou, and driving extreme heat, drought, and sea level rise…

Qualcomm revealed the newest iterations of its Snapdragon mobile processors this week. The chipmaker announced not just one but two new chipsets: one that will power some of the highest-end smartphones to be released in 2020, and another system-on-a-chip for midrange phones.The company's two new chips are the flagship Snapdragon 865, which also includes an…

On the top floor of a Los Angeles courthouse, lawyers for a British diver and a billionaire tech CEO sparred over a linguistic dilemma: Does the phrase pedo guy necessarily mean pedophile?Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, had tweeted the insult about Vernon Unsworth, the diver, in July 2018. Unsworth later sued for defamation.…

Halfway through the first trailer for No Time to Die—the 25th James Bond film, and the last to star Daniel Craig as the lead MI5 agent—007 delivers a warning: “History isn’t kind to men who play god.”Presumably, he’s talking to Safin, the villain played by Rami Malek, but in some ways the Bond franchise has…

Both polar regions are losing marine ice. Ice shelves are breaking up into giant icebergs, more glaciers are retreating and at faster rates, less sea surface is freezing and for shorter periods. Simply put, the north and south poles are becoming less white and more blue. Yet the coldest parts of the planet are also…

Huawei said today it is suing the Federal Communications Commission, asking to overturn a ban on carriers from using money from the Universal Service Fund (USF) to buy equipment from…

As music streaming apps struggle to differentiate, Apple is making concert video a more central part of its strategy with tonight’s big Billie Eilish show at its HQ’s Steve Jobs…

When AWS announced Outposts last year, a private cloud hardware stack they install in your data center, there were a lot of unanswered questions. This week at AWS re:Invent in…