Posts

In an email to employees, newly-appointed CEO Jack Dorsey said “Product and Engineering are going to make the most significant structural changes to reflect our plan ahead,” though its possible more departments will be effected. He continued, “We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel....

An introduction to the UE Megablast and Blast Set up Connecting the Megablast speakers via Bluetooth is still insanely easy. When you turn on the speaker for the first time, it automatically goes into pairing mode, which is handy. Once connected, it detects whether or not you have the UE app installed on your smartphone and prompts you to download if not. This is where things differ from previous UE speakers....

Which is actually a pretty cool idea, mandatory Oakley shooting glasses even when you’re not shooting. The technology Salt Lake City is considering is made by Taser (yes, that Taser, they make other things as well). I caught a briefing on the technology some months back from TaserCEO Rick Smith. And I was kind of impressed. While there’s an argument to be made that all these cameras everywhere are turning us into a police state–especially when the police are the ones getting more cameras....

This may seem like a uniquely human experience, but there’s evidence that a similar behavior is fairly common among vampire bats. A recent study published in the journal PLoS Biology found that on foraging trips away from home, these bloodsuckers tend to meet up with roost mates they share close bonds with. The observed bats didn’t leave to go foraging together, but if a latecomer ran into a friend already slurping on a cow, that friend was likely to scoot over and share its tasty spigot....

You’re arguably more likely to hand over your keys or your ritziest kicks to your BFF, of course. But once upon a time, the person that you adore most was also a stranger—and the road from random acquaintance to closest pal can be a long journey. Friendships always take time, as each of you slowly builds trust for one another. After all, you don’t want to lend someone your ride who wouldn’t do the same for you....

“Bring back Vine?” Musk tweeted on October 30 alongside a Yes/No poll for his nearly 113 million followers. Less than a day later, Axios additionally reported that multiple anonymous sources indicated Musk has instructed Twitter engineers to begin planning a Vine revitalization with an eye to release by the end of the year. Founded in 2012, Twitter acquired Vine mere months before the app’s official launch in January 2013. Within two years, the platform amassed over 200 million users and a devoted fan base surrounding the platform’s short video format....

You may have heard about the hole in the ozone layer, which hovers over Antarctica. It’s shrunk over time thanks to policies that curbed the use of ozone-depleting chemicals. In the nearly 40 years that NASA has kept track, it has never been smaller. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a separate hole in the ozone layer briefly opened up in the Arctic in March before closing in April, and climate change may be partly to blame....

“Even if it may have an exoskeleton, like insects, or an endoskeleton, like us, we’ve got components in us that are soft,” says Jonathan Rossiter, a professor of robotics at the University of Bristol in the UK. “And yet, all robots at the moment are hard. If you can make future robots completely soft, or at least, exploit some of these soft features, then you can make them smaller, simpler, more compatible with the environment....

The same story applies to the universe at large. Stars are the ultimate light bulbs, and while some of their rays dead-end into dust-particles, others get away intact. Space has a reputation for being cold and dark, but out in the comparatively empty void between galaxies, these escaped particles of light collectively produce a diffuse glimmer everywhere. This glow tells you what’s out there without the hassle of counting all the stars and galaxies one by one....

The balloon might look delicate, but it’s big enough to hold 200 Goodyear blimps, and it can carry 6,000 pounds of scientific cargo. That’s about the size of a large sports utility vehicle, as NASA points out–not a light load for something that’s just full of helium. Many balloon-borne experiments in Antarctica fall to Earth in the first few weeks, but Super-TIGER had more stamina. Super-TIGER stands for Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder, and it was looking for rare, heavier-than-iron elements coming toward Earth....

What are you eating and/or cooking for Thanksgiving? All I eat on Thanksgiving is congealed salads… aka jello molds. It’s all I actually want. For others, I’ll be roasting a turkey with a new method I’ve been tinkering with, which I cannot yet discuss other than it’s stupid fast and amazingly tasty. Along with that I’ll be making a nice quinoa salad with roast vegetables. Oh! And sweet potato meringue pie....

Reuters reports that the device that was found in the wreckage, in the aftermath of a disaster that has likely claimed 132 lives, is possibly the plane’s cockpit voice recorder. The devices commonly referred to as black boxes consist of two items: the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. “The flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders have been instrumental in solving the vast majority of accidents,” says John Cox, the CEO of Safety Operating Systems and a former Boeing 737 pilot....

Well, it turns out Curiosity can’t go anywhere near the planet’s narrow streaks, for fear of contaminating it with Earth organisms—and that’s the same problem that NASA continues to wrestle with as it investigates the potential for life on Mars. So if NASA’s water announcement has you pondering, “what happens if we find life on Mars?” you’re one giant leap ahead of yourself. You should be thinking “what do we have to do before we start looking?...

Last week, NASA announced the creation of a new office that will take charge in such a scenario. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) will help to track near-Earth asteroids, develop asteroid deflection strategies, and plan response efforts in case a threat arises. “While there are no known impact threats at this time,” John Grunsfeld from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate said in a statement, “the 2013 Chelyabinsk super-fireball and the recent ‘Halloween Asteroid‘ close approach remind us of why we need to remain vigilant and keep our eyes to the sky....

A quick history of HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is an audio/visual standard capable of transmitting audio and video through a single cable. In the last decade or so, it has become the default connection for TVs, gaming, computers, and any other device where you need to connect a video player to a screen. Look behind your television, and chances are it has an HDMI port (or four). Since its introduction in 2002, HDMI has been a mainstay in households across the globe, with an estimated 10 billion HDMI devices sold—across TVs, monitors, and gaming consoles....

I regularly venture into the Costa Rican jungle to study poison frogs. These little guys don’t make their own poison; instead, they get toxins from the mites and ants they eat. When the mother has tadpoles, she feeds them unfertilized eggs with the same poison inside. I wanted to see whether this defends the tadpoles against predators such as snakes and spiders. We tested snakes in the lab, but tropical banana spiders act weird in captivity....

One axis shows age, the other ranks the cause of death. If the deaths were homicides, the box is shaded brown; if they were suicides, the box is shaded blue. They’re also shaded more heavily if there’s a large number of deaths associated with that cause. So, for example, the leading cause of violence-related death for people ages 65 and above is suicide by firearm, and because there were more than 30,000 of those cases recorded between 1999 and 2007, it’s shaded dark blue....

According to one analysis by the Centers for Disease and Control, as many as 57 percent of middle schoolers and 72 percent of high schoolers may not be getting enough shuteye. That’s bad news, given that “sleep is linked to neuroplasticity, memory, and learning,” says Catherine Kier, director of the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Center at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital. Getting kids on a solid sleep schedule can help them stay healthy and engaged for years to come....

Facebook is down, and the internet is freaking out. Just before noon Eastern time on Monday, users started reporting error messages when they tried to access Facebook or the apps it owns like WhatsApp and Instagram, according to the New York Times. The Facebook-owned virtual reality platform, Oculus, is also affected. Downdetector, which monitors real-time web activity and traffic across sites, has documented and tracked outage reports; it has posted a red banner on its homepage saying that “reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Facebook, which may be impacting your service....

After almost of decade of voting reform and increased scrutiny, have we come far enough in safeguarding the vote? The answer is a resounding question mark. Though the real answer will come on November 4, many parts of the country have made great strides to fix the problems caused by electronic voting machines. The great solution? Send the machines to the dump. According to CBS news, just one-third of Americans will vote on electronic machines....