If you’ve ever made a somewhat rash online purchase after a couple of drinks then you’re not alone – a new survey says nearly 4 in 5 people who consume alcohol have shopped on the web while intoxicated. These purchases add up too, with US$444 the average annual spend for a drunk shopper, and a

The founder of MoviePass is back, and this time he’s not messing around. MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes has a new startup called PreShow, and it’s using a business model straight out of A Clockwork Orange: The company’s new app helps you score free movie tickets — as long as you sit through 15 to 20

Kalashnikov’s AK-47 represents a timeless design and an instantly recognisable icon of warfare, but one thing it cannot do is fly. But Russian arms maker Almaz-Antey Business Insider, 2018 on what looks like a literal flying AK-47 drone. Images filed with the patent show a minimalist drone formed around a Kalashnikov-style rifle, and were Business

A chemical reaction you learned about in middle school could help solve the energy crisis. Running an electrical current through water splits it into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used as a reliable, zero-emission fuel source. In the past, the process of purifying water beforehand was too energy intensive for this

Jak Wilmot, the co-founder of Atlanta-based VR content studioDisrupt VR, spent 168 consecutive hours in a VR headset – that’s a full week – pent up in his apartment. “This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but welcome to a week in the future,” he said in a video about the experiment.

By combining math with 3D printing, researchers from Boston University have created a new material that seemingly defies logic: light and air have no trouble passing through it — but sound cannot. “The idea is that we can now mathematically design an object that can block the sounds of anything,” researcher Xin Zhang said in

Facebook just had a very bad day. Facebook, including Messenger, and Instagram users across North America experienced outages for most of Wednesday, starting in the afternoon and ending late the same night. Third party outage sites suggested it affected users across the entire globe. The media reported it was perhaps the longest interruption ever experienced

When a child first does something without being asked, their parents want to celebrate. Researchers at the University of Southern Carolina (USC) are having that moment right now. The team claims to have created the first AI-controlled robotic limb that can learn how to walk without being explicitly programmed to do so. The algorithm they

A California family is outraged that a doctor told their elderly relative his lungs were failing and he was going to die imminently – via a telepresence robot. “You might not make it home,” the doctor at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center told the patient, according to local television channel KTVU, which broke the story. The

There’s a little-known feature built into your iPhone that keeps a history of everywhere you’ve been – and how many times you’ve been there. This “Significant Locations” list can be found in your settings, but it’s rather hard to find, whether purposeful or not. Apple tracks and stores where you’ve been and how often (and

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests autonomous driving systems may have more difficulty detecting pedestrians with dark skin than those with light skin. The researchers responsible for the study had eight image-detection systems analyse images of pedestrians. The people in the photos were separated into two groups based on how their

Your bags are packed, your rooms are booked, you’re all set for your vacation; there’s just one problem, the government has canceled your tickets. As early as 2014, China began conceptualizing a Social Credit System (SCS), sort of like a credit score for citizen behavior where behaviors deemed good for society are rewarded with privileges

Lots of video games let you take on the role of the anti-hero: Grand Theft Auto, Hitman, even Mario’s mischievous alter-ego, Wario. But there’s never been a video game anti-hero quite like Plague Inc. – in this massively successful pandemic simulator, you actually play the role of a deadly and contagious pathogen, hell-bent on wiping

Lab-made marijuana is coming. In a move that’s expected to transform the marijuana and pharmaceutical industries, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced on Wednesday that they had for the first time created cannabis compounds in a lab, instead of by harvesting them from a plant. If the technique can scale, it could

The newly launched Nokia 9 PureView has something no other smartphone has: a five-camera array on the back. But before the handset has even got into people’s hands, there are claims that it’s triggering trypophobia – a fear of clusters of small holes. While those with trypophobia will no doubt try their best to avoid

A man died after crashing a 2016 Tesla Model S into a tree in Miami, Florida yesterday afternoon, according to local news. The car reportedly swerved through multiple lanes of traffic before hitting a median and some trees and bursting into flames – and the death may have been related to the electric carmaker’s iconic

Facebook’s treatment of its legions of content moderators is under scrutiny after the publication of a report alleging tough working conditions and low pay that saw some employees break down under the weight of the content they were reviewing. On Monday, The Verge’s Casey Newton published an extensive investigation into a content-moderation workplace in Arizona. These

Social media sites like YouTube are stepping up their enforcement against anti-vax content. YouTube channels that promote anti-vaccination content are not allowed to run ads on the video sharing platform, according to a policy first reported by BuzzFeed News on Friday. YouTube said that it considers anti-vaccination content to be “dangerous or harmful,” which as

Last week, we reported on a mysterious new website, ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, that shows you a new human face, generated by an AI, every time you hit the refresh button. It’s a growing trend: more copycat websites like ThisAirbnbDoesNotExist.comand ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net have also cropped up in its wake. And now, ThisCatDoesNotExist.com takes the trend to its logical conclusion:

Earth might have a dizzying array of life forms, but our biology ultimately remains a solitary data point – we simply don’t have a reference for life based on DNA different from our own. Now, scientists have taken matters into their hands to push the boundaries on what life could be like. Research funded by

A group of computer scientists once backed by Elon Musk has caused some alarm by developing an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) they say is too dangerous to release to the public. OpenAI, a research non-profit based in San Francisco, says its “chameleon-like” language prediction system, called GPT–2, will only ever see a limited release in

Researchers in China have developed a new way to remove bacteria from water that they say is both highly efficient and environmentally sound. By shining ultraviolet light onto a two-dimensional sheet of a compound called graphitic carbon nitride, the team’s prototype can purify 10 litres (2.6 liquid gallons) of water in just one hour, killing virtually

At first glance, the two rows of portraits at the top of this article just look like a bunch of average-looking people. The catch is, none of them exist. All of these faces are fakes, put together by artificial intelligence. To be more precise, these faces are created by a generative adversarial network (GAN) developed

China’s Academy of Space Technology is working on an orbital power plant that would capture solar energy in space and beam it back to Earth.  The plant would be able to harness solar power even when it’s cloudy back on Earth, since its photovoltaic array would be floating high above any terrestrial weather. With plans to

Sleep is pretty great. In humans, evidence suggests it has a whole range of benefits, including this one: it keeps the brain healthy by letting neurons prune unnecessary synaptic connections we make during the day. This process, called synaptic homeostasis, prevents the brain from being overrun by useless memories. It’s possible that it helps to improve

In a sensational test of technological independence, Russia is making plans to cut off its internet from the rest of the world, with a giant ‘unplugging’ experiment that will affect over 100 million Russian internet users. The action – which the nation has boasted of doing for years – would be a temporary test, designed

Alarming video captured by a Twitter user in Philadelphia highlights a rare but little-known danger of electroshock Taser-style weapons. In the footage, posted on Saturday, a man is seen struggling with security guards on the street, before being fired upon with a Taser-style device. Almost instantly, the man is alight, screaming in agony as his

3D printers work by laboriously printing objects layer by layer. For larger objects, that process can take hours or even days. But now scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have found a shortcut: a printer that can fabricate objects in one shot using light – and which could, potentially, revolutionize rapid manufacturing technology. The

Artificial intelligence can play chess, drive a car and diagnose medical issues. Examples include Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, Tesla’s self-driving vehicles, and IBM’s Watson. This type of artificial intelligence is referred to as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – non-human systems that can perform a specific task. We encounter this type on a daily basis, and its

In the first experiment of its kind, scientists have been able to translate brain signals directly into intelligible speech. It may sound like wild science fiction at first, but this feat could actually help some people with speech issues. And yes, we could also get some futuristic computer interfaces out of this. Key to the

Apple disabled its Group FaceTime feature in iPhones after multiple reports that users could initiate a FaceTime call and begin listening in on a recipient’s audio without them picking up the call or knowing they were being monitored. The bug occurred after a user initiated a FaceTime video call with another iPhone or device running

We can probably all agree that charging cables are just the worst, and that we’d love to have fewer of them in our lives. Now, a new invention might give us just that: engineers have developed a flexible device that harvests energy from Wi-Fi signals. And not just harvest. It can then convert it into

He Jiankui, the Chinese researcher who drew wide criticism when it emerged that he gene-edited several human babies, told an influential adviser about the work many months before it became public. Though Nobel Prize winner and University of Massachusetts professor Craig Mello admonished He that the work was unethical, according to emails obtained by the

Arthur Ashkin, the world’s oldest Nobel Prize winner, favours comfort over style. When I met him in his New Jersey home, he was sporting a fleece-lined zip-up, corduroy pants, and fuzz-lined Crocs. The outfit makes sense for someone who spends a lot of time tinkering with new inventions in the basement. Ashkin, who’s 96 years

The notion that fake news exists in its own universe turns out to be doubly true: One universe is the realm outside truth. The other is its own seedy pocket of social media. In a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, political scientists surveyed the inhabitants of this Internet pocket around the time

The fact we’re living in a world where surveillance is becoming more common is unlikely to be a surprise to you. But even when you’re out of sight, you might not be safely hidden: researchers have developed a computer program that lets cameras see around corners. The technique is called computational periscopy, and it works

New technology being developed by the MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory uses laser light to excite moisture in the air surrounding a target’s ear, causing it to quietly whisper a personal message from several metres away. “Our system can be used from some distance away to beam information directly to someone’s ear,” says MIT team leader and

For the first time, scientists have successfully demonstrated a ‘gene drive’ in mammals, using genome editing techniques to affect the way genetic traits are inherited in a population of mice. Gene drives have been developed before in previous animal experiments, but so far their use has only been demonstrated on insects. By showing the same

We’ve all thought about it. Maybe it’s time to flick Facebook. Terminate Twitter. Silence social for good, and just be a person again. Sadly, if this dream of going off the grid is about reclaiming your lost privacy, that might not actually be possible, according to new research. A new study by researchers at the

Technology companies have been pummelled by revelations about how poorly they protect their customers’ personal information, including an in-depth New York Times report detailing the ability of smartphone apps to track users’ locations. Some companies, most notably Apple, have begun promoting the fact that they sell products and services that safeguard consumer privacy. Smartphone users

Looks like it’s time to change your passwords, again: security experts have flagged up a monster data breach made up of some 773 million email addresses and 21 million passwords. They’re calling it Collection #1, and more collections are reportedly on the way. First made public by security consultant Troy Hunt, the data dump comes

Not everything is knowable. In a world where it seems like artificial intelligence and machine learning can figure out just about anything, that might seem like heresy – but it’s true. At least, that’s the case according to a new international study by a team of mathematicians and AI researchers, who discovered that despite the

Deeps in mines, at the bottom of lakes, and even in your own gut, bacteria are hard at work producing electricity in order to survive in environments low in oxygen. These potent little power producers have been used in speculative experiments and one day may power everything from batteries to “biohomes“. There are many types

Worms may not have spines, but they’re doing some back-breaking sewer work in more than 4,000 toilets across India. Since 2015, a creative new type of toilet called the Tiger Toilet has been popping up outside homes and schools around the country. From the outside, this toilet looks like any other pit latrine. But it

Science fiction introduces us to elaborate, futuristic worlds that often sound like nothing more than a dream. But humanity has made incredible technological advancements over the past 100 years, and many of the ideas predicted in science fiction have now become reality. Some predictions, like self-driving cars, are still in the early stages, but scientists

An apparent hit-and-run in Las Vegas caught on video seems to show what could be a first-of-its-kind traffic fatality: an autonomous robot struck and allegedly ‘killed’ by a self-driving Tesla. As brutal as it sounds, it’s also suspected to be part of an elaborate PR stunt set up to promote the now-‘deceased’ robot in question

For many years, quantum computers have only been within the confines of the research lab. On Tuesday, though, IBM unveiled the IBM Q System One, billed as the first-ever quantum computer designed for businesses to put to their own use – though the company is clear that this is only the first step towards a

Forget the trial and error – mathematics has proved where the best spot to place your router is. Physicist Jason Cole has figured out a formula that can work out the best place to position your wireless router, and it ultimately depends on your house’s floor plan. Cole started investigating the science behind router placement in