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…
DetailsIn 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…
DetailsQualcomm 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…
DetailsAs 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…
DetailsOn 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.…
DetailsHalfway 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…
DetailsI’ll be honest: I love my drone. I mean, I always had remote-control vehicles back when I was a teenager. And of course the most impressive RC vehicle was the gas-powered helicopter. But it was expensive and hard to fly. Now, with a quadcopter, it’s a breeze. On top of that, it takes pictures and…
DetailsThe service started at a time when gigabit access was rare, and the average American internet speed was “crawling in single digits,” according to Google. Flash forward to 2019 and it’s a different story, with AT&T, Comcast and others offering gigabit broadband options. Google also pointed to rapidly growing demands on internet connections like streaming…
DetailsYou can scour listings for jobs and apartments, lowball people trying to get rid of some of their stuff or see if anyone thinks you’re their missed connection wherever you are, without having to use Craigslist’s mobile site. On the flip side, you can also use the free app to post and edit classified ads…
DetailsTwo browsers have yanked Avast and AVG online security extensions from their web stores after a report revealed that they were unnecessarily sucking up a ton of data about users’ browsing history.Wladimir Palant, the creator behind Adblock Plus, initially surfaced the issue—which extends to Avast Online Security and Avast SafePrice as well as Avast-owned AVG…
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