The headquarters of the world’s leading water design firm, Water Entertainment Technologies, or WET, is best described as a cross between a machine shop, research laboratory, and movie studio. At one end of the sprawling complex in North Hollywood, California, technicians weld together giant sheets of steel and pull plastic parts from injection molding machines.…
Facebook started in 2004 as a simple network for connecting students at Harvard University. At the time, nobody could have predicted that it would grow to become the largest social network in the world, with 2.5 billion monthly active users, or that it would wield such tremendous influence over our lives, our politics, and our…
Photo: Heritage AuctionsA prototype of a never-produced video game machine colloquially known as the “Nintendo Play Station” has sold at auction for $360,000, setting a new record for the most expensive item of video game memorabilia ever publicly sold.Pop-culture auction house Heritage Auctions offered the device, the product of a short-lived collaboration between Nintendo and…
Philips’ original model Hue Bridge — used by the company’s popular Hue bulbs to interface with smartphones and digital assistants — is losing support for all internet connected services on April 30th, 2020, including Google Assistant and Alexa. Once that date passes, customers will still be able to use the Hue Bridge v1, but only…
Quibi is finally almost here, and in an effort to entice people who are probably already spending too much on content every month, the short form video streaming service is giving people a 90-day free trial for a limited time. The company is also planning to pump an impressive amount of content into the app…
The next phase of the Covid-19 outbreak in the United States is about to begin. The disease is here, and public health experts now believe that it’s time to shift to clear-eyed mitigation measures—to shut down some aspects of public life to slow the disease’s progress. But those experts also believe that no one is…
A global outbreak that has killed thousands of people doesn’t seem like a likely source of humor, but the internet can’t stop cracking jokes about coronavirus. Since late last year, when China first alerted the world to the novel coronavirus, jokes, puns, and memes about it have been spreading even faster and wider than the…
Inside a cavernous hangar at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility along the Virginia coast, a gleaming white P-3 Orion aircraft sits parked under harsh floodlights. It’s just after midnight and a group of scientists, technicians and graduate students cluster underneath a wing, peering at a 5-inch crack in one of the ailerons that the pilot uses…
As California has descended into wildfire hell, with ever bigger blazes burning ever more intensely over the past few years, an unlikely firefighting hero has emerged: the goat. Officials in mountain cities in particular have been hiring herds to hoover up overgrown vegetation, creating fire breaks around the edges of towns. It’s what these ungulates—and…
TCL Communication, one of the fastest-growing TV brands in the US, now wants its own slice of the phone market—and it’s not afraid to push the envelope to get it.The company took the wraps off two foldable device concepts, different from the one it showed at CES 2020. The first has a tri-fold display; think…
