BMW M, the German automaker’s motorsport division, has announced that it’s developing its first battery-electric car based on the upcoming i4 EV. According to CarAdvice, BMW M CEO Markus Flasch has made the revelation during a press event for …
Despite starry-eyed promises by the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin, only a handful of humans will actually experience existence outside of Earth’s atmosphere within our lifetime. The rest of us are stuck learning about life in space second ha…
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is almost ready to touch down on the asteroid Bennu, NASA announced today. On October 20th, OSIRIS-REx will make its first attempt at collecting a sample of the asteroid’s rocks and dust. This will be the first tim…
Another electrified motorsport is in the works. Today, Formula E and Extreme E founder Alejandro Agag unveiled E1, a competition that will revolve around battery-powered boats. There’s no start date just yet, but the organizers hope to develop…
The European Commission refuses to back down in its long-running legal battle against Apple and the Irish government’s tax arrangements. Today, the executive branch of the European Union announced that it would appeal a decision granted by the…
Benchmarking is a crucial step in developing ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence. It provides a helpful abstraction of the AI’s capabilities and allows researchers a firm sense of how well the system is performing on specific tasks…
Blue Origin is set to launch its reusable New Shepard rocket on a suborbital mission today (September 24th) and test sensors for a vehicle that could one day land on the Moon. The NS-13 mission, using a rocket that has already flown six times …
As California continues to battle ever more deadly and destructive wildfires up and down the state, California governor Gavin Newsom has issued a sweeping executive order that will effectively ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel-driven veh…
Microsoft is looking beyond flash storage and hard drives to handle the seemingly unstoppable demand for cloud storage. Yesterday at its Ignite conference, the company announced Project HSD (via ZDNet), a new research initiative that’s explori…
As part of its 2021 plans, SXSW will host an online festival that will attempt to replicate the best features of its annual conference in Austin, Texas. SXSW Online will run from March 16th to March 20th, 2021. SXSW’s organizers say the event will al…
The West’s 2020 fire season has been absolutely brutal, with more than 7,600 blazes spreading the length of coast, killing 35 people and charring 3.1 million acres to date. Autumn winds arrived early this year, reducing humidity and desiccatin…
Work has begun to build a new particle accelerator at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, Long Island. The new facility will form the backbone of the Electron-Ion Collider project, an initiative to learn the sec…
When NASA officially announced the Artemis program last year, it revealed its plans to land the next man and the first woman on the Moon in 2024. It’s no small feat, so it’s no surprise that there are aerospace experts who remain unconvinced t…
For years, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) hasn’t given a clear answer on whether it uses facial recognition in its policing work. That changed this week. On Monday, the agency told The Los Angeles Times it has used the technology nearly 30,…
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced plans to become carbon negative by 2030. But the company isn’t just looking at its emissions. Today, it unveiled its plan to be “water positive” by 2030, too. By that, Microsoft means it will replenish mo…
Last fall, Amazon announced Sidewalk, a way to keep low-power, low-bandwidth IoT devices connected even when they’re far from your WiFi router. Today, Amazon revealed a few new details, including the addition of Echo and Tile devices. The comp…
The Pandoras Box that is social media has fundamentally altered our society in ways that we have yet to fully reckon — a digital ecosystem that has sprung up, seemingly overnight, to become a pervasive and ubiquitous part of our daily lives. I…
If you want to be among the first to take a ride in Volocopter’s public electric air taxi — and have a lot of patience — you can now reserve a ticket for your flight. The German startup announced today that the “VoloFirst” flights will take …
A couple of years ago, Facebook announced Oculus for Business, a software suite for enterprise-grade VR. But today, at Facebook Connect, the company is introducing a new virtual office experience for the work-from-home crowd. It’s called Infin…
GM, the company known for Corvettes and pickups, has embraced EVs as much as any US automaker. It already revealed plans for its Ultium batteries and now, ahead of the 2020 Bolt EV launch, is showing off its Ultium electric motors and drive un…
A team of astronomers believe they have found signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus, The New York Times reports. In two papers published today, the astronomers explain that they’ve detected the chemical phosphine in Venus’s thick atmosphere…
As of today, Google has eliminated its entire “carbon legacy.” By that, the company means it has purchased high-quality carbon offsets to match all of the emissions ever produced by its data centers and campuses. That includes the emissions ge…
Walmart has had drone delivery ambitions for years now, and today they’ve announced a partnership with Zipline for on-demand delivery of “health and wellness” products. Zipline drones aren’t the quadcopters that most think of for these types o…
The battle for international hegemony didn’t stop with the fall of the Reichstag in 1945, or of the Soviet Union in 1991 — it has simply moved online. Today, states and their actors are waging a digital cold war with artificial intelligence sy…
A team of MIT researchers has developed a device that can monitor people’s sleep postures without having to use cameras or to stick sensors on their body. It’s a wall-mounted monitor the team dubbed BodyCompass, and it works by analyzing radio…
Baidu launched its Apollo Go robotaxi service in the Chinese cities of Changsha and Cangzhou back in August, shortly after announcing that its autonomous driving computer is ready for use on the streets. Now, Apollo Go has also made its way to…
As part of its plan to send the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024, NASA is looking to acquire some dirt. Today, the agency confirmed that it will pay private companies to “collect a small amount of Moon ‘dirt’ or rocks from the luna…
When you see Mark Zuckerberg being grilled by Congress or listening to people discuss his company’s role in presidential elections, it can be easy to forget Facebook’s roots as a college-only social network. Now, with a new school year upon us, Faceb…
Shortly after receiving final FAA approval for drone deliveries, Amazon already has a rival. Walmart announced that it will start a pilot program with drone company Flytrex to deliver groceries and other household essentials from its stores in…
We’ve all been there at some point: you forget to go to the dryer when it completes a cycle, letting your clothes sit and collect wrinkles. That’s just one example of inefficient home appliance use, and it’s probably one that most people would like t…
“Really, fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck” Andrea Crosta tells the driver of the car he just got in. Crosta is the founder of WildLeaks, a whistleblowing site for environmental crime, and he’s just aborted an undercover operation with a prominent ivo…
The original Game Boy was no slouch when it came to battery life. With four simple AA batteries, you could play games like Tetris and Super Mario Land for about 10 to 15 hours. That was something that made the Game Boy so much more appealing t…
Video games have come a long way from their dim arcade origins. No longer a mere niche diversion for pasty, maladjusted youth, gaming is now an integral part of modern pop culture standing shoulder to shoulder with “classical” forms of media l…
The Trump administration’s latest Space Policy Directive, SPD-5, details policies the government believes the country’s public and private space agencies should adopt to protect their systems from hacking threats. Some of the best practices th…
What if you could have gym clothes that could automatically open cooling vents whenever you work up a sweat and close them when you’ve dried out? You might be able to get your hands on gear that does just that in the future, and it could use a…
Rocket Lab recently made a successful return to flight and launched a client satellite from its Electron Rocket, but that’s not all that happened on the mission. The company also secretly launched its own satellite, called Photon, that could o…
Facebook has been developing its own AR glasses for quite a while now, and a new report from its researchers reveal that the device could feature advanced audio technology. Members of the Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) Research audio team detail …
About a month ago, SpaceX pulled off a first hop test for one of its Starship prototypes, and now it has repeated the feat. SN6 looks a lot like its predecessor SN5, with both missing a nose cone and fins, which makes them resemble a rocket-po…
You can now see ongoing driverless testing programs across the US, thanks to a new tool from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The agency has launched the public-facing platform as part of its Automated Vehicle Transp…
In between beaming internet to people in developing countries and sometimes passing for UFOs, Alphabet’s Loon balloons have been busy helping scientists study how our planet works. A team led by Stanford professor Aditi Sheshadri recently published a…
Basically every aspect of modern life has been touched by the coronavirus pandemic, and the restaurant industry is probably one that has been most significantly affected. As such, restaurants big and small are thinking about how to make things…
Historically, the black holes that astronomers have found come in two distinct sizes: stellar black holes (aka collapsars), which are born from the implosion of dying stars and have a mass range of 5 to several tens that of their stellar mass,…
Rocket Lab is on a roll this week. After successfully returning to launch following a failure in July, the company announced that it has received FAA clearance to launch small satellites from its Electron rockets in the US. So far, all its mis…
While SpaceX didn’t pull off a doubleheader Sunday launch like it planned, the company still managed a rare feat. Instead of launching eastward like every other Cape Canaveral rocket, the Falcon 9 headed south toward Cuba, close to populated a…
NASA has taken a big step towards launching new missions that would help us better understand how the sun interacts with the space environment around our planet. The agency has picked five proposals and given them $1.25 million each to conduct…
Just over a year since their last major announcement, Elon Musk’s Neuralink is finally ready to show off the fruits of its labor: a revolutionary brain-machine interface that could blur the lines between humanity and technology, as well as giv…
Last year Neuralink launched with lofty promises of developing chips and technology that will connect human brains to computers, and now the company is ready to show off its progress. Elon Musk said the webcast will include a look at a working…
California air quality officials have passed two new measures aimed at reducing pollution from diesel trucks and ships. One rule introduces new emissions standards for heavy-duty diesel trucks, while the other requires more ships docked at por…
EV startup Bollinger Motors isn’t scheduled to start production on its rugged utility trucks until next year, but it’s already looking toward the future. It’s given the first glimpse of its electric delivery van, the Deliver-E. Bollinger has o…
Beyond Meat’s plant-based products have expanded through various restaurants and grocery chains, but now fans of its product can order directly. Its competitor Impossible Foods launched direct-to-consumer sales back in June, as both companies …
