Blogs

Back in January, Italy’s antitrust organization launched two separate investigations against Apple and Samsung to determine if the companies were intentionally using software updates to slow down customers’ devices. Now, the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) has issued a statement saying both companies violated several consumer codes, and it has issued fines.

The AGCM is levying a €5 million fine ($5.7 million) against Apple for problems that occurred on various models of the iPhone 6 when users installed iOS 10, which was developed for the iPhone 7. Because the new iOS required greater energy demands, those using it on older iPhones experienced unexpected shutdowns. The company’s fix, which came as an update in…

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Halloween is just around the corner, and some people will celebrate by watching scary movies about brain-eating zombies. But even more frightening are real-life parasites that feed on the human brain, and they can be harder to kill than their horror-movie counterparts. Now, researchers have developed silver nanoparticles coated with anti-seizure drugs that can kill brain-eating amoebae while sparing human cells.

The birds are able to combine individual parts to form a long-distance reaching aid.

Oil spills and industrial discharge can contaminate water with greasy substances. Although it’s true that oil and water don’t mix, separating and recovering each component can still be challenging. Now, researchers have created sponges made from wood that selectively absorb oil, and then can be squeezed out and used again.

FreeWire’s primary product right now is a mobile Level 2 charger.

A leaked memo that proposes to eliminate protections for transgender individuals, in part by relying on genetic testing, is deeply problematic.

Earlier this week, we updated our gigantic visual history of Android to include details of every release from the operating system’s 10-year history. I’ve also made the case that Android is now the world’s most dominant operating system and that Google invested in buying and developing Android primarily because it wanted to ensure that Microsoft didn’t take that crown.

Both of those histories are valuable, but they leave one question open: how did Android become so dominant? Like any big trend with a multitude of causes, there’s no one answer to that question. But in this week’s Processor, I wanted to examine one of those causes.

Verizon.

By arguing that Verizon is one of the reasons that Android is now huge, I want to be clear that I…

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If self-driving cars become widespread, society will have to grapple with a new burden: the ability to program vehicles with preferences about which lives to prioritize in the event of a crash. Human drivers make these choices instinctively, but algorithms will be able to make them in advance. So will car companies and governments choose to save the old or the young? The many or the few?

A new paper published today by MIT probes public thought on these questions, collating data from an online quiz launched in 2016 named the Moral Machine. It asked users to make a series of ethical decisions regarding fictional car crashes, similar to the famous trolley problem. Nine separate factors were tested, including individuals’ preferences for…

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