Tag: Science

Twitter is testing new features designed to enhance conversations on the platform, including presence indicators, which are status indicators to help you describe what you’re doing while you tweet, and “ice breakers,” which are designed to help spur more discussions. Some of the features were discussed in public tweets this year. But in a meeting with Twitter executives, including its design director, the company showed me new designs that it’s considering for the service.

The designs come at a time when Twitter is attempting to promote more positive discussions and to reduce the number of hateful, abusive ones that take place on its service. These prototypes do not directly address harassment; other divisions at Twitter are at work on…

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A few last-minute bargains on costumes, candy and more!

It’s available in Spanish now, but expected to be released in English and other languages in coming weeks.

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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