Technology

Elon Musk intends to make himself immortal by inserting himself into history books as best he can: electric cars will do, but so will a private mission to Mars. At times, it seems that he is the last subscriber to the “Great Man” theory of history. Well, none of us have control over our own obituaries The problem is that history tends to be written by the survivors — a heel turn late in life, for instance, will obliterate any contemporary admiration. In Los Angeles, this is most clearly borne out by William Mullholland. Mulholland — an obsessed engineer whose dream was to supply Los Angeles with enough water for generations of growth — performed an examination on the St. Francis Dam hours before it collapsed, killing hundreds in one of the worst disasters in California’s history. Brilliant...

The Air Force’s mysterious spy spaceplane, dubbed the X-37B, is headed back to space on Saturday morning for its sixth mission in Earth orbit. As usual with this spacecraft, its exact purpose is a secret, though the Air Force says the vehicle will be carrying a number of experiments on this trip and testing out new systems in space before returning them to Earth. This launch comes a little more than six months after the X-37B returned home from its record-breaking fifth mission to orbit. The spaceplane, which looks a bit like a miniature Space Shuttle, landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 27th after spending a total of 780 days, or more than two years, in space. That flight marked the X-37B’s longest mission yet in space, and the vehicle has now spent a total of seve...

As governments across Europe begin to ease lockdown restrictions and allow sport to return during a pandemic, a production team in the UK has quietly been getting ready. BT Sport, which typically produces and broadcasts live Premier League football (soccer) in 4K HDR on a weekly basis, has moved nearly all of its production team remote. Live football returns in Europe this weekend for Germany’s Bundesliga, and producers, directors, and commentators will go live in makeshift home offices just a few steps away from where they usually sleep. “We’ve been doing 7 live shows every week during lockdown all remotely,” says Jamie Hindhaugh, chief operating officer at BT Sport, in an interview with The Verge. “You learn different tricks and traits, and you understand how different people interpret w...

Microsoft’s Surface Go 2 is easy to fall in love with but hard to live with. The small tablet has updates in it that go a long way toward addressing the problems with the original Surface Go, but not entirely. The screen is bigger, and there’s an option for a faster processor, both of which make this a better computer. It starts at $399.99, but that price isn’t really what you’ll pay. It would be silly to get a Surface Go 2 without a keyboard, so add $100 for that. At five hundred bucks, though, it’s a category where you will find competing products that do many of the things the Surface Go 2 does but better. If you spring for the faster processor ($730 with a keyboard), that’s even more true. The only thing those competing products can’t do is be a little tablet that happens to run Window...

Well, here’s a camera trick we’ve not seen in a smartphone before: X-ray vision. Or, at least, something that looks very much like it. It’s a feature of the new OnePlus 8 Pro, which seems to use the phone’s infrared sensors to see through a small subset of black materials. If you’ve got a OnePlus 8 Pro and want to try it out for yourself, just open up the camera app, swipe over to the “Photochrom” color filter, and point it some black objects. Fair warning: we experimented with the filter ourselves and it really is quite selective. It only works on very thin black plastic that’s already a little see-through in the right light. Think things like TV remotes rather than the sturdier plastic of a high-end DSLR. It’s also hit or miss with clothing. We first saw this trick via Ben Geskin on Twit...

Live in Silicon Valley long enough and someone will tell you that the party is over. As far as I can tell, this phenomenon dates back to at least 1874. As Peter Hartlaub recounted last year in the San Francisco Chronicle, upon the occasion of a writer for the Washington Post announcing that San Francisco had broken her heart, that was the first time a citizen had lamented the region’s vanished glory days. (The reason for the citizen’s heartbreak: the construction of the Palace Hotel, which he viewed as too tall and a blight on the skyline at 120 feet.) San Francisco and its surrounding tech hub have continued to die ever since, most spectacularly during the dot-com crash, but certainly well before then, too. (Here, via Andreessen Horowitz partner David Ulevitch, is the founder of onetime s...

An Amazon warehouse worker in Indianapolis, Indiana, has died of COVID-19, the company confirmed. The death brings the known total of COVID-19 deaths at Amazon warehouses to seven, but Amazon’s process for notifying workers makes the true number difficult to determine. Several workers at IND8 first learned of the death through rumors and say management began informing employees more widely only after being confronted. “They weren’t going to say anything if it wasn’t for people asking questions,” says a worker at IND8, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution. Amazon has repeatedly declined to say how many warehouse employees have been diagnosed with or died from the virus. In an interview on “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, Amazon senior vice president of worldwide operation...

Ubisoft is offering free downloads of its educational tours of ancient Greece and ancient Egypt, which are based on the studio’s recreations of those worlds in Assassin’s Creed Origins and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the studio announced today. The tours will be free to claim until May 21st. You can download Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece and Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt from Ubisoft’s website here, though you’ll need a Uplay account to claim them. Here’s what’s available in Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece, according to Ubisoft: Travel throughout 29 regions and uncover hundreds of stations with tours on 5 different themes: philosophy, famous cities, daily life, war and myths to learn more about history of Ancient Greece. And here’s what’s you can do in Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt: The Disc...

Nintendo has announced the addition of four more games to its Switch Online subscription service. Nintendo Switch Online lets you play Switch games over the internet as well as providing a library of free NES and SNES titles. The additions for May include one NES game and three SNES games. The NES game is Tecmo’s mythical action game Rygar, while the SNES additions include Natsume’s cult sci-fi western shooter Wild Guns and Jaleco’s overhead shooter Operation Logic Bomb. The most notable game added to the service in this round is Panel de Pon, which was never released in the US — at least not in this form. It’s a classic SNES puzzle game designed by the legendary Gunpei Yokoi, but outside Japan the game was titled Tetris Attack and its fantasy anime style was replaced by Nintendo character...

The most upsetting thing about The Eddy is that it’s already over. Netflix’s latest bingeable show is a limited series, an eight-episode run about a jazz club in Paris. Produced by Academy Award-winning La La Land and First Man director Damien Chazelle (who directed the first two episodes) and written by acclaimed playwright Jack Thorne, The Eddy feels like it brings something truly new to the many original series the streaming giant has cultivated of late, and it’s one of the most visually rewarding shows in your queue this year. The series follows Elliot (André Holland, terrific) as he struggles to keep his jazz club, The Eddy, afloat during a particularly bad time. His house band is on the verge of getting signed, but bad luck keeps getting in the way. His daughter, Julie (Amandla Stenb...

Rick Riordan’s beloved young adult fantasy series, Percy Jackson, is getting another shot at the live-action treatment seven years after the last film was released — but this time, as a Disney Plus series. Riordan announced the project on Twitter, adding a note of reassurance to fans who were left livid over 20th Century Fox’s original film adaptations in 2010 and 2013: it wouldn’t end up like last time. Both Riordan and fans of the books, which follow demigod Percy Jackson as he travels around the country trying to find Zeus’ lightning bolt, haven’t hidden their distaste of the two live-action movies. In a lengthy blog post published in November 2018, Riordan reiterated that once he “saw the final script and saw what they were doing on the set, I realized I had to step away for my own pea...

Apple’s global supply chain is making safety changes to better protect workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, as outlined in the company’s 2020 Supplier Responsibility report. Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of operations and the person in charge of the company’s global supply chain, detailed the changes the company’s suppliers are making in a letter at the beginning of the report. The company has worked with its global supply chain “on a range of protections suited to the circumstances in each country, including health screenings, limiting density, and ensuring strict adherence to social distancing in their facilities,” said Khan. Apple will require the use of personal protective equipment Apple will require the use of personal protective equipment during work and “in all common ...