Technology

Google is adding a new tab grouping feature to Chrome, the company announced today. I, for one, am extremely excited for it. I can already see how it could help me better organize the dozens of tabs I typically have open at any given time. If you want to try the feature now, Google says it’s available in the latest Chrome Beta and will be rolling out more broadly to the desktop versions of Chrome next week. Google’s implementation of tab grouping looks pretty clever. You can make a group by right-clicking on one tab and assigning it a custom name and color. Then, you’ll see the color of the group under all of the tabs included in the group. You can also drag tabs from group to group if you want to change how they’re organized. If you want an idea of what it looks like, here’s an image from...

The New Mutants, a movie that feels like it’s never going to actually come out, has a new release date: August 28th. Like Mulan and Black Widow, The New Mutants was delayed because of the global pandemic, which saw movie theaters around the world shut down. Disney announced in an earlier press release that Mulan and Black Widow would move into their new release dates, July 24th and November 6th respectively, but didn’t mention The New Mutants at the time. Fans began speculating that The New Mutants could wind up a Disney Plus or as a Hulu exclusive, since Disney owns both streaming services and The New Mutants is now a Disney title following the acquisition of 21st Century Fox. Disney has already shifted some of its theatrical releases, like Artemis Fowl and Hamilton, to now premiere on Di...

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says next-generation gaming consoles, in particular Sony’s PlayStation 5, will bring about changes in game development that go far beyond a jump in graphics quality. During a press briefing for the company’s newly announced Unreal Engine 5, which is optimized to work with next-gen consoles, Sweeney says the PS5 is a “remarkably balanced device.” “It has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management. That’s going to be absolutely critical,” he says. “It’s one thing to render everything that can fit in memory,” he adds, but a much more impressive feat to render a world that “might be tens of gigabytes in size” almost instantaneously, as Sony’s new console and its M.2 solid-state drive are promising. “We’ve been working supe...

Epic Games today said its massive battle royale hit Fortnite would be available on Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5 consoles at launch later this year. Epic made the announcement alongside its reveal of Unreal Engine 5, its new game engine and developer toolkit designed for creating next-generation titles. “Epic will release Fortnite, built with UE4, on next-gen consoles at launch and, in keeping with the team’s commitment to prove out industry-leading features through internal production, migrate the game to UE5 in mid-2021,” the company said in a blog post published today. Epic says all progress and purchases will carry over, and it will support cross-play across generations and will “continue support for existing platforms in tandem with our support for next-generation...

Epic Games today announced the next iteration of its game engine, the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), with a stunning demo running on the PlayStation 5. Epic says the demo shows off what next-generation game consoles will truly be capable of once developers have full access to creative tools like UE5 and the capability to squeeze the maximum out of new hardware and software baked into Sony’s PS5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. “The graphics speak for themselves. And Epic has always pushed the bleeding edge of what’s possible,” CEO Tim Sweeney tells The Verge. “Our goal isn’t just to bring more features to developers. The hardest problem in game development right now is building high quality games takes enormous time and cost. So we want to make developers’ lives easier and more productive.” “The nex...

Slack is making its big mobile redesign official today by pushing the changes live on the public versions of both its Android and iOS apps. The redesign’s standout feature is a new navigation bar at the bottom that lets you more easily get to critical parts of the app, such as your direct messages and your mentions, without having to use swipes or tapping through tiny, hard-to-see menus. The result is a unified mobile Slack that’s virtually the same on both Android and iOS and is much more pleasant to use. The swipe gestures do still exist, and they now consistently open up your workspaces with a swipe right, while a swipe left brings you back to your last conversation. Slack also added a compose button that floats in the button of the screen in most parts of the app, letting you easily st...

When the end came, it was just like Tom and Mary had imagined. Supply chains started to crumble. Millions of Americans lost their jobs. Grocery stores ran out of food. The nearly retired couple wasn’t going to wait for society to collapse. They hopped in their camper van and drove 19 hours to South Dakota. “To come here and experience it in person is like walking the Grand Canyon for the first time,” Tom says. But it’s not the Grand Canyon. It’s a doomsday bunker. Tom and Mary are living at xPoint, an abandoned military facility-turned-survivalist community at the base of the Black Hills in Fall River County. Miles of plains stretch out in all directions, connected by 100 miles of private road. Along the skyline, steel doors tucked into grassy knolls indicate the openings to the bunkers. I...

Amazon has announced a new update for its Fire HD 8 tablet, adding a faster processor, more RAM, and USB-C charging. These are all welcome updates for the 8-inch tablet, which hasn’t seen a meaningful update in years. There’s also a new Fire HD 8 Plus model, which offers even more RAM and Qi wireless charging, in a first for any of Amazon’s hardware. The regular Fire HD 8 is getting spec boost nearly across the board. The processor is getting bumped up from a 1.3GHz quad-core chip to a 2.0 GHz one that Amazon says is 30 percent faster. RAM is going from 1.5GB on the 2018 model to 2GB. Storage is being doubled, going from a choice between 16GB and 32GB to 32GB and 64GB models, with up to 1TB of expandable storage through a microSD card (up from 400GB on the old model). The display is, unfor...

On Monday, a massive, out-of-control Chinese rocket fell out of the sky off the west coast of Africa, becoming one of the largest human-made objects ever to make an uncontrolled descent to Earth from space. At first, the rocket seemed to harmlessly slam into the Atlantic Ocean. But now it seems that some pieces of debris may have hit solid ground, according to local reports from Côte d’Ivoire describing metallic objects that apparently fell from the sky. The rocket that just made a chaotic return to Earth was the core of China’s powerful Long March 5B rocket, which launched on May 5th. The mission marked the first time China had launched this particular rocket variant to space. Ultimately, the mission was a success, allowing China to test this massive new vehicle and put an experimental ne...

Beauty guru and YouTube creator James Charles is well-versed in the apology video, a staple of YouTube culture that many of the platform’s top personalities have had to film, and he’s passing along those skills to a new generation of wannabe influencers. In a recent episode of his YouTube Premium competition series Instant Influencer, Charles gives a group of aspiring beauty stars a new challenge: create an apology video that is believable and won’t end up torn to shreds by the popular commentators who often keep YouTube’s community in check. Apologize correctly, and fans may not turn their backs, declaring a YouTuber instantly canceled. Come off fake, rude, or arrogant, and face the wrath of a community deciding all at once to burn said creator at the metaphorical stake. Apologizing is so...

Robotics and AI are supposed to make people’s lives better, so why don’t they help me suck less at sport? Engineer and YouTuber Shane Wighton has tackled this incredibly pressing issue with one of the cleverest mechanical creations I’ve seen on the internet: a basketball hoop that ensures that you never miss a shot. You can get the gist of how the thing works from the GIF below. Sensors track the trajectory of each shot and motors attached to the backboard adjust its angle to deflect the ball into the hoop. But Wighton’s video (from his channel Stuff Made Here) goes into some fascinating detail, explaining both the underlying technology and the design process. Boom, another. Boom, another. GIF: Shane Wighton / YouTube For example, the whole process of tracking the shot, calculating the ang...

Users of the Wink smart home platform now have until May 20th before they’ll have to start paying a $4.99 a month for functionality that was previously free, the company has announced in an amended blog post. The company originally announced a May 13th deadline for the introduction of the subscriptions. In an email sent to customers announcing the delay, Wink said that it regrets any inconvenience caused by the change. “We can appreciate that some of you may need additional time to subscribe or to make alternate considerations,” it says. The email can be read in full over on MacRumors. “We can appreciate that some of you may need additional time to subscribe or to make alternate considerations” Now, on May 20th, any users who decide not to pay for the service will not be able to access the...