The VAIO Duo 11, Sony's sliding, laptop / tablet hybrid didn't exactly take the market by storm – its price was too high, its keyboard cramped, its trackpad non-existent, and its battery life too short to really be a compelling product. Despite all that, Sony thinks the form-factor works, and...
The return of the Surf Slider
Major League Baseball is reportedly on the brink of suspending some of its biggest stars on allegations of doping. According to ESPN, the MLB is looking to suspend about 20 players who it believes took performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) they...
Researchers at the University of Washington have successfully created a prototype of a system that uses Wi-Fi — and only Wi-Fi — to detect gestures. Called "WiSee," the system cleverly measures the Doppler shifts created by human movement on regular Wi-Fi signals. That means that the system doesn't require line of sight for gesture detection and, the researchers claim, it could work with...
Who says scientists don't have a sense of humor? Archeologists studying the fossilized remains of a giant, plant-eating lizard that roamed the country of Myanmar (Burma) up to 40 million years ago have given the creature the scientific name barbaturex morrisoni after classic rock icon Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, who nicknamed himself "the Lizard King." More importantly, the date range ascribed to the fossilized bones indicates that the lizard lived at the same time as early mammals, a time period when the Earth was much warmer than it is today, when there was no ice at the poles and when there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Music to scientists' ears
Every year, Taiwan's electronics companies gather in Taipei to show off their wares. This year,...
He was born 1988 in Richmond, Virginia and also 1983 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. At age 15 he left SBV Excelsior's youth squad and signed for Feyenoord. He attended University of Virginia from 2006-2010 starting just after he performed "the goal of a lifetime" in a September 2006 match against Charlton. He was hired at PCMag in 2010 and changed his squad number to 10, previously used by Dennis...
24 years ago today, hardliners within China’s government cracked down on student protests in Tiananmen Square with a hail of bullets, killing hundreds, possibly thousands. The event has been all but completely scrubbed from China’s historical record: today, words and phrases as benign as "today," "June 4," and even "May 35" are scoured from web services like Weibo. But dissidents have found one way to sneak references to the tragic event online: memes.
Square, Google Wallet, Isis and plenty others are all working to grab the lion's share of the growing (but nascent) mobile payments market. But, so far, none of these options are as widely used in North America as Starbucks' simple mobile apps, according to new findings from the research firm Berg Insight. Across the continent, Berg claims that about $500 million worth of mobile payment transactions took place last year. "However, the vast majority of these payments were made using Starbucks' phenomenally successful smartphone app, whereas mobile wallets that can be used at multiple merchants have yet to gain traction," the research firm...
First came the fitness trackers. Wearable electronic sensors like the Fitbit, Nike FuelBand, Jawbone Up, and Withings have taken off in recent years, letting users automatically collect oodles of data on their running mileage, food intake, and general activity levels. But the boom in body tracking has also come with a major hurdle: the devices don’t play well with each other. There’s no good, standardized way for users to reclaim their...
Quantified selfless
Google has just announced a big update for what is unquestionably Glass' primary purpose: photography. The key new feature among the "new hotness on Glass" is essentially an HDR mode – now, every time you press the camera button, Glass takes a sequence of shots and combines them into a single...
Adobe has always been a software company, but last month it revealed it was tinkering with something new: hardware. Its first efforts are Project Mighty, a smart stylus with Creative Cloud integration, and Project Napoleon, a smart ruler that can create a variety of different shapes. The company...
NASA is launching a rocket high into Earth's atmosphere tonight between 11 PM and midnight Eastern time, in an effort to capture images from the universe's dawn. The agency will be broadcasting the launch live on Ustream from Wallops, Virginia,...
Shadow of the Eternals, a crowdfunded spiritual sequel to GameCube classic Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, was meant to be a fresh start for a group of developers from struggling studio Silicon Knights. But in a strange development, the team is suspending its fundraising...
Crew of the Monitor Celestra during a March 2013 Swedish larp. Image credit: John-Paul Bichard
For three weekends in Sweden, Battlestar Galactica was real.
With dozens of staff, over a million Swedish kronor ($160,000), and a retired naval destroyer, a team of designers hosted a live action...
Apple just released its latest update to OS X, version 10.8.4. It's a relatively small revision that primarily focuses on minor bug fixes, but there is one promising change for iMessage users. Apple says that it's now fixed an annoying issue that would display your iMessage conversations out of order. After installing the update and checking our messages, we're still seeing some chats that aren't displayed...
I like the woods. I like the quiet, the green — especially as the summer tunes up and Manhattan starts dripping. And even in New York, the woods are closer than you think. Beacon Mountain is about 60 miles north of the city, only a...
Bose today rolled out its first ever noise-cancelling earbuds, the QuietComfort 20s, along with its latest portable Bluetooth speaker, the SoundLink Mini. In typical fashion, the company heralded both products as revolutionary and the result of extensive research and development. "New headphones...
The ends of the Earth are getting their close-up. NASA today released a new, updated map of the topography — that is, the surface structure —...
A full week has passed since the last time The Verge Mobile Show was recorded, which means it's high time we had another episode. A few things have happened in that time span: some email apps have...
Google's updating every part of its Gmail ecosystem this week, and iOS is the latest to get the upgrade. Version 2.3.14159 (an awesome version number Easter egg, by the way) brings the new tabbed...
AmazonFresh, the experimental Amazon service that delivers groceries in the Seattle area, could be poised for a major expansion. According to Reuters, AmazonFresh will be coming to Los Angeles as...
Jurassic Park isn't the only classic film getting the 3D re-release treatment this year — a 3D remastered version of The Wizard of Oz is also coming to theaters in September. The theatrical run...
"Designers have kind of been living in the Dark Ages," says Kelly Sutton, the founder of LayerVault. In October of 2011, his company released a Mac...
NASA has been spying on our neighbors. With the help of Pennsylvania State University, it's assembled a huge photo collage of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two of the closest galaxies to our native Milky Way. The images, gathered with NASA's Swift telescope, create a picture that could let us track the formation of stars. But they're also amazing in their own right: a 160-megapixel...
People of Los Angeles — do you like to party? Do you like free booze? Do you enjoy fist-pumping to beats by DJ Trent? Oh, and what about video games, do you like those as well?
If you answered yes to even just one of those questions you're in luck — The Verge and Polygon are kicking off E3...
