Новости за 25.04.2017

A new trailer for the upcoming Sonic Forces was released today, and it looks tentatively good. I use the word “tentatively” here, because if there's anything Sonic fans know, it's the feeling of disappointment that comes when promising games turn out to be stuffed with random features nobody asked for.

I've heard a lot about graphene and carbon nanotubes, but today was my first visit to the "molybdenum disulfide" Wikipedia entry. Researchers at Tu Wien in Austria have developed a microprocessor that uses 2D molybdenum disulfide as the semiconductor (via KurzweilAI).

Here’s some cool news for fans of DC Comics, as well as fans of the gradual splintering of the television experience: DC Entertainment will launch an unnamed “digital streaming service” next year, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

When Uber first announced its crazy-sounding plan to explore “on-demand urban aviation” — essentially a network of flying taxis that could be hailed via a smartphone app and flown from rooftop to rooftop — the company made it clear that it never intended to go it alone.

Samsung Italia, the Korean company’s Italy-based team, thinks emoji can help people with aphasia communicate. The neurological disorder affects the language part of people’s brains so they often have difficulty speaking, reading, and writing. It doesn’t affect cognition.

Six months ago, Amazon launched Music Unlimited, its on-demand music service, designed to compete against the likes of Spotify and Apple Music. Six months later the company hasn’t shared any subscriber numbers, but it is very bullish about its prospects, encouraged by the success of its Echo smart speakers, which are deeply integrated with its music offerings and in millions of homes across the country. “I see us as one of the top global streaming services,” Steve Boom, the vice president of Amazon... Читать дальше...

As reported by Kotaku, it appears Nintendo used a fan event as the inspiration for at least some of the story for the upcoming sequel to its 2015 hit Splatoon.

Brian House’s new installation takes real-time data from water quality sensors and turns it into sound. The project, titled Animus, is composed of four sheets of metal — iron-oxidized steel, aluminum, copper, and lead — each attached to a microphone and audio transducer, which converts energy into sound. The quality of the sound is manipulated by amplifiers, which receive data from sensors placed in Colorado’s Animus River. As the river changes, so does the sound produced by the installation.

Facebook announced today that it’s testing a new version of related articles that appear in your News Feed, which will underneath the linked story.

Google today announced a new set of changes to its search engine, in an effort to deliver higher quality results and limit fake news. The company outlined changes to its search ranking, feedback tools, and transparency practices in a blog post published today.

FaceApp’s founder Yaroslav Goncharov has apologized for its “hot” filter after some users pointed out it made their skin appear lighter, The Guardian reports. The selfie app uses neural networks to change a person’s appearance by plastering a fake smile onto their face or making them look older or younger. But the app’s hot filter seemingly just makes people look whiter.

Apple is cutting commissions for affiliates for App Store apps and in-app purchases from 7 percent down to just 2.5 percent starting May 1st, as per MacStories’ Federico Viticci.

Apple is about to change the look of its top stores for the first time in 15 years. The company is adding conference and meeting rooms, new video screens, and living trees to its 100 biggest locations; it’s also changing the name of the Genius Bar to “Genius Grove.”

Apple has hired NASA augmented and virtual reality expert Jeff Norris, Bloomberg reports, to build AR and VR projects for the company. Norris apparently joined Apple’s augmented reality team earlier this year, Bloomberg says, as a senior manager reporting to former Dolby Labs executive Mike Rockwell.

The co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is launching a new online publication that aims to combat fake news. The project is called Wikitribune, and will bring together professional journalists and a community of interested readers to produce and publish news stories. The site will be financed by a crowdfunding campaign that launches today, and will focus on a range of issues — from politics to science and technology.

Starting today, residents of the greater Phoenix metropolitan area can sign up to go for a ride in a self-driving minivan. As often as they want. For free.

Siri has gained another string to its bow with WhatsApp’s new update for iOS. Apple’s assistant can now read text messages you receive via the service out loud, making life a bit easier for people with visual impairments, or for people who just want to use their phone without looking at the screen.

The Nvidia Shield box is one of the better ways to get 4K content onto a 4K TV, and it just added another source: you can now stream 4K movies and TV from Google Play.

A week after we got an achingly short glimpse of Kingsman: The Golden Circle — the sequel to 2015 spy comedy success Kingsman: The Secret Service — we’ve now been blessed with a full trailer. The two-minute clip gives us an idea of the setup, with young agent Eggsy watching his headquarters get blown up, meeting his American secret service counterparts, and coming face-to-face with his old (and presumed dead) mentor Colin Firth.

The Ford Mustang is now the world’s best selling sports car, according to a Ford analysis of IHS Markit data. The company has long sold the Mustang in the United States, but has recently pushed an international expansion of the vehicle, with 45,000 Mustangs sold outside the US in 2016, up 101 percent from the year before. Germany and China made up most of the growth.

People sitting down to a breakfast of southern-style frozen hash browns might be surprised to find “extraneous golf ball materials” mixed in with their potatoes, according to a voluntary recall announcement issued by McCain Foods USA.

The most recent update to Google Photos’ iOS app now lets you send images from an iPhone to your TV, so long as you have an Apple TV streaming box hooked up. The update, out today, uses AirPlay to transmit the images, letting you browse on the Google Photos app and choose which ones you’d like to beam to the big screen.

French presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron has qualified for next month’s runoff election, but a Russian government-linked group seems to eager to slow down the campaign’s progress.

A former Lyft driver is filing a class action lawsuit against Uber less than a month after The Information exposed its controversial “Hell” program. Between 2014 and 2016, the software program allowed Uber to track how many Lyft drivers were available and where, as well as which Uber drivers also worked for Lyft.

Silicon Valley is Mike Judge and Alec Berg’s biting comedy about the American tech industry, now in its fourth season. Every week, we’ll be taking one idea, scene, or joke and explain how it ties to the real Silicon Valley and speaks to an issue at the heart of the industry and its ever-lasting goal to change the world — and make boatloads of money in the process.