Новости за 17.06.2017

Batman star Adam West passed away at the age of 88 last weekend, resulting in a flood of tributes from his co-stars, other Batman actors, and the city of Los Angles. Yesterday, NBC released an unaired episode of its recently canceled DC-universe show Powerless, which features the late actor in one of his final roles.

We really liked Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop: it’s got the right balance of power, portability, and design. It’s also apparently impossible to repair on your own, according to teardown specialists at iFixit.

One of the highlights of Microsoft’s E3 press conference last week was the reveal of an all-new fighting game for the Dragon Ball Z universe. Now, there’s been quite a few DBZ fighting and action games over the years — nearly 150 titles in all. The long-running anime hasn’t always had a stellar reputation for quality, but Dragon Ball FighterZ, as the newest title in the franchise is called, should change that.

There's something inherently creepy and annoying about drones buzzing over our heads — a frequent backyard irritation in cities like New York. But it turns out, a drone’s spying abilities can be useful: an uncrewed drone discovered a super-rare plant on a steep cliff on the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi. The discovery wowed botanists — and shows how technology can help conservationists in their fight against extinction.

A Navy veteran accidentally stumbled upon a number of rare documents and images from the height of the space age — in the trash outside of a home in Florida.

Just about any account you own on the internet is prone to being hacked — and one of the easiest ways to add an extra layer of security is to enable two-factor authentication. Also known as two-step verification or 2FA, the process gives web services a secondary access to the account owner (you!) in order to verify a login attempt. Typically, this involves phone number and / or an email address.

Jeff Vandermeer is known for his surreal and unsettling stories. Look no further than his Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), which told the story of a region of the country cut off from civilization, where nature is left to reclaim the space in strange and otherworldly ways. In his new novel Borne, Vandermeer revisits some of the environmental themes of those books, but he turns out an impressive, post-apocalyptic tale about a young woman and a bizarre, intelligent blob that she discovers while scavenging. Читать дальше...

Remember when everyone was panicking for last-minute Mother’s Day gifts back in May? Well, it’s time to do that all over again for Father’s Day — which, in case you forgot, is tomorrow, June 18th. It’s probably too late to order something that’ll arrive in time, but maybe you can try wrapping a photo of the gift? Or a receipt with a tracking number?

Space startup Planetary Resources is killing its nascent Earth observation system, Ceres, opting to focus on its core mission of asteroid mining.

I'm not usually a fan of horror movies. But every once and a while there are films like The Witch that, instead of going for straight-up horror, are just dark and tense through and through — and that I kind of love. The latest is It Comes at Night, and I'll just point you to my colleague Bryan Bishop's review, which I think nails the film's creepy strengths and thematic shortcomings.

My dog spends a lot of time sniffing the ground with her adorable little nose. She doesn’t care what she finds: grass, cement, flowers, fire hydrants, poop, trash cans, fences, buildings — it’s all an exciting adventure of scents to her.

Deborah is a computer-generated human who needs to get from the Hotel de Anza in San Jose to Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, post haste. Traffic on the 101 is a nightmare, so rather than spending hours in traffic, she whips out her smartphone and hails an electric, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft through Vahana, the on-demand, aviation project. Total fare: $77. Total flight time: 18 minutes.

I did not attend this year’s E3, so my knowledge of what happened in gaming this week is based off my colleagues’ adventures in New Donk City, live reports from the exhibition halls of Los Angeles Convention Center, and their struggle to understand why some games bother to exist. And while some games looked intriguing, it appears my peers failed to inform me of a new title that I wholly identify with; a game that involves eating as many sushi as possible and flinging empty plates at your opponent. Читать дальше...

When Airbnb first announced in 2015 that it would operate in Cuba, it was clear the company had lofty ambitions. CEO Brian Chesky appeared alongside President Obama during his visit to the country last year, where the president heralded the company’s business success, adding that there were now “thousands of potential sellers of a great experience here in Cuba.”

Nickel-rolling — or the practice of trolling someone with songs, images, or lyrics from Nickelback — is a time-honored tradition at The Verge. It’s why I have the band’s not-really-seminal album Here and Now on my desk. (No one knows for sure where it came from, only that the troll is strong.) So finding out that a US senator is being nickel-rolled is like seeing a child grow up and hit it big.

YouTube is rolling out new analytics tools for 360-degree and VR video producers that will include a heat map of where users are actually looking while watching those clips. The heat maps, which will be available for videos that exceed 1,000 views, will clearly highlight “what parts of your video are catching a viewer’s attention and how long they’re looking at a specific part of the video.”