Technology News

Stay hydrated in style and cut down on single-use plastic with our favorite bottles—now updated with information on lead.

Apple's midrange tablet is now an option for creatives and gamers alike, but it lacks exciting upgrades all around.

Looking for something extra cozy to sleep in? These flannel sheets are the softest you'll find, whether you're looking for luxurious velvet flannel or something light enough for a hot sleeper.

In New York and other cities where congestion pricing policies, bike infrastructure projects, and car bans have been put in place, cyclists are finding the streets more welcoming.

The Spark 2 from Positive Grid looks like a miniature old-school amp, but it is, essentially, a computer with some knobs and a speaker. It has Bluetooth, USB-C, and an associated smartphone app. It needs firmware updates, which can brick the device—ask me how I found this out—and it runs code on DSP chips. New guitar tones can be downloaded into the device, where they run as software rather than as analog electrical circuits in an amp or foot pedal.

In other words, the Spark 2 is the latest example of the "software-ization" of music.

Forget the old image of a studio filled with a million-dollar, 48-track mixing board from SSL or API and bursting with analog amps, vintage mics, and ginormous plate reverbs. Studios today are far more likely to be digital, where people record "in the box" (i.e., they track and mix on a computer running software like Pro Tools or Logic Pro) using digital models of classic (and expensive) amplifiers, coded by companies like NeuralDSP and IK Multimedia. These modeled amp sounds are then run through convolution software that relies on digital impulse responses captured from different speakers and speaker cabinets. They are modified with effects like chorus and distortion, which are all modeled, too. The results can be world-class, and they're increasingly showing up on records.

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The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago, and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon's size, body shape, and swimming speed, among other characteristics.

While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark, others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon's body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodon were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.

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From beach days to board meetings, these top totes are designed to protect your valuables, and then some.

TCL’s upgraded 6 Series skips the brightness blast for impressively balanced performance.

This new wide-plate straightening iron has only one temperature setting, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

From comforters to sheets, pillows, and bed frames, here’s how to keep your bed in tip-top shape.

By proving a broader version of Hilbert’s famous 10th problem, two groups of mathematicians have expanded the realm of mathematical unknowability.

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself—and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

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These tips and tricks will help your dreams stay sweet.

Those clicks and pops aren't supposed to be there! Give your music a bath with this handy guide.

See how we're celebrating International Women's Day and Women's History Month across our productsSee how we're celebrating International Women's Day and Women's History Month across our products

If the game you want to play is only available for Windows, here are three things you can try to get it running on your Mac.

I happened upon the budget brand at a chintzy souvenir shop in Maine. I've since sworn full allegiance to the cult of Comfort Colors.

The wildifires in the Carolinas have followed months of whiplash weather—drought, followed by hurricane-fueled floods, and then more drought.

If you and your partner have different sleeping styles and debate over how soft or firm a mattress should be, the answer is this split topper.

A longstanding scientific belief about a link between cancer prevalence and animal body size has tested for the first time in our new study ranging across hundreds of animal species.

If larger animals have more cells, and cancer comes from cells going rogue, then the largest animals on Earth—like elephants and whales—should be riddled with tumours. Yet, for decades, there has been little evidence to support this idea.

Many species seem to defy this expectation entirely. For example, budgies are notorious among pet owners for being prone to renal cancer despite weighing only 35 g. Yet cancer only accounts for around 2 percent of mortality among roe deer (up to 35 kg).

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