When it’s done well, pop music makes you feel you live on a planet populated by other intelligent beings. When it’s done really well, pop music makes you feel you live on a slightly better version of the planet you inhabit.
Late Thursday night Beyoncé dropped an album on us like a ton of...
The Knowles knows
Though the NSA has tried to paint Edward Snowden as an unqualified and unscrupulous rogue, a new report suggests that he may have only gained access to the sensitive documents he leaked earlier this year because he was anything but. Speaking with Forbes, an alleged NSA employee who knew him...
The holidays are upon us, and you know what that means: a very special week in Verge Video. Will this week's podcasts like The Verge Mobile Show and The Vergecast be holiday themed? Probably not, but that doesn't mean it can't be special in your heart. And to help fill your holiday downtime, you can catch up on Detours, Small Empires, and Top Shelf in the playlists below.
Until now, 3D printing anything flexible like a blanket or a dress was left to the professionals. Fabric-like objects were technically possible, but they weren't things people could print using their own MakerBots. Nervous System, a generative design studio, is working to change that: its new, free desktop app Kinematics allows anyone with a 3D printer to create flexible products at home.
Kinematics' simulation and compression technology can take the design of an object larger than the 3D printer itself and crumple it up to a size that will make it fit in the printer, allowing it to be made in one shot, in one piece. The final product is, literally and figuratively, larger than the sum of its parts.
The process starts with the design for a 3D-printed object like a bracelet. The Kinematics app turns the design into a puzzle made of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of triangles. The smaller the triangles, the more flexible the final piece. All the triangular puzzle pieces...
Print objects that bend and don't break
Beyoncé's surprise album release on iTunes this past Friday has, unsurprisingly, been a huge hit. Apple just announced that the self-titled video and song collection sold a whopping 828,773 copies in only three days, making it the fastest-selling album on iTunes ever. 617,213 copies were sold in the US. According to BIllboard, it will be the top-selling album of the week — even though it...
Over 800,000 copies sold in just three days
Millions of Americans rely on soaps and body washes labeled "antibacterial" or "antimicrobial" to kill germs and prevent illnesses. But the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) isn't convinced that the products do what they claim — and says they might pose longterm health risks that outweigh any potential benefits.
Sequels for popular '90s films Rounders and Shakespeare in Love are likely on the way. A multi-year agreement announced today will see The Weinstein Company produce new movies, TV shows, and live productions in partnership with Miramax, the studio that brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein founded in 1979 and eventually sold to Disney. Miramax is now controlled by a group of private investors, who in recent years have focused on milking its huge library of over 700 films rather than producing fresh content. The newly announced pact allows the Weinstein brothers to dig back through that archive...
The job of senior policy advisor to the EPA doesn't sound like a very exciting one, but for John C. Beale, it was an open license. Beale's official job was running the agency's Air Policy office, but he convinced his colleagues he was also on contract to the CIA, taking unannounced trips to Pakistan and blaming recurrent absences on a fictional malaria infection contracted during an equally fictional tour of duty in the Vietnam War.
Microsoft is preparing to ship its Windows Phone 8.1 update with two significant changes: a notification center and a Siri-like personal assistant. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans have revealed to The Verge that the company is currently beta testing copies of Windows Phone 8.1 internally, with plans to fully detail its features at the Build Developer Conference in April, 2014. A highly requested notification-center feature will be...
Microsoft addresses requested features
Digg-creator-turned-startup-investor Kevin Rose thinks blogging has turned into a lifeless experience. Blog pages with words on static background only go so far in telling a story, so to fix that Rose is pitching a concept called Tiny. It adds blurred video that streams in the background of...
The web may be growing, but in America the physical infrastructure most people use to access it is barely keeping pace. Eighty-five percent of the country is still stuck with cable modem service as...
Amazon is planning to make 4K content a little bit easier to come by. This morning, Amazon Studios announced that it will shoot all of its 2014 series — both comedies and dramas — in the ultra...
With the laudable Nexus 5 and G2 as its most recent smartphones, you wouldn't think that LG is in need of any help in making appealing new phones and the Korean company wholeheartedly agrees. Nonetheless, a report by the Korea Times today...
No joint venture on the cards, at least not yet
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a former distinguished engineer at Microsoft, is joining Google. Agüera y Arcas originally joined Microsoft in 2006 after the software giant acquired his Seadragon startup. He was a key software architect who helped...
A source close to the beleaguered BlackBerry has told The Wall Street Journal that two senior staff members will soon be leaving the smartphone manufacturer. Chris Wormald, head of BlackBerry's mergers and acquisitions, will reportedly be leaving by the end of December, while...
Governments worldwide are trying to solidify their positions on Bitcoin. Chinese regulators banned financial institutions from using Bitcoin earlier this month, while in July, Thailand's government declared the virtual currency's use illegal due to a lack of applicable laws. Now Bitcoin has taken another hit to its legitimacy: Norway —...
no cash value
When it came time to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s children’s book The Hobbit to the big screen, Peter Jackson didn’t go for a straightforward adaptation. Pulling from appendices to The Lord of the...
Two down, one to go
After becoming the first robot to successfully land on the Moon in nearly 40 years, China's Yutu rover has started taking photos. The first picture shows the Chang'e-3 lander,...
Peter O'Toole, best known for his legendary role in the classic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, died this weekend at a hospital in London. He was 81.
O'Toole announced his...
A Redditor exploring the streets of Ronse, Belgium stumbled across some spectacular art. Hidden inside an abandoned nursing school were walls full of Batman graffiti, featuring various incarnations of the Dark Knight alongside the Joker, Bane, and...
German chancellor Angela Merkel has come up with a way for President Obama to atone for years of wiretapping her cellphone: posing for a couple of selfies. Last night, Saturday Night Live poked fun...
After giving 30-day free trials a shot, Amazon has a new master plan to get its Kindle Fire HDX tablets under as many trees as possible this holiday season: a nine-month financing option. According to a new offer spotted by All Things D, you’ll be able to pay just 25 percent of the tablet’s purchase price up front, with another quarter due...
Valve’s prototype Steam Machine gaming consoles are making their way to beta testers, and just like everything the company does, it’s all about presentation. Reddit user colbehr’s detailed unboxing shows the wooden crate Steam is using to ship the machine, full of Valve touches like a...
Microsoft is continuing its 12 days of deals today with a 50 percent discount on a 12-month Xbox Music subscription. Normally priced at $99.90, Microsoft is allowing US customers to purchase a subscription for just $49.90. The deal is limited to three subscriptions per customer, and a code for...
We all know the feeling. You're sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn't cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose...
More than a decade after its introduction, TiVo is putting its trademark thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons to good use. Well, "good" is strictly a matter of opinion in this case: Zatz not Funny! reports that the DVR maker is testing a feature on...
A mainstay of drive-up bank tellers for decades, a New Zealand cafe is finally taking the pneumatic tube to its logical conclusion: as a delivery mechanism for delicious, nutritive sliders. The Press reports the story of Christchurch's C1...
Google may be in hot water with the Canadian Competition Bureau. The bureau announced it would be investigating the company in May, but more recent reports suggest it's not too happy with what the investigation has turned up.
Privacy advocates scored a major victory in Boston this week when the city’s police department announced it would indefinitely suspend its use of automated license plate readers. The Boston Globe reports that the 14 devices currently in use let...
At a Variety event this week, Nancy Tellem — a TV industry veteran who now leads Microsoft's digital media business — noted that the company hoped to have original programming ready for Xbox Live "in the first quarter, at minimum second...
Few organizations have been more vocal or more active in the fight against the NSA's far-reaching surveillance programs this year than the American Civil Liberties Union, and it's driving the point home this month with a holiday-themed parody. "The NSA is Coming to Town" is exactly what it sounds like: a darkly comedic remix of the Christmas classic "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," featuring NSA agents dressed up as Santas wreaking havoc through the streets of New York City. The climax of the...
In video posted of a New York event held on Tuesday, Tim Cook accepts a Lifetime Achievement Award from Auburn University, where the presiding Apple CEO earned his bachelor's degree in industrial engineering. Cook spends much of his 13-minute...
First revealed by All Things D in April, The Wall Street Journal reports today that some users of Twitter's mobile apps are seeing a new "Nearby" timeline that surfaces local tweets. Twitter has never excelled at local discovery — location is turned off by default for tweets that users post from their phones — but the fact that the company is moving forward with testing suggests that it still has its eyes on the prize. It's easy to see how the feature could be useful, at least in theory:...
According to state-run media outlet Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Iran successfully launched its second monkey to space and back, the country's latest step toward sending humans into orbit. The monkey, named Fargam, was flown on Iran's...
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