Apple and Samsung prepare for another patent lawsuit: 90 Seconds on The Verge

Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair California, where we lay our scene, from ancient patent law to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two technologically advanced foes. A pair of star-cross'd board members take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows. Do with their death bury their companies' strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, And the continuance of their parents' ongoing legal battles, which, but their employees' end, nought could remove, Is now the never-ending traffic of our lawsuit; the which if you with patient jurors attend, what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend or possibly ban sales of the other's products.

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OKCupid asks users to boycott Firefox because of CEO's gay rights stance

Anyone accessing the popular dating site OKCupid with Firefox today is in for a surprise. Instead of the homepage, OKCupid.com is serving Firefox users with a message calling out Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for his support of California's Proposition 8, revealed in a $1000 donation last week. "Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples," the message tells users. "We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid."

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Scientists engineer mouse muscles that can survive cobra venom

That humans can engineer muscle tissue in petri dishes is extraordinary, but it isn't enough to heal serious bodily injuries. To do that, you also need tissue that has the ability to grow strong, heal itself, and respond to commands after being implanted in a living animal. Scientists simply aren't there yet. But a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today brings us one step closer to orthopedic surgery bliss, because scientists were able to engineer mouse muscle that was just as strong as native muscle — and that could heal itself after injury.

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PATERSON ASSIGNED TO GRIFFINS

The Detroit Red Wings on Monday reassigned goaltender Jake Paterson from the Ontario Hockey League’s Saginaw Spirit to the Grand Rapids Griffins.



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Close-up: an industrial robot photographs the finest details of the human face

These are not your usual Hollywood closeups. Swiss photographer Daniel Boschung created the series Face Cartography by using a robot to take high-megapixel pictures of peoples' faces, blowing up their features to striking detail. While macro photography like this isn't new, Boschung is slightly more removed from the process because he uses an ABB industrial robot with an attached Canon EOS Mark ll camera and a 180mm macro lens to capture hundreds of single shots of each subject. The final...

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Healthcare.gov breaks again, starts rejecting applications on deadline day

Today is officially the last day to sign up for health insurance, and the government marketplace isn't working. Following a temporary outage this morning, the Associated Press reports that the site is now rejecting new applications outright.

The issue is with new accounts only, meaning those who have already started their applications can continue to work on them. New account creation has historically been a problem for Healthcare.gov, which experienced severe technical issues for the first two months after it launched.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the health department agency that oversees Healthcare.gov, issued the following statement:

There are a record number of people trying to access HealthCare.gov right now –...

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March 31: Look Ahead in Hockeytown

DETROIT – On Sunday evening, Mike Babcock earned his 411th victory behind the Red Wings’ bench, passing his mentor, legendary coach Scotty Bowman, to move into sole possession of second place in franchise history. Babcock, in his ninth season w...



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Happy birthday to Mr. Hockey

Gordie Howe, the legendary Mr. Hockey, celebrates his 86th birthday Monday. Born March 31, 1928 in Floral, Saskatchewan, Howe has been part of the hockey universe since his debut with the Detroit Red Wings on Oct. 16, 1946. The numbers that...



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Rdio adds Chromecast support for music listening on the TV

Rdio just updated its mobile apps for iOS and Android with support for Chromecast, letting users listen to the music service on any TV connected to Google's $35 streaming device. The large-screen interface is very basic, but that's probably a good thing in this case. It puts album artwork front and center, with Rdio's signature blur effect filling out the background. You're able to pause a track and scrub forward or back with your phone, and there's also the ability to control music volume by hitting the corresponding buttons on your device — though this proved a bit hit or miss in our brief tests. But if you've got a powerful sound system hooked up to your HDTV, it just got a bit easier to pump Rdio through those speakers. Chromecast...

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Thermodo turns your smartphone into an instant thermometer

Today’s smartphones offer countless apps to check the weather, find out upcoming forecasts, or even get alerts when it’s about to rain or snow. But no app can tell you exactly what the temperature is right where you stand. That’s why Robocat, the developers of Haze and other smartphone weather apps, created Thermodo, a small device that plugs into the headphone jack of your Android or iPhone.

Thanks to a highly-sensitive sensor inside of its minuscule housing, Thermodo can tell you the exact air temperature wherever you are, whether that’s at the top of a ski slope or sweating away in the sauna afterwards. It works with an accompanying app to show instant readings and if the temperature is climbing or falling. The Thermodo is...

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Samsung's next Windows Phone arrives in April without 8.1 update

Samsung is preparing to release its next Windows Phone handset on Verizon next month. Sources familiar with Verizon’s plans tell The Verge that the Samsung Ativ SE will be made available as a Windows Phone 8 device, despite the upcoming announcement of an 8.1 update. While images originally leaked with a promise of Windows Phone 8.1, the Ativ SE will receive the update once it’s ready for the handset.

We’re told that the Ativ SE is similar to Samsung’s Galaxy S4 handset, with the same 5-inch 1080p display and 13-megapixel camera. It even looks the same, with a fake brushed metal effect on the rear of the device. Samsung has opted for the Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor inside the Ativ SE, along with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of...

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Can you make gasoline that slows down global warming? Google Ventures thinks so

Cool Planet, a startup headquartered in Colorado, announced a major $100 million round of financing today. Investors include a roster of big names including Google Ventures, BP, General Electric, and ConocoPhillips. Last month the company broke ground on its first commercial plant, located in Louisiana, and this new capital will go towards completing that infrastructure and building two more Louisiana facilities.

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UN orders Japan to halt whale hunting off Antarctica

The United Nations' highest court has ordered Japan to halt a whaling program that it found to be in violation of a moratorium on commercial whaling that's been in place since 1986. Japan had claimed that its whaling activities in the Southern Ocean, which have been ongoing since 1987 as part of two successive programs, were being legally conducted as scientific research, but the UN's International Court of Justice found its research claims to be tenuous and ordered that it end the program. Japan said that it would abide by the case's ruling, reports The Wall Street Journal.

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Inside the fight against high-frequency finance

In June 2007, Brad Katsuyama noticed a problem on Wall Street. Working as an equity trader for the Royal Bank of Canada, he started to see markets drying up as soon as he placed an order, almost as if someone was beating him to the punch. Michael Lewis' new book Flash Boys (excerpted in The New York Times Magazine ) details the long hunt that followed, as Katsuyama tracks down the intricate mechanisms that let high-frequency traders construct a shadow market beyond the reach of everyday traders. "The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value," Lewis writes. "The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all."

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Round two: Apple and Samsung suit up for another billon dollar patent war

On a warm summer’s afternoon two years ago, a group of jurors secretly exited a San Jose courthouse, avoiding a swarm of reporters and news cameras. They had just reached a verdict on what was dubbed by some as “the patent trial of the century,” a fight between Apple and Samsung that was ultimately over the idea of originality.

After a three week-long trial that included more than 50 hours of testimony and arguments from both sides, Apple handily beat Samsung, convincing the jurors that...

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The future is now: advancing the field of sports science with Intel technology

As big data and technology continue to rise in importance, the sports world is taking notice. Leading the way in athlete analytics, Catapult is an Australian-based company that tracks athlete performance using state-of-the-art wearable technologies and software. Gary McCoy, a Senior Applied Sports Scientist at Catapult, travels the world working with top college, professional, and national teams, introducing them to the future of fitness.

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The Obamacare deadline is today, except when it isn't

Today is officially the last day to sign up for health insurance in order to get coverage in 2014 and avoid a fine for being uninsured under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). A slew of exemptions have effectively extended the deadline indefinitely, however.

If you’ve started an application by 11:59PM tonight, you can complete it after the deadline and still receive coverage in 2014. Even if you haven’t started an application by tonight, you’re allowed to apply after the deadline if you experienced website errors, were given misinformation by an ACA worker, were the victim of exceptional circumstances, or fit into one of another seven categories. These claims will not be audited and there is no penalty for lying. "Most people are...

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These grotesque 19th-century animations will hypnotize you

19th-century animation is trippy. For years enthusiasts have been transforming the artworks created for early animation devices like the zoetrope and phenakistascope into grotesque yet wonderful GIFs, and it was only a matter of time before these revived animations were repurposed elsewhere.

Film-making duo The Brothers Lynch dug up a number of animations from Victorian-era phenakistoscope discs, blending them together to create a music video for the Carly Paradis song "The Hope Of A Favourable Outcome." Watched alone, the resulting animation is mesmerizing, but when juxtaposed against Paradis' relentless beat, the video sends the viewer into truly disturbing, seemingly endless hypnotic tunnel.

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Amazon Studios announces new slate of TV shows, renews 'Alpha House'

Earlier reports had indicated that Amazon Studios had decided which of its new pilots would be making it to series, and now it's official. Today the company announced that it is ordering six new shows, including Chris Carter's apocalyptic drama The After, the LA detective noir Bosch, Jill Soloway's comedic drama Transparent, and Mozart in the Jungle. Two kid's series have also been ordered, one of which is Gortimer Gibbon's Life On Normal Street — the first Amazon TV series to have been submitted through the company's open-door submissions program.

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Watch this: The perfect 'gearing up' supercut

You'll find the same scene in nearly every action movie: a solemn montage where the hero gears up for battle, putting on gloves, bandanas, a belt, a bandolier of some kind, and (of course) an insane amount of weaponry. This supercut pulls dozens of the scenes together — we spotted Commando, Dredd, and Point Break just for a start — into a five-minute blast of action-camp intensity-building that's perfect for a Monday morning. Time to gear up.

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LG's curved OLED tech is better in lamps than phones

Having already released one of the world's first smartphones with a curved display, LG has clearly been hard at work determining where else the phone's curved OLED tech could be of use. At the Light+Building show in Frankfurt, Germany, LG is showcasing one potential use for curved OLEDS: a lamp. Although OLEDs have been used in lighting for some time, LG says the lamp, which is inspiringly titled "OLED Table Lamp," is the world's first to utilize a curved OLED panel as a light source.

The sculpted red design can be controlled remotely by smartphone or tablet, which lets you automatically define lighting modes such as "movie" or "relax," and can also manually dim the light. Should it be released — there's no firm information from LG on...

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Video for Talib Kweli's latest takes hip hop back to its New York roots

The video for Talib Kweli's State of Grace is as dense and lyrical as the song itself. Created in collaboration with Kweli and production company dreambear, it's packed with color and custom typefaces, the song's lyrics appearing like graffiti art daubed on New York's imposing brownstone buildings. It's animated and otherwordly — starring a flaming microphone, a lightning-powered car, and an Akira-esque hip hop monstrosity — but it still evokes the New York that both Kweli and hip hop itself call home.

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Nyquist nets highlight reel goal in Wings win

DETROIT - There are only so many times forward Gustav Nyquist can attribute his scoring success to lucky bounces, good deflections and opportunities created by his teammates. In Detroit’s 3-2 victory over Tampa Bay Sunday, the 24-year-old showc...



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Where they Stand: After win vs. Lightning

DETROIT – After losing three straight last week, how badly did the Red Wings need two big wins in regulation this weekend? Sunday’s 3-2 victory over the Tampa Bay Lightning, coupled with a 4-1 win at Toronto on Saturday, upgraded the Red Wings'...



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An ancient virus may be the reason human stem cells can transform

The embryonic stem cells responsible for producing every other type of cell in the human body gained their power from an ancient virus that copied itself into our DNA millions of years ago, according to new research. National Geographic reports that the discovery could lead to more effective stem-cell treatments for diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease, among other ailments.

The new research, published today in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology , offers new insights on pluripotency, the ability of stem cells to transform into other types of cell. The study's authors say their research demonstrates that an ancient virus known as human endogenous retrovirus subfamily H, or HERV-H, plays a key role in pluripotency.

H...

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Listen to De La Soul's latest album for free thanks to BitTorrent

Hot on the heels of making their entire catalog available online for free — a move that may have involved distributing pirated MP3s — hip-hop legends De La Soul are back with another free download. This time around, the trio is giving away their latest mixtape on BitTorrent. Smell the DA.I.S.Y. , which layers old De La Soul lyrics over previously unreleased J Dilla beats, is now available on the peer-to-peer file sharing network. While the album is free, downloading it requires handing over an email address — the latest demonstration of how recorded music has become a marketing tool for artists rather than a source of revenue in its own right.

Head over to BitTorrent to download the mixtape — or, for a preview, you can listen to...

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'Frozen' is now the most successful animated movie of all time

Following its recent release in Japan, Disney's Frozen is now the highest-grossing animated movie of all time. Takings reached $1.07 billion this weekend, narrowly surpassing the previous record holder, Toy Story 3. The Japanese release also pushed it into the global all-time top ten for the first time. Loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen, Frozen came out in the US last November, and was the first non-Pixar 3D animation from Disney to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Although it performed well, Frozen remains only the fourth-highest performing animated film in the US. Its international run has been a massive success, however, as the past few months have seen Frozen become the top animated movie in...

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Smart skin patch knows when you need your meds

A lot can go wrong when doctors prescribe drugs to patients. For one thing, there's always a chance that someone might forget to take their pill or refill their prescription. And then there's also the risk of unmonitored side-effects, drug addiction, and overdose. So pharmaceutical companies have been trying for some time now to come up with wearable drug-delivery systems that can dispense a continuous flow of therapeutics, without having to rely on the patient to physically take the drug.

There's a problem with that approach, however, because these systems don't monitor a patient's vitals. This means they can't be responsive. So when a patient needs to take a stronger dose or when they actually feel pretty good, they still receive the...

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Your old biology textbook is now a hallucinatory stop-motion music video

Director Ewan Jones Morris' latest work is a treat. Crafted for the British band Fanfarlo, the music video is a hallucinatory reimagining of old science journals and magazines. Morris took thousands of images from vintage publications and created collages, effortlessly turning the imagery into a bizarre stop-motion animation peppered with live footage of the band performing and interacting with the animated events. "I had to lick my finger 2,638 times turning the pages to make it," Morris jokes on Twitter, "so watch it."

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How netbooks forced Facebook to scrap its bold redesign

A Facebook director has dismissed claims that the social network ditched last year's big redesign because it was bad for ad revenues. Those claims came from Dustin Curtis, a UX designer and writer who owns the publishing platform Svbtle. In a blog post on Friday, Curtis cited several sources saying Facebook found that testers of the redesigned News Feed were spending less time in user profiles and event pages. "The new News Feed was performing too well," says Curtis "this change in user behavior led to fewer advertisement impressions, which led, ultimately, to less revenue." However, according to Facebook's product design director Julie Zhuo, Curtis' sources are incorrect.

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The best writing of the week, March 30

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 of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it's one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it's better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab the entire list as a Readlist.

On age

Noam Scheiber looks at the rampant ageism of Silicon Valley.

The New Republic: Noam Scheiber - The Brutal Ageism of Tech

Consider a fortysomething...

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HAPPY HOMECOMING

One night after clinching a berth in the 2014 Calder Cup Playoffs, the defending champion Griffins were welcomed home from a season-high seven game road trip by a sellout crowd of 10,834 that was given plenty of reasons to cheer in a 4-1 victory over Rockford.



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A 3D-printed house is being built right now in Amsterdam

Architects in Amsterdam have begun construction on what they're calling the first full-sized 3D-printed house. Using what's essentially a large-scale version of a desktop 3D printer, Dus Architects is building what will eventually be a 13-room Dutch canal house made of interlocking plastic parts. The project was announced earlier this year — part proof of concept, part art project. After about three weeks of work, The Guardian reports, one three-meter-high corner segment has been produced. The interior and facade are printed as part of the same brick, and spaces are left for wiring and pipes; for now, the walls are later filled with concrete for insulation and reinforcement. The entire process of printing and assembling the house is...

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European Space Agency testing 'touchy-feely' robot-controlling joystick

An innovative new robot control system will be huddled inside the European Space Agency's next ship heading to the International Space Station. It's a joystick that is designed to remotely control robots from space with a particular emphasis on haptic feedback. A haptic-feedback joystick seems like a simple enough thing — but few things are as simple as they appear in zero gravity. To compensate for the effects of zero-g, the joystick can be mounted to the space station or, as pictured above, directly to the astronaut. The haptic feedback is important for enabling precise and complex controls of remote robots — so that their human operators can use their sense of touch to perform tasks.

The experimental model is designed to...

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'Sharknado 2: the second one' is coming with more sharks and no shame July 30th

Above, you will find a crop of the new, official poster for Sharknado 2: the second one. It stars Tara Reid and is the followup to the original, which became a darling of the internet for a brief time, probably because the rest of cable television completely lost its sense of humor sometime around Season 2 of The Walking Dead. SyFy — whose tagline "Imagine Greater" has become masterful commentary on the complex interplay between genuine heartfelt enthusiasm for campy shows and the pointless, empty core of all creative human endeavors — has announced that this sequel will air on July 30th at 9pm ET, which is one day earlier than originally planned.

Below, you will find the entire poster, uncropped, so that you are able to count how...

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The Weekender: boxers' brains, others' eyes, and developers' dreams

Welcome to The Verge: Weekender edition. Every Saturday, we'll bring you some of the best and most important reads of the past seven days, from original reports, to in-depth features, to reviews and interviews. Think of it as a collection of some of our favorite pieces that you may have missed — or that you may just want to read again. You can follow along below, or keep up to date on Flipboard.

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Alzheimers awareness takes the form of 'Alz': a haunting stroll among pixels

More often than not, video games about illness involve surviving in a post-apocalyptic hellscape filled with zombies, not diseases typically associated with old age. But that's just what you get with Alz , a very brief web game — if you can call it that — that tries to put the viewer in the mind of someone with Alzheimer's disease. You play the role of a nameless, faceless man walking through various parts of a house and city, trying to remember the details of what's around you, but failing. "Enjoy your walk. Interact with your surroundings. Or don't," Alz's creator who goes by Dylan, says. "Have a forgotten, but hopefully not forgetful, experience."

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A SILVER LINING IN THE SHAPE OF THE CALDER CUP

Landon Ferraro and Andrej Nestrasil each scored a pair of power play goals for the Griffins, but they couldn’t manage to overcome Midwest Division opponent Rockford IceHogs as Grand Rapids fell 5-4 on Friday at BMO Harris Bank Center. Despite the loss, the Griffins (41-20-2-4) still clinched a playoff spot due to other scores around the league.



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Blackberry Bold is coming back: 90 Seconds on The Verge

Dan Seifert has vowed to eat his Blackberry Bold if Blackberry isn't profitable by 2016. While this may seem like a surprising bet to make, it's far from his first one. Previously, Dan vowed to eat his left foot if Google ever did more than just create a search engine, eat his own parents if the government ever breached our privacy, and eat his childhood memories if Facebook beat Myspace.

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Vets need to step it up down the stretch

DETROIT – With nine games left it’s do or die time for the Red Wings. While injuries are an easy scapegoat for the dire situation that the Wings find themselves, the youngsters from Grand Rapids have certainly done their share in keeping the c...



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Weiss skates for first time since setback

DETROIT - To say it’s been a long, difficult 3 ½ months for center Stephen Weiss would be quite an understatement. After undergoing surgery to repair a sports hernia in December, Weiss was just one day away from returning to Detroit’s lineup when...



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UN human rights report criticizes US on surveillance, drone use, and torture

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has issued a report critical of the United States' stance and history on a wide range of issues, including surveillance, drone use, and torture. The report, one in an infrequently issued series by the committee, expressed concern over the NSA's bulk collection of telephone records as well as the programs PRISM and UPSTREAM, which collect internet communications directly from companies and through the fiber-optic cables used to carry internet traffic, respectively. It also criticized the United States' use of a secret court to handle surveillance matters, "thus not allowing affected persons to know the law with sufficient precision," it writes.

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How a radio expert helped the Zetas become the most dangerous drug cartel in Mexico

Jose Luis Del Toro Estrada didn't fit the description of a high-profile collar in a major drug cartel. A 37-year-old shop owner in McAllen, TX, he kept a simple white brick house with pink flowers out front. He didn't have much of a rap sheet, and didn't keep anything in the way of drugs or AK-47s in his home. However, after an extensive operation that left one of Mexico's most feared and powerful drug cartels bereft of $90 million in cash, 61 tons of narcotics, and "enough weapons to equip an insurgency," new information made it clear that Del Toro Estrada was a key drug player. He wasn't a killer or a leader. Instead, he was the IT expert, and he was instrumental in creating the radio infrastructure that allowed the Zetas, one of the...

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'Noah' review: a biblical fever dream

It’s been easy to snicker at Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. The notion of the Requiem for a Dream filmmaker taking on a Bible epic was enough to raise eyebrows, and trailers framing the film as a Day After Tomorrow-style action ride only added to the confusion. Controversy swirled, and as news broke that Paramount was testing out alternate cuts in an effort to appease religious audiences, it begged the question: just what was Aronofsky up to?

As it turns out, he was making a much more...

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Microsoft pledges not to search user email for stolen property

Microsoft is making huge changes to its privacy policy in the wake of a recent email scandal that saw the company searching through a French blogger's hotmail account in search of leaked company property. In an announcement today on the company's policy blog, general counsel Brad Smith said that Microsoft would no longer search user content when company property is threatened, but would refer the entire matter to outside law enforcement and let them guide further action. The statement goes beyond a previous statement made last week, which only stated that the company would "comply with the standards applicable to obtaining a court order" when searching user content.

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Sony vs. Facebook: the battle for your reality has just begun

Virtual reality is truly coming. There’s no longer any question. In the span of a single week, two titans emerged to proclaim that VR would be the future of their industries. Facebook and Sony, companies which respectively defined social networking and personal electronics, each validated what plucky startup Oculus VR had been saying all along: that virtual reality will be a bold new medium for gaming, for communication, and much, much more. Facebook’s play was to buy Oculus outright, spending $2 billion to bring an array of impressive talent under its wing, while Sony spent untold millions to introduce Project Morpheus, its own spin on the Oculus headset.

But just because virtual reality is a multibillion-dollar idea doesn’t mean...

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Government hackers have attacked 80 percent of top news organizations

A new report from Google researchers indicates 21 out of the top 25 news organizations have been the target of advanced malware attacks typically carried out by state-sponsored groups. Google has been tracking state-sponsored malware for nearly two years now, but the new report, unveiled by a pair of Google security engineers at the Black Hat conference in Singapore, indicates the attacks disproportionately target the press. The report also named specific incidents involving the Associated Press in Vietnam and reporters at The New York Times.

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Homeopathic drug company caught putting actual drugs in its remedies

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knocked the stuffing out of homeopathic drug company Terra-Medica last week, when the regulatory agency announced that a number of its "natural" remedies contained actual drugs.

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Verge Favorites: Trent Wolbe

Verge staffers aren't just people who love technology. They're people who love stuff. We spend as much time talking and thinking about our favorite books, music, and movies as we do debating the best smartphone to buy or what point-and-shoot has the tightest macro. We thought it would make sense to share our latest obsessions with Verge readers, and we hope you're encouraged to share your favorites with us. Thus a long, healthy debate will ensue where we all end up with new things to read, listen to, or try on.

World Dissolver EP

When I become President of the Universe the first thing I’m going to do is make the creation of any new music punishable by death... unless it’s by Ceephax Acid Crew. There’s...

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If you back a Kickstarter project that sells for $2 billion, do you deserve to get rich?

The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter, no strings attached. Those donors weren’t looking for a payout; they wanted to support something they believed in, and maybe get a pair of virtual reality goggles to play with. But when Facebook bought Oculus a year and a half later for $2 billion in cash and stock, backers wondered: what if I’d asked for equity instead of a poster? "I would have rather bought a few shares of Oculus rather than my now-worthless $300 obsolete VR headset," backer Carlos Schulte wrote.

If Schulte’s donation had been an investment, he could have earned around $43,500, estimates Greg Belote, the co-founder of equity crowdfunding platform Wefunder — a stunning 145 percent...

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The future is now: revolutionizing product design through Intel technology

In the past decade, developers and programmers have ushered in a digital revolution. But Tomorrow Lab, a New York-based product design and development consultancy, is using its work in product design and engineering to bring about the next great technological revolution. The brainchild of Ted Ullrich, Pepin Gelardi, and Dean Dipietro, Tomorrow Lab is focused on prototyping new hardware and smart technologies that improve our everyday lives.

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New trailers: ‘Into the Storm,’ ‘Hercules,’ and ‘Phantasm V: Ravager’

It's been a big week for movie trailers. We've seen new clips for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Jupiter Ascending — and there’s still more to watch. Let’s take a look at some of the latest trailers to make the rounds.

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Airline 'black boxes' are drowning in red tape

Air travel has left an indelible mark upon the 20th century. Before the advent of the internet, the worldwide web that brought disparate people and cultures together was composed of flight paths. The face of international conflict was changed by the bombing raids of the Second World War, and some have even argued that the devastation wrought from the skies then is what kept the Cold War cold. But the 20th century also continues to exercise an influence on flying today, with the recent disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 highlighting the archaic nature of safety equipment aboard most planes.

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Japan to send phone alerts for incoming missile strikes

Residents of Japan are used to receiving phone notifications of natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis, but from next week the government will be able to warn them of a whole new threat. On Tuesday, the country's Fire and Disaster Management Agency (FDMA) will flip the switch on a new alert system designed to relay information on nearby ballistic missile launches.

The notifications will be sent through the same J-Alert system used to warn residents of earthquakes, and users with phones or smartphones on the three major carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI, and SoftBank will automatically start receiving them for free. Local governments can already receive the same missile data from the FDMA and notify citizens via loudspeaker or other...

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Wish is granted for a young Wings fan

DETROIT - When Brendan Flaherty stepped off the Red Wings’ bench and shuffled to center ice, the 17-year-old couldn’t help but worry that he might fall in front of his favorite NHL players. “That was cool, I was a little nervous I was going to ...



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'Threes' developer shows the work that clones and rip-offs never do

A few short weeks after superb puzzle game Threes was first released on iOS, it started earning clones. In a lengthy post on the game's site, Threes' designers recall finding the copies — straight clones, "rip-offs," and games that were "different, but not" such as 1024 and 2048 — describing a process that "made them sad." Particularly galling was the short time for clones and copies to be knocked together following Threes' launch — not because the developers had wasted their time, but because they had spent 14 months tweaking and testing before hitting on a simple and glorious game, while the clones offered "broken" experiences. In a bid to "show their working," the developers have released a fascinating chunk of their email...

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Where they Stand: After loss to Habs

DETROIT – Despite Thursday’s 5-4 loss to the Montreal Canadiens, the Red Wings still have a slight hold on the second wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference. The loss was disappointing because Detroit had a chance to gain valuable ground in a...



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Nyquist's goal streak ends vs. Montreal

DETROIT - While one of Gustav Nyquist’s streaks came to an end Thursday night, another continued right along without skipping a beat. Nyquist, who was riding a six-game goal streak heading into the Eastern Conference matchup against Montreal, f...



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Microsoft makes Office for iPhone and Android completely free

Microsoft's Office Mobile apps for Android and iPhone are now completely free for all home users. The company has done away with the need for an Office 365 subscription, opening up the full document viewing and editing capabilities of each app. It's a clever move that will quickly make Office an essential download for many users. No one likes making changes to a spreadsheet on a 4-inch screen, so it makes sense for Microsoft to give the software away in hopes of steering users to its desktop Office software and the all-new iPad version — which still requires an annual $99 Office 365 subscription if you want to edit anything.

The free Office apps are intended "for home use" according to Microsoft's update notes, which implies the...

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West Nile virus may have met its match: tobacco

Some people think of tobacco as a drug, whereas others think of it as a therapy — or both. But for the most part, it's hard to find people who think of the tobacco plant in terms of its medical applications. Qiang Chen, an infectious disease researcher at Arizona State University, is one such person. His team of scientists conducted an experiment, published today in PLOS ONE, that demonstrates how a drug produced in tobacco plants can be used to prevent death in mice infected with a lethal dose of West Nile virus. The study represents an important first step in the development of a treatment for the mosquito-borne disease that has killed 400 people in the US within the last two years.

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Obama's plan to eliminate NSA phone sweep: 90 Seconds on The Verge

Hi, this is Ross Miller. Is the line secure? Are you sure? Don't you hear that weird clicking noise? Alright, alright. I trust you. Ok, here's the idea I have. We take the top story of the day from The Verge and make a 90 second video explaining what the news is, what the backstory is, and why this is important to our viewers. What was that? Yes, of course there will be goofs in it. Who do you think I am?

<iframe src='http://ift.tt/1rH1Jbh; frameborder='0' seamless='true' marginwidth='0' mozallowfullscreen='true' webkitallowfullscreen='true' name='42957-chorus-video-iframe'></iframe>



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Daft Punk takes a trip back to the '70s to show off its band merchandise

It's not often that we write about band merchandise, but that's because most bands just slap their album art onto a T-shirt and call it a day. Daft Punk's latest merch is a bit more creative than that. It's a full-on, '70s-style blast from the past. Whereas Random Access Memories celebrated the disco music of the 1970s with tracks like "Get Lucky," these T-shirts and posters look as if they've been directly ripped from the era. Time to hit the dance floor.

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Inside the greatest sci-fi film never made

In the late 1970s, science fiction and cinema changed forever. Star Wars helped usher in the era of the outer-space blockbuster, while Ridley Scott’s Alien crystallized a sinister vision with some of the most horrific creature design ever seen. But as the new documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune argues, neither may have become the classics we know today were it not for another epic film — one that nobody has ever seen.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is the avant-garde filmmaker behind cult classics...

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Jurco works to combine physicality, skills

DETROIT - When Tomas Jurco arrived in Detroit last December, he was known more as a YouTube sensation for his impressive puck handling skills than the physical NHL player he has become. The 21-year-old earned the nickname “The Magician” for t...



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Scientists just took a major step toward making life from scratch

Synthetic biology has come a long way in recent years. In the last two decades alone, scientists have been able to go from synthesizing the genome of a relatively small virus, Hepatitis C, to creating what researchers refer to as the "first synthetic cell" from a unicellular organism. Yet until recently, researchers had been incapable of constructing one of the most emblematic symbols of our own genetic makeup: the eukaryotic chromosome. Now, a team of scientists has announced that the age of the synthetic chromosome is upon us, as a study published in Science today reveals how the group was able to construct a yeast chromosome from scratch — an experiment that allowed the team to make fully functional "designer yeast."

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Datsyuk remains positive about return

DETROIT – Pavel Datsyuk did not skate at the Red Wings’ morning skate Thursday, which was a planned day away from the ice in the superstar’s rehabilitation regimen. Still, Datsyuk was at Joe Louis Arena where he did conditioning exercises and r...



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Microsoft unveils Office for iPad

After years and years of rumors, Office for iPad is finally here. At a press event in San Francisco this morning, Microsoft Office general manager Julia White has unveiled the company’s latest mobile Office app. While Office for iPad was originally rumored for a release in 2012 and 2013, it will be available in Apple’s App Store today. Just like Office for iPhone, the iPad version will make use of Microsoft's Office 365 subscription for editing features. Microsoft recently launched Office 365 Personal, a $6.99-per-month (or $69.99 a year) subscription service that provides access to the Office 2013 applications for Windows, and the ability to install and use the Mac and mobile versions of the application. 3.5 million people are...

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