There's a reason Microsoft's latest version of Outlook for OS X leaked before the rest of its Office suite: the email client is ready, but other apps like Word and PowerPoint aren't quite finished yet. Today Microsoft is launching a brand new Outlook for Mac, and Office 365 subscribers can download it right now. The company is promising "improved performance and reliability and a fresh look and feel that is unmistakably Microsoft Office," and says this refresh brings Outlook on OS X closer in line with what users of the PC, web, and iPad Office apps have come to expect.
The user interface has been updated with a more modern look, smoother scrolling, and improved "agility" when switching between Ribbon tabs. It also delivers full push...
This week's best trailers range from huge epics to tiny productions, but they all look pretty great in one way or another. Head down below to see trailers for a number of new things to watch this November and beyond.
Liverpool artist Boneface grew up absorbing 1990s pop culture like video games and comics, and in a lot of ways, little has changed since then. "I used to draw superheroes and video game characters and monsters and crap back then," he says. "I just get paid to do it now."
His vibrant, violent illustrations include everything from beaten down superheroes to badass bikers that look ripped out of the best anime never made. Many of his pieces feature original creations, but he also tackles...
It took 182 years to build the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, starting with the first bricks in 1163. For Caroline Miousse, a level artist on Assassin's Creed Unity, building a virtual likeness centuries later took considerably less time — she spent around two years modelling the landmark inside and out. "I made some other stuff in the game," she says, "but 80 percent of my time was spent on the Notre Dame."
Like previous games in the series, the star of the next Assassin's Creed is its...
Sony's attempt to become a major player in mobile have hit another speed bump. The company now expects to ship 41 million smartphones in its current fiscal year — that's down from a forecast of 43 million units in July, which was itself a cut from the 50 million projected in April. Although Sony's mobile division brought in ¥308.4 billion ($2.83 billion) in revenue from July to September, around a 1.2 percent increase on a year ago, the company is writing down ¥176 billion yen of the business' value.
Kunimasa Suzuki, the president and CEO of Sony Mobile since April 2012, has been replaced by Hiroki Totoki, until now a senior VP in charge of corporate planning. Suzuki will become executive VP at Sony Entertainment and move to a group...
The hype meter is off the charts this week. The sweat is real. This Vergecast is beef, not bust. Our hosts Nilay Patel, Chris Plante, and The Verge's social beast Sam Sheffer begin the hour with a reflection on various motorized death machines and enormous phones. Then David Pierce steps in to discuss super heroes, Apple Pay vs. CurrentC, Microsoft's fitness band, and Chris's alarming misunderstanding of contraception. Join us, won't you?
Even in an industry where things move quickly, 2014 has seen a dizzying amount of change for Twitter. In the last 10 months, Twitter has lost: its chief operating officer, its chief financial officer, its head of product, its head of news, and (just this week) its head of engineering. Then today came another twist: the company promoted Kevin Weil, its head of revenue products, to oversee the entire product organization. That means that Daniel Graf, the former Google Maps executive who Twitter hired away with some fanfare six months ago, has effectively been demoted.
Gaming laptops are prone to wild designs, and the newest one from MSI — called the GT80 Titan — is no exception. The massive 18-inch laptop was announced today and its most notable feature is a mechanical QWERTY keyboard made by Cherry, a company that has been making mechanical keyboards for almost 50 years.
Instead of the typical chiclet keys found on most current laptops, the GT80 Titan will feature Cherry's MX Red keys, which are actually well-suited for gaming thanks to the way they're built (light with quick actuation). They keyboard will still add weight, but for mechanical keyboard devotees it's probably an easy trade-off — especially considering that it's a huge laptop in the first place.
MSI hasn't...
In a way, what Tim Cook said today felt inevitable. At least since 2008, when Owen Thomas asked the question in Gawker, a steady accretion of reporting has suggested Apple’s chief executive is gay. By 2011, Cook’s sexual orientation was a matter of regular discussion in the media, with gay magazine Out putting him on the top of its gay power rankings. And since becoming Apple CEO this year, Cook has inched toward making a more public statement about his private life: making suggestive speeches about "human rights," for example, and leading Apple’s opposition to antigay legislation around the country.
What happens if a drone enthusiast leaves his quadcopter unattended and his son's friends use it to spy on the neighbors? Many big, sweeping issues have been addressed as the popularity of personal drones has skyrocketed in the last year, but more specific ones like this have so far gone largely unexplored. Leave it to South Park take up the call.
Last night's episode begins with Butters filming birds using the "Specter 2.0" quadcopter — South Park's version of the DJI Phantom 2. Cartman excitedly convinces him ("We could spy on everyone!") that they should use it to poke around the private lives of their neighbors — because, according to him, "that's all drones are for." Eventually the kids post a video to the internet of their...
Researchers think they’ve finally found a piece of Amelia Earhart’s lost plane. An aluminum sheet, found in 1991 on Nikumaroro Island, might be the patch that once covered a window on Earhart’s plane, reports Discovery News . The finding, the researchers say, supports the idea that Earhart died from starvation on the island, 77 years ago.
Today, Louisiana state health officials told anyone who has traveled to an Ebola-affected country within the last 21 days — or treated Ebola patients elsewhere — not to come to the annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
The group, founded in 1903, is an organization of scientists, doctors, and others who aim to control infectious diseases that mainly affect the poorest people in the world. Like, for instance, Ebola. Their meeting will begin on Nov. 2 in New Orleans, and the group doesn't know how many scientists will be affected, incoming president Christopher Plowe told Science . Some who will be affected were planning to come from the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control...
Pininfarina is best known as Ferrari's frequent collaborator, but the Italian design firm sketches a lot of other things, too — take the Pininfarina Fuoriserie, for instance, a bicycle that's just a little fancier than your average fixie. Much of the steel frame is concealed with a walnut wood coating, for instance; the handlebars and seat are covered with a woven leather pattern. It's beautiful, particularly with the combination of wood and bare metal on the frame that gives the Fuoriserie a...
By now, you're likely quite familiar with the concept of reading an ebook, whether on a tablet or dedicated e-reader: you load it up with as many books as you can, tap or flip your way through the pages, and maybe highlight a few favorite passages or look up some word definitions along the way. Google believes that's a fine formula for reading a novel, but sorely lacking when reading nonfiction books — think cookbooks, textbooks, or any other book that you don't typically read straight through from cover to cover. If it's not something you read serially, Google's thinking goes, the ebook experience is still sub-optimal.
The company is looking to improve that experience with a new version of its Google Play Books app for Android — Google...
The doctor gives my scrotum a firm tug, stretching the skin flat. “This is where I would punch the hole,” he explains. I wince, and he says, “I can assure you, it doesn’t hurt at all.” From there, he explains, it’s a simple process to extract and sever my vas deferens, the tiny tubes that carry my seed. Just to be safe, he’ll cauterize the cut ends before tying them back together, burning my baby-making apparatus into oblivion.
I’m in the office of Dr. Robert Nejat, getting a final...
Whether you're talking on-track performance or off-track health benefits, Formula 1 has been at the forefront of technology for decades. One obvious example is the evolution of the cars' steering wheels, which have sprouted enough knobs, buttons, lights, and displays that they look more like something out of a spacecraft than an earthbound machine. McLaren Mercedes — the second-oldest active F1 team behind Ferrari — just posted a look back through some of the most radical wheel designs that their team's drivers have used over the years with some insight into when, why, and how they changed.
A buttonless wheel from McLaren's early years
What's most stunning is that right up until the turn of the millennium, F1 drivers were still...
Michael Bay may be officially handing off his crowd-pleasing but critically panned Transformers for weightier fare: a film about the 2012 attack on US diplomatic and CIA compounds in Benghazi, Libya. The Hollywood Reporter and Variety report that Bay is in talks to direct a film adaptation of 13 Hours, a recently released account of the Benghazi incident that ended with the deaths of a US ambassador, a State Department official, and two CIA operatives.
Unlike Bay's massive Transformers films, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make, 13 Hours will supposedly have a budget of $30 to $40 million, taking it out of the range of huge Hollywood blockbusters (for comparison, Gone Girl's budget was around $60 million; Bay's last non-T...
Horace Luke, Gogoro's CEO.
Taiwanese firm Gogoro came out of stealth mode this morning — sort of — announcing in very broad, vague terms that it's looking to "utilize the power of mobile connectivity and data analytics to transform energy distribution and management in the world's cities." It's hard to say what that really means, beyond that the company has an energy focus — but it's interesting to note that they're promising products at next year's CES in January. That suggests that there'll be a consumer angle here of some sort.
Tokyo Designers Week is one of the Japanese capital's biggest calendar events in art, culture, architecture, and design, and it gets bigger every year.
From the colorful characters of Hiroshi Yoshii (above) to a mind-bending Oculus Rift music video from a J-pop megastar, there was a lot to see in 2014. Scroll down for the best of it.
Finding the right news to read is hard. That’s why hundreds of companies have jumped into the game offering different takes on what you might want to read, and why you might want to read it. Some apps offer expert-level curation, like Yahoo News Digest, which bundles ten stories into a simple package that comes every morning and evening. Other services like Circa hope to actually rewrite the news into tiny, bite-sized pieces. Then, there's Flipboard, the comparatively ancient older brother that does a great job aggregating news your friends post across all of your social networks.
The app boasts 250,000 downloads per day, consistently tops App Store charts, comes pre-installed on a variety of Samsung and Microsoft Surface devices, and...
Microsoft's fitness tracking ambitions are not small.
Yusuf Mehdi is sitting at a conference table at the company's campus in Redmond, WA, crossed legs revealing the sneakers he's wearing, talking to me on Skype as he swipes through a presentation on his Surface. Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Devices and Services is explaining Microsoft Health, the company's sprawling new project: a multi-platform system for compiling and analyzing all the world's health data. Throughout our...
You've never watched YouTube quite like this: today the company began rolling out support for higher video frame rates like 60fps. We've seen movie trailers and other special clips appear with higher fps counts before, but now it works for regular user uploads, too. To see the smoother motion, you'll need to be watching in either 720p or 1080p HD. (Both Chrome and Safari 8 worked fine in our tests.) Once you are, the difference is immediate and hugely noticeable — especially when you're watching video game footage.
There are plenty of situations where faster frame rates can make a huge difference, but it's easy to spot the upgrade with gaming content. For years, YouTube has stuck with 24fps, which looks perfectly fine when watching most...
Well before drones were a hobby, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the FAA created a rule designating stadiums as "national defense airspace." Between an hour before and an hour after an event, the agency said, aircraft were not allowed less than 3,000 feet above and within three miles of games. If anyone was wondering what "aircraft" entailed, the FAA has clarified: yes, that means drones.
After companies shut down and collectors lose interest, the Library of Congress is supposed to keep our cultural history intact. But digital media has turned our understanding of preservation on its head. It’s no longer enough to just get "a copy" of something: an ebook can be set to self-destruct, an MMO can be nothing without the people who play it, and a streaming video can have a million digital copies and no physical ones. When Buzzfeed journalist Joseph Bernstein profiled the Library of Congress’ video game collection, he included a tantalizing reference to how new media and traditional archival can collide:
The Library's processes are, by the standards of 21st century media consumption, antiquated. Netflix has to print special...
The retired Microsoft boss is speaking live now about his years at the helm of the company, competitors, and his new role as owner of the LA Clippers NBA basketball team.
Projection keyboards aren't anything new, but it's a technology that's had plenty pratfalls over the years. HP's trying to change that with a new desktop computer it announced today called Sprout. It has a 23-inch,1080p screen that is topped with a canopy of cameras and a projector that turns a companion touch mat into an interactive display. Because of that technology, HP believes Sprout will bring about the end of keyboard-and-mouse interaction.
Three-dimensional "mini-stomachs" have been created from human stem cells. The tiny organs measure about 3 millimeters in diameter and can be used as models for the infections that are often precursors to peptic ulcers and stomach cancer.
"This represents the first in vitro model of the human stomach," says James Wells, a stem cell biologist at Cincinnati Children’s and a co-author of the study, which is published in Nature today. And "it’s not a cute little term — they really do look like ‘mini stomachs.’"
"It’s not a cute little term — they really do look like ‘mini stomachs."
When the researchers first tried to grow these tissues, they did so using embryonic stem cells — cells that originate from a human embryo. The growth...
A video released today on UK Assassin's Creed YouTube page details the handful of graphical features in Assassin's Creed Unity designed for NVIDIA GTX graphics cards. Assassin's Creed Unity already looks beautiful on console hardware, but these extra touches, like horizon bases ambient occlusion and temporal anti-aliasing, make a huge difference for graphic snobs like myself.
While the PC version looks fantastic, running the game won't be easy for everyone. The minimum PC requirements, revealed last week, are incredibly high. Here's what you'll need.
Minimum PC specs:
Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.3 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or AMD Phenom II x4 940 @ 3.0 GHz processor
6 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970 (2 GB VRAM)...
Google has opened up pre-orders for its Nexus 6 today, The flagship Android 5.0 Lollipop phone starts at $649 for a 32GB model, and you can also bump up to 64GB of storage for $699. It's unclear how much inventory Google has to start; the 32GB model almost instantly switched over to a message reflecting that it's already sold out. All four major US carriers will be carrying the Nexus 6, though on-contract pricing isn't official just yet. Nexus 6 comes in two colors: a "midnight blue" version with a black rear shell and blue metal frame, or "cloud white" with a white back and silver frame.
The Motorola-made device is a powerhouse with its quad-core Snapdragon 805 processor and 3GB of RAM. But the big question to ask yourself is whether...
Daniel Radcliffe is a fine rapper. Who would have thought?
Promoting his new film Horns on last night's Jimmy Fallon, the actor best known for playing the world's most famous boy wizard accepted a challenge to perform the Blackalicious song 'Alphabet Aerobics,' a super fast, tongue twisting rap. Radcliffe keeps up with the increasing tempo of the beat, landing the majority of the lyrics. It's hard to tell from the video if Radcliffe really loves to rap, or simply enjoys stupendously challenging vocal warm-up exercises. Is this the "Lion Face, Lemon Face" of the Harry Potter School for Acting?
Microsoft has been experimenting with projectors for years, but HP is bringing a PC to life today complete with a built-in projector and multi-touch capacitive touch mat. Sprout is HP’s latest PC design, and it ditches the mouse and keyboard in favor of a system that is built purely for touch interactions. There’s a traditional 23-inch display, but at the base of Sprout is an interactive touch mat that you use to control projected objects and applications. You can type onto the mat with a software keyboard projected on your fingers within touch-optimized apps.
The projector itself hangs over the top of the all-in-one like a desk lamp and it’s equipped with 4-camera system thanks to Intel’s RealSense 3D camera, a 14.6-megapixel...
And you don't need several hundred thousand dollars to do it.
Fiat Chrysler announced this morning that it'll be spinning off Ferrari, the storied Italian sports car maker responsible for some of the most outrageous vehicles ever made. Fellow Italian car company Fiat — which took full control of Chrysler earlier this year — first bought an interest in Ferrari some 45 years ago, an interest it has owned ever since. (Piero Ferrari, son of founder Enzo, still owns a minority stake.) The new company will offer its own publicly traded shares — 90 percent of them will go to existing Fiat Chrysler shareholders, while another 10 percent will go to market.
Ferrari's ownership has been less fraught over the years than arch rival Lamborghini,...
The self-proclaimed "front page of the internet" is expanding into crowdfunding and community-driven creation with Redditmade. According to its announcement post, the new site was created in part to provide a way for subreddits to develop official merchandise, although anyone with a Reddit account can begin a campaign of their own.
The man who created classic children's game Operation is crowdfunding his own surgical operation. The 77-year-old is currently wrestling medical expenses, and is need of $25,000 to pay for oral surgery. Thanks to the nature of the business arrangement he struck in his twenties, creator John Spinello was never paid more than the $500 for his work, and cannot claim royalties from the sales of his invention. The game was a household sensation for millions, spawning numerous spin-offs since it was first introduced in 1965.
In a show of camaraderie, his friends Tim Walsh and Peggy Brown created a funding campaign over at Crowdrise, where they've raised more than $9,000. Those who can't afford to donate to the cause are invited to write a...
Last week, privacy advocates turned up some unsettling news: for two years, Verizon's Precision Insights division has been seeding web requests with unique identifiers. If you visited a website from a Verizon phone, there's a good chance the carrier injected a special tag into the data sent from you phone, telling the website exactly who you were and where you were coming from, all without alerting customers or informing the public at large. Today, Forbes' Kashmir Hill reports that AT&T is testing a similar program, although it may be possible to opt out. In both cases, the message is clear: there's a lucrative business in tracking users across the web, and carriers want in on it.
About six seconds after liftoff at 6:22 p.m. Eastern, the Antares rocket exploded in mid-air. Fortunately, no people were aboard and no one was injured.
The rocket is designed by Orbital Sciences Corporation, under a contract with NASA. It's a two-stage launch vehicle that can shepherd up to 6,120kg or about 13,500 pounds, to the International Space Station. The first launch took places from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in April 21, 2013.
No personnel were in the area, and there appear only to be damages to today's launch site at Wallops and vehicles, according to the NASA livestream. The Antares rocket would have launched a Cygnus spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station; this would have been Orbital's...
Beats headphones have always been just as much — if not more — about making a fashion statement as they've been about sounding good. Now, a new collaboration with Japanese company Sanrio is about to tip the scales even further. To honor the 40th anniversary of the Hello Kitty franchise, the audio industry giant will be releasing new versions of its staple Solo2 headphones and urBeats earbuds next month adorned with images of iconic bow-wearing cat. (Or is just the personification of a cat? We're actually still not clear on that whole cat/not a cat thing). Rabid fans who can't wait a few weeks to get a real-life look can do so this weekend at the official unveiling during Hello Kitty Con 2014 in Los Angeles.
The bigger, Kitty-covered...
The slate of upcoming Marvel films was announced at today's Marvel media event. There are a number of interesting tidbits within the schedule. For one, the subtitle for Captain America further confirms the film's connection to the Civil War comic series. Also of note, the separation of Avengers: Infinity War into two parts, because clearly there's more money to be made from the release model popularized by young adult film adaptations.
Avengers: Age of Ultron: May 1, 2015
Ant-Man: July 17, 2015
Captain America 3: Civil War: May 6, 2016
Doctor Strange: November 4, 2016
Guardians of the Galaxy 2: May 5, 2017
Thor 3: Ragnarok: July 28, 2017
Black Panther: November 3, 2017
Captain Marvel: July 6, 2018
Inhumans: November 2, 2018
A...
At an event in Los Angeles, Marvel just announced that Black Panther will hit the big screen on November 3rd, 2017. Plot details are currently thin, but the news is big. Black Panther is one of Marvel most important black superheroes.
Developing...
Google's ambition to cure death is beginning to take shape in a new product from its Google X division. Andrew Conrad, the head of the company's life sciences division, today announced the details of an effort that would use nanotechnology to identify signs of disease. The project would employ tiny magnetic nanoparticles, said to be one-thousandth the width of a red blood cell, to bind themselves to various molecules and identify them as trouble spots.
Google’s approach for rolling out the latest version of Android, Lollipop, is a little different. There are the usual things we see every year — a new Nexus phone and a new Nexus tablet — but instead of a big event, the company is posting details in blog posts and on the main Android site. So if you’re tracking the rollout closely, you probably have a sense of what’s new and what’s cool in the OS. If you’re not, though, getting a sense of what Lollipop is actually like and what it actually does isn’t easy.
Luckily, we got a chance to sit down with some Google execs last week to get a walkthrough of the coolest features. We won’t know everything until we actually have a chance to use the final version, but there are some clever additions...
Science fiction author William Gibson’s work, from cyberpunk classic Neuromancer to his more recent, less overtly futuristic novels, is usually more concerned with smart cultural analysis than plotting the mechanics of new technology. Gibson has given us a lens to see everything from high fashion to virtual reality, coining the term “cyberspace” to refer to what would soon become a ubiquitous computer network in the real world (“And they won’t let me forget it,” he quipped after being...
A few weeks ago, I discovered that Google knows the lifespan of a goat. Search for "how long does a goat live" and you'll see it displayed in a special card above the search results. 15 to 18 years! It's not an important fact, and I can't imagine people ask it very often — but there it is. I couldn't tell you where they got the answer (it's surprisingly hard to nail down, as I'll get into later) but I'm pretty sure it's right. It's the kind of accidental discovery that Google loves to serve up. I went looking for a fact, and there it was. You come away feeling as if the engine knows the answer to any question you could ask.
In 2007, the FBI was tracking down a series of bomb threats against Timberline High School, originating from an anonymous MySpace page. To break through that anonymity, agents had to get creative — but new documents suggest that in catching the culprit, the FBI may have committed a crime of its own.
A minibus studded with fake diamonds and Louis Vuitton branding curled around a busy traffic circle at the top of the Champs-Elysée before escaping into the Bois du Boulogne, an enormous forest on the outskirts of Paris. Everyone’s gaze turned outward as we meandered through the woods, passing playgrounds and lunch break joggers, looking for a hulking white oasis that was impossible to miss.
I was on my way to see Frank Gehry’s latest work, the sprawling new Fondation Louis Vuitton. The...
Let's say you need to fix your vacuum cleaning robot, or even worse, the machine that makes your vacuum cleaning robot. You know which part is broken, but where do you go from there? Most of the time when the machine reaches the customer, it's already assembled and the parts aren't labeled at all. Without that crucial bit of info, it can be very difficult to explain to a sales rep exactly what you need, or find a replacement you can order on the web. Googling for "round, squiggly rubber thing with the metal edges" won't help.
Partpic, a startup from Atlanta, Georgia, is hoping to solve that problem. Think of it as visual search for replacement parts. Snap some photos of the item with your phone and the app will try and match you to a...
Emoji might be primary used by teenagers or in Katy Perry videos, but Microsoft is now bringing the Japanese electronic smileys to its search engine. Bing is being updated to enable the use of emoji in search queries allowing you to search for "the best donut (using a donut emoji) in New York." Bing will take the semantic meaning of the emoji and convert it into a text string to search the web. It’s purely a gimmick, but it does serve as a quick way to find out the meaning of some of the particularly puzzling emojis. You can even use it to look up the legendary Konami Code, although you should really know it off by heart by now. If you’re a fan of emoji then head over to an English version of Bing to try it in action.
Touchable Memories might ostensibly be an advertisement campaign for a 3D printer, but it's also a poignant social experiment that delineates how technology can be used to better lives. Featuring five visually impaired people, the video series illustrates the connection between remembrance and tactile contact. It uses a 3D printer to turn photographs from the subjects' lives into three-dimensional models that can then be caressed and handled. The results are heart-warming, and a vivid reminder that we sometimes take our blessings in life for granted. Make sure to check out all the interconnected videos in order to build a complete image of the experience.
Travis Purrington's interpretation of the US currency looks like it belongs in a cyberpunk movie. Gone is the uniformed green, and the portraits of long-dead presidents. Purrington's designs are subtle yet sleek, embossed with astronauts, crashing waves, ice-capped mountains, and distant galaxies.
The project draws inspiration from the Swiss Franc, and was conceptualized to showcase banknotes that placed greater emphasis on the accomplishments of the living, rather than "codifying myth or...
Tim Cook talks about the future of Apple with The Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker.
