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Mark Zuckerberg may believe Elon Musk’s warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence are “irresponsible,” but a recent incident at the social network appears to suggest the Tesla boss could have a point: Facebook researchers decided to shut down an AI they invented after it started speaking its own made up language.

After many years of claiming the title of world's richest person, Bill Gates has been dethroned. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has officially become the world's richest person, overtaking a spot previously held by Microsoft co-founder  Bill Gates . As  Bloomberg reports , the shift comes as Amazon saw an increase of 1.3 percent in its share price this morning ahead of the company's earnings report scheduled for later in the day. The stock price increase had the effect of pushing Bezos' net worth to around $90.9 billion, which is just a hair above Gates' $90.7 billion. Gates had held the top spot since 2013, but, as  CNET reports , the former Microsoft CEO has actually held the title during 18 of the last 23 years. In that time, Gates has briefly traded spots with Warren Buffett and Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim. If Amazon's stock price holds through the end of trading, Bezos will keep the top spot. And that's likely to be the case, as the company is

Google  is no stranger to developing products that may inevitably end up competing with each other to some extent. It then has to decide which product bites the dust and which doesn’t. The company faced the same dilemma with YouTube Red and  Google Play Music . Google has now decided that instead of having to kill off either one of the two services, it’s going to merge them into a single entity. YouTube’s head of music Lyor Cohen has confirmed that Google is planning to merge Google Play Music and YouTube Red into a new streaming service. Cohen says that the company feels the need to merge both services in order to better educate customers about the offerings and bring in new subscribers. “The important thing is combining  YouTube Red  and Google Play Music, and having one offering,” Cohen  said  at the New Music Seminar conference in New York. It has been rumored for quite a few months now that Google might end up merging these two services together. The rumors started makin

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, news headlines were splashed with serial murder cases such as the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy Jr, Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez, the Zodiac Killer, and BTK.  The FBI notes  that  this sparked a massive "renewed public interest" in serial killers  –  a similar curiosity of which had previously sprung up in the 19th century following the notorious murders of “Jack the Ripper” in Victorian London. Now, it’s the post- Making A Murderer  Internet age, when it has never been easier to indulge in your morbid curiosity. With this, too, comes a whole new bag of serial killer-infused Netflix documentaries, TV series, podcasts,  Reddit threads , movies, and even the odd  IFLScience article .

Following on from the launch of the NES Classic Edition and SNES Classic Editon, Nintendo appears to be preparing another re-booted, miniaturesed Classic Edition console; the Ninentdo 64 Classic Edition. The Nintendo 64 – or N64, as it was more commonly known – was one of my favourite consoles of ALL TIME. I spent untold hours, usually bunking off school, playing Golden Eye death matches. You can still by the original console  via Amazon for around 40 quid . I loved everything about the N64; the controller, the console design itself, the games – everything. For me, this is was my first proper love affair with a console and gaming in general, so the news of a rebooted Classic Edition made me very happy! How do we know this? Simple really, Nintendo just filed a  trademark  in Europe for a Nintendo 64 Classic Edition; it's not named as such, but it is most definitely a console, and it shows an image of the controller, which is classic Nintendo 64 style.

A German energy company  recently announced  that it’s partnering with a university to build a massive flow battery in underground salt caverns that are currently used to store natural gas. The grid-tied battery, the company says, would be able to power Berlin for an hour. The technology that the project is based on should be familiar to Ars readers. Two years ago, Ars  wrote about an academic paper published in  Nature  that described “a recipe for an affordable, safe, and scalable flow battery.” German researchers had developed better components for a large, stationary battery that used negatively and positively charged liquid electrolyte pools to exchange electrons through a reasonably priced membrane. These so-called “flow batteries” are particularly interesting for grid use—they have low energy-density, so they don’t work for portable energy storage. But as receptacles for utility-scale electricity storage, their capacity is limited only by the amount of space you have. Now

A few days ago  Google announced plans  to update its iOS and Android apps. The update sees the arrival of algorithm-powered feeds that display a personalized stream of content.  Note the reference to Apple and Google’s mobile platforms. This story was widely reported in the tech press, but the Guardian decided to take things further, claiming that Google was on the verge of unveiling a "radical" change to it homepage on the desktop. The story is seemingly plucked out of thin air, as Google has made no such suggestion. In fact, the company has spoken out to refute the claim.

The teleportation accident is an  all-too-common trope of science fiction . The moral quandary of teleporters as  "suicide boxes"  and  as potential human duplicators  has been grist for many science fiction and speculative fiction writers, from  George Langelaan's 1957 short story "The Fly"  to  China Miéville's 2010 novel  Kraken  (and yes, a few  Star Trek  episodes). But that trope has been given a fresh spin by Tal Klein in his debut novel,  The Punch Escrow —fresh enough that, even before its release, the book  was optioned for a film by Lionsgate . A compelling, approachable human narrative wrapped around a classic, hard sci-fi nugget,  The Punch Escrow  dives into deep philosophical territory—the ethical limits of technology and what it means to be human. Cinematically paced yet filled with smart asides, Klein's  Punch  pulls off the slick trick of giving readers plenty to think about in a suspenseful, entertaining package.

The idea of a modular smartphone — where a number of components can be swapped out for replacements or allow users to focus on a key feature, such as a larger battery — has been widely pursued by the tech industry over the last few years, with Google going as far as developing a prototype for its Project Ara concept (seen above). But while most companies have given up on the idea,  like Google did last year , it appears  Facebook  is still pursuing it. The company’s secretive Building 8 division appears to be developing a modular consumer product that could fit into either smartphone or smart speaker categories. A newly published  patent filing  from Facebook describes a “modular electromagnetic device” that allow users to avoid the wasteful and expensive cycle of buying and replacing electronics once they get outdated every few years.

A Russian Soyuz rocket has successfully launched a  controversial satellite  into orbit, which will become one of our brightest stars in a few days – and may hamper astronomical observations. The satellite is called  Mayak , developed by Moscow State Mechanical Engineering University (MAMI) and funded with $30,000 through Russian crowdfunding website Boomstarter. We first learned about it back in  early 2016 , and on Friday, July 14, it launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome along with  72 other satellites . “The satellite launch was good, and we are waiting for NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] to track it,” Oksana Klichnikova from Mayak told IFLScience. “Roscosmos reported that everything was as planned, without any additional info.”

Clinical decision support (CDS) embedded directly into the patient's electronic medical record is associated with decreased overall utilization of high cost imaging, especially among higher utilizers. That is the main finding of a study published in the July 2017 issue of  Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) , a journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine. The lead author is Kelly Bookman, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine and medical director for the Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr. Bookman is nationally recognized for her work in operations, quality, patient safety, and clinical informatics. As the Senior Medical Director of Implementation and Informatics for UCHealth ED Service Line, Dr. Bookman is an integral part of the process improvement initiatives for the emergency department service line.  She is also active in the optimization of the EHR for daily use as well as the development of clinical decisio

GETTY WhatsApp has received a major update WhatsApp users can now download the latest update on their Android and Apple devices which includes a host of new features. The Facebook-owned messaging app now lets its army of loyal fans send documents of any type during chats. Previously, files that could be sent via WhatsApp were limited to standard PDF documents, but file size is now the only limitation. WhatsApp says documents of up to 100MB can now be sent which should easily be enough for the average user. Other new features include the ability to pin chats to the top of chat lists and multiple photos can now be forwarded quickly and deleted all at once. WhatsApp: Hidden Tips, Tricks and Features You Never Knew Mon, June 20, 2016 WHATSAPP • EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS 1  of  10 WhatsApp - Hidden tricks and features you probably don't know, but definitely should be using  Along with these official upgrades it's also thought that more new features could be

Outspoken cybersecurity entrepreneur John McAfee, the founder of the anti-virus software that still bears his surname, believes that multinational technology giant Google has become "so large and so powerful" that its alleged greed now "threatens to destroy us all". On 14 July, in a tough-talking interview with Russia's primary state media outlet RT, McAfee took the search engine goliath to task, saying: "If you believe that Google is not harmful then you must believe that the total loss of our privacy and human dignity is not harmful." McAfee, who now heads up a cybersecurity and cryptocurrency venture called  MGT Capital Investments , slammed Google's data collection and web-crawling capabilities, claiming it reduces individuals to statistics without considering their human emotions.

YouTube has stopped working for some users. People are seeing a message reading "500 internal server error", rather than the videos they want to watch. This is the second round of issues the site has experienced today, following an outage earlier in the morning. Gadgets and tech news in pictures According to  Down Detector , the video site went down at 3.22am, then quickly recovered before going down again at 1.26pm. Users are having issues watching videos, accessing the website and uploading clips. Others, meanwhile, are saying that they can't access channels, but can open videos and use the site's search functionality. According to some users, logging out of your account and logging back in again seems to solve the problems. The issues appear to be affecting people across a number of cities around the world, including London, Berlin, Munich and Vienna   at the time of writing . What exactly has gone wrong with the site isn't yet cle

FRINGE PICTURE SHARING WEBSITE Myspace is really, really easy to hack, and it's probably time you deleted your account. Myspace, a social network that encouraged you to rank your friends, is largely redundant nowadays, but there are still millions of people with accounts set up on the website. If you fancy a blast from the past and want to see what emo song you last set to autoplay on your profile, Myspace offers an account recovery mechanism for people who have lost access to their old associated email address. However, security researcher Leigh-Anne Galloway has revealed that it's pretty easy to abuse this recovery tool, which she describes as "so flawed it deserves its own place in history", as it'll let hackers access any Myspace account as long as they have just three bits of information - the target's full name, username and date of birth.  "Myspace only validates name, username and date of birth. The full name and the username of the ac

If you've got an idea for how to make Windows 10 better - or if you've found a problem in the OS that you think needs to be addressed - the Feedback Hub is the place to go. Microsoft uses the app, which is pre-loaded in Windows 10, to collect feedback about every aspect of its operating system, to help guide its development of the OS for future updates.  Today, Microsoft will be hosting a Reddit AMA ('ask me anything') session to answer Windows 10 users' questions about the Feedback Hub. The event will be hosted by Microsoft engineer and program manager Devin Sinha ( @Giffdev ), who said that he will "take questions, hear your thoughts about the app and your feedback experiences with engineers at Microsoft."

The community-driven organization overseeing Bitcoin on Wednesday warned that any Bitcoins received after Monday, July 31, 2017 at GMT-0700 may vanish into thin air or be rejected as invalid. Bitcoin.org  said  that at the end of the month, Bitcoin confirmation scores – a number that represents the difficulty of altering the associated transaction – may become unreliable for an unknown period. "This means that any Bitcoins you receive after that time may later disappear from your wallet or be a type of Bitcoin that other people will not accept as payment," the group said. The reason for this "potential network disruption" is  Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 148  (BIP 148), which describes a "user-activated soft fork" (UASF). It's an effort to implement a code revision referred to as a  Segregated Witness , or SegWit, a method for separating signature data from transaction identifier data in a Bitcoin transaction. Doing so offers a number of os

An official Samsung twitter account has posted a picture of a mysterious smartphone, prompting many followers to speculate whether the company has inadvertently dropped the dime on its own  Galaxy Note 8  design. The tweet form the Samsung Exynos account aims to extol the virtues of its in-house Exynos 9 (8895) processor with the image showing the chip sitting upon an unknown device. The phone shows the same Infinity Display from the Galaxy S8, but it appears to have an even slimmer bezel at the top of the device. Although it’s hard to tell, it appears the phone within the image might be a little flatter. The full phone isn’t shown in the image, so we can’t tell whether it has the signature S-Pen or not. While we’re used to seeing renders pop out before the official launch of a phone, it’s rare they come from the manufacturer itself.

 n 1999, Bill Gates wrote a book titled “Business @ the Speed of Thought.” In it, Gates made 15 bold predictions that at the time might have sounded outrageousBut as Markus Kirjonen, a business student, said on his blog, Gates’ forecasts turned out to be eerily prescient. Here are the 15 predictions Gates made nearly 20 years ago — and how close they’ve come to being true. No. 1: Price-Comparison Sites. Gates’ prediction: “Automated price comparison services will be developed, allowing people to see prices across multiple websites, making it effortless to find the cheapest product for all industries.” What we see now: You can easily search for a product on Google or Amazon and get different prices. Sites like NexTag and PriceGrabber are built specifically to compare prices. No. 2: Mobile Devices. Gates’ prediction: “People will carry around small devices that allow them to constantly stay in touch and do electronic business from wherever they are. They will be able to check the new

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University warned President Trump to stop blocking Twitter users. The  freedom of speech  organization sent the president a  letter last month  arguing that when Twitter is used by a President, it operates as a "designated public forum" like a city council or school board meeting. When blocking users for mocking or critical tweets, it argues, the president is violating their First Amendment rights. While the letter did not explicitly promise legal action, the implication was clear. Now, the same institute has  filed suit , asserting that President Trump and "his communications team are violating the First Amendment by blocking individuals from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account because they criticized the president or his policies."

One in 12 British people use public Wi-Fi to access pornographic content, according to a new report. Some of the most popular places to watch pornography in public are restaurants, train stations, offices and libraries, though the street is also a common choice. Norton by Symantec has warned public Wi-Fi users that they  risk exposing themselves to hackers , unless they start taking proper precautions. 

If this giant cave battery ends up working the way it's intended to, it could change the way that the world views energy storage. Caves aren’t just homes to giant bat colonies — thanks to modern technology, they can also house  batteries . And not just any batteries — the world’s largest battery. A few weeks ago, German utility  EWE unveiled its plans  to build an  energy  storage system in an old salt mine that could ultimately become the biggest battery on Earth. The ambitious new project has been named “ brine4power ,” and will take form in underground salt caverns that were previously natural gas storage facilities, and even further back in history, were salt mines. All these caves have a volume of 3.5 million cubic feet, which ought to give the resulting battery a capacity of up to 700MWh at an output of 120MW.

Rural communities are often missing a lot of the commodities that urban hotspots can't imagine living without. There's not a Starbucks or Soul Cycle on every corner, and broadband internet access isn't always a given.  Microsoft is the latest tech company trying to make "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of rural broadband" its new motto. The company's new $10 billion  Rural Airband Initiative  is aimed at filling the gap of underserved rural Americans with affordable high-speed internet. Facebook, Google, and Amazon have all jumped into the area of providing some form of internet service, and now we can finally add Microsoft to the list.

Two large energy companies, Siemens and AES Corporation, are joining together to start a new company aimed exclusively at building utility-grade batteries. The company,  called Fluence , will market these large lithium-ion storage systems to utilities and energy providers around the world. The news follows reports from last week that AES  closed on a deal  to build a 100MW/400MWh battery system in Southern California, which would be tied to a new, 1,284 MW combined-cycle natural gas generator. The system will replace 1960’s-era power plants in Los Alamitos, Huntington Beach, and Redondo Beach. The gas generator is expected to be online by 2020, and the storage is expected to be online by 2021. Siemens and AES will each have a 50-percent stake in Fluence, pending approval from US regulatory bodies, which the companies say they expect in late 2017. Both AES and Siemens have their own energy storage platforms—software systems that allow operators to manage how the batteries are cha

Someone has finally made an Easy-Bake Oven for adults. Ordering delivery from Seamless or picking up take-out on the way home has become the norm for many people who work long hours & don’t have the energy to cook. Ultimately, this leads to unhealthy consumption of  fast food .  Tovala  hopes to change those bad habits by offering the best of both worlds — a subscription  meal plan  that delivers fresh, healthy food to your door, and a special high-end oven that is tailor-made to cook those exact meals to perfection. Here is how it works: The 26-pound smart, counter-top conventional oven can thoroughly cook balanced meals in under 30 minutes by broiling, steaming, baking, and heating Tovala brand meals, which are cooked by five-star chefs and delivered to your door. These meals come in a tray that has a scannable bar code. The oven will scan the code and then know precisely how to cook the meal to perfection.

Google hasn't said anything about the feature-- XDA just happened to discover the code in a recent build of Android 7.1. Essentially, it listens for back button presses, and if enough of them happen (four to be exact) in rapid succession (with less than a third of a second delay) then Android will override the app and bring back the home screen. This could apply to apps that just freeze, but also to rogue software that tries to intercept any and all actions, like malware or adware. It's a smart idea, because what's the first thing you do when you can't make an app go away? Frantically pressing the back key is probably the first thing, so that will kill the app and allow you to uninstall or disable it until you figure out the problem. You'll have to enable the feature to get it to work, apparently. Google seems to be rolling it out on a limited basis, and may in fact just be testing it, so it may be some time before it ends up on your device.

Microsoft is calling for an elimination of the rural broadband gap by 2022 and has laid out a few strategies meant to achieve that goal. Over the next five years, Microsoft will invest with telecommunications companies to bring broadband access to two million rural Americans and it will use its recouped investments to invest in additional coverage-expanding projects. It will also invest in training to make sure people in areas with new access have the skills to utilize the technology. And in order to get other groups to do their part to spread broadband access, Microsoft will provide free access to dozens of patents and source code that will help with the development of technology that can expand broadband access and it will also license its own technology. As of now,  Microsoft  says its Rural Airband Initiative already has plans for 12 projects in 12 states that should get going within a year. The company also calls on the public sector to play its part, which includes airwave

Oracle has added a new dedicated  UK Government Cloud , allowing government institutions to move their workloads to the cloud, while still keeping up with security standards.  The Oracle UK Government Cloud Region is the next step in Oracle’s expansion, following the EU-Germany Regions, which are expected to come online in H2 2017. “At Oracle, security is at the heart of everything we do,” said Dermot O’Kelly, senior vice president and country leader, Oracle UK, Ireland & Israel. “We understand that the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your information is vital to your business. Security is embedded in Oracle’s “DNA”- within the product, the development cycle, and Cloud Operations practices – to ensure your information remains your information. Mission critical data can only be maintained by having the most stringent security measures in place. Today’s announcements show we share the Government’s commitment to provide the highest possible levels of security.”

If you use Facebook at all, you have almost certainly seen warnings recently that make reference to Jayden K Smith. You've probably not only been warned about this "hacker" but also been advised to make everyone you know aware of the danger they pose. "Please tell all the contacts in your messenger list not to accept Jayden K. Smith friendship request. He is a hacker and has the system connected to your Facebook account. If one of your contacts accepts it, you will also be hacked, so make sure that all your friends know it," reads the message. It is -- of course -- utter nonsense, yet it is being shared far and wide. Stop it. Stop it this instant. The hoax is a variant of a scam that has been doing the rounds for quite some time. Before the days of social media, similar messages were sent out via email, but now it's easier and faster to scam people than ever, thanks to the power of Facebook. Do-gooder after well-meaning do-gooder is only too keen

Jeff Reynar is a director of engineering and New York site lead at  Facebook . He interviews between 50 and 100 people annually for various technical roles. Since Facebook regularly lands near the top of lists of the best companies to work for, we asked Jeff how to make a résumé stand out. Following is a transcript of the video. JEFF REYNAR:  The biggest mistake people make is to just not prepare enough. And that shows up in both the technical portion of an interview, if they haven't really practiced, and it can often show up as well if someone is asked about what projects they've worked on in the past and they're not able to explain them in detail or talk about challenges they faced and how to overcome them. How do you prepare for a technical interview at Facebook? Well, there are a few different phases, typically, to an interview. Depends a little bit on exactly what role you're interviewing for. We might change things up a little if you're looking for a j

Jeff Reynar is a director of engineering and New York site lead at  Facebook . He interviews between 50 and 100 people annually for various technical roles. Since Facebook regularly lands near the top of lists of the best companies to work for, we asked Jeff how to make a résumé stand out. Following is a transcript of the video. JEFF REYNAR:  The biggest mistake people make is to just not prepare enough. And that shows up in both the technical portion of an interview, if they haven't really practiced, and it can often show up as well if someone is asked about what projects they've worked on in the past and they're not able to explain them in detail or talk about challenges they faced and how to overcome them. How do you prepare for a technical interview at Facebook? Well, there are a few different phases, typically, to an interview. Depends a little bit on exactly what role you're interviewing for. We might change things up a little if you're looking for a j

Decades ago, while Philip H. Lieberman was soaking in a bathtub and listening to the radio, he heard anthropologist Loren Eiseley ponder an evolutionary puzzle: Why couldn't monkeys talk? Like us, they're social primates, intelligent and certainly not quiet. Rhesus macaques grunt, coo, screech and scream. Infant macaques make sounds known as geckers. Despite the grunting and geckering, though, no other primates - not even the chimpanzees and bonobos, our nearest ape relatives - can make the vowel and consonant sounds we know as speech. Scientists figured there were two likely sticking points. Either the brain was not wired for speech in nonhuman primates, or their windpipes were shaped the wrong way.

Are you addicted to coffee? Then you may have a reason to celebrate. A long-term international study suggests that enjoying a cup of coffee is good for your health. And several cups are even better.

UA palimpsest containing an ancient medical treatise beneath biblical text has been discovered by the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery in South Sinai, according to a report in Ahram Online. Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Enany said the manuscript was found during restoration work in the monastery’s ancient library, which holds some 6,000 manuscripts. The leather pages of the palimpsest were first used in the sixth century A.D. for a recipe attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates. Three other medical recipes, and pictures of medicinal herbs, had also been recorded on its pages by an anonymous scribe. During the medieval period, the pages were scraped and reused for the text of the Codex Sinaiticus, an early version of the Christian scriptures. “This was done due to the high cost of leather at that time,” explained Ahmed Al-Nimer, supervisor of Coptic archaeology for the ministry. To read more about recovering ancient texts, go to "The Charred Scrolls of Herculaneum.&q

Music streaming service Spotify has denied that some of its playlists contain music tracks by "fake artists". A music industry publication listed 50 artists it claimed were not real. They have racked up millions of streams by appearing on mood-based playlists such as Sleep and Ambient Chill, but many have no other visible profile. However, one industry expert told the BBC Spotify was "not committing a crime" if it was commissioning tracks or buying production music. "We do not and have never created 'fake' artists and put them on Spotify playlists. Categorically untrue, full stop," Spotify said in a statement. "We do not own rights, we're not a label, all our music is licensed from rights holders and we pay them - we don't pay ourselves." Low profile Some of the artist names  in the list, compiled by Music Business Worldwide (MBW) , did appear to have a presence on other platforms - generally rival services s