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While there seems to be an emoji to represent everyone and everything, a significant group was completely left out — the transgender community. But yesterday, the Unicode Consortium (the group which decides what emoji make it onto our phones) revealed 117 new emoji designs that’ll be rolled out later this year, and among them is a transgender flag. The call for a transgender flag and symbol was sponsored by Google and Microsoft to “better represent individuals with non-cisgender identities....

According to Bricker, while people can easily identify the external trigger, “it takes some time and trials to begin noticing those all-important inside triggers.” He recommends discussing the urge as if you were an observer, telling yourself something like, “I’m feeling that tension in my chest right now. And there I go, trying to reach for my iPhone.” The better we are at noticing the behavior, the better we’ll be at managing it over time....

The development comes as security researcher Vasily Kravets disclosed a second zero-day vulnerability on August 20 after being shut out of HackerOne bug bounty program. The original story follows. A second zero-day vulnerability has been publicly disclosed in the Steam gaming client by security researcher Vasily Kravets after he said he was banned from its bug-bounty program. The revelations come two weeks after another zero-day previously disclosed by Kravets and researcher Matt Nelson was disputed by Valve, Steam’s parent company....

The VFX artists over at Corridor have put together a video to explain why COVID-19’s exponential growth meant the pandemic took so many by surprise by using visual analogies. In one example, they ask you to imagine doubling a sheet of paper one hundred times. How thick would such a stack of paper be? In another example, they ask you to imagine a droplet of water doubling every minute while you’re on a trip to the grand canyon....

In 2018, Hofmann had announced he’s going to release the app in Spring 2019. While he certainly missed that target, the app is finally here. Byte is available for both iOS and Android, but not for all countries. The app retains the idea of creating six-second looping videos. But it has a TikTok-styled vertically scrolling timeline for endless consumption. Byte has a curated discovery section where you’ll see six-second videos handpicked by editors....

Now, a new study focused on a hum heard by the intrepid space shows this overlooked signal could tell us a great deal about the distant void lying outside our solar system. Voyager 1 is now over 22.5 billion kilometers (14 billion miles) from Earth, soaring through a diffuse mixture of particles and gas called the interstellar medium. This hum, recorded since 2017, is thought to be the result of plasma waves in this cosmic soup....

With 89 years, the legendary investor isn’t the youngest anymore, which might make it harder to grasp the new economy that’s been building over the last few decades, specifically the digital economy. It was just a few years ago when the “oracle of Omaha” started dipping his toes into this new world, by acquiring a large stake in Apple. Today, Apple takes up roughly 30% of Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio of publicly traded companies....

The big idea behind the beautiful balls of fire is figure out how to make terrestrial flames more efficient. According to NASA, the experiment has incredible implications for our theoretical understanding of flames and how gravity effects the temperature and efficiency of a fire. While there aren’t currently any direct extra-terrestrial use-cases for lighting fires in space – aside from the fact that they’re gorgeous – it’s clear that humanity is on a collision course with heavenly bodies such as the Moon and Mars that have incredibly different gravitational fields....

Let me introduce you to the Drako GTE. Its name makes it sound like it’s some kind of Bond villain, and boy does it drive like one. In a recent video, the company took a pre-production model out to a frozen lake in Colorado, at 8,500 feet above sea level. The thin air would have strangled a combustion engine, but it wasn’t a problem for the Drako’s 1,200 hp electric motors....

What’s a better fuck you to city traffic than whizzing through the air above it? A video on YouTube by Omni Hoverboard shows a man flying the hovercraft, using a handheld device to steer, over a large ornamental pond outside a city landmark (I suspect it’s an art gallery). The unnamed rider stands upright, legs akimbo and slightly bent, with his feet strapped onto the board. He’s taken his cue from Top Gun and is wearing a leather flying jacket, helmet, and aviation sunglasses....

Fast-forward a few short weeks and the situation has changed entirely. First came the news in late April that Tesla had sold 10% of its Bitcoin holdings, reportedly to demonstrate the digital currency’s liquidity. And more importantly, Elon Musk has now announced on Twitter that Tesla has suspended purchases using Bitcoin amid concerns about the “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels” used in mining the cryptocurrency. This has prompted a huge sell-off in the crypto markets, with Bitcoin plunging from around US$55,000 to the mid-US$45,000s, before recovering to around US$50,000 at the time of writing....

By: Eve Zelickson Chances are at some point in your internet travels you’ve stumbled on a warning that reads something like “Your connection is not private. Attackers might be trying to steal your information.” The page usually gives you an option to proceed to the website anyway. But should you? Why did I get rerouted to this page? Today, we conduct more activities online than ever before: paying bills, buying groceries, and interfacing with doctors, to name a few....

In recent years, machine-learning algorithms have promised governments and private companies the power to glean all sorts of information from people’s appearance. Several startups now claim to be able to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help employers detect the personality traits of job candidates based on their facial expressions. In China, the government has pioneered the use of surveillance cameras that identify and track ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of schools installing camera systems that automatically sanction children for not paying attention, based on facial movements and microexpressions such as eyebrow twitches....

Occasionally, pulsars produce unpredictable giant radio pulses (GRPs) — short-lived bursts of energy far more powerful than the flashes coming from the stellar corpse itself. New observations show X-ray emissions from the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula are about four percent higher than expected. This means the total amount of energy emitted by this object (and others like it) is tens to hundreds of times greater than previously believed....

There’s a hilarious prank making the rounds on TikTok and Instagram where people pretend to have their hands stuck in glasses or vases. What’s exactly so funny about that? Well, it’s best if you watch it for yourself — as it’s both so genius and so dumb it’s hard to believe it works — but let me explain the premise just in case. Basically, the prankster pretends their hand is stuck in a container of sorts and calls out for help....

Apple’s most recent overhaul of iOS adds multiple new bells and whistles to the platform, including the ability to completely change your screen layout and set your own default apps. However, it may be the new privacy updates that are the most important. Here’s what you need to know. There have been multiple additions, like light indicators near the battery display that show you that apps are using your microphone and camera, and clipboard notifications that tell you from where you’re copying and pasting....

The ads were reportedly slated to air on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC in their DC markets but were “pulled at the last minute” for reasons unknown. Allow me to clear the mystery: they were probably pulled because this is a bad idea. But before we get into that, let’s take a moment to break down what’s happening in the ads. Here’s Deepfake Vladmir Putin: And here’s Deepfake Kim Jong Un: RepresentUs, the not-for-profit behind the project, says on its website that it brings together “conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between to pass powerful state and local laws that fix our broken elections and stop political bribery....

Raising the bar through intelligence, virtual assistants have been propelled by advancements of mobile technology. Technology giants are putting their weight on a platform designed to answer ad-hoc queries in real-time and fuel sales as chatbots can remember customer preference and use order history to learn from customer responses to the product advertisements, suggest products, and cross-sell aptly. For instance, if a customer asks for a pizza recommendation with a chatbot, it can remember which pizza the customer ordered and follow up with it when offering a recommendation for another pizza or a restaurant....

It’s not complicated, is it? Well, you think that but every day I get countless emails addressed to Yossi, Yassi, Yussi, Yesse, and Mr Yassi. The list goes on. [Read: Using jargon to sound smart? Science says you’re just insecure] If you’ve scrolled this far, congratulations — I hope it’s given you some insight into what it’s like to have a unique, different, or dare I say it, foreign-sounding moniker....

You might ask why there’s an asterisk sign? It’s not a typo. It’s there because this new system will only work with iPhone 12 and above. BOOOOOOO! Apple’s reasoning behind this is that the feature requires “advancements in the TrueDepth camera system.” And apparently, the pleb Face ID system on the iPhone 11 is not powerful enough. Sadly, this mask-unlocking feature won’t work with iPad Pros at the moment either....