Microsoft announced Wednesday morning that it has entered into an agreement to acquire SwiftKey, makers of the SwiftKey predictive keyboard and its SDK that runs on over 300 million Android and iOS smartphones, for about $250 million.
We all have those moments where we're bored or lonely, and in those times, just having anyone to talk to would be awesome. But maybe your friends are all busy, or everyone you know is at work and nobody's responding to your text messages.
Our dog has tons of energy and always wants to play. However, play time can be exhausting to the humans of the house. We found out a few months ago that the dog loves to play ‘chase the red dot.' Boredom leads to creativity, so we attached a laser pointer to her head with a bandana and small piece of tape. This kept her continuously occupied until we removed it after 20 minutes. I assume you could try this with a cat if you were daring enough – good luck with that. Caution: Laser pointers (ev...
Looking for a costume that breaks the mold of skimpy and clinging fabrics? Stay warm on Halloween and impress at any spooky event by turning yourself into a perfect recreation of the apes in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
There's no TV show that stands out quite like American Horror Story. With its crazy characters and nightmarish storylines, there are countless costume ideas hiding in its episodes.
Thomas Ridgewell, more widely known as TomSka, is a popular Youtuber who creates over-the-top, ridiculous, and overall pretty funny videos—but sometimes they don't make sense.
Video: . Extraterrestrial life is life that does not originate from Earth. It is also called alien life, or, if it is a sentient and/or relatively complex individual, an "extraterrestrial" or "alien" (or, to avoid confusion with the legal sense of "alien," a "space alien"). These as yet hypothetical forms of life range from simple bacteria-like organisms to beings far more complex than humans. The possibility that viruses might exist extraterrestrially has also been proposed.
Many people drink green tea for health reasons, and it's no wonder. This beverage is a superstar when it comes to antioxidant levels, and is being studied for its potentially curative properties on multiple health concerns, whether it's staving off the aging process or fighting cancer.
Over the past decade, touch screens have changed the way we interact with our electronic devices. Gone are the days of clicking and pecking at keyboards, with these gestures replaced by swipes, taps, and long-presses on most of our newer devices. From the early years spent swapping out vaccuum tubes and reading light indicators, human interaction with computers has been constantly evolving. Can Qeexo's FingerSense usher in the next era in manual input?
lubuntu is a is a lightweight Linux/Ubuntu that makes it suitable to virtual environments, that you run with VirtualBox to add a secondary machine to your computer or laptop. With this program you can run a number of operating systems upon the same platform.
Having to read a bunch of articles and tweets everyday can be tiresome, but if you can have a sweet-ass personal assistant read them for you, you're pretty golden.
You've seen security cameras everywhere in the public space. How many are there? Where are they? This is information that can be difficult to come by. It's not just criminals that are interested in information on this. It's your fundamental human right to be able to go about your daily life without being monitored and watched at every step. You might think that these cameras are for safety, and they can certainly help make people feel secure. Then it automatically follows that these people sh...
We all know that DNA is pretty amazing, but it's not something that most of us get much hands-on experience with. Even though it's in every living thing around us, we never see it, so we rarely think about it either.
Red Bull Stratos sent the first skydiver to space in a weather balloon this past weekend. Free-fall jumper Felix Baumgartner reached 24 miles in altitude in the Earth's upper stratosphere before he leaped from the capsule. Felix reached a maximum speed of 833mph, breaking the sound barrier, before slowing down at the atmosphere, where he finished with a 4:20 minute freefall.
Hurdlers are some of the least appreciated, most athletic people in the world. Hurdling does amazing things to the human body. If you're new to track and have been thinking of trying hurdles, watch this video for a general idea of how to run and jump the hurdles and ways you can practice.
This educational video tutorial will show you how to compute mathematical problems in your head. You will see some techniques to do some maths problems in your mind. Learn to do algebraic computations in the head without having to look at a calculator. Become a human calculator!
Use four chairs, lean back, and remove the chairs. The structure will hold - it's really cool.
This walkthrough guide will cover the complete Overload DLC mission pack for the Mass Effect 2 action role-playing game on the Xbox 360. Overload became available for download in June 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), and features four different missions. Watch this series for all the gameplay action from Mahalo.
In 2018, Niantic unveiled its in-development augmented reality cloud platform for smartphones, the Niantic Real World Platform. A demo showed Pikachu and Eevee cavorting in a courtyard, darting in front of and behind potted plants and people's legs as they walked through the scene. This would be the future of Pokémon GO.
Hey, you, still stuck at home? Cheer up, today is the first day of spring. Yes, really. And since you're probably locked in on TV, we're guessing you need a break from some of the less than sunshiney news reports rolling in. Well, no worries, because there's actually some good news to report.
Does TikTok scare you? Trust me, I get it. It's a strange, unfamiliar place to those of us not accustomed to its ways, populated by teenagers and college students with their own subcultures, memes, and humor. But here's the thing: TikTok has something for everyone, you included.
Unless you've been hiding under a (moon) rock for the past month, you already know that Saturday, July 20 is the 50th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Now that we've officially seen the HoloLens 2 and Microsoft has shown off the improvements and new superpowers of the augmented reality headset, what about the specs?
Everyone from first responders to hotel cleaning staff use radios operating in the sub-megahertz range to communicate, often without even encoding the transmission. While encoding and encryption are increasingly used in radio communication, an RTL-SDR adapter and smartphone are all it takes to start listening in on radio conversations happening around you.
When you drive along the deceptively sedate streets of Silicon Valley, there are few hints that all those nondescript office parks and low-rise buildings contain the very future of the planet, but they really do. On a recent trip to tech's epicenter, I found that out firsthand when I got to visit the offices of Meta, the startup that produced the Meta 2 augmented reality headset.
According to Google at their 2018 I/O conference, Google Assistant is now available on over 500 million devices. Now that the assistant is available on iPhones as well, Google has to give iOS users a reason to switch to its assistant over the built-in Siri. Today, Google has eight more reasons for users to do so.
A virus easily spread among trout and salmon could make it harder to keep your favorite fish on the menu.
People infected with HIV take many different types of pills every day to decrease the amount of virus in their body, live a longer and healthier life, and to help prevent them from infecting others. That could all be in the past as new clinical trials testing the safety and effectiveness of a new type of treatment — injections given every four or eight weeks — look to be equally effective at keeping the virus at bay.
While not cuddly to most, bats are shy, skilled flyers that fill an important role in their environments. A new study reveals a deadly disease decimating North American bat populations has stepped up its attack on vulnerable bat populations in the summer months.
For about a million Americans each year, a joint replacement brings relief from pain and restored mobility. But, 5–10% of those people have to endure another surgery within seven years, and most of those are due to an infection in their new joint. If doctors could treat infections more effectively, patients could avoid a second surgery, more pain, and another rehabilitation.
Cancer cells do a pretty good job of flying under the radar of our immune system. They don't raise the alarm bells signaling they are a foreign invader the way viruses do. That might be something scientists can change, though.
For a company more associated with debugging computer programs, Google's parent company, Alphabet, is making a name for itself by taking on the real thing — mosquitoes.
During the millions of years they've been on earth horseshoe crabs have developed a trick that can save our lives even now — and may be especially useful in the fight against healthcare-associated infections.
Nvidia has emerged as the indisputable leader in chips for Level 3 and even more advanced driverless applications, catching some of the world's largest semiconductor makers and automotive suppliers by surprise.
Forget Waymo, Uber, Tesla, and other other heavily mediatized driverless contenders — German premium carmaker Audi AG has become the first OEM to introduce a Level 3 car sold in retail channels.
Everything from disposed of drugs to hormones and disease-causing bacteria — anything that is rinsed or flushed down the drain — can contaminate wastewater.
If you know that ticks spread Lyme disease, you may already know you might also catch a bunch of other infections from them. One of the lesser-known diseases spread by ticks is infection with the bacterium Anaplasma phagocytophilium, called anaplasmosis.
Alzheimer's disease — an irreversible, progressive brain disorder — is the sixth leading cause of death in the US and more than afflicts 5 million Americans. As if those numbers aren't scary enough, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expect that number to nearly triple by 2050.
Mosquitoes are a big problem, and citronella candles are not the solution. There are a lot of mosquito species. The American Mosquito Control Association reports there are more than 3000 mosquito species in the world, and about 200 of those occur in the US. The most common are the Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex species. These are also the three mosquito species most likely to transmit serious illness, and all of them live in the US.
Several recent research studies have pointed to the importance of the microbes that live in our gut to many aspects of our health. A recent finding shows how bacteria that penetrate the mucus lining of the colon could play a significant role in diabetes.
