Quevedo’s telekino of 1904 was the first step on the road to autonomous Waymos. No one knows exactly when the vehicles we drive will finally wrest the steering wheel from us. But the age of the autonomous automobile isn’t some sudden Big Bang. It’s more of a slow crawl,…
“Accessing and remediating any of these issues can only be performed in the VAB.” A day after NASA officials expressed optimism that they could be ready to launch the Artemis II mission around the Moon next month, the space agency’s administrator announced Saturday that a new problem will require…
Like rocks, egg shells can trap isotopes, allowing us to use them to date samples. When dinosaur fossils surface at a site, it is often not possible to tell how many millions of years ago their bones were buried. While the different strata of sedimentary rock represent periods of…
A new book argues that tests might reshape human diversity even if they don’t work. Daphne O. Martschenko and Sam Trejo both want to make the world a better, fairer, more equitable place. But they disagree on whether studying social genomics—elucidating any potential genetic contributions to behaviors ranging from…
“Noncitizens” lost after-hours access to a NIST lab last month. One of the US government’s top scientific research labs is taking steps that could drive away foreign scientists, a shift lawmakers and sources tell WIRED could cost the country valuable expertise and damage the agency’s credibility. The National Institute…
Microsoft CoreAI exec Asha Sharma will take over in surprise executive shake-up. Microsoft Executive Vice President for Gaming Phil Spencer announced he will retire after 38 years at Microsoft and 12 years leading the company’s video game efforts. Asha Sharma, an executive currently in charge of Microsoft’s CoreAI division,…
The company asserts it will continue to make VR headsets, though. Meta announced today that it will divorce its Horizon Worlds social and gaming service—once promoted as the company’s first major step into the metaverse—from its Quest VR headset platform and digital store. The company says it is now…
Director says PC is the “foundation” when targeting “high-end environments first.” For a long time now, PC gamers have been used to the Final Fantasy series treating their platform as somewhat secondary to the game’s core console versions. There are some signs that may be starting to change, though,…
The revised age may help make sense of 2-million-year-old stone tools elsewhere in China. Two skulls from Yunxian, in northern China, aren’t ancestors of Denisovans after all; they’re actually the oldest known Homo erectus fossils in eastern Asia. A recent study has re-dated the skulls to about 1.77 million…
Games appear to be mostly unmodified ports of the well-regarded remakes. For my money, the 2004 Game Boy Advance re-releases of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are still the best versions of the original Pokémon games. They fixed most of the bugs and balance issues present in the originals—partly by also including the rosters…
