Back in the 1980s, it seemed as if everyone with a spare quarter was playing the arcade game Donkey Kong, scooting up ramps and climbing ladders while avoiding barrels hurled by a giant ape. For most players, the video game provided a few minutes of excitement before inevitable defeat. But a handful of top players…
A private astronaut mission is scheduled to launch on Thursday to the International Space Station. But unlike on earlier such flights, none of the passengers are wealthy space tourists paying their own way to orbit. Instead, three nations — Italy, Sweden and Turkey — are taking advantage of new commercial possibilities to send astronauts from…
On the volcanic slopes of Hawaii’s Big Island, hundreds of farmers in the Kona region produce one of the most expensive coffees in the world. Those farmers recently won a series of settlements — totaling more than $41 million — after a nearly five-year legal battle with distributors and retailers that were accused of using…
Apple is expected to begin selling its flagship smartwatches without the capability to detect people’s pulse rate. The tech giant is likely to drop the feature after losing a patent case over its blood-oxygen measurement technology two months ago. The court ordered Apple to stop selling its Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2…
Google will cut 100 employees at its video platform, YouTube, on Wednesday, continuing piecemeal layoffs after shedding more than a thousand jobs in the past week. The tech giant notified workers from YouTube’s operations and creator management teams that their positions had been eliminated, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times. YouTube,…
Worried about smartphone addiction after seeing your latest screen-time statistics? A certain amount of phone use is often necessary these days, but repetitive tasks pile on the minutes. Google’s Assistant Routines and Apple’s Shortcuts app are two free options that may help — by condensing several actions into one tap or command. Here’s how to…
As Teslas and other electric vehicles dazzled car buyers with futuristic technology and dreams of a gasoline-free future, hybrid cars began to seem like yesterday’s news. Sales of the Toyota Prius, the standard-bearer for hybrids, fell 85 percent over a decade. Now, a slowdown in the growth of electric car sales has led General Motors,…
For four years, the computer scientist Trieu Trinh has been consumed with something of a meta-math problem: how to build an A.I. model that solves geometry problems from the International Mathematical Olympiad, the annual competition for the world’s most mathematically attuned high-school students. Last week Dr. Trinh successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on this topic…
Worried about smartphone addiction after seeing your latest screen-time statistics? A certain amount of phone use is often necessary these days, but repetitive tasks pile on the minutes. Google’s Assistant Routines and Apple’s Shortcuts app are two free options that may help — by condensing several actions into one tap or command. Here’s how to…
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, stunned investors by demanding that the company’s board give him shares worth more than $80 billion if it wants him to continue developing products based on artificial intelligence. In the latest demonstration of his disregard for conventional ways of communicating with investors, Mr. Musk said late Monday on…
