Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Facebook’s Oculus virtual-reality business, is leaving the company. Facebook didn’t give a reason for Luckey’s departure. His last day is Friday. Luckey, who is 24, is leaving Facebook in the heels of controversies. Earlier this year, a federal jury found that Oculus, Luckey and co-founder …
Researchers in a pilot clinical trial have made it possible for a paralyzed man to move his arm. As Bronwyn Benito reports, it is a critical step toward restoring mobility to people with paralysis. …
The White House on Thursday defended a bill recently passed by Congress to repeal Obama-era internet privacy protections, saying the move was meant to create a fair playing field for telecommunication companies. White House spokesman Sean Spicer, during a Thursday news briefing, reiterated President Donald Trump’s support for the plan …
In a cave in a mountain in western Texas, the Long Now Foundation is building a clock – a big clock, 150 meters tall. The clock will tick only once each year, go bong once a century, and once a millennium, it will send out a cuckoo. Its creators plan …
Twitter has found more creative ways to ease its 140-character limit without officially raising it. Now, the company says that when you reply to someone – or to a group – usernames will no longer count toward those 140 characters. This will be especially helpful with group conversations, where …
While President Trump’s latest executive order gives renewed life to power plants that burn coal, energy companies continue to seek and find alternative, less expensive and cleaner sources of fuel. One possibility is turning trash into fuel in an environmentally responsible way. VOA’s George Putic reports that authorities in Tel …
Imagine a vaccine vial with a temperature-sensitive label that changes colors when exposed to excessive heat. That’s the sort of technology that can make a huge difference for doctors working in challenging conditions, allowing them to determine at-a-glance whether heat-sensitive vaccines are viable. The vaccine vial monitor is one of …
When he was growing up in Hyderabad, India, Ravindra Sunku, 52, could see and smell the burning kerosene and wood his neighbors used to cook. It stuck in his memory people he knew might have suffered from lung disease caused from what they inhaled by doing something as simple as …
The vote by the U.S. Congress to repeal rules that limit how internet service providers can use customer data has generated renewed interest in an old internet technology: virtual private networks, or VPNs. VPNs cloak a customer’s web-surfing history by making an encrypted connection to a private server, which then …
Tech billionaire Elon Musk is announcing a new venture called Neuralink focused on linking brains to computers. The company plans to develop brain implants that can treat neural disorders — and that may one day be powerful enough to put humanity on a more even footing with possible future superintelligent …
Tech giant Samsung Electronics plans to sell refurbished versions of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, the company said late on Monday, signaling the return of the model pulled from markets last year because of fire-prone batteries. Samsung’s Note 7s were permanently scrapped in October after some phones self-combusted, prompting a …
Broadband access in the United States is not universal, with a longtime digital divide between urban and rural areas. But in one small town just four hours from Washington, D.C., there’s no internet service at all. The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is the site of the largest fully steerable …
Facebook Inc will add a feature to its Messenger app Monday to allow users to share their locations, the company said, ramping up competition with tools offered by Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google Maps. The company has found that one of the most used phrases on Messenger as people …
Driverless vehicles operated by Uber Technologies Inc. were back on the road in San Francisco on Monday after one of its self-driving cars crashed in Arizona, the ride-hailing company said. Uber’s autonomous vehicles in Arizona and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, remained grounded but were expected to be operating again soon, according to …
Islamic State propagandists are seeking to capitalize on last week’s terror attack in London, which left five people dead and 40 injured, by flooding YouTube with hundreds of violent recruitment videos. The online propaganda offensive comes as Britain demands social media companies scrub their sites of jihadist postings. Amber Rudd, …
These days, the only words most people see are typed. Many young people never learn cursive handwriting, but it is making a comeback. Thousands of school students around the country are learning to write in longhand. At one elementary school in New York City, teachers and students seem excited about …
One day you may be carrying your own drone everywhere you go. A drone has been developed to take selfies that is so thin it can be put into your pants pocket. The Selfly, as it is called, is attached to a smartphone that fits into the phone’s case. VOA’s …
Uber Technologies Inc suspended its pilot program for driverless cars on Saturday (March 25th) after a vehicle equipped with the nascent technology crashed on an Arizona roadway, the ride-hailing company and local police said. The accident, the latest involving a self-driving vehicle operated by one of several companies experimenting with …
A Chinese court has ruled in favor of Apple in design patent disputes between the Cupertino, California company and a domestic phone-maker, overturning a ban on selling iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones in China, Xinhua news agency reported. Last May, a Beijing patent regulator ordered Apple’s Chinese subsidiary …
Khmerload, a Cambodian entertainment news website modeled after the American media giant Buzzfeed, has become the country’s first local tech startup to attract the backing of Silicon Valley investors. A $200,000 investment to be exact. The money came from 500 Startups, a global venture capital seed fund and startup accelerator …
What happens when a piano is combined with technology? “Kids or anybody could learn how to play the piano really properly from the best musicians in the world,” said Mischa Dohler, composer and professor of Wireless Communications at King’s College London. ‘Could we digitize skills?’ Dohler’s aim is to build …
As the internet continues to drive innovative ideas, some scientists envision a world where people can digitize their skills and do their jobs from anywhere in the world with the next generation of optical and wireless technology. How this idea is executed was demonstrated at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference …
A message of resilience posted online in the wake of the London terrorist attack Wednesday was read in Parliament, it was mentioned on the BBC, and it went viral online. Unfortunately, the hand written message, which appeared in a photo of a whiteboard commonly seen in the London Underground, was …
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has technology capable of infecting “factory fresh” iPhones and has been bugging the devices since at least 2008, WikiLeaks claimed Thursday. In a statement released on its website, the whistleblowing organization said the technology developed by the CIA’s Embedded Development Branch (EDB) was designed to …
Google Maps users will soon be able to broadcast their movements to friends and family — the latest test of how much privacy people are willing to sacrifice in an era of rampant sharing. The location-monitoring feature will begin rolling out Wednesday in an update to the Google Maps mobile …
The cost for individual homes in the U.S. to “go solar” has dropped by more than 60 percent over the last decade. Those low costs helped convince more than a million Americans to install solar panels on their roofs. Now schools are beginning to get in on the benefits. One …