In-office perks can provide a recruiting edge and boost employee morale, but not every company can afford to foot the bill. Microsoft and Amazon...
Startup Spotlight: Airlift sells in-office grub using high-tech ‘micro markets’
Science & patent news
Opera fights back, says that its browser has the best battery life
(credit: Opera)
Earlier this week, Microsoft made some bold claims about the battery life of its Edge browser, saying that laptops running Edge lasted much longer during video playback and used less energy during normal browsing operations than Chrome and Opera.
Opera, however, disagrees. The company has run its own tests and written up the results: with...
Study: Fewer Bay Area residents are searching for homes in Seattle
Relativistic reverberation in the accretion flow of a tidal disruption event
Our current understanding of the curved space-time around supermassive black holes is based on actively accreting black holes, which make up only ten per cent or less of the overall population. X-ray observations of that small fraction reveal strong gravitational redshifts that indicate that many of these black holes are rapidly rotating; however, selection biases suggest that these results are not necessarily reflective of...
Sierra Nevada Corp. moves ahead on NASA milestones for Dream Chaser spaceship
After...
Can cops use a phone left at scene of a crime to call 911 and find its owner?
(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)
On Thursday morning, a federal judge in Sacramento will evaluate a novel legal theory recently raised by the defense lawyer representing an admitted California burglar and suspected kidnapper.
The lawyer, Thomas Johnson, claims that cops shouldn’t have been able to pick up his client's Samsung Galaxy left at the scene of a burglary, where they...
Working Geek: Code Fellows CEO Dave Parker on shifting career goals, productivity, and work-life balance
Dave Parker launched five startups (three sold, two closed) before shifting to mentorship roles. In 2014, he joined UP Global, the non-profit that operates Startup Weekend and Startup America,...
If you kill the headphone jack, you need to replace it with something better
Enlarge / Little ol' headphone jacks causing a big ol' fuss. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
As the rumors that the next iPhone will drop the 3.5mm headphone jack have intensified, I’ve been keeping tabs on the specific argument that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber made yesterday: that removing the headphone jack from the iPhone is the modern-day...
The Laws of Mixed Reality: A vision of the future, without the rose-colored glasses
Guest Commentary: The future of human consciousness will be a hybrid affair. We will live and work in a ubiquitous computing environment, where physical reality and a...
Astrophysics: Recipe for a black-hole merger
The detection of a gravitational wave was a historic event that heralded a new phase of astronomy. A numerical model of the Universe now allows researchers to tell the story of the black-hole system that caused the wave. See Letter p.512
Nature 534 478 doi: 10.1038/534478a