Put on your friendliest face and say hello to the newest member of our planetary neighborhood: Barnard’s star b. An international team led by researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science announced today that they’ve detected an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to Earth at just six light-years away. The astronomers calculate the newfound world, dubbed Barnard’s star b, to be about 3.2 times the mass of Earth and to orbit its host star once every 233 days.

Amazon has selected a pair of cities to host its new, expanded headquarters: Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, and Long Island City in Queens, New York. Amazon’s decision came after a 14-month search that saw cities around the U.S. promise tax breaks, taxpayer-funded infrastructure and business-friendly ordinances in an effort to win what Amazon says will be $5 billion in new investment and thousands of jobs.

Stephen Colbert has won another key battle in his late-night “war” with Jimmy Fallon: His CBS Late Show is now No. 1 this season among adult viewers under 50, the key demo group most attractive to advertisers. While Colbert has dominated in overall audience for close to two years now, Fallon’s Tonight Show has clung to an ever-shrinking lead in the demo. But per Nielsen data released Tuesday, Late Show is averaging 658,000 adult viewers under 50 in the TV season to date, just barely ahead ...

The indie game Bit.Trip Runner is a rhythm-based platformer where your jumps are timed to the beat of frantic music. Go ahead and try playing it on mute. I dare you. Too hard? Alright, try to imagine how lacking Supergiant Games’ influential indie game Bastion might have been without the hero's every step narrated by a disembodied...

During a speech at the annual UNESCO Internet Governance Forum in Paris Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the “Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace,” a new initiative designed to establish international norms for the internet, including good digital hygiene and the coordinated disclosure of technical vulnerabilities. The document outlines nine goals, like helping to ensure foreign actors don’t interfere with elections and working to prevent private companies fro...

For a group of paleontologists, a tour of the Creation Museum seemed like a great tongue-in-cheek way to cap off a serious conference. But while there were a few laughs and some clowning for the camera, most left more offended than amused by the frightening way in which evolution -- and their life's work -- was attacked.

One of the mysteries of Facebook is that whenever public sentiment about the company feels most mixed, it delivers smashing results for Wall Street that keep any social consequences from depressing the company’s share price. This was true even during the depths of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which began with a major price drop and ended with Facebook at a new all-time high, $209.94 a share, ahead of its earnings announcement in mid-July.

The set of ‘Westworld‘ has burned down after wildfires in California spread to the Paramount Ranch, where the hit HBO show is filmed. The news was shared by the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area’s Twitter account, who said that the ongoing Woolsey fire has claimed the Ranch’s ‘Western Town’ area.

We say a lot with our hands. We spread them wide to indicate size, stab the air for emphasis and reach out to draw people in. Waving our hands about when we speak makes us appear less robotic – and that’s true for robots too.

From the New York Times: In the northern town of Paradise, the ruins of houses and businesses smoldered throughout the day, while in Southern California, tens of thousands of residents fled their homes and jammed onto highways. Exotic lemurs and parrots were packed up and carried away to safety as fires ringed the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park. Officials estimated that the blaze in the north, called the Camp Fire, had destroyed a staggering 6,700 structures — most of them residential. Such ...

Amazon is going after FedEx and UPS with steep discounts as it looks to court more sellers to try its pilot shipping service that launched this year. Ray Berman, an Amazon seller who was recently invited to the program, said the rates were as much as 50 percent cheaper than those offered by UPS. He said for a shipment of 600 pounds of boxes from his warehouse to Amazon's fulfillment center, Amazon charged only $80 — much lower than UPS' $160 and FedEx's $104.

We may not punch ballots on Election Day anymore, but for one 78-year-old man, he was punching something: a big black bear. Sonny Pumphrey was cleaning up fall leaves in his driveway in White Oak, North Carolina, on Nov. 6 when he came face to face with a mother bear and her two cubs. He said that the cubs ran away when he saw them, but that the mother stayed behind, leaving him with no choice but to confront her.

Months after a student was expelled for refusing to stand for her school's Pledge of Allegiance, the Texas Attorney General is intervening on the school's behalf. The mother of Windfern High School senior India Landry launched a legal battle against the Houston-area school, saying her daughter wasn't able to practice free speech.

An Israeli biotech company specializing in HIV and cancer treatments has finally released the results of its first clinical trial of its HIV-drug Gammora and the news is bringing renewed hope to the many affected by this devastating retrovirus. The novel drug has been found to eliminate up to 99% of the HIV virus within four weeks of treatment.

Boys and young men who are obsessed with building muscle have more mental health issues than researchers and healthcare professionals have previously recognized. A new study from NTNU and Harvard University shows that young men who are overly preoccupied with building muscle have a significantly higher risk of...

The iPhone XR does not have a pressure-sensitive display, so it lacks 3D Touch. Apple has introduced alternative gestures for many 3D Touch features under the marketing guise of ‘Haptic Touch’. This combines a normal long-press gesture with haptic feedback, like holding down the spacebar to activate keyboard trackpad mode, or using long press for the lock screen torch button.

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Ageing online survival game DayZ is finally launching a beta build, nearly five years after it first arrived as a standalone release. Up until now, DayZ has only been available in a version labelled as an Early Access alpha. Development progress has been slow, to put it lightly. But a fresh update from Bohemia Interactive lead producer Eugen Harton has laid out an ambitious plan - to freeze the deployment of new items and focus on "bugfixing, polishing and balancing" to get the game re...

Those who focus on the U.S. national debt (and I’m one of them) keep wondering how long this debt levitation act can go on. The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is at the highest level in history (106%), with the exception of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. At least in 1945, the U.S. had won the war and our economy dominated world output and production. Today, we have the debt without the global dominance.

The goal of AI is not to replace doctors, it's to optimize physician performance, releasing them from menial tasks and providing alternative assessments.

Findings open new avenues for the research of neurodegenerative disorders

New ultra-slow-motion footage captures aggressive roach defense mechanisms

While it seemed like the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X might avoid the practice, Apple now says it will trottle them as well.

Project Milestone is building the world’s first 3D printed concrete homes that will actually be lived in.

Suppose neuroscientists could predict your intentional actions before you can. Would that mean that you lack free will? I used to think that it would. Now I'm not so sure.