Jussie Smollett is facing prison time and the implosion of his career if it turns out he lied about being the target of a hate crime, legal and public relations experts say. “The best thing that Jussie can do is pray and pray a lot,” said Ronn Torossian, founder of 5W Public Relations. “If he made it up, he has big problems in both the court of law and the court of public opinion.”

OpenAI, a non-profit research company investigating "the path to safe artificial intelligence," has developed a machine learning system called Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2 ), capable of generating text based on brief writing prompts. The result comes so close to mimicking human writing that it could potentially be used for "deepfake" content.

A bold life-hunting mission to the surface of Jupiter's ocean-harboring moon Europa was shut out yet again in the 2019 federal budget proposal, but NASA still aims to see it fly. The budget request, which was released Monday (Feb. 12), allocates $19.9 billion to NASA in 2019 and lays out some details about the agency's plan to return humans to the moon — a key focus that the Trump administration announced this past December.

The day after two suspects were released without charges due to new evidence in the attack on Jussie Smollett, police reportedly are investigating whether the Empire star was an “active participant” in the assault against him. On Saturday afternoon, multiple media outlets cited Chicago police sources in reporting that the 36-year-old actor is now suspected of paying the two brothers who were involved in the alleged racial and homophobic attack against him that took place on Jan. 29.

The LA Times Guild has been negotiating a new contract with the newspaper, but has hit a wall thanks to an unprecedented demand from the paper's owners: they want writers to sign away the rights to nonfiction books, novels, movies and other works they create separate from their reporting for the paper. The newspaper is also demanding the right to use reporters "byline, biography and likeness" to market these works.

The botched launch of two Galileo navigation probes made for an unexpected experiment

What separates a lethal prion from dementia-inducing amyloid plaque? Maybe not much

Ah, February. The month of love. With Valentine's Day just a heartbeat away, Netflix is giving you... a superhero show?

We’ve reported several times about the Apple Watch Series 4’s ECG functionality alerting unsuspecting users to seek medical attention. In addition to ECG, however, the Series 4 has a fall detection functionality. That feature is what one Norweigan Apple Watch user credits with saving his life. As reported by NRK, 67-year-old Toralv Østvang was found “bloody and unconscious” on his bathroom floor by emergency authorities. According to the report, Østvang fell in his bathroom, with the ...

Native to central and southern Europe, the amphibious alpine newt breeds in shallow water, where its larvae are born, hatch and feed on plankton, before sprouting legs and moving to land. This timelapse video from the Dutch director Jan van IJken tracks the development of a single-celled zygote into the hatched larva of an alpine newt. Captured in stunning detail at microscopic scales, Becoming is a remarkable look at the process of cell division and differentiation, whence all animals – fro...

Let’s talk about Facebook Dot Com. It’s a place for your parents to post jeremiads about millennials, it’s the only website your grandparents know how to use. It’s a place to blog, a place to post to blogs of others. It’s a place to conduct business, it’s a place to gossip with your coworkers while you’re on the john. It is a place to advertise and be advertised to, a true “market” in the dumbest possible sense of the term. The fact that Facebook is not particularly good at doi...

Caution: Do not throw a pot of boiling water into the wind if the wind is blowing at you.

Alphabet's Google had announced its plans to completely shut down Google+ back in December last year. Launched in 2011, Google+ was expected to be the company's answer to Facebook with a number of similar features. However, it didn't gain much traction over the years. While Google+ will cease to exist from April 2, 2019, the company now says it will start removing some of the features as early as February 4. Google has outlined the timeline when and which features will be taken of...

People watching the total lunar eclipse in the early hours of Monday morning noticed a brief flash of light, which has now been confirmed as a meteorite impact.

Something superhero movie fans have criticized the MCU for over the years is “playing it safe” by always aiming their releases at the PG-13 crowd when the likes of Fox’s X-Men franchise and even DC have made R-rated comic book films such as Deadpool, Logan and Watchmen. It’s possible, though, that Marvel Studios might be ready to branch out into more mature fare with one of their upcoming projects, and it could be the Black Widow movie.

Imagine being confined to a small, dark room, with no social interaction whatsoever for 30 days. Not many people would jump at this opportunity. But, in November 2018, a professional US poker player Rich Alati bet US$100,000 that he could survive 30 days alone and in total darkness. He was kept in a small, completely dark room with nothing but a bed, fridge and bathroom. Even with all the resources he needed to survive, Alati couldn’t last the month. After 20 days he negotiated his release, ta...

The World Bank is warning of increasing risks, or what it calls "darkening skies", for the world economy. In its annual assessment of global prospects the Bank predicts continued, though somewhat slower, growth this year and next. The Bank's forecast for the global economy is expansion this year of 2.9% and 2.8% in 2020. But overhanging the broadly favourable outlook are rising concerns that could mean economic performance falls short.

The fall lasts long enough that I have time to watch the blue ice race upward, aeons of time compressed into glacial ice, flashing by in fractions of seconds. I assume I’ve fallen far enough that I’ve pulled my climbing partner, Sean, into the crevasse with me. This is what it’s like to die in the mountains, a voice in my head tells me. Just as my mind completes that thought, the rope wrenches my climbing harness up. I bounce languidly up and down as the dynamic physics inherent in the rop...

It’s CES time again, with a flood of gadget news set to arrive when the industry’s biggest tech show kicks off later this afternoon. As usual, it’s easy to see the broad outlines of the show already: tons of new devices that support Google Assistant and Alexa, a flood of nonsense 5G news, and the TV industry trying to make people care about 8K after finally hitting mass adoption of 4K.