One year after a $38 million Series B valued on-demand aviation startup Blade at $140 million, the company has begun taxiing the Bay Area’s elite. As part of a new pilot program, Blade has given 200 people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley exclusive access to its mobile app, allowing them to book helicopters, private jets and even seaplanes at a moments notice for $200 per seat, at least.

Chinese scientists recently cloned their best police dog and the pup is a 99.9% match. What is next?

Silicon Valley is built on the idea that technology can optimize, or "hack," any aspect of our lives — so why not the human life span? Until recently, anyone hawking pills or treatments that promised to restore youthfulness was considered a quack, yet a growing number of "transhumanists" are convinced that, in time, human beings can be transformed through bioengineering, and that aging will be curable just like any other malady.

By the time Dawei Zhang’s study visa to the United States had been renewed, it was too late. The 29-year-old materials scientist was back in China with his wife and son, ready to begin a postdoc at the University of Science and Technology Beijing — one of the country’s leading materials institutes. The delay had prompted him to accept a position in China, rather than pursue research on self-healing materials in the United States.

Most of us have heard the stories: the Oxford University study that claims that 35% of jobs will be lost to automation, or the wild-eyed hyper-utopians who claim that a new era of bio-communism will inexorably emerge from the age of machine learning. Such visions, at times, alarm and may even excite. But they are shallow visions; invariably either focussed through the narrow lens of job losses to automation, or else speculating wildly based on precious little evidence, they offer little that is useful to the debate on the human and cultural phenomenon that is the future of work.

The math is simple. Humans are cutting down 15 billion trees a year and replanting only 9 billion, creating an annual net loss of 6 billion trees. Planting trees by hand is time consuming and expensive, making it difficult to keep up with bulldozers clear-cutting over 40 football fields of trees ever minute. We’ve had impressive efforts, such as India planting 66 million trees in a day, but that was a large-scale event, which required organizing millions of volunteers. It would be difficult to recreate something like that on a regular basis.

By the Motion Picture Association of America's count, more people are now subscribing to online video streaming services than cable television.

Research duo who hacked Tesla car win the competition's overall standings. They also get to keep the car.

In a scientific first, neuroengineers from the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University have developed a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognisable speech. By monitoring someone's brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which combines the power of speech synthesisers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain.

Microsoft has been working toward a photocopier-size device that would replace data centers by storing files, movies, and documents in DNA strands, which can pack in information at mind-boggling density.

One writer's theory on why, two years after launching, Apple's expensive, magical headphones are suddenly taking over our headspace. Look to your left. Look to your right. If you’re on the sidewalk, a subway, a train, or your dorm couch; at a WeWork, an airport, a construction site, or an open-plan office, there are almost certainly little white sticks nearby poking out of someone’s head. Apple’s AirPods have slowly and all at once taken over America’s ears.

When the Mars 2020 rover lands on the Red Planet in early 2021, it will carry with it a small helicopter, the first human craft to fly on another planet. Until now, Mars has hosted orbiters, landers, and rovers, but no flying machines. The Mars helicopter is meant only as a technology demonstration. If it doesn’t work, the Mars 2020 mission will still succeed. If it does, it will have opened up entirely new avenues for exploring other worlds.

At my bodega down the block, photos of shoplifters sometimes litter the windows, a warning to would-be thieves that they're being watched. Those unofficial wanted posters come and go, as incidents fade from the owner's memory. But with facial recognition, getting caught in one store could mean a digital record of your face is shared across the country. Stores are already using the technology for security purposes and can share that data -- meaning that if one store considers you a threat, every business in that network could come to the same conclusion.

A scheme to stealthily run video ads behind banner images drained users' batteries and data while they used popular Android apps.

Payments startup Square plans to hire a number of engineers and a designer to work on its crypto initiatives, according to tweets from CEO Jack Dorsey. Dorsey, who also founded and runs Twitter, announced Wednesday evening that Square plans to hire three or four engineers and one designer “to work full-time on open source contributions to the bitcoin/crypto ecosystem.” A Square spokesman said there was no additional information to share beyond the tweets.

In a dusty plastic bin under my bed lies at least four laptops, six cellphones, and a half-dozen hard drives. I have no idea what’s on any of them. Most of these devices predate the cloud-storage era, and so likely contain solitary copies of photos, texts, and emails, among other confidential files (porn?) that I’d probably be horrified to learn had fallen into the hands of strangers.

While electric cars are displacing global oil demand at increasing rates, new research shows electric buses are making a much bigger mark overall thus far. Electric vehicles have displaced about 3 percent of total oil consumption growth since 2011, a larger share than ever before. And so far, more than three-quarters of that oil displacement has come from electric buses, Bloomberg reports.

The Finnish data protection watchdog has confirmed it’s investigating HMD Global’s Nokia-branded phones over reports they were found to be sending unencrypted data to a Chinese server. Details first emerged after a user, Henrik Austad, tipped off the Norwegian broadcaster NRK, who investigated the breach, Reuters reports.

An iMac Pro with 256 GB of RAM pretty much just exists for bragging rights.

Apple’s red iPhone M68 in all its glory.

The well known Swiss Bank, the Julius Baer Group AG, announced to allow its users to access cryptos by partnering with SEBA. SEBA is building a progressive technological bridge between the traditional and the digital asset world, raised quite a handsome amount of $103 million back in September, 2018. The raised funds are to be poured into the project to allow the users the liberty to transact cryptos through the banking system.

We can remember it for you wholesale. But we probably prefer to use today's storage technology, at least for now.

Weird-looking robots are the best robots.

We are looking at a rough figure of 4,083,105,000 number of Internet users as of 2019. This counts for about 40% of the world’s population, and this number is shooting north.

“Kingsmill Bond” certainly sounds like a proper name for a City of London financial analyst. He looks the part, too: gray hair expertly trimmed, well-cut suit. He’s lived in Moscow and Hong Kong and worked for Deutsche Bank, the Russian financial firm Troika Dialog, and Citibank. He’s currently “new energy strategist” for a small British think tank called Carbon Tracker, and last fall he published a short paper called “2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming.”

MySpace, one of the first online social networks, has apologised after a server migration caused a huge loss of data. A message on its website says that "any photos, videos and audio files" uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available. There had been complaints going back several months that links to music were no longer working.

These and many other insights are from this Indeed’s The Best Jobs in the U.S.: 2019 study released this week. Indeed defined the best jobs as those experiencing the fastest growth measured by the increase in job postings between 2015 and 2018, in conjunction with those offering the highest pay using a baseline salary of $75,000. Indeed’s best jobs of 2019’s data set is available here in Microsoft Excel.

For a newborn giraffe or wildebeest, being born can be a perilous introduction to the world—predators lie in wait for an opportunity to make a meal of the herd’s weakest member. This is why many species have evolved ways for their juveniles to find their footing within minutes of birth.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp said on Tuesday its fourth-quarter net profit more than tripled to 1.85 billion yuan ($275.59 million), on stronger revenue. That exceeded the 1.7 billion yuan average estimate of 10 analysts, according to Refinitiv data. Revenue for the period increased 27 percent to 44.4 billion yuan, lower than the 47.4 billion yuan average estimate of 13 analysts, according to Refinitiv data.

Amid general political divisiveness these days, it appears plenty of us would be happy to have robots make the tough decisions instead. New research has claimed that a quarter of Europeans would rather trust artificial intelligence to make political choices than regular flesh and blood humans. Although, worryingly, that same research highlights that over half (56%) of those quizzed fear that robots will replace human jobs.

The makers of a new hypersonic rocket engine say it could whisk flights from London to Sydney in just four hours, traveling at five times the speed of sound. That’s a flight that can take 20 hours on a conventional jetliner. According to the BBC, UK company Reaction Engines says it’s gearing up to test the futuristic craft in Colorado — a startling vision of the future of transportation that could also, if the engine lives up to the hype, inform the future of spaceflight.

ne way to tell who made the aircraft you are boarding is to steal a glimpse of the cockpit. A traditional control yoke in front of the pilots suggests a Boeing; a joystick beside each seat, an Airbus. Pilots argue about which system is better; neither is considered safer than the other. Each exemplifies a different approach to a problem that manufacturers of not just aircraft but also cars, trains and ships must grapple with as long as human operators handle increasingly automated machines.

Ransomware cracker Fabian Wosar lives in hiding because of the threats and abuse he receives from those whose code he cracks.

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates issued a grave warning Monday, comparing advanced artificial intelligence to nuclear weapons — and arguing that the United States is losing its edge in the global AI research race. “The world hasn’t had that many technologies that are both promising and dangerous,” Gates said during an event at Stanford, according to CNET. He added that “I won’t say there are that many” examples of AI having improved society.

The iPad mini and iPad Air Apple quietly announced ahead of its big March event will come with eSIM support. Cupertino's latest iPad Pros have eSIM support, as well, but these new entries are the first non-Pro models with the feature. While the Apple SIM works similarly -- and present in older non-Pro iPads -- it's only compatible with the tech giant's partner carriers. By giving these devices eSIM support, they'll be able to work even on the networks of non-partner carriers.