A strange space object called Oumuamua has been a topic of debate among scientists and astronomers, with one Israeli Harvard professor claiming it is likely an alien probe.

After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV, the company has been quietly developing another product targeted at the kids. According to a new report, the company has spent months building LOL which is a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch late Friday that it was experimenting with the “LOL” hub for kids. “We are running a small scale test and the concept is in the early stages right now,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Kraft Foods wants to make sure that government workers currently on furlough during the shutdown do not go hungry. On Tuesday, the food corporation announced it will open a pop-up store in Washington, D.C., from Jan. 16 through Sunday, Jan. 20, that will provide free food to government workers who can present the appropriate identification. The store is located at 1287 4th Street NE, two blocks from Union Market.

Bethesda taking the Fallout series online with Fallout 76 was met with, shall we say, mixed results. Modders, meanwhile, have been trying to take Skyrim online for years, and now it's almost a reality. Skyrim Together is a co-op mod that lets you play Skyrim with your pals, and after a few false starts it appears to finally be ready for a closed beta trial.

Netflix is raising its U.S. prices by 13 percent to 18 percent, its biggest increase since the company launched its streaming service 12 years ago. Its most popular plan will see the largest hike, to $13 per month from $11. That option offers high-definition streaming on up to two different internet-connected devices simultaneously. Even at the higher price, that plan is still a few dollars cheaper than HBO, whose streaming service charges $15 per month.

The breeding of designer pets could be effectively outlawed this year in Scotland under new licensing regulations. The Scottish Government plans to tighten the licensing of dog, cat and rabbit breeding activities in Scotland to stop people breeding these animals in poor conditions and then selling them on.

A team of Chinese and U.S. scientists estimated that the world’s oceans are warming by up to 40% faster than previously thought. The oceans are warming faster than previously estimated, setting a new temperature record in 2018 in a trend that is causing major damage to marine life, a Science article published Thursday warns. "How fast are the oceans warming?" was the main question addressed by a team of Chinese and U.S. scientists in a research which demonstrates that "global wa...

AT&T is reportedly planning a significant round of layoffs, despite receiving a large tax break and various regulatory favors such as the repeal of net neutrality rules. Motherboard reported the pending layoffs yesterday, saying it obtained the information from AT&T internal documents and an anonymous AT&T source. "A source at AT&T who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly told Motherboard...

Not long ago, during an Amtrak ride, I met a college student who told me he was a fiction writer. I asked him what he’d been writing and reading, and he said that he was writing a novel about time travel, and that he was reading — well, he had been reading Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” but after about 50 pages, he said, he’d tossed it into the trash.

The commercial space business has blossomed over the past decade. Two companies, though, have grabbed the spotlight, emerging as the most ambitious of them all: Blue Origin and SpaceX. At first glance, these two companies look a lot alike. They are both led by billionaires who became wealthy from the Internet: Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin earned his fortune from Amazon.com, and Elon Musk of SpaceX got rich initially from Web-based businesses, notably PayPal.

Kevin Spacey has just declared what his lawyers made clear days ago ... that he will plead not guilty in his sexual assault case, but he wants to do it without appearing in court. Spacey's lawyers filed legal docs Monday, which include a declaration from the actor, saying he does not want to appear at his arraignment for allegedly groping an 18-year-old male in a Nantucket, Massachusetts bar. Spacey says his presence would "amplify the negative publicity already generated in connection...

Humans can do a lot with a little context. If you see a picture of a toilet, you’ll know it’s probably flanked by a bathtub and sink. The picture didn’t include any of that stuff, but the human brain has a knack for filling in missing pieces. And now thanks to Google DeepMind computer scientists, so does artificial intelligence. In a paper published in Science Magazine in June, the company described how it created a Generative Query Network (GQN) that can see and imagine almost like a human.

Voters in Oregon could decriminalize “magic mushrooms” in 2020, joining California and Denver, Colorado in their efforts to make the psychedelic fungus more easily available for medicinal research and treatment. Currently, psychedelic mushrooms, which contain the active compound psilocybin, are classified as a Schedule I drug by the FDA, the same category as heroin and cocaine. Possession is a felony nationwide.

Is our reality, including its forces and particles, based on the strange properties of numbers with eight dimensions called "octonions"? A physicist thinks so, having found a way to expand 40-year-old research to reach surprising new directions. First, a brief history of numbers.

Uppsala University researchers have devised a new model for the universe – one that may solve the enigma of dark energy. Their new article, published in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new structural concept, including dark energy, for a universe that rides on an expanding bubble in an additional dimension.

In 2016, the last year for which the CDC provides numbers, 35,353 people died from gun injuries, the majority of them suicides. In other words, out of every 100,000 people living in the US that year, 12 were killed by a gun, compared to 11 in 2015 and 10 in 2014. “But mortality rates don’t show you how much of your life is lost,” says Bindu Kalesan, a Boston University assistant professor of community health sciences. “Who is dying young, and who is dying old?”

Harry Brower Sr. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale. Although Brower’s body remained in Anchorage, the young bowhead took him more than 1,000 kilometers north to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), where Brower’s family lived. They traveled together through the town and past the indistinct edge where the tundra gives way to the Arctic Ocean.

Amazon Air announced Friday it will add 10 more planes to its cargo aircraft fleet over the next two years. Those planes are Boeing 767-300 aircraft leased from Air Transport Services Group, which Amazon says is already leasing 20 planes. That will bring its fleet number to 50 planes, and render Amazon all the better to deliver packages in a timely fashion.

It’s not yet time to abandon the idea that adult human brains make new nerve cells.

China has launched a plan to develop the world’s most powerful brain scanner, one that could generate an extremely strong magnetic field to observe for the first time the structure and activities of every neuron in a living human brain. The goal is to build the world’s most powerful magnetic resonance imaging device. The projected scanner would not only produce a snapshot with details far beyond what existing instruments can provide, but also track various types of chemical agents including...