Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Hum...

Facebook hired a PR firm that attempted to discredit the company’s critics by claiming they were agents of the billionaire George Soros, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. Soros is a Jewish philanthropist who is the frequent subject of antisemitic conspiracy theories. At the same time, the social media company urged the Anti-Defamation League to object to a cartoon used by anti-Facebook protesters over its resemblance to antisemitic tropes.

The average temperature of the planet has been rising since the 1700s and its Industrial Revolution. Three years ago, in 2015, 195 nations signed onto what is known as the Paris Accord. In it, they agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions to limit that warming by 2100. The goal is not to let it exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial times. But a new report says there may be big benefits to setting an even lower target.

Researchers have used a neural network to generate artificial fingerprints that work as a “master key” for biometric identification systems and prove fake fingerprints can be created. According to a paper presented at a security conference in Los Angeles, the artificially generated fingerprints, dubbed “DeepMasterPrints” by the researchers from New York University, were able to imitate more than one in five fingerprints in a biometric system that should only have an error rate of one in ...

Fallout 76 is out and the Atom Shop is well and truly open. In Bethesda’s new online multiplayer RPG, the Atom Shop is the place to go to spend your in-game currency, but the prices are a little over the top.

A 2000 Honda S2000 with just 1,001 miles in the odometer that sold for $48,000 is officially the highest-priced S2000 to ever sell on Bring a Trailer. The beloved Honda convertible, which eclipsed its previous price record of $44,500, was purchased on Tuesday by famous American IndyCar racing driver Graham Rahal.

Delegates from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Ecuador to discuss efforts to repair the ozone layer, and the return of a banned chemical will be on the agenda.

Apple's anti-tracking tool is causing pain for digital advertisers, experts say.

A lump of metal in a building near Paris has long served as the global standard for the kilogram. That’s about to change…

Life may exist elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, though try as they might, scientists have yet to detect any sign of it. Part of the problem has to do with the size of space; finding traces of organic substances or the waste signatures of alien megastructures isn’t easy at such cosmic distances. Fortunately, there’s the possibility that alien life will come to us in the form of interstellar objects.

If you need a safe haven on the internet, where the pipes are open and the freedoms are plentiful — you might want to move to Estonia or Iceland. The latest “internet freedoms” rankings are out, courtesy of Freedom House’s annual report into the state of internet freedoms.

Clumps of gas have been seen swirling around the mysterious region, ten billion times bigger than the Sun

A UK-based budget airline announced this week that it is “moving fast” toward developing a fleet of electric planes.

Predictive policing using data analytics is gaining acceptance among police forces, but at what cost?

The Little Drummer Girl, the latest John Le Carré spy adaptation, launched last night on BBC One in the UK with just over 5M viewers. The ratings for the AMC co-pro couldn’t match the launch of the…

The VA says the delay is a result of technical issues that occurred last year after the president signed the Forever GI Act.

Two of the biggest automakers are pushing back on the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of U.S. fuel-economy standards. In filings due Friday, General Motors Co. planned to propose that, rather than oppose California’s so-called zero-emission vehicle sales mandate, federal regulators should embrace a nationwide electric-car sales program starting in 2021. Honda Motor Co., meanwhile, took exception to President Trump’s proposed freeze on mileage standards and called for steadily incr...

Hossein Rahnama knows a CEO of a major financial company who wants to live on after he’s dead, and Rahnama thinks he can help him do it. Rahnama is creating a digital avatar for the CEO that they both hope could serve as a virtual “consultant” when the actual CEO is gone. Some future company executive deciding whether to accept an acquisition bid might pull out her cell phone, open a chat window, and pose the question to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligen...

From catastrophic climate change to alien invasion, the theoretical physicist’s thoughts about what might lie ahead were often far from optimistic.

After months of waiting, the Asus ROG Phone finally received its stateside launch last night in New York City. The latest entry into the burgeoning gaming phone market is available for pre-order now from several U.S. retailers, including Amazon. There are two storage variants of the Asus ROG Phone, both of which have the same specs otherwise. The entry model features 128GB of storage and is priced at $899, while the higher-end 512GB variant will sell for $1,099.

Although Intel added more cores to its previous-gen Coffee Lake processors in an effort to keep up with AMD's Ryzen CPUs, struggles with its 10nm node obviously delayed a more significant response. The company's ninth-generation Core processors, otherwise known as the Coffee Lake refresh, represent another step forward in a contentious battle for desktop supremacy.

Actor Sean Bean will star in the first Elusive Target mission for Hitman 2, publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and developer IO Interactive announced. In the game, Bean will take on the role of Mark Faba, a former MI5 agent turned freelance assassin. Faba is notoriously known as “The Undying” and has a reputation as a master of faking his own death, which causes the International Contract Agency to put a bounty on his head.

Clicking ‘Like’ is something most of us do without thinking. It’s a form of social currency that gives us a momentary jolt and revs up our dopamine centers. Yet who knew all our ‘Likes’ could predict our personality and be turned into a tool of political persuasion against us?