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We're starting to get close to July 4th, which makes it an oddly fruitful weekend for tech deals. There are still a few E3 Game and Console Deals going on, and Best Buy's Massive Apple Sale is still happening. Microsoft has already tried to get a head start on competitors with an early Microsoft Store Independence Day Sale, with discounts on Surfaces, Xboxes, and other Microsoft products. Learn mo...

Google’s clever new AI-powered camera is designed to capture stellar 7-second snippets of family shenanigans. Here’s how to get started. There’s a chip inside the Clips loaded with a version of ­Google’s ­computer vision code. It can learn to recognize faces, so train it to know yours. When you first get the camera, wave and smile at it, and take a lot of selfies and ussies. It can also recognize...

I'm going to tell you a secret. It's something almost no one in my professional life knows. I'm dyslexic. Given that knowledge, my chosen career—writer—might seem odd. But while I was cursed with poor spelling skills, I’ve always been drawn to storytelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 1805, Zebulon Pike, a US Army officer and explorer, explored the Louisiana territory his young country had just bought on the cheap, hunting for the source of the mighty Mississippi River. A year later, he led expeditions through the Spanish settlements of New Mexico and Texas. But in November of 1806, he and his men met their match in Colorado, while trying to scale a mountain that towers 8,00...

You’ve seen the scene a thousand times: a cop, probably in a trench coat, shows up at the site of a brutal murder or some other crime and starts poking around, trying to figure out what went wrong. It might look like standard gumshoe stuff on TV or in the movies, but crime scene investigation is actually a science—one that Hollywood adaptations often get wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

This Amazon Echo doesn't seem to understand that all I want is a whiskey. I'm seated in the Tribeca offices of marketing firm 360i and the haunting voice coming out of its little speaker just says, "Never heard of it." The problem is that me and 360i's creative director Andrew Hunter both gave the order at the same time and "Rose," our guide at the Mariposa Saloon in this audio play, couldn't make...

Testing workout earbuds requires an entirely different set of metrics than regular in-ear headphones. More than anything else, workout earbuds need to stay put. Running is hard enough without constantly flibberting with something in your ear canal. Other factors that might be big pluses when you're sitting at your desk are not so great when you're in motion. Excellent noise filtering is less attra...

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, last week, 125 mostly white, mostly male, business-card-bearing attendees crowded into a brightly lit ballroom to consider "mobility." That’s the buzzword for a hazy vision of how tech in all forms—including smartphones, credit cards, and autonomous vehicles— will combine with the remains of traditional public transit to get urbanites where they need to go. Learn more about...

This storyoriginally appeared on The Guardianand is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. Sea level rise driven by climate change is set to pose an existential crisis to many US coastal communities, with new research finding that as many as 311,000 homes face being flooded every two weeks within the next 30 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Former Mythbusters host Kari Byron says that her young daughter was enthralled by the character Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “She was just done with princesses when she saw Rey,” Byron says in Episode 313 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Because it was like, OK, this is a smart badass, and I could see that it was so much more interesting to her than a helpless princess that’s lo...

If you know the company Square, it's probably because you've paid in a store using a Square “stand,” a dock that supports a tablet, or you've swiped your card through Square Reader, a smartphone dongle that processes payments. These products have a simplistic, decidedly Apple-y aesthetic, from the simple dongle to the all-white stand that typically houses an iPad. Learn more about your ad choices....

The great tragedy of the Concept Coupe was that it was never meant to be built. Drawing on the style of the vintage P1800 with a helping of American muscle—healthy haunches, slim windows—the two-door won much praise when Volvo brought it to the 2013 Frankfurt Motor Show. It was lovely, but no more than a showcase. Fans would have to settle for seeing elements of the design feed into Volvo products...

It's pretty easy to guess how it works: the pointy end goes in the meat and it connects via Bluetooth with an app on your phone. What's pleasantly surprising is that there's a second temperature sensor at the exposed end that tells you the air temperature just outside of whatever you're cooking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On my first attempt at a corner kick in decades, the soccer ball peels up and away, well behind the goal and clear over the fence surrounding Stanton Field, the practice pitch at Santa Clara University. "Not bad," says Brandi Chastain, generously. "You've got good bend, now we just have to make sure we get you in the right direction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...

Finding the perfect summer travel shoe can be an overwhelming task. No one wants to tote around a suitcase full of sneakers and sandals, but it's hard to have fun on vacation with blisters or a limp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I stand in front of a lanky two-legged robot stomping along a treadmill. I watch, all impressed, until the researcher next to me tells me to trip it. The thing looks expensive, so I hesitate. Really, he tells me, it’s OK. And he probably knows better than I do, so I drag my boot along its shin like a good soccer trip. The robot stammers, yet recovers. And then again, and again. No matter how much...

The self-driving robots are coming to transform your job. Kind of. Also, very slowly. That’s the not-quite-exclamatory upshot of a new report from the Washington, DC-based Securing America’s Future Energy. The group advocates for a countrywide pivot away from oil dependency, one it hopes will be aided by the speedy adoption of electric, self-driving vehicles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

Say there’s a fire. A fire caused by a car crash, inside a 2.5-mile tunnel under a major American city. It’s a terrifying idea, but if you want that kind of problem to ignite anywhere, it’s in the stretch of State Route 99 that, later this year, will start whisking traffic underneath downtown Seattle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dog owners will go to crazy lengths to make sure that their fur-babies are entertained during the long, boring workday. I’ve frozen wet dog food in red rubber Kongs, or stuffed them full of peanut butter. I’ve hired dog walkers and pet sitters. I’ve turned on DogTV on my Roku. But my dogs were bred to herd cattle or sheep all day, and they still get bored. It’s not like they can read a magazine. L...

"People were in dire straights. They were desperate," says Ryan Jensen of the Central Valley's Community Water Center. "Elderly people or people battling chronic illnesses that need water to be able to deal with their health issues had no access to it. There was just absolute desperation." In total, the wells at 300 properties had failed. So a local nonprofit distributed 275-gallon tanks and offic...

On Wednesday last week, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council revealed that pig herds in the United States receive almost as many antibiotics as people in this country do. That’s bad news, especially since most of the pigs receiving antibiotics aren’t sick, but instead are getting the drugs to prevent infections in intensive farming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...

In Ensenada, a Mexican city about two hours south of Tijuana, a new crime fighter has taken to the skies. It’s not a bird, or a plane, or Superman. It’s a drone. And over a few months on patrol, it’s had quite the impact. The city’s police department claims the solitary DJI Inspire 1 Quadcopter led to more than 500 arrests and a 10 percent drop in overall crime rates, with a 30 percent drop in hom...

This self-portrait depicts Wu standing before one of the domes at the Svalbard Satellite Station. A fogbow arcs above the dome, and Wu's headlamp casts an eerie pink light on the ground. A fogbow appears above the road on the way to the Svalbard Satellite Station. The station sits above the Arctic Circle at 78 degrees north. When Wu visited Svalbard in October, the sun moved in a shallow arc, kiss...

Most of the best Memorial Day tech sales have slowly trickled to an end, but with summer in full swing and new products coming out all the time, there are a surprising number of killer deals this week, including a rare sale on some excellent Google gadgets. With the help of our friends at TechBargains, below are some of our favorite deals going on this week. Google discounts some of its products n...

Before Lyft was Lyft, it was a struggling California startup called Zimride. Cofounder and CEO Logan Green launched it in 2007 (the name was an ode to Zimbabwe’s carpooling culture), aiming to connect college kids who needed rides with those who had cars. John Zimmer, now Lyft’s president, signed on with the idea that putting more people into existing cars could help cities fight emissions and tra...