New Adventures | The Verge

Kohler can now run you a bath with just a voice command

2022-01-03T08:00:00-05:00

Kohler’s PerfectFill technology can run your bath for you. | Image: Kohler

Kohler's long-touted PerfectFill technology is finally here, and frazzled parents everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief. The company announced the availability of its smart bath tech at CES 2022 this week, which lets you fill up a bathtub with a simple voice command. So, if you're downstairs cooking dinner and want to get the kids' bath going, you can just ask Alexa or Google to run the bath for you.

PerfectFill consists of drain kit and digital valve that work together to draw the bath to your preferred temperature and depth. So, no more worrying about flooding the bathroom because you forgot it was running or scalding junior when they j …

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Twitter launches new process for reporting COVID misinformation

2021-08-17T15:00:00-04:00

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it will begin testing a new reporting feature for users to flag tweets containing possible misinformation.

Starting today, users will be able to report misinformation through the same process as harassment or other harmful content, through the dropdown menu at the top right of every tweet. Users will be prompted to select whether the misleading comment is political, health-related, or falls into another category. The politics category includes more specific forms of misinformation like content related to elections. The health category will also include an option for users to flag COVID-19-specific misinfor …

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Google plans to open its US offices to some employees in April

2021-03-31T16:48:32-04:00

Google plans to open its US offices in a limited capacity in April for employees who want to work in person, the company tells The Verge. The announcement follows Microsoft, Facebook, and Uber's plans to return to offices in the coming months.

Offices will likely open in April, "based on specific criteria that include increases in vaccine availability and downward trends in COVID-19 cases," Google says. All employees who prefer to work remotely will also be able to do so until September 2021, which is in line with Google's previous announcement. Anyone who decides to work in person will be required to follow safety guidelines like wearing a …

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How Blade Runner got its name from a dystopian book about health care

2019-11-01T09:58:10-04:00

As of November 2019, we've officially caught up with Blade Runner's dystopian future. But we're already ten years past the very different book that inspired its name.

Most fans of Ridley Scott's 1982 film are aware that it's based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, and that the book is not called Blade Runner. If you pick up Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, you'll notice the term never appears in it. Even in the movie, "blade runner" is a slick but random name for mercenaries who hunt replicants. But it isn't meaningless. Blade Runner's remarkably weird title has its own backstory, which has nothing to do with androids, bounty …

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XKCD’s Randall Munroe on his new book How To and the joys of using science to build lava moats

2019-09-03T11:41:23-04:00

XKCD author Randall Munroe is no stranger to answering strange science questions, but his latest book, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, might be his most practical science guide yet.

How To, which hits stores today, is a quasi-sequel to Munroe's book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, which was based on a series of blog posts Munroe wrote as a spinoff of his webcomic.

How To aims to be a more practical guide by using math and science - taken to the absolute extreme, in Munroe's typical style - to answer basic questions about life, like how to charge a cellphone, how to tak …

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J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Alien is the definitive story of the classic horror film

2019-08-04T12:00:00-04:00

If you're a fan of film history, the benchmark for behind-the-scene film books has been the work of J.W. Rinzler and his series of massive "The Making Of" tomes. Over the last decade, he's written definitive histories behind the productions for the original Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones series and Planet of the Apes. His latest, The Making of Alien, is now out in stores, and is a comprehensive look at how Ridley Scott created the science fiction horror classic.

The Making of Alien is an exhaustive overview of the production of the film, featuring pages of concept art, behind-the-scenes photographs, script excerpts, and a detailed nar …

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JY Yang’s Tensorate series is a sweeping, experimental blend of sci-fi and fantasy

2019-08-03T13:00:00-04:00

Genre is an odd thing. At times, it's merely a sales tactic, where similar books are grouped together in a bookstore to make them easier to find. But it can also be a codified canon of literature in which authors are engaged in a decades-long conversation, bouncing themes and tropes off one another. Every now and again, a book or author will come along that really breaks away from the conversation and ignores those tropes and conventions. One recent example is Singaporean author JY Yang, who published the final installment of their genre-blending Tensorate series last month.

The series is made up of four short novellas: The Red Threads of F …

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N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth fantasy trilogy is getting an RPG

2019-08-03T10:55:34-04:00

N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy has become an acclaimed fantasy classic since its debut, earning three consecutive Hugo Awards in as many years. Now, fans will be able to explore the world on their own: Green Ronin Publishing announced that it'll be releasing a roleplaying game based on the trilogy.

Over the course of the three novels (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky), Jemisin introduced readers to the Stillness, a far-future Earth where the planet experiences catastrophic, civilization-ending disasters known as Seasons. What remains of humanity struggles to survive in protected communities known as Comms, sitting …

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10 new science fiction and fantasy novels to check out this August

2019-08-01T12:37:03-04:00

I always enjoy a good space opera thriller. In recent weeks, I've been reading Dan Moren's latest book, The Bayern Agenda, which I'd characterize as John le Carré meets Battlestar Galactica.

In it, Simon Kovalic is an intelligence agent for the Commonwealth of Independent Systems, which has been engaged in a sort of cold war with the Illyrican Empire. He was injured in the course of his last mission, and his covert team of operatives has been handed over to his ex-wife, Lieutenant Commander Natalie Taylor, for a mission to the banking planet Bayern Corporation. When he's tipped off that their cover might have been blown, it's up to him to g …

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The French Army is hiring science fiction writers to imagine future threats

2019-07-24T11:17:54-04:00

The French military wants to figure out what its armed forces might face in the future. To help, it's bringing on a group of people who are well-versed in imagining the future: science fiction writers. The UK's Telegraph reports that France's Defence Innovation Agency is hiring between four and five writers to form a "Red Team" that will come up with "scenarios of disruption," which is military-speak for out-of-the-box thinking.

France set up the Defence Innovation Agency in September 2018 as a sort of incubation hub to find existing technologies and equipment that the military might be able to use. The idea is that the military might be ab …

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