Technology

Uber announce today that it will soon allow users in the UK to rent cars via its app in a partnership with car rental company CarTrawler. Users will be able to select the new “Uber Rent” option from within the app and then browse available cars for their chosen date and location. Rental cars can then be picked up from the “hundreds” of car hire company pickup locations. The UK launch follows trials in France and Australia. The process works a little differently from Uber’s bike or scooter rentals. Although Uber says you’re technically able to make your booking at the same time as you pick up the vehicle (as you would when renting one of its Jump bikes in the UK), it encourages you to make car reservations at least 24 hours in advance. Rentals can be cancelled up to 48 hours ahead of collec...

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is getting a graphical upgrade for next-generation hardware, and current owners of the game on PC, Playstation, and Xbox will get the update for free. Developers CD Projekt Red announced the news today, saying the updated game will be available on the PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC, featuring a “range of visual and technical improvements.” These include faster loading times and ray tracing graphics. The upgrades will apply to the base game, says Projekt Red, as well as to both of its expansions (Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine) and all other “extra content.” The appeal of this news is testament to The Witcher 3’s lasting greatness. This is a game that came out five years ago but remains incredibly well-regarded and an appealing title for many to pick up and play thr...

Ford’s first electric vehicle of consequence, the Mustang Mach-E SUV, will start arriving at dealerships at the end of the year. But before customers begin driving off with their new EV, the automaker wants to let them start tinkering with their personal profiles. Because everything these days, even driving a car, requires some level of online registration. Starting today, Mach-E customers can create a personal profile, input their home address and other important locations, familiarize themselves with nearby charging stations, and setup climate controls and other amenities. That way, when they finally accept delivery of their Mach-E, all those preferences will be available and ready to go from Day One. Rather than sit at a dealership inputting all this information, customers can do it all...

The original Game Boy from 1989 was an iconic handheld console but, as anyone who owned one will tell you, it required a steady stream of batteries to keep running. Now, a team of researchers at Northwestern University and Delft University of Technology have developed a new take on the classic console, replacing its array of four AA batteries with a set of five rows of solar panels and buttons that harvest power as you play. The Engage, as the team have called their device, is theoretically capable of being used to play any game made for the original Game Boy, and it’s even got a slot on its back if you want to insert an original game cartridge. It’s about the size of a paperback book, but as CNET reports, it only weighs half as much as the original handheld. “We kind of need radical, craz...

When someone gets a COVID-19 test, the result does one thing: tells that person if they have the coronavirus in their body. Some researchers, though, are trying to get tests to do more — and reframing the goal of testing as a result. Instead of simply finding people who are infected with the virus, they’d prefer to focus on finding people who are infectious and at risk of spreading it to other people. The proposal offers one possible way to get the pandemic under control in the US. It would allow for a more targeted approach to isolation and quarantine and help give people a better understanding of when they’re most at risk to others. It would be a big change in how we think about testing. Clinicians have never used tests for respiratory infections like COVID-19 to determine if someone is ...

The Department of Justice is preparing to file antitrust charges against Google’s parent company Alphabet possibly as early as this month, The New York Times reported. Attorney General William Barr is moving forward with the case despite the objections of Justice Department lawyers who say they need more time to prepare their case and worry that pushing to file charges this month could weaken the case, according to the Times. The Justice Department opened its probe into Google last June, reportedly with a focus on its massive search business and other parts of the company. The Justice Department also opened another, broader probe last July to investigate whether big technology firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google were stifling competition. The department said the review would “consider ...

If you’re curious what kind of data Twitter stores on you — and what those hackers could have stolen during their big bitcoin scam — you can now find out once again. Twitter has reenabled the ability to download archives of “Your Twitter Data,” nearly two months after shutting off the feature as a precaution against further hacking. To access it, go to Settings > Account > Your Twitter data and you should see a screen like the one below, where you’ll need to type in your password to start the transfer. If you’re using a phone app, it may shove you over to the mobile website instead. It also might take a while before the archive is ready: I pressed the button an hour ago, and I’m still waiting for the in-app notification so I can actually download it. Twitter had a pretty good reason ...

Logitech G has announced a new esports training program for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive called Playmaster, which is designed to help assess your skills and help you practice specific techniques, like tracking players, moving, and (of course) shooting. The company is taking this seriously, too. It’s built custom maps and levels within CS:GO to help both assess players’ current skill levels and for practice. It’s also worked with the Lero Esports Science Research Lab at the University of Limerick to develop the software — as the company proudly boasts in the announcement, Playmaster is “backed by science.” To start, players take a roughly 30-minute skill test that will allow the software to get a baseline reading for where you’re at now and your specific strengths and weaknesses. You’ll...

On September 8th, CBS All Access is holding an all-day streaming event to commemorate the 54th anniversary of the premiere of the original Star Trek television show. I’ll admit I skimmed the email announcement until I found what I was looking for: yes, Patrick Stewart aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard will be part of the Star Trek panel discussions and will even reunite with Jonathan Frakes aka William Riker aka Number One aka Ensign Babyface. You can tell I am a) respectful of Star Trek because I didn’t go with a cheap “boldly go” or “engage!” pun in my lede, and b) I have a somewhat limited scope of interest in the Star Trek universe. But I think that’s OK! Unlike that other space-related franchise, you can fully enjoy one aspect of the Star Trek dynasty and it doesn’t mean you’re any less of ...

We weren’t huge fans of the LG Velvet, the design-first, specs-second flagship smartphone the company released this summer. The sleek phone felt stuttery in our review. But what if I told you the T-Mobile variant comes with a different chip? Today, T-Mobile announced it’s brought an LG Velvet to the United States with a MediaTek Dimensity 1000C processor inside, instead of the mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 and 765G it usually employs. It’s one of the first times in recent memory we’ve seen a MediaTek chip in a US flagship phone, so it’s a significant milestone for a company that generally plays second-fiddle to Qualcomm, if nothing else. The question is whether T-Mobile is now giving you a faster chip than the existing LG Velvet can get you, and that’s not clear yet. At first glance, i...

Gigabyte has announced the Aorus 15P, a portable laptop tailored to professional gaming. It’s available now on Gigabyte’s online store, starting at $1,599.99. The company says it worked with esports teams, including G2 Esports, to design the new laptop. It weighs 4.4 pounds (2kg) — which is portable so far as gaming laptops go — and it’s 0.9 inches thick. Gigabyte says the chassis passed “a series of pressure tests” for durability. Gigabyte is promising up to eight hours of battery life, which is certainly an optimistic prediction for a gaming rig (and this one has a per-key RGB keyboard, which might draw some extra power). The Aorus 15P under the Prime95 and Furmark stress tests. Gigabyte says the unit’s temperature is 32 degrees Celsius.Image: Gigabyte Specs-wise, the 15P comes with a 14...

In 2011, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe became an unstoppable box office and cultural force, THQ Studio Australia was hard at work on a video game tie-in for an upcoming movie called The Avengers. Not the Destiny-esque Marvel’s Avengers game that’s being released tomorrow — an Avengers game that never saw the light of day. A first-person superhero brawler, instead of the traditional behind-the-character perspective. A game on a deadline so stressful that one developer beat up his filing cabinet with an umbrella, and another decided to repeatedly stab his desk with a giant kitchen knife. Today I am featured in an article about a game I worked on that never came out. It includes dev quotes like: “Just put the knife down. We’ll go outside and figure this out.”https://t...