Kiran Upadhyay

At this point, there’s very little difference between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. But there was one key differentiating point. Xbox gamers could only play with Xbox and PC players as Microsoft was restricting access to the multiplayer component. Microsoft just announced that game developers can now create cross-platform multiplayer modes that work with other consoles and operating systems. So it means that the next Call of Duty or FIFA could feature a multiplayer mode that works with both Xbox and PlayStation gamers. It just depends on developers now. Microsoft has historically restricted cross-platform play as the Xbox Live was the first successful multiplayer network for consoles. The PlayStation Network only appeared with the PlayStation 3. And yet, Microsoft is now lagging behind the PlayStation 4 with its Xbox One. There are more online players on competing platforms, and Microsoft is now the underdog. By opening up cross-platform multiplayer, Microsoft could co

It’s finally here. After teaming up with Michael J. Fox to tease us with self-lacing Nike Mags on Back To The Future day in October, Nike has finally announced a mass production shoe that will feature real-life power laces. Meet the HyperAdapt 1.0. Announced today at the Nike Innovation Summit, the HyperAdapt 1.0 will be the first shoe to take advantage of Nike’s adaptive lacing (self-tying) technology, which the company is touting as an entire new platform for sneakers. This means that one day your Jordan’s, Air Max’s, and FlyKnit shoes could all be built on top of Nike’s adaptive lacing platform. But before we get ahead of ourselves, lets take a closer look at how the shoe will actually work. In the launch announcement, Nike touted the self-tying shoes as a way to reduce a typical athlete concern, distraction. So, to save wearers time, the shoes will automatically tighten as soon as you step into the shoe. “Your heel will hit a sensor and the system will automatically

The average Instagram user misses 70 percent of what’s in their feed, including great photos with tons of Likes and posts by their best friends. So today Instagram announced it will start rearranging the order of posts in its feed. Rather than strictly reverse chronological, Instagram will order posts “based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.” The testing will start out slowly; at least at first “all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.” But eventually, low-quality posts might be filtered out entirely. The changes mean if you don’t check your feed until the next morning but a friend whose photos you usually Like posted something awesome the night before, it could appear at the top of your feed even if it is hours old. This is essentially how Facebook’s feed works, and how Twitter recently reconfigured its feed to work On the one hand, the relevancy-optimized Insta

Gmail supports encryption in transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS), and will automatically encrypt your incoming and outgoing emails if it can. Some other email services don't support TLS, and therefore messages exchanged with these services will not be TLS encrypted. In Gmail on your computer, you can check that a message you’ve received was sent over TLS by clicking the small down arrow at the top-left of the email and reading the message details. If you see a red open padlock icon  on a message you’ve received, or on one you're about to send, it means that the message may not be encrypted. If you see the red padlock while composing a message Don’t send confidential material, like tax forms or contracts, to that email address. If you see the red padlock when viewing a received message This message was sent unencrypted. In most cases, there’s nothing you can do. If it contained particularly sensitive content, you should let the sender know and they can cont

Air conditioning is one of the biggest costs in running data centers. Traditional data centers use as much electricity for cooling as they do for running the actual IT equipment. Accordingly, much of the innovation seen in the high-density cloud server space has been to develop data centers that are cheaper to cool and hence cheaper to run. With its much higher heat capacity than air, water has become the coolant of choice, pumped around and between the computers to transport their heat outside. Microsoft has demonstrated an experimental prototype of a new approach: instead of pumping water around the data center, put the data center in the water. Project Natick is a research project to build and run a data center that's submerged in the ocean. The company built an experimental vessel, named the Leona Philpot, and deployed it on the seafloor about 1 kilometer off the Pacific coast. It ran successfully from August to November last year. Read More

In an effort to offer healthier menu items, McDonald’s has unveiled a new salad with a “nutrient-rich lettuce blend with baby kale,” shaved parmesan, and chicken (grilled or fried). Like many fast-food salads, it may seem like a healthy option at first, but it’s not. The salad, when paired with the restaurant’s Asiago Caesar Dressing, packs more fat, calories, and salt than a double Big Mac—that’s a sandwich with four beef patties. While the nutrition check on a McDonald’s item may not come as a shock, the unhealthy salad option falls into a bigger trend of restaurant meals—fast food or not, eating out is hard on your waistline and health. In one recent study, researchers found that 92 percent of large-chain, local-chain, and mom-and-pop restaurants served meals that exceeded the calorie intake for a healthy meal. The study included 364 meals from restaurants in three cities: Boston, San Francisco, and Little Rock, Arkansas. The meals covered American, Chinese, Greek, Indian, It

LIVINGSTON, La.—The rain began to fall as Joe Giaime and I scrambled down a lonely rise, back toward the observatory’s main building. It wasn’t so much rain as a hard mist, characteristic of the muggy weather southern Louisiana often sees in January when moisture rolls inland from the Gulf of Mexico. As gray clouds fell like a shroud over the loblolly pines all around us, Giaime mused, “Well, I guess you’ve already gathered that we’re in the middle of nowhere." Middle of nowhere happens to be ground zero in the search for gravitational waves, which were first posited by Albert Einstein a century ago and may soon become one of the hottest fields in science. Livingston is remote in terms of geography, but as humans scan the heavens for gravitational waves this forest is practically the center of the physics universe. Because of general relativity, we understand that large masses curve spacetime, kind of like standing in the middle of a trampoline distorts the fabric. When mas