Month: March 2016

Amazon has signed a lease on 20 Boeing 767 freighter planes, according to Reuters. This comes at a time when the company has been making quiet moves to invest in a variety of logistics-focused services, presumably to gain more control over how and when its packages are delivered.

A big part of Amazon’s value proposition is that it can get items to customers fast enough that they’d prefer to buy the item online as opposed to in a brick-and-mortar store. The company has experimented with conveniently located lockers in city centers, and it has proposed schemes to deliver items via drone.

In January, Amazon China also registered to become an “ocean freight forwarder,” essentially giving the company the right to subcontract shipments from China to the US. An Amazon-owned subcontracting permit would help the company compete with other overseas suppliers and could give the company a leg-up if it wanted to get into the logistics industry.

(credit: Tyler Irving/Boyang Zhang/Kevin Soobrian)

To go along with mini thinking brain balls grown in lab, researchers have built functional, tiny organs as well—inching closer to the possibility of stitching together teeny-weeny Frankenstein monsters.

While the sci-fi-esque idea of full petri-dish people is just silliness (for now), miniaturized body parts could be highly useful for testing the safety and effectiveness of new drugs—perhaps someday replacing animal testing and some aspects of human trials, researchers speculate. And, in tests with prototypes of tiny, functional livers and hearts, researchers showed that the wee organs could successfully be implanted into living animals. The findings, reported in Nature Materials, suggest that the itsy-bitsy tissues could be used to repair full-sized organs some day, as well as for drug development.

While other lab-made mini organs have come before them, the new design offers a notable improvement to previous versions: vasculature and cell-to-cell connections.

This is the fully assembled Pixel C—for $349, you'd just get the tablet part.

With the release of the Android N Developer Preview and split screen coming to Android, Google's Pixel C is looking more promising than ever. To celebrate the release of the Android N Developer Preview, Google is offering a "Developer Discount" on the device—$150 off, making it $349 for the 32GB tablet. Google wants to encourage more developers to buy the tablet, but it doesn't actually require any proof of your development chops—anyone can wander over to the special site to get the discount.

The tablet is usually paired with a keyboard, but for $349 you'll just get the tablet—the keyboard is still another $149. The device is only about three months old, and it sports an Nvidia Tegra X1 SoC, 3GB of RAM, and a 10.2-inch 2560×1800 LCD.

In our review, we were fans of the all-metal body and high-res display, but we also ran into some problems. We encountered several bugs with keyboard pairing and touchscreen responsiveness, but Google has spent the past few months ironing out all of those bugs. There was also the issue of Android not being great for tablets, but with split screen coming in Android N, that looks to improve a bit. With a little more time for software debugging and the launch of (a still in development) split screen mode, it seems like now is the Pixel C's time to shine, and now you can get it for the lowest price ever.

The Internal Revenue Service has temporarily suspended use of its Identity Protection PIN tool "as part of its ongoing security review," according to a notice issued by the IRS. The IP PIN is supposed to act as an extra layer of security for taxpayers who are at higher risk of becoming the victims of fraud because of personal information leaked in commercial data breaches.

Last year, the IRS shut down an electronic tool for obtaining tax data after a massive fraud operation using stolen Social Security numbers and other data from commercial data breaches managed to extract filing data for hundreds of thousands of taxpayers. This year, the IRS is facing a new wave of fraud, as criminals engage in a phishing campaign to obtain employees' W-2 form data.

On March 1, the IRS issued a warning to human resources departments throughout the US about the wave of phishing attacks—e-mails purportedly from company CEOs directed to payroll or HR employees, usually with text such as:

Welcome to Blue Origin, where you're greeted with a replica of the spacecraft in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. (credit: Blue Origin)

KENT, Wash.—Notebooks in hand, we gathered around a long table inside Jupiter 2, a conference room on the second floor of Blue Origin’s headquarters. Ten of us had come at the company’s invitation to see for the first time, first hand, where Blue Origin builds its spaceships and rockets. For years, this had been undiscovered country for journalists. And then Jeff Bezos, as casual as you please in a blue and white checkered shirt and designer jeans, strolled into the room.

Bezos may be better known for upending the retail world with Amazon and making himself the fifth richest person in the world along the way. But his passion lies above in the night sky. He has thought about building rockets and flying into space since he was five years old, so he started this day accordingly. “Alright, are you guys ready to have some fun?” he asked.

We were.