As first uncovered by McAfee and subsequently reported on by Ars Technica, five extensions (Netflix Party, Netflix Party 2, FlipShope, Full Page Screenshot Capture, and AutoBuy Flash Sales) are covertly tracking installers’ browser histories and injecting JavaScript code into certain e-commerce websites they visited. For instance, if someone visited a particular site, the extensions in question would insert a code that modified domain’s cookies so its designers could receive affiliate payments for any purchases....

To tackle this larger issue, researchers from MIT as well as institutions in Qatar and Bulgaria have been working on a way to use artificial intelligence to help humans make sense of the complicated media landscape. And they realized that an important step they needed to take before developing an AI that can fact-check individual claims was to analyze how reliable different news websites are themselves in the first place....

Drive.ai, launching today, doesn’t make a car. Instead, it will sell a driverless car kit that will allow drivers to retrofit their existing vehicle with the gear needed for it to pilot itself. An in-car system will provide the brain of the driverless car, while a roof-mounted display will let drivers communicate. The appeal for self-driving cars is obvious to some: the visually-impaired and elderly can suddenly partake it efficient transport....

Truth be told, your smartphone and camera are enough to capture your surroundings, but if you need a ticket to the skies, a drone is your best option. And if you don’t want to make that big of investment just yet, the Black Drone with Dual HD 4K Camera is currently available for $74.95 with this post-New Year Cyber Week deal. Outfitted with dual cameras capable of capturing high-definition photos and stable videos, this drone is designed to help you get the best shots from up in the air....

But in places without nostalgia for the nocturnal critter—or predators to keep it in check—the call is a nightmare, registering up to 90 decibels from 3 feet away. That’s like a mower running outside your window all night. Coquí have infiltrated the Dominican Republic, Virgin Islands, Florida, and California, but are most worrisome in Hawaii, where their cacophonous spread shows no signs of slowing. When the species arrived on Hawaii’s Big Island in the ’80s—likely a stowaway on imported plants—locals raged over lost sleep....

The about three-inch-long species, Macrobdella mimicus, had lurked in freshwater bodies and natural history collections for decades—until scientists gave it a closer examination. They described the species for the first time Thursday in the Journal of Parasitology. “It’s been here this whole time,” says Anna Phillips, research zoologist and curator of parasitic worms at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Macrobdella mimicus lives in freshwater wetlands from Georgia to New York, its range flanked in the west by the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Coast to the east....

The rose-like spirals, which often herald the birth of baby planets, signify how the young objects disrupt the gas, causing waves as if it were a boat on a lake. The dandelion yellow twist region near the spiral’s center lies at the same distance from the star as Neptune from the Sun, or around 2.8 billion miles. Altogether, the twist, described as a spiral arm in a study published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics detailing the image and its discovery, is caused directly by the formation of this young planet....

Researchers who study public health and disaster preparedness say that having a national task force focused on pandemic response is important, but how it’s run and managed is key. “The criteria should be that they are experts in their field, and that those fields are relevant to how we move forward in this pandemic,” says Amesh Adalja, a professor at the John Hopkins University Center for Health Security. Physicians and health experts should play a significant role, he says....

Smith didn’t get into academia to spend her days gilding and mixing. “I’m not very handy,” she admits. Artisans caught her attention when she penned a dissertation on Johann Joachim Becher, a 17th-century writer who pondered the economics of alchemy and crafts. Then, while doing research for her 2004 book, The Body of the Artisan, she came across a 16th-century French manuscript containing nearly 1,000 sets of instructions, covering subjects from cannon casting to finding the best sand in Toulouse....

Most small underwater animals would paddle to get around, like how a sea turtle swims. But these little sea butterflies are true to their name: they swim through the ocean much like how insects fly through the air, by flapping their “wings.” The flapping motion produces lift, much like it does for insects in the air, first clapping their wings together, then swiftly flapping them outward. But the snail isn’t exactly the same as a buzzing bee or its namesake butterfly....

DNA Test Finds Horse Meat In UK HamburgersWhoever Kills The Most Burmese Pythons In Florida Wins A Cash PrizeA Cheeky Guide To Eating Like A CavemanDetroit Auto Show 2013: The Sexiest Corvette We’ve Seen In Way Too Long And don’t forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week: Why Is Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner Such A Piece Of Crap? 10 ’80s Tech Inventions That Never Really Took OffFYI: Why Would Someone Create A Fake Internet Girlfriend?...

“Knife throwing as a sport has grown exponentially in popularity in the last 10 years,” says performer and professional knife thrower Caleb McEwen. It used to be difficult to find information about weird sports and unusual hobbies, he explains. But the internet gives us access to information on the most arcane subjects. On YouTube, anyone can watch artists like McEwen and his three-man act, The Danger Committee, which has appeared on television shows such as America’s Got Talent....

First up is Pseudomonas putida, the plastic-craving microorganism. Organized by SeedLabs in a collaboration with MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Harvard Medical School, the upcoming experiments will test out the microbes’ capabilities in space, potentially providing important advancements for both pollution reduction on Earth as well as uses for astronauts during future lunar and Martian explorations. As Fast Company explained earlier today, Pseudomonas putida is not only capable of breaking down PET, an extremely common plastic often used in bottling and packaging, but also turning those broken down compounds into β-ketoadipic acid, “a nylon monomer that can be made into fabric or used in existing manufacturing processes....

You read that right: The Turtle Beach Recon Xbox Controller has a lot of audio-focused features—namely, a control panel that lets you quickly mute your mic, swap EQ profiles, adjust volume or microphone monitoring, and use the company’s “Superhuman Hearing” competitive audio boost for headsets jacked directly into the controller. For players who use a wireless headset or don’t need that level of dialed-in sound at their fingertips, it also features two customizable rear panel buttons....

“Integrating podcasts into Spaces, where audio conversations happen on Twitter, is another way we’re continuing to invest in audio creators,” Twitter explained in the statement released on Thursday. The new format will also introduce personalized hubs that group content by thematic categories—News, Sports, Music, etc.—and include suggested shows based on users’ Twitter preferences, follows, and interactions. “Our internal research indicates that 45 percent of people who use Twitter in the US also listen to podcasts monthly, so we’ll automatically suggest compelling podcasts to help people easily find and listen to the topics they want to hear more about,” the announcement continued....

That can be a problem if you’ve gotten used to having multiple windows open to look at files and research, listen to music, and do whatever else makes your work easier. Of course, you can swap between programs, but that requires maximizing, minimizing, rearranging, and other short, repetitive tasks that eventually add up to quite a bit of wasted time. On Windows 10, you can launch “virtual desktops” or “virtual workspaces” that allow you to create two, three, or more desktops, with various programs ready to go in each one—a feature that, admittedly, has been available on Linux for quite some time....

Players guide the characters through various missions and games, and along the way, make decisions about whether to have sex and, if so, whether to use a condom. To help make its healthy message stick, the game tries to relate its story to players’ real lives. Characters listen to popular Kenyan hip-hop, play soccer, and wander through neighborhoods that look like Nairobi. The game is currently being tried out at three test sites in Kenya, and behavioral psychologists from Emory University are studying the results to see if it helps reduce the risk of HIV....

The VfR Lays Down Roots On June 5, 1927, Max Valier met with a small cohort of fellow rocket enthusiasts in a the back parlour of an alehouse in Breslau. The group who shared fascination with spaceflight founded the Verein für Raumschiffahrt — the Society for Space Travel — that afternoon. Their goal was eloquently summed up by their motto: “Help to create the spaceship!” In the fall of 1930, VfR member Rudolf Nebel found the group a home, a two-square-mile vacant property surrounded by a wire fence down a bad road in Berlin’s northern suburb of Reinickendorf....

With a quick tap on his iPad, Meyer, creator of the popular flight simulator X-Plane, summons his app Xavion to rescue us. The program already knows the closest airports that we can successfully glide to. In fact, it’s been tracking our entire flight and plotting a path to them. It also knows what kind of airplane we’re flying in (a Van’s Aircraft RV-10), what the weather is like outside (blues skies, gentle wind from the south), and all of the other data it needs relative to heading, airspeed, altitude, and position....

And this: It’s hard to say how much of the spectacle exactly is an ad (for Emirates Airlines and/or X Dubai, the “action sports” tourism company whose account the video was posted on), but it’s delightful nonetheless. I imagine if I took a $30,000 for a 16 hour flight, I’d expect a little airshow at the end too. Watch the full video below: The Verge