TechLife News

Some of the country’s leading technology companies have committed to investing billions of dollars to strengthen cybersecurity defenses and to train skilled workers, the White House announced Wednesday following President Joe Biden’s private meeting

Best Buy raised its sales outlook for the year after breezing past Wall Street expectations in the second quarter. The nation’s largest consumer electronics chain joined other major retailers including Walmart, Target and Macy’s in putting up banner

Not long ago, anticipation was high that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell might begin to sketch out a plan this week for the Fed to start pulling back on its support for an economy that has been steadily strengthening. That was before COVID-19 cas

A COVID-19 resurgence this summer has caused consumers to turn cautious, while investors trim their investments in a travel sector still struggling to recover. Retail sales dipped a surprising 1.1% in July as consumers spent less on clothing, furnitu

A Spanish judge in a decision cheered by environmentalists has put a halt to backup plans for the construction of a giant telescope in the Canary Islands — eliminating at least for now the primary alternative location to the preferred spot in Hawaii,

What is a COVID-19 vaccine passport, and do I need one? “Vaccine passports” are digital or paper documents that show you were vaccinated against COVID-19, and could help you get into a growing number of places. What they look like and why you might w

Walmart said it will start farming out its delivery service, using contract workers, autonomous vehicles and other means to transport rival retailers’ products directly to their customers’ homes as fast as just a few hours. The nation’s largest retai

Waymo, the Google self-driving vehicle spinoff, is expanding its autonomous ride-hailing service to San Francisco. Selected “trusted tester” customers in the city by the bay will be able to hail a ride in self-driving Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles,

At its August AI Day event, Tesla founder Elon Musk made the next leap forward for mankind, announcing the firm was working on a prototype humanoid robot that could revolutionize the way we live. Designed to replace manual workers in dangerous, repet

Drone pilots beware. Authorities at one of the nation’s top nuclear weapons laboratories issued a warning that airspace over Los Alamos National Laboratory is off limits. The birthplace of the atomic bomb, Los Alamos lab reported that recent unauth

For months, Gabrielle Walker had been looking for a part-time job. She applied to restaurant chains and retailers like Nando’s and Primark, and she scoured the job search site Indeed. Nothing. Then one day, Walker, a 19-year-old student at Universi

TikTok users will soon be able to buy stuff directly through the short videos on the app — something they had only been able to do through ads until now. Canadian e-commerce company Shopify said this week that businesses will be able to add a shoppin

The only time Californians voted to recall a governor, they replaced him with a Hollywood megastar. This time, could it be a 29-year-old YouTube star who ends up leading the nation’s most populous state? It’s a very long shot, but Kevin Paffrath coul

A Democratic senator said the U.S. Justice Department needs to look into whether the algorithm-powered police technologies it funds contribute to racial bias in law enforcement and lead to wrongful arrests. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, was res

The county with jurisdiction over the Las Vegas Strip has joined a legal fight to try to collect what attorneys maintain could be be hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid hotel room taxes owed by more than 20 online travel companies. A lawsuit by

Rebecca Hall occupies nearly every fame of the elegant psychological thriller “ The Night House ” and you still leave wanting more of her and her character, Beth. It’s quite a feat even for someone as inherently compelling as Hall. For one, Beth not

Just as surely as climate change is scarring the land and warming the seas, it is also flooding our movies. The planet’s imperiled future has been in the DNA of disaster movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” for years, of course. But lately, climate h

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed spending more than $1.5 billion in federal pandemic rescue funding to help boost the business climate, redevelop polluted sites and take steps such as accelerating the development of electric vehicle charging infrastruc

Personal information from students at a California college who requested a religious exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine has been posted online after an apparent data breach. The records from about 130 students at California State University, Chico w

A few weeks into the new school year, growing numbers of U.S. districts have halted in-person learning or switched to hybrid models because of rapidly mounting coronavirus infections. More than 80 school districts or charter networks have closed or d

China’s Zhurong Mars rover is soldiering on after completing its initial program to explore the red planet and search for frozen water that could provide clues as to whether it once supported life. China’s National Space Administration said on its we

Richard Barclay opens a metal drawer in archives of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum containing fossils that are nearly 100 million years old. Despite their age, these rocks aren’t fragile. The geologist and botanist handles them with casual ea

The operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant said this week it plans to build an undersea tunnel so that massive amounts of treated but still radioactive water can be released into the ocean about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) away from the pla

The U.S. Department of Energy announced a new kind of climate observatory near the headwaters of the Colorado River that will help scientists better predict rain and snowfall in the U.S. West and determine how much of it will flow through the region.

At nearly every community meeting on firefighting efforts in the U.S. West, residents want to know why crews don’t simply put out the flames to save their homes and the valuable forests surrounding them. It’s not that simple, wildfire managers say, a