These instruments, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking program (Sarsat), picked up the signal and immediately pinged alerts to Earth.

Last fall, a colleague of Sofia Sheikh’s posted a message in her group’s Slack channel, where members of the Breakthrough Listen Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) collaboration talk about the radio telescope signals they’re analyzing for possible signs of communications from space.

In their experiment, Curé’s team tested how dolphins responded when the researchers parked their boats overhead and played them social noises recorded from other groups.So to test how the animals respond, researchers play a recording of those sounds over a speaker and watch what happens.

While more established privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero have been more widely used and arguably better tested, Marlinspike says Signal chose to integrate MobileCoin because it has the most seamless user experience on mobile devices, requiring little storage space on the phone and needing only seconds for transactions to be confirmed.

Opensignal covers those bases if you tap Network Stats and swipe through its results for a given location, but you can also look at things like PCMag's yearly coverage of the fastest mobile networks for an idea of how speeds might vary from one city to another.

Screenshot: David Nield via SignalYou have a number of apps to choose for text messaging, but few are as security-focused as Signal (Android, iOS) while also working across multiple platforms with ease.

But some scientists think phosphine—a humble pyramid of three hydrogen atoms bonded to a phosphorus—may be a useful biosignature: a sign, if you see it on a solid-surface terrestrial planet, that life might live there.

However, it’s worth stressing that the content of the messages you send isn’t shared, as Facebook doesn’t have access to them due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption .WhatsApp collects more information about you than it shares with Facebook.

By doing so, they can now take advantage of Signal’s end-to-end encryption, which means that no one—not the government, your phone company, or Signal itself—can read the contents of messages as they pass between devices.

For more info, read our guide to where to put your router for the best possible home Wi-Fi .You might need to apply some creative cabling to get your router in a better place, but it's going to be worth the effort for the end results.

The pandemic has fueled debate about contact-tracing apps, but researchers say that it is possible to design encryption schemes for such services in a way that would successfully protect user privacy.

Another new feature it's testing, called "secure value recovery," would let you create an address book of your Signal contacts and store them on a Signal server, rather than simply depend on the contact list from your phone.

To that end, researchers at the University of Southern California have shown that when working in a simulation, you can give robots “tough love” by trying to knock objects out of their hands, and it’ll actually help them better learn to grasp objects.

And it would have gone entirely unnoticed by faraway humans if it weren’t for the assistance of a company called Vaisala, which operates the sensor network and uses it to triangulate a lightning strike, feeding the data to outfits like the National Weather Service.

At the Defcon hacker conference today, independent security researcher Pedro Cabrera showed off in a series of hacking proofs-of-concept attacks how modern TVs—and particularly Smart TVs that use the internet-connected HbbTV standard implemented in his native Spain, across Europe, and much of the rest of the world—remain vulnerable to hackers.

Verizon launched its mobile 5G network last week in "select areas" of Minneapolis and Chicago, and a speed test shared by a Verizon spokesperson showed an impressive download speed of 762Mbps.

As of this month, the multi-level streets of Chicago are studded with Waze Beacons, hockey puck-sized squares that stick to the sides of tunnel walls and broadcast an open standard signal via Bluetooth so Waze and other navigation apps can triangulate a position.