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If this was a special effect, we'd call it fakey looking, but apparently it's real lightning, captured in Tampa and posted to Reddit by UnobtrusiveElephant.

Directed by Robert Carlos, filmmaker and author, who "spends his spare time playing with toys and riding roller coasters."

 Amazon this morning announced that, for the first time ever, it will begin distributing its Original Series from Amazon Video to social media sites, including Facebook and YouTube. Pilot episodes from ten primetime and kids series are now available in both places, in their entirety, allowing anyone – including non-Amazon Prime members – to watch. While the company has before… Read More

After a tense teaser release, the first full-length trailer for Denis Villeneuve's latest sci-fi offering Arrival is here. The movie stars Amy Adams as a linguist and translator hired by the government to communicate with aliens who have just arrived on Earth. The team must make their way inside the aliens' oblong spaceship and determine whether they want friendship or something more sinister.

Without giving away much, the trailer positions Arrival as a movie about language, and imagines what a slight miscommunication could mean for two species on the brink of a global war. The movie also stars Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Tzi Ma.

Villeneuve, who helmed last year's Sicario, and is also set to direct the...

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Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Games

Riptide GP: Renegade

Android Police coverage: Riptide GP: Renegade brings premium jet ski racing to the SHIELD TV, phone and tablet release coming later

Riptide is back for another round of water racing, and this time it's a full premium game.

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30 new and notable (and 1 WTF) Android games from the last 2 weeks (8/2/16 - 8/15/16) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

When Maria Rivera got a bill from Orange County for her young son's year in juvenile detention, she sold her house to pay for it, but ended up short, and the county got a court order for another $10K to pay the remainder and various fees and penalties. (more…)

We all know the traditional, navigator-friendly Mercator projection distorts the true sizes of Earth's landmasses. But it's fascinating to see how countries look next to one another when that distortion is, as far as possible, removed. The tininess of Britain against Japan, for example, or the vastness of Alaska against France, become specific in this video from RealLifeLore. As for Greenland...

Mark Carpenter made this spot-on Google Map of Frodo's journey from Hobbiton to Mount Doom. (more…)

Travelers mishearing applause apparently triggered a full-scale "stampede" at JFK, complete with screaming crowds, people shouting about guns, and police running around aimlessly with weapons drawn. It was shut down for hours.

The fact that there was no attack at the center of it was both the weirdest and the scariest part — that an institution whose size and location and budget should make it a fortress, in a country that has spent 15 years focused compulsively on securing its airports, in a city with a terrifyingly competent anti-terror police unit, could be transformed into a scene of utter bedlam, stretching out from all eight terminals across the tarmac and onto the adjacent highways, by the whisper of a threat. ...

For several hours, we were in the flood of panic and chaos of an ongoing act of terror. There’s no other way to describe it. That it was an overreaction almost doesn’t matter; in fact, that is how terrorism works.

Hysterical fear was always the invisible counterweight to security theater. Each is as real as the other.

There they are, fluffy floofblobs. “Cat legs appear to function like airplane landing gears as the stow safely away in the floof,” observes one commenter.

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The trademark was granted to discount eyewear company Specsavers, whose slogan is "should've gone to Specsavers." If you object, you have until October 12 to file with the IPO. (more…)

 Google announced today that Hangouts On Air will move from Google+ to YouTube Live on September 12; users will be asked to migrate to YouTube Live. In an email to TechCrunch, Google confirmed that Hangouts on Air isn’t shutting down, but will move to YouTube Live. “We’re focusing our live streaming efforts on YouTube Live and consolidating our services there,”… Read More

 Hyperloop One tells TechCrunch it might be building its crazy fast transportation system at the Jebel Ali port in Dubai if all goes according to plan. And it could be the first place to build an actual Hyperloop for commercial use, says CEO Rob Lloyd. “It’s got the infrastructure, regulatory movement and kind of capital in place needed to build it already,” he told… Read More

 UK antivirus maker BullGuard is acquiring Israeli startup Dojo-Labs to expand its portfolio of security products to the Internet of Things. Read More

Video calling is the next best thing to being with someone in person, but too often it can be a frustrating or complicated experience. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether your call will connect, or if your friend is using the same type of device as you are. It’s no wonder that nearly half of us never make video calls on mobile*.

Today, we’re releasing Google Duo — a simple 1-to-1 video calling app available for Android and iOS. Duo takes the complexity out of video calling, so that you can be together in the moment wherever you are.

Google Duo works across Android and iOS — all you need is a phone number

Simple interface
Duo is simple from start to finish. To get started, all you need is your phone number and you’ll be able to reach people in your phone’s contacts list. No separate account is required, so you can sign up in just a few steps. From there, you can instantly begin a video call with a single tap.

Fast and reliable
We all know how it feels when a call fails to connect or when video gets choppy. We’ve built Duo to be fast and reliable, so that video calls connect quickly and work well even on slower networks. Call quality adjusts to changing network conditions to keep you connected — when bandwidth is limited, Duo will gracefully reduce the resolution to keep the call going smoothly. For video calls on the go, Duo will switch between Wi-Fi and cellular data automatically without dropping your call. You can start your call at home, and continue seamlessly even when you head out the door.

Human design
We designed Duo to feel warm and inviting, focused on just you and the person you’re calling. To make calls feel more like an invitation rather than an interruption, we created a feature in Duo called Knock Knock which lets you see live video of your caller before you answer, giving you a sense of what they’re up to and why they want to chat. Knock Knock makes video calling more spontaneous and welcoming, helping you connect with the person before you even pick up.

Knock Knock in Duo lets you see who’s calling before you pick up

Finally, we built Duo with an emphasis on privacy and security, and all Duo calls are end-to-end encrypted.

Give your friends a wave with Duo! We’re beginning to roll out Duo for Android and iOS today, and it will be live worldwide in the next few days.

Posted by Justin Uberti, Principal Software Engineer

*Google YouGov Survey, July 2016, U.S., Among 18+ online population, n=1,058

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yrKJX9bE9ss/V7IQn5bM1NI/AAAAAAAASy0/rBzwE6rPqBc3ZxHpFnAQ4GkY1CU5qt6iwCLcB/s200/Screen%2BShot%2B2016-08-15%2Bat%2B11.56.08%2BAM.png Justin Uberti Principal Software Engineer Google

Google Duo, a new video chat app that works exclusively on phones, is getting released today. I've been using it for about a week and I can tell you that it's fast, easy to use, and devoid of complicated bells and whistles. You tap on the face of the person you want to call, they answer, and you have a one-on-one video chat going. Nobody who uses this app can say that Google didn't achieve its goal of creating a video chat app that's relentlessly, explicitly designed solely for phones.

That effort is so single-minded I can't decide if it's timid or bold.

First, a bit about how Duo works. It's available on both Android phones and iPhones. When you sign up, the app checks your phone number from your SIM and then sends you a confirmation...

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After years of mistakes and errors, science has finally come good. While investigating the Californian coast with a remote-controlled submersible, a team of researchers from the E/V Nautilus found this incredible squid. The googly-eyed fella was chanced upon during a live stream, which means we get to hear the scientists involved react professionally and calmly to their discovery. (I'm kidding: they laugh a ton because it's very funny).

Some select comments:

• "What is it?"
• "It's got weird eyes."
• "It looks like they're painted on."
• "It looks fake."
• "It's like some little kid dropped their toy."
• "He. Is. Awesome."

Basically, it's all about the eyes. And although they may look weird and fake, just imagine this squid appearing...

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A moody, beautiful vignette honoring the landscape around Sitka, Alaska.

[via]

Mother and child viewing images on a tablet

Tony Fullman is one of the only people that we know to have been targeted by Prism, the NSA's signature mass-surveillance tool: he's a Fijian-born expatriate with New Zealand citizenship, and had his passport seized and his name added to terrorism watchlists after the NSA helped their New Zealand counterparts spy on him, intercepting his bank statements, Facebook posts, Gmail messages, recorded phone conversations, and more. (more…)

Stanford computer science student Joshua Browder, whose DoNotPay bot helps you fight parking tickets in London and New York (it's estimated to have overturned $4M in tickets to date) has a new bot in the offing: a chatbot that helps newly homeless people in the UK create and optimise their applications for benefits. (more…)

Private prison titan Corrections Corporation of America has extensively diversified its holdings into the entire carceral-industrial sector: halfway houses, electronic monitoring, mental health -- and family immigration detention, a growth industry where the human rights standards are rock-bottom and the payouts are guaranteed to jackpot. (more…)

Stuck for something smug to say? The Idiomatic randomly generates idioms by gluing together parts of other idioms, allowing you to control conversations and stymie unwelcome trains of thought through the power of confusion. (more…)

 Those are words I never expected to write – certainly not in that order, at least. But the journey to reintroduce the once-mighty Nokia brand back into the ever-competitive mobile market has been a strange one to say the least. It all started when a struggling Nokia went ahead and agreed to sell itself to Microsoft at the end of 2013, after attempts by the one-time world’s… Read More

It has been often said that when Google redesigns a product, features are often removed. A good example of this would be the material Google Maps release, where a lot of 'classic' features of Maps were absent. Said features do, however, get added back in, and today one returns to Google Photos after being left out of the Google+ Photos split: rotating video.

As of version 1.25 (we can't find it on any version earlier than that, although it may exist) the ability to rotate a video at 90° intervals is a feature in Google Photos.

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Rotating video in Google Photos returns after long hiatus was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Imagine a future where individuals can illustrate their progression of lifelong learning and training and its links to their real-world performance. In this version of the future, the once-ubiquitous résumé has been ousted by the experience graph. Read More

This column is part of a series where Verge staffers post highly subjective reviews of animals. Up until now, we've written about animals without telling you whether they suck or rule. We are now rectifying this oversight.

For a brief moment in March, a tortoise captured the hearts and imaginations of hundreds of New Yorkers, most of them unemployed. I was among those who applied for the rare opportunity to get paid to walk a 17-pound tortoise around Central Park. Utterly crushed when I — someone who has zero pet-sitting experience — did not receive the job, I tasked myself with learning more about this creature, hoping to be better-prepared should I one day have a similar opportunity. It soon became clear that I had dodged a bullet....

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Another one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets successfully landed on a floating drone ship this evening, after the vehicle launched a Japanese communications satellite into orbit. The feat marks the fourth time SpaceX has landed one of its vehicles at sea and the company’s fifth rocket recovery overall this year.

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