The Defender

Facebook users are complaining the company has removed the cross-posted tweets they had published to their profiles as Facebook updates. The posts’ removal took place following the recent API change that  prevented  Twitter users from continuing to automatically publish their tweets to Facebook. According to the affected parties, both the Facebook posts themselves, as well as the conversation around those posts that had taken place directly on Facebook, are now gone. Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it. TechCrunch was alerted to the problem by a reader,  Lawrence Miller , who couldn’t find any information about the issue in Facebook’s Help Center. We’ve since confirmed the issue ourselves with several affected parties and confirmed it with Facebook. Given the real-time nature of social media — and how difficult it is to pull up old posts — it’s possible that many of the impacted Facebook users have yet to realize...

More More More More Blistering heat. Flooded streets. Preoccupied politicians and corporations more concerned with profit than protecting the planet. Earth’s future looks pretty bleak. There are ways to mitigate the most devastating effects of climate change —  clean energy offers alternatives to fossil fuels  and  science may help us help us save some species  — but the fact is Earth will change and we’ll have to adapt along with it. That realization sparked an innovative — if a bit dystopian — project by  Jun Kamei , a materials scientist and student at the Royal College of Arts in London. After learning about studies showing  how sea level rise could flood many coastal cities  and displace billions of people across the globe by 2100, Kamei began to wonder what our future would look like — and what humans would look like in the future. He envisioned a scenario in which coastal megacities “like New York, Tokyo, B...

This robot maintains tender, unnerving eye contact Humans already find it unnerving enough when extremely alien-looking robots are kicked and interfered with, so one can only imagine how much worse it will be when they make unbroken eye contact and mirror your expressions while you heap abuse on them. This is the future we have selected. The Simulative Emotional Expression Robot, or SEER, was on display at SIGGRAPH here in Vancouver, and it’s definitely an experience. The robot,  a creation of Takayuki Todo , is a small humanoid head and neck that responds to the nearest person by making eye contact and imitating their expression. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s pretty complex to execute well, which, despite a few glitches, SEER managed to do. At present it alternates between two modes: imitative and eye contact. Both, of course, rely on a nearby (or, one can imagine, built-in) camera that recognizes and tracks the features of your face in real time. I...

According to a report from  Bloomberg , Apple has been working on multiple new Macs. In particular,  Apple   could be planning to release a new entry-level laptop to replace the aging MacBook Air. This isn’t the  first rumor  about a MacBook Air refresh. While Apple has released a 12-inch retina MacBook, it’s not nearly as cheap as the MacBook Air. It’s also not as versatile as it only has a single USB Type-C port. And yet, the MacBook Air is arguably Apple’s most popular laptop design in recent years. Many MacBook Air users are still using their trusty device as there isn’t a clear replacement in the lineup right now. According to Bloomberg, the updated MacBook Air could get a retina display. Other details are still unclear. After Apple updated the MacBook Air in March 2015, the company neglected the laptop for a while. It received an update in June 2017, but it was such a minor update that it looked like the MacBook Air was  on life ...