Photo: Adam Clark Estes (Gizmodo) Plenty of companies want to build the centerpiece for tomorrow’s smart home. Amazon has a head start, too. Tens of millions of Americans now own Echo devices, and Alexa now has tens of thousands of skills. Adding a voice assistant to any TV, I’ve always thought, could be a game…

Photo: Getty Your Newegg purchases are likely to get a little bit more expensive in the near future. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled against the online retailer in what’s been called the “tax case of the millennium.” The five-to-four decision found that states are allowed to collect sales tax from online purchases even if…

Photo: Samuel T. Turvey A certain Chinese noblewoman—potentially Lady Xia, grandmother to the first emperor of China—had a menagerie buried with her in her tomb: a leopard, a crane, an asiatic black bear, a lynx, and, most notably, a gibbon. That gibbon was part of newly identified, now-extinct genus and species, researchers reported Thursday. The…

Jeff Bezos, center, the CEO and founder of Amazon.com, laughs as he talks with Ron Gagliardo, right, the lead horticulturist of the Amazon Spheres, following the grand opening ceremony for the plant-filled geodesic domes built for Amazon.com employees.Photo: Ted S. Warren (AP Images) Following employee protests at Google and Microsoft over government contracts, workers at…

The Instagram and Facebook logos are displayed at the 2018 CeBIT technology trade fair on June 12, 2018 in Hanover, GermanyPhoto: Getty Facebook, in attempts to crack down on fake news and other content, has somehow made news organizations its enemy. Just one day after Facebook was criticized for rejecting a promoted post from the…