Adam Clark Estes

An Interactive Map of What America’s Spies Are Worried About

With eight months of freaking out over the fact that that the NSA is spying on everyone all the time, you can’t help but wonder: Why exactly are we spying again? What are we really worried about? https://gizmodo.com/watch-the-guardian-destroy-the-computers-containing-sno-1513092326 Well, Defense One just made it easy for you with this interactive map of what America’s spies…

Incredible new video of Felix Baumgartner’s space jump

You’ve seen Felix Baumgartner’s harrowing jump from 128,1000 feet above Earth’s surface, but you haven’t seen it like this. This new exhilarating video shows you what it was like from Felix’s point of view with perfect clarity. Fast forward to the 1:40 mark for the action. The feat is just as incredible now as it…

Sochi’s Olympic Village Is Half-Built and Full of Trash

Sochi’s in bad shape. With two weeks to go before the most expensive Olympic Games ever, the sleepy city on the Black Sea sort of looks like a giant garbage dump. All it needs now is a giant torch to start a giant tire fire. https://deadspin.com/how-the-sochi-olympics-became-a-51-billion-quagmire-1493890966 Seriously, though, we already knew that Sochi was screwed;…

12 Photorealistic Paintings of Handsome Vintage Gadgets

Think you like gadgets? You don’t hold a candle to Canadian artist William Fisk who’s spent the last decade painting impossibly realistic portraits of everything from vintage cameras to aging computer consoles. In his ongoing “Portraits” project, Fisk focuses on monochromatic objects—with an emphasis on chrome. (A nice way of saying: he likes shiny things.)…

IBM’s Graphene Circuit: A Genius Reminder of How Far Graphene Has to Go

IBM’s mad scientists have created a graphene-based circuit that’s 10,000 times more powerful than existing alternatives. This radio receiver is so sophisticated and futuristic, in fact, that it can… send a text message to your friends. Yes, unfortunately the best we can do with this incredible, ultra-conductive, one atom-thick material is create a little chip…

First custom mutant monkeys bring us one step closer to designer babies

These are the first monkeys with customized mutations were just born in China, marking a new era in precision gene editing. (Read: bringing us closer to a Gattaca-like future where designer babies grow into perfect people that never get sick.) They are twins. Working out of the Model Animal Research Center of Nanjing University, a…

Architecture in Helsinki Play Cyborg Scientists In Their New Video

It’s been almost ten years since the first and only time I ever talked to Architecture in Helsinki. I was writing for the college newspaper and trying too hard to look cool. But they didn’t have to try at all. “Why are you guys so fun?” I asked. “We’re from Australia,” they replied. It was…

Watch—and Smell!—the World’s First Multi-sensory Fireworks Display

London was the place to be this past New Year’s Eve. While you had your ball in New York City and your party in Sydney, London was home to the world’s first multi-sensory fireworks display. You could literally taste the celebration. Bompas & Parr, the crazy food geniuses who crafted this multi-sensory experience, made a…

Apple’s Touch-Friendly, Solar-Powered Laptop Would Be Insane

Hey you, Apple user. Have you been waiting—and waiting and waiting—for Apple to make some face-melting upgrades to the MacBook instead of just bumping the specs every few months? Well, this is it. Maybe. With a capital “M.” Those crazy Cupertino kids were just granted a patent for a touch-friendly, solar-powered laptop from the future.…

How Bioelectronics Promise A Future Cure For Cancer

When you think of cyborgs becoming a reality, you probably picture Arnold Schwarzenegger’s glowing red eye from Terminator or the steely, tight-lipped stare of Robocop. But the future where man and machine converge won’t just be built with nuts and bolts. It will be built with biology. Self-avowed cyborg expert Tim Maly said as much…

Just in time for Super Bowl madness, Verizon has launched voice, 3G, and 4G LTE wireless service in 35 New York City subway stations, all on the west side of Manhattan. This is good news for the broader effort to end the era of the subway cell phone blackout.

Scientists Use Acid to Turn Blood Cells into Stem Cells in 30 Minutes

This is a game changer, folks. Whereas mining stem cells has been either an ethical quandary or a months-long affair, scientist can now turn any old blood cells into stem cells in just 30 minutes—by dipping them in acid. That’s right. Take blood cells, add acid, get stem cells. It’s as simple as it sounds.…

London’s Giant Shoebox Is Actually An Adidas Pop-Up Shop

Pop-up shops are a dime a dozen these days but, when a brand decides to get weird, it’s often memorable. Such was the case with the recent Adidas project in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood. Designed to celebrate the launch of the new Stan Smith collection, this giant shoebox of a pop-up shop had a short run.…

The first ever Porsche car

Over a century after it first hit the highway, Porsche has finally unveiled the first car its founder ever designed. And guess what? It’s electric. When you think of Porsches, you undoubtedly imagine smooth lines, purring engines, and blistering speeds. The Egger-Lohner electric vehicle, C.2 Phaeton model (a.k.a. the P1), designed by Ferdinand Porsche, has…

Should We Really Be Tracking Our Children Like Wildlife?

Many New Yorkers are still mourning the news that the body of Avonte Oquendo, a non-verbal autistic boy, was found on the banks of the East River. To meet—and partially assuage—the grief, Senator Charles Schumer has an idea: let’s put tracking chips on autistic children. “Tracking chips” is just a loose term for describing the…

Each State’s Biggest Stereotype, According to Google

Everybody knows that Arizona is hot and Minnesota is cold. But what does Google autocomplete have to say about each state’s defining stereotype? Over the weekend, the Twitter account @Amazing_Maps ran a simple test involving each of the 50 states and autocomplete. They simply queried the search engine: “Why is [X state] so…” and recorded…

The NSA Spies on You Even When You Play Angry Birds

Newly published slides from the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ show that the spy agencies delight in scooping up data from “leaky” smartphone apps. That means that you’re being watched when you do everything from playing Angry Birds to uploading Facebook photos. What kinds of data, you wonder? Just about everything actually. Using all…

Meet Google’s Robot Army. It’s Growing.

Google can’t stop buying robotics companies. In the past two months, eight of the 12 companies the search giant has acquired have “robotics” in their name or descriptions. Here’s your complete breakdown of the robot army presently at Google’s command. As stated in the midst of its buying spree, the company’s largely letting its new…

The FBI Seized All of TorMail’s Data and Is Using It to Catch Hackers

If you had any faith left in anonymous email services, now would be the time to let that go. New court documents show that in chasing down associates of Freedom Hosting, the FBI managed to download the entire email database of TorMail. And now it’s using that information to take on the Darknet. It’s unknown…

A Brief History of the Body Told Through 10 Eye-Popping Drawings

We’ve all seen it: That colorful human body, staring blankly ahead in the doctor’s office, its stomach skin missing and guts exposed. But have you ever really stepped back and wondered what it took to perfect that anatomical diagram? Long story short, it took centuries of study—and plenty of mistakes, most of which have been…