Adam Clark Estes

France Will Pay You $5 Million to Invent an Oil-Drilling Drone

France’s equivalent of DARPA has a lofty task for you. The National Research Agency is challenging engineers to design and build an autonomous oil-drilling robot that can operate continuously for six weeks at a time. And they’re willing to pay you handsomely. Well, to be exact, the French oil company Total is offering a €3.5…

These 3D-Printed Hubble Images Let Blind People See Outer Space

What does space feel like? I’m not talking about space itself—but rather the images we see in a telescope. Could you render those spectacular images into something that a blind person could experience? That’s exactly what a pair of astronomers are trying to figure out. Carol Christian and Antonella Nota, of the Space Telescope Science…

DuckDuckGo Handled 1 Billion Search Queries in 2013

Ever since Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on the NSA’s relentless snooping, the anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo’s been breaking traffic records practically everyday. The privacy-friendly site just announced that it answered a whopping one billion search queries last year. And things are only getting busier for DuckDuckGo. On January 7, the site had its…

IBM’s Watson Is Now the Size of 3 Pizza Boxes–It’s Also a Billionaire

IBM just put the pedal to the metal on Watson’s crawl towards relevance. The company just announced a $1 billion investment, giving the supercomputer its own business division as well as an office in New York City’s Astor Place. The so-called Watson Business Group will have 2,500 employees, the majority of whom will be programmers…

How Star Trek‘s Architects Built the San Francisco of the Future

For architecture nerds, the best part about Star Trek: Into Darkness is undeniably the phantasmagoric depiction of a 23rd-century San Francisco. Towering skyscrapers lined the horizon and flying vehicles weaved between them. It was all so beautiful—until a starship crashed into Earth and wiped out half the city. Still! Building the San Francisco of the…

Gorgeous Photos Capture Smoke Bombs and Pyrotechnics As They Explode

We all know how it feels. A flame hits the fuse, and sparks spray into the cool nighttime air. Your jaw goes slack and your eyes wide when you hear the boom and smell the smoke. Well, this is how that feeling looks. Artist and photographer Lisa DiLillo calls this series “Before the Echo,” and…

Watch OmniCorp Unveil Robocop at Its CES Keynote In 2027

Remember OmniCorp, the sinister mega-corporation that built Robocop and his unstable robo-cousins? With the advent of surveillance drones and mechanical police officers, that scenario doesn’t seem that far-fetched anymore. Which makes this video of OmniCorp introducing RoboCop at a CES keynote 13 years in the future even more fun. It must makes you wonder: If…

Reddit Has a Burgeoning Gun Market and Its Sales Numbers Are Shocking

Reddit’s great for many things: funny pictures, interesting factoids, revealing crowd-sourced interviews. Also, assault rifles. Mother Jones just published an unnerving investigation into the little known gun market tucked into the GunsForSale subreddit, and the numbers are disturbing. According to the magazine’s research, the site has hosted at least 159 transactions since last June, nearly…

Inside the Highest Hotel Rooms on Earth

Hey there, thrill-seeker. Do you like altitude? Do you like views? Well, why not book a night in one of the tallest hotels on Earth? The tallest hotel in the U.S. opened up in Times Square this week, spurring us to take a peek at the tallest rentable rooms in the world. The 68-stories of…

The deepest view of the Universe ever captured is truly overwhelming

The universe is vast, seemingly infinite thing, and the Hubble Telescope is here with the latest reminder of that fact in the form of eye candy. This is the first photo from NASA’s Frontier Fields project, and it’s the deepest we’ve ever seen into space. The only thing more impressive than the image itself is…

Watch Water Dance In Slow Motion On GE’s Superhydrophobic Surfaces

We already knew that hydrophobic surfaces are extremely fun—but they’re even better in super slow motion. The Slow Mo guys recently paid GE a visit and shot some footage of their latest projects in their trademark super slow motion—including a hydrophobic coating GE is developing to keep wind turbines free of ice. You’ll have a…

This Rubber Band Gatling Gun Fires 14 Rounds Per Second

Rubber band gatling guns are not a new invention, but good God, they keep getting better. The latest and greatest iteration from 18-year-old Ukranian design student Alex Shpetniy fires a startling 14 rounds per second from its 16 barrels. That’s 672 shots in total. You can do a lot of damage with 672 shots. And…

Astronomers: Super-Earths have oceans and continents, just like Earth

A pair of Chicago-based astronomers have some good news for you alien-hunters out there. Despite previous assumptions, geophysics tell us that large Earth-like exoplanets (a.k.a. super-Earths) likely have both oceans and exposed continents. That means more Earth-like climates, too. Northwestern’s Nicolas B. Cowan and University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot just presented a new theoretical model…

China Finally Suspends Its Ban on Foreign Game Consoles

After 14 years of prohibition, the Chinese government has lifted a ban on the sale of foreign consoles inside the country’s border. This opens the door for Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony to tap in the multi-billion market—though the companies have already admitted it won’t be easy. It’s so far unclear exactly how far the suspension…

Jaw-dropping photo of the frozen Great Lakes looks like the Moon

Everybody knows that it’s cold as hell in the Midwest right now, but satellite images of the tundra are still a sight to behold. It’s amazing to see it like this, with any sign of civilization covered in snow. From NASA: NOAA’s GOES-East satellite captured a Midwestern wintertime “White Out” at 2015 UTC/3:15 p.m. EST…

The Paleo Diet is bullshit: Cavemen actually ate lots of carbs

We all have that friend—that friend who won’t even look at a slice of bread because they’re participating in the latest faux-hippie, fitness-addict trend, the Paleo diet. “Cavemen didn’t eat carbs so why should I?” they say. Well, they’re just plain wrong. Cavemen actually ate tons of carbs, according to new research from paleobiologists at…

Finally, an iPhone Case That Provides Extra Storage Space

Many of us have been there. You want to take a beautiful picture of a beautiful thing with your iPhone and up pops a very ugly alert: “Cannot Take Photo.” Storage full. And without a memory card slot, you can’t exactly add more. Until now. Mophie, the makers of those handy battery pack cases, just…

Supervolcanoes Are Even Scarier Than We Thought

Do you have a cute and cuddly stuffed animal near you? If not, you might want to find one because what you’re about to read will scare you silly. And not the good kind of silly either. We’re talking The-End-Is-Coming sort of silly. Two studies published in Nature Geosciences describe new findings on supervolcanoes, the…

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has announced that the McAfee brand name will be phased out in favor of a new name, Intel Security. John McAfee said of news: “My elation at Intel’s decision is beyond words.”

Magical New Gel Expands In Your Stomach to Make You Feel Full Longer

Hungry? You probably are, because we eat more soft foods than ever before, meaning we feel satiated less often and want to eat more. Then we get fat. No big deal. Science has a new solution in the form of a gel, derived from ingredients used in molecular gastronomy by a team of engineers from…