Ashley Feinberg

Why Even Almighty Google Couldn’t Keep Track of the Flu

The flu, as many are unfortunately aware, hit especially hard this year, and Google’s Flu Trends map only confirmed and then heightened our mucus-coated fears. Or so we thought. As Nature points out, a comparison between Google Flu Trends (which bases its map off flu-related searches) and traditional surveillance data showed that our beloved search…

5 Dating Apps to Find Last-Minute Valentine’s Love

Valentine’s Day—that cherished celebration of love and its joyful bounty—is just around the corner. But for the lonely-hearts littered across the country, seeing couples enjoying all the love and the happiness and the not-being-perpetually-alone-for-eternity can, perhaps, pour a little salt on a long-standing wound. Fortunately, and as with everything else in life, the Internet has…

Two Years Later, The New York Times Closes Its Paywall’s Most Gaping Hole

As soon as The New York Times first hit us with its paywall back in 2011, industrious little news fiends all over the Internet began looking for ways to get around it—and it didn’t take long. One of the simplest and most bafflingly long-lasting holes in The Times’ paywall simply required you to delete a…

Greek Police Accused of Terrible Photoshop Job to Hide Evidence of Brutality

With Photoshop’s ubiquity, it’s actually surprising that scenes like this don’t happen more often: Greek police may soon be under investigation for attempting to airbrush out evidence of police brutality in the mug shots of four young men. And they did a horrible job of it, at that. The men were arrested for an attempted…

Bill Gates Shows Off Sense of Humor, Come-Hither Eyes in Reddit AMA

In Bill Gates’ closing remarks on his Reddit AMA earlier today, he left the Internet with the following message and this image: Thanks for the great AMA, Reddit! I hope you’ll read my annual letter www.billsletter.com and visit my website, The Gates Notes, www.gatesnotes.com to see what I’m working on. I’d just like to leave…

Bill Gates is doing an AMA on Reddit right… now.

The SETI Institute is taking a vote to name Pluto’s new moons. They even accept write-ins—as long as its Hades-related.

Most Beautiful Items: February 2-February 8, 2013

This week has been bleakly overcast with constant talk of dull, dreary weather and unwelcome torrents of snow. Take a break from the grayness, and bask in the most beautiful things we laid our eyes on this week. It’ll help; we promise. Don’t Worry, You Can’t Kill These Intricately Woven Wire Bonsai Trees The intricate…

Charles Darwin Is Helping Facebook Reinvent the Emoticon

Emoticons have wholly integrated into modern language. Tweens communicate in nothing but nonsensical strings of emojis, and artists use them to create entire tales. But even with widespread use, emoticons’ emotions have remained relatively 1-dimensional since their inception. As BuzzFeed learned, Facebook has enlisted Matt Jones, a current Pixar story illustrator and former Wallace and…

Why Some AT&T Users Didn’t Receive Yesterday’s Emergency Alert

If you were anywhere near the East Coast yesterday, you might have received an emergency storm alert on your phone telling you it’s time to to break into mass hysteria. Or maybe you didn’t! While it was nice to know that someone cared for those that got it, the emergency alert was hitting people’s phones…

Life in an Amazon Warehouse: Fear and Efficiency at 35 Orders Per Second

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Amazon’s warehouses, especially at Christmastime, have to be a perfectly greased, gargantuan machine in order to meet the needs of its hundreds of millions of clients. We’re less likely, however, to look beyond the company’s impressive exterior at the individual pieces that make it run—Amazon’s very human employees.…

Now anyone can edit and share Office Web Apps, even without an Office 365 account—a very welcome addition.

Soothe Your Achey Joints by Sticking Each Limb Into Its Own Tiny, Electrified Bathtub

What looks like some horrific, early 20th century polygraph test cum torture chamber was, in fact, a gentle medical solution to a common, achey problem. The Schnee Four Cell Bath was a type of galvanic bath that was prized for its convenience by busy—although rheumatic—men and women about town. Unlike conventional galvanic baths (a type…

Mailbox for iPhone Is Finally in the App Store, Along With Its 250,000+ Waiting List

Mailbox, the new e-mail client that’s had the tech world all atwitter recently, has officially gone live in the App Store. Created by the productivity software masters at Orchestra, the ultimate goal was to reinvent the mobile-specific email experience. Mailbox’s greatest innovation comes in the way you address e-mails: a single swipe to side will…

Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things Tumblr Is Exactly What It Sounds Like

Remember that toy of yersteryear with the variously shaped holes and similarly shaped blocks to shove in them? Remember how great it felt when you stopped trying to jam the star into the circle and everything fell into place? This incredible tumblr has captured that wonderful if mildly obsessive compulsive desire to find order and—dare…

Microsoft and Symantec Just Busted a Major Cyber Crime Ring

It sounds like the plot of a movie: two major software corporations join together to shut down an evil global cyber crime operation and engage in wacky hijinks along the way. While the latter can be neither confirmed nor denied, according to an exclusive report by Reuters, Microsoft and Symantec did shut down servers that…

Watch Siri Turn Into a Home Automation Master With the Help Of Raspberry Pi

With home automation being all the rage these days, it was only a matter of time before Siri got her little, occasionally holier-than-thou claws into the action. All it took was YouTube user Elvis Impersonator, a Raspberry Pi, and enough trust in Siri’s goodness to believe she won’t devolve into a Hal 9000 wannabe. The…

In addition to Facebook sharing, Vine is now rated ages 17+ to keep porn from innocent eyes. Because that always works.

Jack White’s Next Record Will Be Printed On the Bones Of Humans Past

Bizarre human being and Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes has the honor of creating the next installment in Jack White’s record label’s, Third Man Records, fantastic Blue Series. The coolest part, though, is that some of the 7-inch, three-song singles are going to be printed on old medical x-rays. The pairing of song and bone isn’t…

PBS’s Silicon Valley Gives You an Inside Look At the Startup World Before It Became Terrible

Silicon Valley wasn’t always the buzzword-flinging, startup-sprouting tech Mecca it is today. And PBS’s latest installment of the “American Experience” series looks back 10 years before the phrase “Silicon Valley” had even been coined, when eight young physicists decided to shed their corporate shackles and found the Valley’s first startup, Fairchild Semiconductor. The documentary mainly…