Chris Mills

The iPhone 6s Might Be Surprisingly Waterproof

Apple certainly doesn’t market its phones as being waterproof, but drop your shiny new iPhone down the toilet, and all might not be lost (apart from your dignity): one intrepid and wealthy YouTuber has found the 6s can stand a full hour of submersion. Both the 6s and the 6s Plus sat in a bowl…

The Pentagon’s Research Arm is Putting Money Into DNA Manufacturing

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the governmnet division that tries to take cutting-edge technology and turn it into something the military can use. The agency’s latest target? Genetic engineering. The Foundry is a facility which is part of the Broad Institute, a joint MIT-Harvard biomedical research institute. It started work on a…

There’s Already an iPhone 6s Teardown

We’re still some hours away from the new iPhone launch here in the States, but over in Australia, the iFestivities are already underway. Thanks to iExperts, we also have our first peek at the new iPhone’s guts. According to them, there’s not a whole mountain of differences: the screen is now glued differently to the…

Verizon Becomes The Final Carrier to Offer an iPhone Upgrade Program

Contracts that get you a shiny new iPhone every year are the trendy thing in the world of smartphone financing. Just in time for the latest iPhone launch, Verizon has a new financing plan that will get you the latest iDevice every 12 months. The new plans start at $27/$31 a month, for the 16GB…

Compared To the Rest of the World, US 4G (Unsurprisingly) Sucks

We’re always being told the U.S. is now lagging behind other, more industrious nations in science and technology and basically anything that isn’t spending on the military. How much are we lagging? Here is a depressing graph to help quantify that. According to a new report from Open Signal, the U.S. is now in 58th…

Why One Random Web Address Can Crash Chrome

As it turns out, one sixteen-character garbage URL is enough to bring Google’s mighty browser crashing to its knees. Here’s the computer science behind the bug. As Tom Scott explains in the surprisingly understandable video above, it’s all to do with how computers parse binary files. The %30%30 at the end of the URL gets…

T-Mobile’s Trade-In Program Gives You a New iPhone for $5 a Month

There’s all sorts of complicated economics surrounding when and how and where you should upgrade iPhones, but T-Mobile’s trying to make the math a lot easier: trade in an iPhone 6, and you’ll get a 6S for $5 a month. https://gizmodo.com/which-iphone-6s-should-i-buy-a-guide-1730054334 The low-price deal relies on you trading in an iPhone, and taking out and…

Don’t Buy The Bullshit This Indiegogo Campaign Is Selling

Batteriser is a crowdfunding campaign for a magical little sleeve you pop over your AA batteries, extending their useful life by ‘up to 800%’. Sound a little too good to be true? That’s because it 800% is*. The science behind the Batteriser isn’t actually pure crap. The premise is this: a new AA battery starts…

Drone Crashes, Hits Baby

The worst nightmare of every helicopter parent has come true: earlier this month, a 6.4-pound drone crashed at a movie premiere in Pasadena, hitting a one-year-old baby in the head. Spoilers: the baby was OK. According to the Pasadena Star News, a DJI Inspire 1 — a $3000 drone broadly aimed at professionals — crashed…

I Would Actually Go To This Converted Church Home

When I think of churches, it’s normally as places I spent vast amounts of my childhood counting stitches in knee cushions. But this ex-church, which has seven bedrooms and a climbing wall? I would attend the hell out of that. Designed by Linc Thelen Design and Scrafano Architects, it’s an old church in Chigaco that’s…

9 Things You Can Now Do With Apple Watch That You Couldn’t Before

With today’s launch of watchOS 2, Apple has brought a whole new lease of life to its pretty little wrist ‘puter. Here’s the most interesting things you can now do with your $800 wearable square of technology. Use Apps Apple Didn’t Make With watchOS 2, Apple is hoping to do what it did for the…

The New Google Wallet App is an Absurdly Easy Way to Send People Your Money

Previously, Google Wallet was some kind of hybrid payment system that few people understood, and fewer used. The newly revamped Wallet — now available on iOS — is meant to do just one thing: send money to other people with minimal hassle. Download the new Wallet app on iOS or Android, add a debit card…

This Is What a Road Bike Might Look Like, If There Were No Design Rules

People don’t often realize it, but the design of every high-end bicycle is shaped, one way or another, by the governing body of bike racing, the Union Cycliste Internationale. This is what bikes might look like if their rulebook didn’t exist. The UCI has a famously stringent set of rules about the design of bikes…

Crane Controllers are the Most Overkill Way to Play Pong

Ever looked at the wireless remotes you use for shop cranes — boxy yellow things the size of shoe boxes, with industrial STOP buttons — and think they’d be perfect for controlling the world’s simplest video game? No, me neither. The intrepid YouTuber who put together the demo hooked up two crane controllers to a…

There’s a new update forAmazon Echo that adds a bunch of new features, like news headlines on a particular topic, more smart home controls, and better control over alarms and timers. The full list of Alexa’s tricks is over on Amazon’s site. [Amazonvia Engadget] Contact the author at [email protected].

Drones Autonomously Build a Bridge, So the Robot Army Never Has to Stop

In the future war against the machines, humans might have gained a brief respite by powering through the flowing rivers where electronic killer robots cannot tread. These bridge-building quadrotors have now closed off that avenue of escape. The pair of drones you can see in the video use a spool of rope – about 120m…

Apple is Cleaning The App Store Of its First Major Malware Attack

Apple cleaned the App Store of apps containing malware today, having discovered a long con that saw developers using infected software tools, inadvertently turning their legit apps into data-collection tools for hackers. According to Reuters, hackers duped developers into using a bad version of Apple’s Xcode app-development tools. The bad version of Xcode, dubbed XcodeGhost,…

Emoji Help Explain Pantone Colors

Pantone, self-declared arbiter of visual light, has defined more colors than you would think imaginable. But with many colors comes a problem: how do you remember the names? This project uses emoji to try and help. Designed by Burro Studio, this series of images imagines a world in which Pantone color strips ship with helpful…

iPad Mini 4 Teardown: Literally Just a Smaller iPad Air 2

The new iPad Mini 4 was a footnote at Apple’s recent event, and for good reason: the little tablet really is just Apple’s year-old iPad, with a slightly smaller display. The good folks at iFixit took the Mini 4 apart piece by loving piece to see what’s new. Although things look pretty much identical on…

Here’s How Hockey Players Deal With Drones

Steven Stamkos is one of the NHL’s most prolific goalscorers, thanks to his ability to hit pucks at things with unnerving speed and accuracy. He also doesn’t like drones. You can probably see where this is going.