Chris Mills

You Might Actually Want AMD’s Latest Processor In Your Next Laptop

For years, AMD processors have been a byword for cheap and cheerful — frequently picked in budget gaming guides, but always followed by some justification about how a Core i3 would be a better option if you weren’t so poor. But the latest AMD APU, named Carrizo, might just be the company’s battery-sipping, gaming-friendly saviour.…

United Can’t Even Be Bothered To Pay Money For Finding Security Bugs

Bug bounty programs are pretty common among tech firms: the likes of Facebook and Google (although notably not Apple) will offer you hundreds of thousands of dollars in order for exposing security flaws in their products. It’s a good system, and one United Airlines wants to use: just without offering cold, hard cash. Instead, United…

Apple Sues To Prevent Radioshack Selling Customer Data

As the painful destruction of the once-mighty RadioShack empire continues, administrators have been selling off anything worth anything — including a massive trove of customer data, much to the displeasure of some states’ Attorneys General. And now, Apple is joining the good fight. As it currently stands, the data of 117 million RadioShack victims —…

Pepsi Is Lying: This Is Not Drone Football

Drones are no longer cool. I know this because a brand has now tried to shoehorn one into a TV spot in a lame attempt to make its ad go viral. And worst of all, the title is all wrong: this isn’t drone football. Not even close. In the ad, Pepsi purports to transform a…

Relighting A Candle In Slow-Mo Is Bizarrely Interesting

On a scale of one to mundane, relighting a candle with a match sits just a little higher than watching paint dry. But as with almost anything, film a candle at 2000 frames per second, and things get much more interesting — and weird. As the slow-motion footage of relighting a candle reveals, just holding…

The original Raspberry Pi board just got a price cut: the Model B+, which spent a while as the flagship board before the Pi 2 came into being, is now just $25. The Raspberry Pi foundation claims this is due to manufacturing efficiencies found in the manufacture of the Pi 2 board; I’m sure it…

Rdio Launches $4 Service For Budget Streaming

Jay-Z’s TIDAL made big, messy waves the other month when it launched a $20-a-month streaming service. The accepted monthly rate for this kind of streaming service has normalized around $10 — which is why Rdio’s is hoping to undercut the competition with a new $4 tier. http://gawker.com/tidal-atry-my-tortuous-trial-with-jay-zs-overpriced-sp-1697023467 For that paltry amount of money, Rdio Select…

The UAE Will Lead The First Arab Mission To Mars

The list of countries that have mounted successful missions to Mars is not exactly long: the U.S. and Russia, as you’d expect, and more recently India. But now the United Arab Emirates has an ambitious plan to enter the race as soon as 2020. The mission would consist of a probe named ‘Hope’, launched sometime…

Russia’s Building A (Slow) Computer Chip Of Its Very Own

While Russia might have fleets of tanks and fighter jets to call its own, there’s one important product it still relies on the western world for: computer chips. But thanks to the launch of the Elbrus-4C, the 2006 Intel Pentium chip finally has a competitior. The top-of-the-line (in Russia) chip uses a proprietary architecture called…

Lovers of grainy portrait-orientation livestreams, rejoice! The Meerkat for Android app is out of beta and downloadable on the Google Play Store. That means Meerkat has beaten Periscope out of the Apple walled garden, although Windows Phone and Blackberry users might still be left in the cold for quite some time. Contact the author at…

Say Hi To Pluto’s Smallest Moons

After nine years and a 3 billion mile journey, NASA’s New Horizons probe is finally getting close to everyone’s favorite ex-planet, Pluto. And in doing so, she’s also captured the first ever family portrait of Pluto and all its little moons. So far, we’ve seen five moons orbiting Pluto: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx.…

Samsung’s Next Smartwatch Will Pack A Round Screen And Rotating Bezel

Amidst all the Apple Watch hype, it’s easy to forget that Samsung’s aleady worked its way through two generations of smartwatch, and is prepping to launch a third. And according to a new Samsung software development kit, the next Gear will have a circular display, and rotating bezel to control it with. Digital crown what…

Here’s How Much Energy We Waste On Cat GIFs and Twitterbooks

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, because you’re about to get a good old-fashioned dose of guilt. The folks at SciShow have put together a video examining how much energy we waste on running the internet, and yup, the number is embarrassingly large. As the video explains, loading videos of people falling off rooftops (and, y’know,…

BitTorrent’s Encrypted P2P Chat Service Is Now Live

Announced a year ago, BitTorrent’s charmingly-named Bleep P2P chat app is finally live, for all your secretive anti-governmental murmurings. Bleep has been out as a pre-release alpha version for nearly a year now, but with the public launch, you can now chat from Windows, OS X, iOS and Android. It works much like any other…

Tweeting To Order A Pizza Is Probably The Laziest Thing You Can Do

Starting on May 20th, there will be a new definition for a first-world problem. For those too lazy to order pizza delivered to their door via an app or (god forbid) talking to a human being on the phone, a new option will exist: tweeting a pizza emoji to @Dominos. In an interview with USA…

Europa’s Icy Surface Looks Like Cracked Glass

This is a false-color image of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, a water-covered giant with the smoothest surface in the Solar System. And yet, I could still swear I’m looking at the end result of a football going through a stained-glass window. The image, taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, shows a region charmingly known as the…

Imagining The Lab-Grown Food Of The Future

Scientists are charging full steam ahead with building lab-grown meat, so that we can fulfil our burger cravings without the moral, environmental and economic costs of raising cows. But that raises an important question: what the hell would a lab-grown meal even look like? https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-first-lab-grown-meat-burger-tastes-terrible-1027385867 The first lab-grown burger was grilled up back in 2013…

How Broken Hyperlinks Are Screwing Up Science

For most of us, a hyperlink 404ing is a problem fixable with a quick visit to the Wayback Machine (or maybe just taking a walk away from the computer and reflecting on the importance of cat GIFs). But for academics, broken links present a more serious issue. In case (like me) you thought that broken…

This Zero-Gravity Training Plane Only Carries Science

NASA’s vomit comet is a second-hand McDonnell Douglas C-9B Skytrain II, a hollowed-out airliner that can briefly create weightless conditions for the occupants. But NASA isn’t the only one with toys: the ESA also maintains its own weightless training aircraft, a stripped-out Airbus A310. In order to create brief periods of weightlessness, pilots climb, top…

Fully-Functional TRON Lightcycle Sold For $77,000

If you’ve always had your heart set on a TRON Lightcycle — a working one, not a matchbox toy — you’d better start saving. The going rate (as much as there is a going rate for one-off movie-replica collectibles) is $77,000. The bike was sold at auction by RM Sotheby’s, as part of a wider…