Chris Mills

Google Now has a new card, which will keep an eye on flight prices for you. If you’ve been shopping on Google’s flight comparison siterecently, it would appear that you’ll get a Now card popping up with current flight prices for your intended destination on it. Now if only it could organise all your frequent-flyer…

Learn Just How Crazy Russian Smokejumpers Are

To be a smokejumper — the front-line firefighters who parachute into forest fires — in the US, you’ve already got to be a little unhinged. To do the same job in Russia, with antique equipment, for no pay, you must be certifiably insane. The National Geographic has an in-depth feature following a band of Russian…

Microsoft’s Former Software Guru Wants to Reinvent Phone Calls

Ray Ozzie, former Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, has decided that voice communication — in other words, the venerable phone call — is broken, and he’s going to fix it. With an app. Talko, his solution, is an iPhone app that basically takes voice calls and voicemail, and gives it all a 21st century spruce-up.…

Watching the iPhone 6 Plus Get Shot With .50 Is Incredibly Theraputic

The pace of iPhone coverage has been a little relentless the last few weeks: first there was the announcement, then the reviews, then the laughing at idiots camping in lines for weeks. Now, the ultimate stress relief: watching Apple products get some .50-cal slow-motion loving. While we’ve certainly seen plenty of other videos of the…

UPS Now Offers 3-D Printing Nationwide

Fresh off its 3-D printing experiment with a measly 6 stores last year, UPS is now offering 3-D printing at 100 stores nationwide. If you’ve ever wanted your very own tiny thing made out of plastic, your hour is here. The printers themselves will be Stratasys uPrint SE Plus, which UPS (naturally) says are far…

We’re Finally Going to Be Able to Track Missing Airliners

It’s only taken two major crashes and untold millions in search operations, but the world is finally going to have the capability to track airliners anywhere in the world. A collaboration between Iridium and Nav Canada will see a constellation of 66 — count ’em — satellites in orbit by 2017, and hopefully the tracking…

This Is What Happens When You Give Cirque du Soleil a Bunch of Drones

When you think Cirque du Soleil, you probably think teams of sequin-suited acrobats doing improbable things in time to music, not quadrotors. Well, that’s where you’re wrong. The Montreal-based circus’s latest trick manages to take the mechanical, and make it wonderfully artistic. In collaboration with the Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich, the folks at…

Lyft, the pink ‘stache-sporting ride-sharing service, announced today that it’s acquiring Hitch, a service that tries to get multiple users into one taxi. Lyft has said that the acquisition will bolster its Lyft Line service (and hopefully stem the onwards flooding of the Uber tide). [Lyft]

This 3-D Printed Robot Could Secure the Ports Of The Future

Transport by sea has been a favorite of smugglers for centuries – it’s hard to patrol an entire coastline, and it’s easier to move a ton of stuff by sea than by land. In the future, though, getting your contraband through a port might be made exponentially more difficult by this tiny, ultrasound-packing submersible robot.…

Fingertip Sensor Makes Robots Better (And Far Scarier)

Good as robots are at repeating the same motion over and over, they can’t adapt to situations nearly as well as good ‘old flesh-and-bones. That’s where MIT’s new fingertip sensor comes in. The technology employed to make a robot version of our fingertips is sophisticated, but surprisingly simple. It uses an existing project called GelSight,…

This Incredible Aurora Is 2014’s Best Astronomy Photograph

Another year, and another set of winners of the Royal Observatory’s Best Astronomy Photographer. This year’s overall winner is this insane shot of an aurora captured over a glacier, which is so other-wordly it looks like it was made with special effects. The winning shot was captured by the UK’s James Woodend over the Vatnajökull…

This Hamster-Wheel Desk Is a Sad Statement on Modern Offices

Corporate culture today is often said to be about working slavishly, with an above-all focus on profit and productivity. Nothing captures that idea more strikingly than this (fully functional) hamster-wheel desk. The project, designed and built in 24 hours by Pier 9’s artist-in-residence Robb Godshaw, is actually a pretty clever piece of design: the wheel…

An Electric Wakeboard is Probably The Best Way to Spend $20,000

If you’ve ever wanted to go wakeboarding, but thought “Man! Thosee ski boats are expensive!”, then never fear: the budget wakeboarding option is here. For just $20,000 (€15,000), Swedish entrepeneurs Alexander Lind and Philip Werner will sell you a jet-propelled, electrically-powered wakeboard. Using a salt-water-resistant jet, their creation (dubbed Radinn) will get you up to…

Grindr Pollster Nailed the Results of Scottish Referendum

With almost all the results in, it’s now looking like Scotland will say ‘no’ to independance by a 54%-46% majority. Interestingly, that’s the same result predicted by a pollster…using Grindr. In the days leading up to the referendum, Tom Court polled a few hundred Grindr users to try and work out which way the vote…

No, A Smoke-Filled Airliner Is Not A Good Place For a Selfie

Most humans’ priority when their flying metal tube starts filling with smoke: panic, scream, scrabble for oxygen mask, pee their pants a little. This guy? He pulls out his smartphone and starts video-selfie-ing for all he’s worth. A Jet Blue airliner had to make an emergency landing this morning after taking off from Long Beach.…

First iPhone 6 Buyer Does an Accidental Drop-Test on Live TV

It’s iPhone 6 launch day, which of course means that YouTube will be full of drop tests by lunch time. But the very first buyer, coming out of the iPhone store in Perth, decided to beat them all to it. According to the local news reporter, ‘Jack’ was so excited to get his shiny new…

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Teardown: Bigger Phone, Bigger Battery

iFixit, famous breakers of things, were Down Under to scoop up an iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus as soon as it went on sale. Now, they’re teasing the rest of us with a step-by-step liveblog of the teardown process. The disassembly isn’t the simplest — you have to extract two proprietary Pentalobe screws, and…

Larry Ellison, who you’ll remember as the CEO of Oracle and a man who likes to build really, really fast sailboats, has relinquished his boss-man role at Oracle. Although it means that Oracle won’t be helmed by Ellison for the first time ever, he insists that “nothing will change”. [Reuters]

Google Follows Apple in Encrypting Phone Data by Default

Last night, Apple head honcho Tim Cook announced that iOS 8 will encrypt all your personal data by default, making it harder for the NSA to root through your stuff. Now, in a totally coincidentally timed move, Google’s announced that Android L will do the same. According to the Washington Post, the latest and greatest…

Amazon Beat Google to Buy the .Buy Domain Name for $4.5 Million

Amazon — king of selling stuff on the interwebz — just paid a cool $4.5 mil to buy the rights to the .Buy top-level-domain, beating out Google in the process. The auction, held by internet boss ICANN, involved the sale of three of the fancy new top-level domains (TLDs) that have been created in the…