Jamie Condliffe

The First 4K OLED TV You Can Buy Will Cost $11,000

OLED has taken its sweet time to arrive in 4K sets, but now LG has announced that the first such set is about to go on sale. And this thing looks good enough to fall in love with. https://gizmodo.com/hands-on-i-just-fell-in-love-with-lgs-flexible-4k-ole-1496503499 LG will be selling its 65-inch 4K OLED—first in South Korea this week and then in…

A Simple Guide to Choosing Which Messaging Service to Use

Given the myriad ways we now all have of sending digital messages, it can be difficult to to choose the most appropriate. So why not follow the simple guide? Put together by Doghouse Diaries, this chart suggests which medium you should use to send your precious words. Ultra time-sensitive? Shoot off an SMS. Completely unimportant?…

Scientists Are Building a Tomato That Grows 24 Hours a Day

Scientists already know how to make a tasty tomato, but in the quest for mass production, there’s another barrier to overcome: how to make a tomato that grows 24 hours a day. Thing is, if tomato plants don’t enjoy eight hours of darkness—which sees them stop growing—they become covered in yellow spots and, if it…

How the Hell Does Quantum Mechanics Work Anyway?

People that know about quantum mechanics tend to talk about it very breezily, leaving us mortals behind. Be left behind no longer, though, with this wonderful little video. Taking a cue from Schrödinger’s famous cat thought experiment, Josh Samani walks us through the basics of quantum mechanics and entanglement. It’s still not easy—you’re going to…

Reuters: iPhone 6 Display Redesign Could Limit Availability

Whether it’s made of sapphire or not the display of the next iPhone is rumored to be causing some trouble.Reuters reports that Apple suppliers are “scrambling to get enough screens ready” for the new phone as a last-minute redesign has disrupted production. https://gizmodo.com/whats-sapphire-glass-and-why-would-apple-want-it-in-yo-1603457905 The newswire explains that two supply chain sources have told it that…

Wait, is that… human bones on Mars? Not quite, conspiracy theorists: in fact it’s just a rock that happens to look a little bit like a femur thigh bone. It was snapped by the Mars rover Curiosity using its MastCam. [NASA]

White House Cybersecurity Leader: Technical Know-How’s a Distraction

In much the same way that the best heart surgeons have never studied medicine and Supreme Court judges have never really read the law, Michael Daniel, the White House’s cybersecurity co-ordinator thinks that “being too down in the weeds at the technical level could actually be a little bit of a distraction” in his position.…

This Sneaker Is an Homage to an Eames Chair

This sleek-looking Nike trainer isn’t real (yet), but it ought be. Because while it looks like a piece of footwear from the future, it is in fact a homage to furniture from the past. The brainchild of French designer Ora-Ïto, the shoe pays tribute to Modernist furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames—and in particular their…

The Modern-Day Loop of Infinite Self-Distraction

When you’re sat at your computer gazing at its screen it’s easy to get bored and start looking at a smaller screen until you get bored and start looking at a computer screen and then get bored and… This is the modern-day infinite loop of self-distraction. But, as Randall Munroe points out, there’s nothing particularly…

Apple Patent Helps Find Your Car Even When You Can’t Get a Signal

A pair of new Apple patents explain how your phone could help you find your car in the parking lot, even if you’re struggling to get a phone signal and aren’t in range of a GPS satellite. The patents—”Automatic identification of vehicle location” and “Vehicle location in weak location signal scenarios“—describe how an iOS device…

Cargo Ships Arriving at the ISS Are Guided In Using a Plastic Ruler

You’re looking at the European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst as he guided in the Automated Transfer Vehicle 5 to dock with the International Space Station on August 12th. In his hand? A simple plastic ruler. While ATV-5 is designed to dock without human intervention, someone aboard the ISS always manually checks the approach speed…

Someone Built a Fully Functioning 1KB Hard Drive Inside Minecraft

Cody Littley is a computer science PhD student with a little time on his hands. Which perhaps explains why he built a working 1KB hard drive in Minecraft out of virtual building blocks. Why did he build it? Because he could. “When I built the the device, I didn’t have anything in mind that I…

A New Attack Secretly Binds Malware to Legitimate Software Downloads

A team of researchers from Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, has created a new kind of cyber attack where malicious code is able to be sent in parallel with a legitimate software download without modifying any code. The new attack binds the malware to free and open source software, because there are fewer code signing…

SoundCloud is Getting Ads

SoundCloud has been getting a little more business savvy of recent time, but now the pivotal music service has announced some sad news: it’s getting ads. https://gizmodo.com/how-soundcloud-changed-music-forever-1588811594 From today an ad-supported On SoundCloud program is live—first in the U.S. and then later around the rest of the world. It will allow content creators to monetize…

The Earth’s Ozone Layer Is Still Being Chewed Apart

If you thought that the depletion of the ozone layer was a problems of the 90s, think again: according to new NASA research, the Earth’s atmosphere contains an unexpectedly large amount of ozone-depleting chemical, decades after it was banned worldwide. The new study shows that carbon tetrachloride—once used in dry cleaning and fire extinguishers but…

Jaime King Took an Uber To the Hospital to Give Birth

When Jaime King was home alone and thought she was about to give birth, she didn’t want to make a fuss. So instead of calling for an ambulance or getting a friend to give her a ride she… got an Uber. I mean, giving birth in your own car would make a bit of a…

Facebook has added Oculus to its bug bounty program, which means that people reporting issues in the code for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, software development kit, and website will be rewarded with cold, hard cash.

The Easiest Way to Understand How Bad California’s Drought Really Is

California’s drought problem is bad and shows no signs of letting up. This clever chart imagines the state as a one-dimensional line to show just how bad it is compared to recent history. https://gizmodo.com/nasa-made-an-underground-water-map-to-see-just-how-bad-1610315490 Put together by Randall Munroe of XKCD, the visualization relies on the fact that California is long and thin. He’s taken…

How Tornadoes Form

Ever wondered how we go from still air to swirling storm? In this video meteorologist—and storm chaser!—James Spann explains where tornadoes come from. In truth, we don’t know for certain—the exact same conditions won’t necessarily give rise to a tornado every time. But we have learned a lot from observations made by scientists over the…

This Pen Is Beautiful Enough to Make Me Want to Write in Ink

This pen is smooth, sleek, beautiful; it’s solid but gracious. And it’s even called Nautilus. All things considered, it’s enough to make me want to write something in ink instead of typing. Designed by Australian Marc Newson, this smart retractable nib pen was conceived in collaboration with Pierre-Alexis Dumas for French fashion house Hermès. Newson…