Jamie Condliffe

Beautiful Images of Astronauts Releasing Nanosatellites Into Space

This is Oleg Artemyev. In his hand is a tiny satellite, known as a nanosatellite, called Chasqui 1—and he’s about to throw it into the wilds of space. Well, throw might not be quite the right word—Artemyev would favor “deploy”—but it’s not far off. Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev conducted a 5-hour spacewalk on Monday,…

Google claims to have made 890 improvements to search over the past year. Still can’t find my keys though, can it, hmm?

How We Can Build Better Cities

Over the coming years, cities are set be born, and grow, at a rapid rate. But how do we make sure that they grow in a sustainable way? This Minute Earth video is a wonderful whistle-stop tour of the problems that cities face—and create—and how we can go about designing and planning builds to mitigate…

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Was Hacked 3 Times in 3 Years

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been hacked three times over the course of the last three years according to a recently published NextGov report. The report explains that hackers from an unnamed foreign country duped NRC employees into installing malware and clicking on phishing links in an attempt to secure log-in details. It’s…

When someone at Reuters designed this, they probably didn’t expect that it would be interpreted as a Venn diagram. But once you see it that way, it’s impossible to unsee. Just what are its values? [Reddit]

Project Tango Tablet Teardown: Everything You Need For Handheld 3D

Google’s Project Tango tablet is an amazing bit of hardware that made us finally realize that computer vision could be useful for regular people, too. So now that iFixit has ripped one apart, we’re pretty excited to see what lurks within it. We already know that the tablet is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra K, making…

How You Really Use Spotify and iTunes

There are times in every person’s life when Alt-J, Future Islands and Manchester Orchestra just don’t scratch the itch. For those times, there is iTunes. [Truth Facts]

Samsung’s New Bluetooth Speaker Looks Awfully Familiar

No, that’s not an picture of Jawbone’s now-iconic Jambox Bluetooth speaker. It is, in fact, the new Samsung Level Box mini. The new speaker measures 156 x 66 x 50 mm and weighs 392g. (The Jambox measures 151 x 57 x 40 mm and weighs 347g). It features Bluetooth connectivity and and aux-in port. (The…

NASA Wants You to Sift Through Its Astronauts’ Photos

NASA has a problem, and it wants you to help. Since the 50s, it’s amassed 1.8 million images of Earth from space—and it needs your assistance in working out exactly what they’re of. As part of The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, NASA is releasing the huge library of images—1.3 million of which have…

A little blurry? Perhaps, but this is a three-second exposure taken from aboard the ISS. As astronautReid Wiseman points out, it “shows how crazy our atmosphere really is.” [Reid Wiseman]

This Simple Chip Could Turn All Your Clothes Into Activity Trackerssho

These little chips may not look much, but in fact they’re a new breed of super-small, super-cheap accelerometers that could make motion sensing ubiquitous—even in the clothes you wear. The chips, made by mCube, measure just a couple of millimeters across—less than half the size of most accelerometer chips. Perhaps most importantly, though, they’re more…

How to Fix a Wobbly Table Using Math

We’ve all been sat drinking a beer only to realize that the table wobbles irritatingly. But while a piece of folded paper can solve the problem for a few minutes, there is a better solution—and it uses some simple math. Matthias Kreck from the University of Bonn explains in this video how simply turning the…

Sprint has announced that, from Friday, a new family rate will allow 10 lines to share 20GB worth of data for $100 per month. (Though, everyone will need to be moving to Sprint from a different carrier, and the pricing will only last until the end of 2015.)

How to Read Text in Binary

Though you might not often need to do it, reading text in binary in surprisingly straightforward. Here’s your new nerdy party trick. In this vide, Tom Scott explains how letters emerge from a string of 1s and 0s. You simply need to be able to count in binary and know the order of your alphabet.…

The Amazon Fire Phone isn’t great. But its first software updatemeans that it now does multi-tasking, allows you to organize apps in folders, lets you pin apps to the home screen, and last longer on a charge, too. Still not good, but catching up.

It’s not all about Google Fiber: Cincinnati Bell is now offering gigabit internet to customers in its home town, too.

GIFYouTube Lets You Turn YouTube Clips Into GIFs in Seconds

Want to spread some video love in the form of a GIF? Now it’s easier than ever thanks to a web app called GIFYouTube. All you have to do is head over to the site, paste the URL of the YouTube video you want to GIF-ify, choose the start point and duration, wait a few…

The Sounds Around You Could Soon Charge Your Phone’s Battery

Sitting in a noisy bar, caring for screaming children, or watching the ball game—all awful locations to make a phone call, but soon these scenarios could actually help charge the battery of your cell. New collaborative research by Queen Mary University of London and Nokia shows that the piezoelectric zinc oxide—which creates a voltage as…

How Cities Sleep, Visualized

People in Melbourne get the most, those in Tokyo the least. No, get your mind out of the gutter: we’re talking about sleep here, and how much of it the inhabitants of certain cities manage to actually get. The Wall Street Journal has been playing with a new dataset released by Jawbone which tracks how…

This Beetle Has a Thin Coating Whiter Than Anything Humans Can Make

This beetle looks like it’s been given a lick with a paintbrush—but in fact, it’s covered in paper-thin scales that are brilliant white, and reflect more light than anything of a similar thickness that can be made by humans. These critters—Cyphochilus to their friends—are covered in scales made from complex networks of chitin filaments. Chitin…