Jamie Condliffe

Why Your Next Smartphone Might Be Full of Wax

It might not just be your ears that are stuffed with wax for long—because researchers from the University of Michigan want to pack your phone full of the stuff, too. In the process of trying to make processors more efficient, they’ve hit on an intriguing idea: cover the chip in a mesh of wax which,…

Google’s Word Definitions Just Got Way More Useful

While Google’s word definitions may literally be a little odd at times, the “define word” search command is incredibly convenient—and it’s now got a whole lot more useful, too. https://gizmodo.com/googles-definition-of-literally-is-not-the-literal-def-1143090535 An update to the search tool means that the define command now throws up a nice table of data about the word in question, not…

Samsung has been denied a new trial over the long-standing dispute of Apple’s ‘bounce back’ scrolling patent. Finally!

This Is the World’s Most Precise Clock

Need the time? How about to the closest hundred trillionth of a second? No problem! Because this, officially now the world’s most precise clock, can tell the time more precisely than any other device ever has. Fuelled by the rather exotic element ytterbium, the clock is stable to one part in a quintillion. Like the…

How Flavors Are Linked, Visualized

If you’ve ever wondered why certain foods taste great together—tomato and basil or, hell, peanut butter and jelly—then wonder no longer. This amazing visualization from Scientific American shows how flavors are linked, and explains why certain combinations work so well. In the fully interactive visualization, each blue dot is a food which sits in one…

Xerox is finally rolling out an update for those rogue copiers that mix up numbers.

iMessage and Parts of iCloud Are Down (Updated)

Looks like Apple is having a tricky time of things this morning: its iCloud and iMessage services are currently experiencing difficulties. The hiccup means that users are having problems with Photo Stream, iCloud documents, back-ups, iPhoto journals and iMessage. So, if things aren’t quite working properly this morning, it’s not you—it’s Apple. It’s not clear…

The Otherworldly Glow of the Solar System’s Auroras, Bottled in a Lab

If this image makes you think of the Northern Lights, you shouldn’t be surprised. Because this is in fact a planeterrella: a large glass dome containing spheres and charged particles, which mimics the auroral glows present within our solar system. When magnetic fields are applied within the dome, put together by NASA, charged particle of…

The Amazing Art of Perfect Portrait Photography

A well-shot portrait is an amazing thing: it can reveal hidden depths of personality and convey layers upon layers of emotional complexity. This video tries to get to the bottom of what makes the perfect portrait photograph. Perhaps understandably, that’s no easy task, and there’s talk of philosophy and feelings as much as insight and…

A Periodic Table of Booze

You can fit an awful lot of information into the classic Periodic Table—and here, Brazil-based designer and illustrator mayra.artes has taken advantage of it to communicate the contents of… booze. Providing details about composition, percentages, year of invention, and more, it might not prove as useful as the real Periodic Table—but it’s probably a bit…

Ubuntu’s crowdfunding effort for its Edge smartphone has fallen massively short on Indiegogo—by a staggering $19 million. Bad luck, Linux lovers.

Read This Letter That Bradley Manning Is Sending to the President

Yesterday, Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for crimes related to stealing government documents and sharing them with WikiLeaks. Now, you can read the letter he’s sending to the President to state his case. https://gizmodo.com/bradley-manning-sentenced-to-35-years-in-prison-1177370126 The letter was read by defense attorney David Coombs following Manning’s sentencing yesterday, but the Associated Press…

Microsoft: Xbox One and Kinect Will Definitely Not Be Sold Separately

Microsoft has had an indecisive month or two recently, contemplating a series of U-turns in its attempts to compete with the forthcoming PlayStation 4. But now, it seems to have settled on a final decision about one of the most controversial flip-flops: every Xbox One WILL come with a Kinect. https://gizmodo.com/the-xbox-one-is-worse-for-everyone-if-kinects-not-mand-1113731041 About that, there now…

Mark Zuckerberg Explains How He Plans to Get the Whole World Online

Having teamed up with Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, Mark Zuckerberg has plans to make the Internet available to the entire world (of course he does). If you were in any doubt about how Internet.org plans to do that, you should watch this video interview from CNN’s New Day show. https://gizmodo.com/facebook-wants-to-get-everybody-in-the-world-on-the-int-1175829249 If you wanna read…

Somebody Save Us, We’re Drowning in Online Chat Systems

Choice is a wonderful thing, but when it comes to digital communication, perhaps we’re starting to drown in a sea of instant message apps and chat clients. Hangouts, WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, Google Voice, Skype, a regular phone call? So many ways to contact people, and little chance of ever knowing which is best. Maybe we…

This Hard Shell Suitcase Is Made From Recycled Carpet

This hard shell suitcase might look like just another piece of high-end luggage, but scratch its surface and you’ll realise it’s made from recycled carpet. No, really. Developed by New Zealand designer Daniel Mclaughlin, Terracase is a hard shell suitcase made from a heady mixture of recycled carpets and bio resin derived from rapeseed oil.…

A Super-Accurate Gravity Map Shows You Where You Can Weigh Less

Gravity’s often assumed to be constant across the entire planet, but because the Earth varies in shape and density, that’s not really the case. Now, this super-accurate gravity map reveals that the fluctuations are even more extreme than scientists previously thought. A team of scientists from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, rolled together data…

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Vevo has signed a big deal with Samsung and Apple—and may make a big announcement about an arrival on new platforms this week.

Your Phone Will Soon Spew 4K Video From Its USB Port

The Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) standard, beloved of Roku and Android phone manufacturers, is about to get exciting: an update coming in September will allow phones to spit out 4K video from their USB ports. https://gizmodo.com/what-is-mhl-5873143 The upgrade, MHL 3.0, will add 4K support to the increasingly popular media standard. It will allow mobile devices…

Fukushima’s Radioactive Puddles Are More Serious Than Anticipated

Japan’s nuclear agency wants to raise the severity level of the new radioactive water leak at the Fukushima because the problem is more serious than initially expected. https://gizmodo.com/fukushimas-now-surrounded-by-extremely-radioactive-pud-1168088710 The incident—newly discovered leaks of radioactive water—was first classified as a level one incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), which refers to an…