Kate Knibbs

Doctors Implanted a 3D-Printed Vertebra for the First Time

Doctors in Beijing successfully replaced a 12-year-old boy’s damaged second vertebra with a 3D-printed custom implant made from titanium powder. The boy, who had bone cancer, is now in recovery. This isn’t the first surgery swapping busted bones for 3D-printed replacements, but it’s the first time doctors managed to fix a spine using a 3D-printed…

Dyson Teases Upcoming Secret Project (It’s Probably a Robot Vacuum)

Dyson just released this video teasing its upcoming project, codenamed N223. They might as well have codenamed it “We’re going to destroy the Roomba” because it’s very probably a robotic vacuum cleaner. The only thing the video actually confirms is that someone at Dyson has a boner for wide angle lenses, but we do get…

Facebook Really Wants You to Stop Being Pissed About Messenger

Facebook wants you to know Messenger isn’t spying on you. After people got mad about the company’s decision to make downloading Facebook Messenger necessary to use Facebook Chat on mobile, the backlash got so bad Facebook’s Peter Martinazzi issued an official “calm the eff down” announcement. You might have heard the rumors going around about…

​No, water doesn’t drain backwards when you cross the equator

At La Mitad Del Mundo, a tourist attraction outside of Quito, Ecuador, visitors are invited to watch a demonstration after they’ve finished taking corny photos of themselves straddling the line dividing the world. Three tubs stand on both sides and on the middle of this line. The demonstration begins, as pink-nosed travelers clutch their Tilly…

You Can Now Get 1TB of Dropbox Pro Storage For Just $10 a Month

Dropbox Pro users just got way more storage for the same price. The file-sharing service now gives you 1TB of storage for $10 a month instead of 100GB. This isn’t a casual price cut; that’s a 90 percent price reduction per gigabyte. Dropbox likely did it to stay competitive with Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive,…

Someone Boiled Their GoPro To Film an Egg Being Poached

People use GoPros to film all sorts of stuff, from swimming manta rays to swimming races off Alcatraz. You could watch footage of people doing extreme water-based activities captured via GoPro every day for the rest of your life, and there would still be so much GoPro footage of people doing extreme water-based activities left…

Google launched iOS app Slidestoday, along with updates to its Docs and Sheets apps. Slides lets you collaborate on presentations from your mobile devices, including PowerPoint files. The whole push is geared to make sure people who create stuff using Google products don’t get frustrated when they can’t pull them up on different devices. If…

Why FireChat’s Latest Update Is a Big Deal

FireChat, the clever app that lets people talk to each other without using cell reception, just got an update that gives its users fixed handles. That might not mean a damn thing to you, which is understandable. FireChat doesn’t have the name recognition of Snapchat. It’s not a popular messaging app. But it should be,…

The Facebook Messenger App Migration Officially Starts Today

The Great Unbundling has begun. Recode reports Facebook has begun to shut off access to chat within its main app. We’ve known about Facebook’s plan to make everyone use Messenger by disabling chat within the main Facebook app for a while now, but itjust started rolling out to people in the U.S. If you still…

Why This Japanese Village Is Full of Creepy Dolls

Guys, dolls are creepy. They have unblinking, soulless eyes. They seem like they could come alive at any moment and murder everyone with their tiny hands, their uncanny plastic features morphing from a facade of innocence to PURE EVIL. So an entire village populated mainly by life-size dolls is not an un-terrifying proposition. In fact,…

Watch the Evolution of Amazon’s Kindle Hardware In a Single GIF

The Amazon Fire Phone is kind of whack, but being ugly is not one of its problems. Amazon’s hardware design has improved over the years, and the GadgetLove team created this GIF to illustrate how its products have evolved since that first clunky, oddly designed Kindle. Not every iteration is included (no Paperwhite, for example)…

Twitter’s Latest Test Suggests That Tweet-Based Shopping Is Coming Soon

A group of Twitter users have spotted a “payment and shipping” option within their Android apps. As The Next Web pointed out, this is just one in a series of tests that suggest Jack Dorsey might be able to buy his latest monochromatic designer suit from within the platform he helped build. The option can’t…

Wikipedia Reveals Which Pages the “Right to be Forgotten” Law Killed

Earlier this week, Europe’s controversial “Right to be forgotten” legislation started going after Wikipedia pages. Now we know more: Wikipedia has revealed the five pages removed from Google searches, adding up to more than 50 links in total. The Wikimedia Foundation posted the notices of removal online today. Pages on Italian criminal Renato Vallanzasca, Irish…

Russian Hackers Are Hoarding More Than a Billion Stolen Passwords

A Russian crime gang is in possession the largest known collection of stolen passwords, user names, email addresses, and other online credentials. That’s one of the worst collections a Russian crime gang can have other than, I don’t know, rocket launchers and dirty bombs. Milwaukee-based security research firm Hold Security says that the Russian hacking…

A Table That Looks Like Topography Is the Prettiest Way to Serve Tea

Drinking tea is already a pretty chilled out activity. The aromatic steam, the cozy cup, the soothing liquid, the overwhelming sensation of warmth and health. It’s like a spa for your mouth. If you want to take your tea-drinking zen levels from Richard Gere to Dalai Lama, though, I have located the perfect tea accoutrement…

Love Ravioli But Suck at Making It? This Clever Rolling Pin Will Help

Why would you choose to swirl boring ass spaghetti around your fork instead of biting into a delicious, cheesy mouthful of ravioli? Unfortunately, the fun pasta shapes are harder to make. But it doesn’t have to be so hard. If engineer Michael Finizio gets his way, you won’t have to settle for beginner’s noodles just…

Plan for Secret Satellite Receivers Wins Hackathon to Help North Korea

Cut off from outside communication and at the whim of a despotic political leader, the people of North Korea are in a bad place. The conditions in the country inspired the Human Rights Foundation to help North Koreans by holding a hackathon. And the winners came up with a clever plan to import satellites receivers…

Europe’s “Right to be Forgotten” Law Kills Its First Wikipedia Page

Europe’s controversial “Right to be forgotten” ruling has claimed its first Wikipedia page victim, according to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wales told The Observer that the E.U. legislation is “completely insane and needs to be fixed.” The Wikipedia page will stay up, but it will not appear in Google search results. Google, like Wales, is…

Johnny Appleseed was real, and he got frontiersmen hammered

Most kids growing up in the U.S. have heard of Johnny Appleseed. He’s the subject of museums and storybooks. Like Paul Bunyan, he’s a larger-than-life American myth, an outdoorsy, folksy wonder. Unlike Bunyan and his big blue ox, the shoeless hero bringing fruit to the frontier is actually based on a real person. A real,…

Watch Kids Try to Figure Out How to Use an Old Typewriter

Children growing up today can’t remember a world without computers. Typewriters, once ubiquitous in offices and considered the cutting-edge way to write, are now more of a quaint relic than an actual tool… which means they’re perfect fodder for the latest installment of the Fine Brothers’ “Kids React” series. Watching the kids try to figure…