Maddie Stone

Malaysia says it’ll be sending a team to the Maldives to inspect debris that could be related to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Late last month, the discovery of a flaperon on Réunion Island reignited the hunt for the aircraft’s remains. Malaysia claims the Réunion Island debris is definitely from MH370, but French officials say…

Small Wireless Car Devices Allow Hackers to Take Control of a Vehicle’s Brakes 

Last month, security researchers showed the world that a car can be hijacked from thousands of miles away using its internet-connected entertainment system. As if that wasn’t disturbing enough, there may be an even simpler way to take remote control of somebody else’s car: By hacking into small, internet-enabled device people plug directly into the…

This Digital Map of the Seafloor Can Help Scientists Predict Environmental Change

We know less about the deep ocean than we do about the surface of Mars. But if we want to really understand how humans are impacting the Earth, we need to start looking down deep into the muck. That’s why scientists created the first digital map of the seafloor’s geologic composition. Other seafloor maps have…

Laser Dinosaurs Prove That Nothing on the Internet Goes Extinct 

Adding lasers to photos of cats is a time-honored internet tradition, right up there with Rickrolling and looking at explicit pornography. But this is 2015. Cats are passé. And dinosaurs may be extinct, but they’re breathing new life into an old meme. Paleoart is best known for its scientifically accurate depictions of extinct animals, but…

Mimas and Dione Beam up at Saturn in a Stunning Portrait

The Moon may be Earth’s kid brother, but Saturn’s moons seem more gnats on an elephant in this incredible image captured by the Cassini probe. Pictured here are Saturn’s moons Mimas (right) and Dione (left) staring up at their behemoth of a planet, with the unilluminated side of the rings angled about one degree from…

Watch the World Switch from Internet Explorer to Chrome

Somewhere deep in the cobweb-filled recesses of your brain, you might remember a time when checking your email meant booting up Internet Explorer. But as this infographic shows, it wasn’t long ago that the world was filled with Internet Explorers. Then, a couple years back, nearly every country switched to Chrome. The visualization below, which…

Some Genius Turned Fisher Price Cassette Player Into a Bluetooth Speaker

If you still own a Fisher Price cassette player, it’s probably buried deep in some ‘80s nostalgia-filled corner of your closet. But where most of us see a beloved electronic fossil, Matt Gruskin saw a retro-styled Bluetooth speaker. Turning his Fisher Price cassette player into a Bluetooth-enabled device took a clever combination of electronic and…

Wastewater from the Colorado mine spill that turned the Animas River orange this week has made its way to northern New Mexico, the Associated Press reports. Officials in the cities of Aztec and Farmington have temporarily shut down the river’s access to water treatment plants. Meanwhile, containment crews are building makeshift ponds to catch and…

Five Places Where People Have Turned the Water a Crazy Unnatural Color

On Thursday, a breach during an acid mine cleanup effort sent a million gallons of wastewater seeping down the Animas River. Overnight, the popular waterway was abandoned as its color quickly changed from blue to an acrid, neon orange. It’s not the first time we’ve managed to turn a large body of water an eerie…

Elephants Discover Public Toilets Are Great Watering Holes

Your dog isn’t the only one who likes drinking from the toilet. Clever elephants at the Elephant Sand Lodge campsite in Botswana have also wised up to the most refreshing water source around. According to Laughing Squid, the elephants are so accustomed to their human visitors they’ve got no qualms throwing their trunks over the…

This Material Could Turn Greenhouse Gas Into Fuel

In the energy world, carbon capture technology is often seen as the Holy Grail: Imagine if we could just suck all pesky climate-changing CO2 out of the atmosphere. Scientists at the DOE are hot on the problem. They’ve just identified a new material that not only captures CO2, it helps convert the greenhouse gas into…

Retweets Kinda are Endorsements if You’re Retweeting ISIS

You can claim your retweets aren’t endorsements, but if you’re retweeting known terrorists on a regular basis, the feds may just use that as evidence to arrest you. A detailed report by the Huffington Post describes the myriad ways in which the FBI is ramping up its monitoring of social media, including, yes, busting people…

Explore the Surface of Mars With NASA’s Latest Web Tools

Most of us will never set foot on Mars, but thanks to NASA’s unceasing public outreach campaign, now we can all imagine what that might be like. To commemorate the three year anniversary of the Curiosity rover’s Martian landing, NASA has unveiled two new web tools that allow you to explore the Red Planet’s surface…

These Glasses Block Facial Recognition Technology

Facial recognition software is cropping up everywhere, so it was only a matter of time before anti facial recognition tech started to catch up. Naturally, Japan is leading the way. That’s right: Japan’s National Institute of Informatics is now developing ‘privacy glasses’ that make human faces unreadable to machines. An earlier (and way amazingly dorkier)…

Russians Blamed for Cyberattack on Pentagon Email Systems 

Russia is the leading suspect behind a cyberattack that prompted the Pentagon to take an unclassified email system offline last month. According to NBC News, that the email system has been offline ever since. The breach occurred around July 25th and affected about 4,000 military and civilian personnel who work for the Joint Chiefs of…

Astronauts Will Eat Space Lettuce for the First Time Next Week

In a rather science fictional moment, the Expedition 44 crew members on the International Space Station are about to eat the very first space crops. On Monday, a batch of red romaine lettuce will be harvested from the Veggie plant growth system on the ISS orbiting laboratory. Cosmically delicious. It’ll probably be the most scientific…

Boozy Ice Cream Is the Best Ice Cream

Booze and ice cream. Two of humanity’s greatest inventions, so why not combine them? As I discovered on a weekend trip to San Antonio recently, you can, and it’s magical. And while boozy ice cream is typically made with gelatin, if you’re willing to put in a little extra leg work, yours can be 100%…

New Anglerfish Proves Deep Sea Life is Just as Hideous as Ever

The deep ocean is home to some of the ugliest creatures imaginable, so this newly discovered anglerfish, which looks like a radioactive turkey leg with a spiny mouth face, is fitting in just swimmingly. The creature, which has been placed in the genus Lasiognathus, was discovered in the northern Gulf of Mexico 5,000 feet beneath…

‘Tidal Fence’ Will Harness the Power of the Surf

The ocean could be a boundless source of cheap energy, if only we could figure out how to tap it. A British startup has just announced an intriguing new idea: A long fence of shallow water turbines that would soak up the power of tides as they roll toward the beach. According to Kepler Energy,…

Ancient Humans Had More DNA Than We Have Now

Our ancestors weren’t blessed with smartphones, WiFi and Amazon Prime, but for what it’s worth they did have a little extra DNA. According to a study published today in Science, Homo sapiens have shed about 40.7 million base pairs of DNA since migrating out of Africa nearly two million years ago. The human genome’s 3…