PJ Smith

The Washington Post and Twitter users are reporting a massive outage of Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, and other services. Are you experiencing problems? Share them here! [WP]

A Self-Sustaining Indoor Garden System Made Me a Summer Fresh Sandwich

An aeroponics system called the Replenishing Tower is living in our kitchen, and it just gave me fresh-from-the-roots lettuce and basil for a sandwich. Fresh vegetables are within reach all year long in the future. For the uninitiated, aeroponics is a soil-free self-watering gardening system that you pretty much can’t screw up, even if your…

These Mirrors Could Give Satellites Their Own Dust-Busting Space Lasers

Anyone who’s watched Gravity knows debris is always worse in space. Even dust, which can meddle with satellite sensors and cause all kinds of trouble—until now. Thanks to science, lasers are coming to the rescue. The engineering folks at Fraunhofer have developed a unique thermic-piezoelectric deformable mirror that won’t break while focusing high-powered lasers. When…

Walk Manhattan’s Entire 32-Mile Shoreline In 25 Images

This past Saturday, people from all over the world gathered for an event known as the Great Saunter: a 12-hour walk around Manhattan’s perimeter. The 32-mile pilgrimage in the midst of spring’s bloom brought us through 20 waterfront parks, a surprise farmer’s market, underneath historic bridges, and within parting and welcoming gazes of the Statue…

Appliances Chiseled From Marble Are Surprisingly Elegant

Marble isn’t the first material you think of when it comes to home appliances. But the Milan-based design house Clique, which presented their its collection at its hometown’s design week last month, have turned the staid material into something surprisingly pleasant. Take the Cimmy ultrasonic humidifier—it uses opposing marble hues to give its steam the…

This Farmer Reinvented the Wheel to Build a Better Wheelchair

It’s one of the most stale idioms in the book: Don’t reinvent the wheel. But that didn’t stop Gilad Wolf, the Israeli inventor who found that comfortably getting around in a conventional wheelchair was nearly impossible. Instead, Wolf set out to reinvent his wheelchair wheels. Drawing from everything from farm equipment to the innovations at…

Watch As This Map Tracks the Whales Swimming Around Hawaii

Would you rather be swimming off the coast of Hawaii right now? You aren’t alone, and I can’t get you there—but your imagination and the Smartmine Whale Tracking map can! This interactive animated map was put together by the earth sciences and tech company GeoEngineers using data from the Cascadia Research group. It lets you…

Watch This Super Annoying Drone Harass Geese Like a Pro

The Goosebuster drone is one small Canadian town’s solution to a stinking problem: keeping hundreds of geese from leaving thousands of pounds of poop off the shores of their beach. Town counselor Bob Monette was in charge of ridding the waterfowl’s waste, and couldn’t understand why these poopetraters didn’t fear typically decoys, flee from barking…

There’s a whole host of improvements coming to Facebook Messenger version 5.0: photo sharing has a new, streamlined design, improving accessibility; there are new shortcuts for downloading sticker packs; and the kicker, recording and sharing video. For the moment, the update is only available on iOs, and will come to Android later this week.

The ghost of Brutalism is alive and well in Granada, where Mediomundo Arquitectos have drawn on the past without sacrificing modern technology, since it houses the schools of physiotherapy, nursing, podiatry, and geriatric care at Granada University. Despite its foreboding exterior, the entire building is ventilated naturally—one detail you won’t find in most Brutalist buildings…

Build Your Favorite Space Gadgets With LittleBits’ Awesome NASA Kit

The Mars Rover. The ISS grappling arm. An infrared light meter. You can build working models of all of those and more with LittleBits‘ new space-themed electronics kit, which is NASA scientist-approved and here to let kids experience simpler versions of the challenges that space scientists and engineers face every day. By following the kit’s…

If your Sony Vaio Fit 11A spontaneously combusted in the past week, you’re in luck: Sony just announced a repair program to replace your battery. Click here to check and see if your product is at risk. [Sony]

The Starship Enterprise Looks Great Decked Out In Midcentury Design

Subterranean captains’ chairs, rounded counters for flight monitoring, perfect pastels in the crew’s uniforms: Midcentury Herman Miller and Eames furnishings look awesome on the Starship Enterprise. Take a minute to check out these throwback posters and you’ll be daydreaming of Captain Kirk shaking you an out-of-this-world gin martini. [MattWileyArt via Retroist]

If you’ve been waiting for a compelling reason to start backing up your mobile photos with Google’s Auto Backup, it’s finally here: Gmail now has an “insert photo” button, giving emails one step access to your photo gallery. Sharing photos privately just got a lot easier. [gmailblog]

AT&T is currently experiencing a nationwide blackout in U-verse service. The company says the outage is “due to a power-related issue triggered by a third-party at our video hub.” [Mashable]

Verizon just announced it’s matching AT&T’s mobile plan pricing with its More Everything Plan: unlimited talk, text, and 10GB of data shared between four lines will now cost $160 per month. Check out the new pricing here. [Verizon via BGR]

Explore the Moon’s North Pole With This Gargantuan Photo Mosaic

Over the past four years the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was busy collecting photographs… 10,581 to be exact. And it was all for you! So you could explore the moon at a dazzling resolution of six feet per pixel—your tax dollars at work The total explorable area captured by the LRO spans 25% of the…

Mac Users, hop over to the App Store today and download a free copy of Microsoft OneNote.

Watch Pure Platinum Turn Into a Pricey 3D Portrait

No, this portrait isn’t made up of thousands upon thousands of magnetic sculpture beads. The metallic wonder’s lifelike contours and shimmer comes from painstakingly hand-placing 13,000 variably sized platinum beads. The Japanese jewelers, Platinum Guild International K.K, offer the work, and quotes begin a half million dollars. This is absurdly expensive, but not all together…

Retracted: Study That Found Acid Converts Blood Cells Into Stem Cells

The team of Japanese scientists who published a study trumpeted as a groundbreaking advancement in stem cell biology are now asking that it be retracted. The study claimed that by dipping blood cells in acid, scientists had discovered they could turn them into stem cells. But since its publication at the end of January, many…