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How 4K TV Works

Imagine 80-inch screens with quadruple the image quality of Full HD, plus passive 3D content that you’d consider actually watchable. That’s 4K TV technology. It could deliver a stunning home theater experience—just as soon as 4K-enabled TV’s like Sony’s latest begin to cost less than a Kia. https://gizmodo.com/sonys-monster-4k-tv-costs-more-than-a-car-5940793 But what exactly is 4K, and why…

Everything You Need to Know About Gravity in One Five-Minute Animation

All right — so maybe not everything, but this expertly crafted animation is easily one of the most lucid and entertaining introductions to gravitational forces we’ve ever come across. Too busy to watch the five minute crash course? (You’re not; just watch it.) Here’s the upshot: everything is attracted to everything else, but we’re still…

Nestle Is Playing Real-Life Willy Wonka

Goodbye everyone! I’m moving to the UK where I will eat my weight in chocolate. Coincidentally, Nestle’s just kicked off a campaign where it’s embedding GPS trackers in candy bars. If you unwrap one of six winning sweets, they’ll find you within 24 hours and award you 10,000 pounds and the rights to legally change…

How does this chemical vanish when light hits it?

Thionin is a compound that is often used in laboratories to stain specimens in preparation for observation. It is also a two-faced lying vampire of a chemical, that disappears when light is introduced. Want to see a glass split, vertically, between blue and clear water? Thionin is a strong purple dye that, when placed in…

Outlier Blazed Cotton Pivot Shirt Review: Can Science Save You from Sweat Stains?

It doesn’t have to be the middle of summer for you to sweat though a shirt. We’re humans, and we sweat. Sometime a lot! Often that means awful dark pit stains. That’s not supposed to happen with Outlier’s Blazed Cotton Pivot shirt—a unique anti-sweat textile designed so you can look like a million bucks in…

Everything You Need To Not Stink Up the iPhone 5 Line

You’re excited to get your hands on the new iPhone 5, but at what cost? If you missed out on pre-orders and don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars scoring an early unit on eBay, your only recourse is to find a line and start waiting. And with being away from your home (and your…

Meet the Machine That Is as Alive as You Are

Some machines make light bulbs, and some machines make clothing. Some machines make our lives easier, and some make them more complicated. Some machines silently putter along, and some machines roar. As you’ll see in the video above, the Jaguar XF is one of those roaring machines. Jaguar’s full model line-up is the result of…

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Futuristic New Music Videos by Cat Power and Baron Von Luxxury: Rayguns and Jumpsuits in the Desert!

Both of these new music videos are pretty fun — although neither of them is quite up to the standard of Christina Hendricks selling off her body parts in space. Still, they’re both entertaining little mini-movies, in which pop stars deal with zombies and space people in the desert. Both clearly filmed in a weekend,…

Watch Mob Doctor compare this teen’s hymen to the Death Star

No this is not a viral video — this is, in fact, actual dialog from last night’s episode of Mob Doctor. In this scene, an adult human doctor calls a teen’s hymen the “Death Star.” And then refers to their non-sex, sex times as basically Star Wars (specifically that scene where Luke impregnates the Death…

Ridiculous Home Theater Looks Like a Camaro Crashed Through Your Living Room Wall

Appealing to only die hard Gone In Sixty Seconds fans, this garish home theater system started life as a 1969 Camaro RS/SS that unfortunately now has to spend the rest of its life in someone’s tacky den. The only silver lining is that only one was ever created. What’s most peculiar about the setup is…

A downright gorgeous short film about doomed astronauts after a spaceship crash

This is Grounded, director Kevin Margo‘s trippy seven-minute film about the final moments of extrasolar astronauts. Margo — who works on visual effects for Blur Studio — tells io9 that this project took several months of planning and animating, including “one weekend with a forklift dangling an astronaut 50 feet high in the parking lot.”…

Russia Has More Diamonds Hiding in an Asteroid Crater Than the Rest of the World Has Combined

If you had more diamonds than the rest of the world combined hiding under an asteroid crater, would you tell anyone? Russia was happy to keep that knowledge a secret until now, finally revealing plans to begin tapping into a reserve containing trillions of carats worth of diamonds. It’s a treasure trove of unprecedented scope,…

This Portable Hard Drive Is Your For-Media-Hoarders Deal of the Day

Portable hard drives have never been called sexy. They’re simply not the most desirable gadget. You know what is worth lusting over? Ultrabooks. They’re skinny, tapered, and fast. They’re the sports car of the gadget world. But like sports cars, they don’t come with much space. The 128GB of flash memory in my laptop means…

Russia admits to having ‘trillions of carats’ worth of diamonds hidden in an asteroid crater

Back in the 1970s, the Soviet government discovered a rather remarkable deposit of precious gems in a 100 kilometer (62 mile) crater located in eastern Siberia. Called the Popigai crypto-explosion structure, it contains “impact diamonds” — massive mineral deposits that formed when an asteroid hit the area 35-million years ago. The Russians have kept it…

These Are the Tiny Gorgeous Guts of Apple’s Improved EarPods

Jony Ive and Tim Cook made a big hubbub about all the design that went into improving Apple’s famously terrible earbuds such that they might actually be usable. We might disagree about how much better they really are, but take a look inside the tiny EarPods, and you can help but squeeeeeee at their adorable…

One Step Closer to Building a Simulated Human Brain

The Holy Grail of neuroscience is a complete map of all of the synaptic connections in your brain — which could allow us to describe the very flow of information in the brain. And now, researchers working at the Blue Brain Project have successfully reconstructed a virtual microcircuit that is making it possible to predict…

Nintendo 3DS XL Review: Bigger Screen, Better 3D, Still Kinda Clumsy

When everyone’s already got a smartphone in a pocket, what good is a portable game console? Figuring that out is one of the toughest challenges for traditional game makers right now. Nintendo’s answer is the simplest and best: Just make it nothing like a smartphone. That’s worked so far. But the 3DS XL, Nintendo’s latest,…

First Glimpse of Russell T. Davies’ Wizards Vs. Aliens!

Russell T. Davies brought Doctor Who back from the dead — and now he’s making genres collide. We couldn’t possibly be more excited for RTD’s new show Wizards Vs. Aliens, in which a boy wizard fights an alien invasion. And now, here’s the first glimpse, which is wrapped in with some footage from another new…

How can a small piece of copper prevent you from getting pregnant?

Birth control comes in all shapes and sizes, from the incredibly high-tech to the ridiculously simple. So if you’re worried about the long-term effects of taking hormones, or tired of taking a daily birth-control pill, there’s always another method of birth control that’s simple, cheap and effective: the Copper T. The only downside? It requires…