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Why Apple Ditching Google Will Make Your iPhone So Much Better

After a frosty five-year relationship—and on the heels of the highly publicized Maps breakup— YouTube and iOS have filed for divorce. And you know what? It’s the best thing that could’ve happened for Apple, for Google, and most of all for you. https://gizmodo.com/apple-has-its-own-killer-maps-with-turn-by-turn-navigat-5917324 YouTube first fell into the iPhone’s sweet embrace back in the summer…

Ill teenager misses her family cat, so the internet builds her a virtual cathedral of felines

Because of her weakened immune system, 16-year-old cancer patient Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem has spent many months over the past year recovering in isolation at the Seattle Children’s Hospital. While waiting for a suitable bone marrow donor and receiving subsequent treatments, Maga found herself missing her beloved cat Merry. The hospital stepped in and created “The…

Would You Rather Know the Origin of Life or Watch People Run Faster Than Others?

People are making a lot of comparisons between the cost of the Mars Curiosity Rover—incidentally, the cost was all spent in our economy not sent to Mars in a bag—and other events and projects. Among them, the cost of the olympics, as shown above. https://jalopnik.com/why-its-great-we-send-robots-to-mars-and-why-people-sho-5932213 Would you rather spend more money on the science that…

SOG Dark Energy 214 Review: A Fistful of Daylight

Your toes are not sonar. Rather than pick your way through a darkened room by smashing them into every obstacle in your way, bring a flashlight. The Dark Energy 214 from SOG is bright enough to light any path and small enough to take everywhere. What Is It? A blindingly bright palm-size flashlight. Who’s it…

Pupil dilation could be “a subconscious indicator of sexuality”

Your pupils tend to dilate, or widen, when eyeing somebody that you find particularly attractive. Now, newly published research suggests that measuring pupil responses may be an effective way of assessing a person’s sexual orientation. Cornell Researchers Gerulf Fieger and Ritch C. Savin Williams summarize their findings in the latest issue of PLoS ONE: In…

What Will iOS 6 Use Its New ‘Bluetooth Sharing’ Feature For?

There has been a slew of news today about the newly released Apple iOS 6 beta, and here’s another interesting if mysterious, bit. There’s a new tab called “Bluetooth Sharing” under the iOS privacy settings. It seems the new OS will allow apps to share more types of data over Bluetooth than before. What are…

Toilet Paper: A Brief and Sometimes Painful History

Seinfeld excelled at criticism of the everyday. A few months ago, in a fine essay in the NY Times, Sam Anderson suggested that Roland Barthes was the father of pop cultural criticism and that we are all now cultural critics in the Barthian vein, “decoding everything.” Perhaps. But if Barthes gave us serious criticism of…

Deepest, Darkest Coming of Age Stories from Science Fiction and Fantasy

When it comes to discovering strange new worlds, there’s nothing like a young protagonist venturing out into a world where it feels like absolutely anything can happen. Many of science fiction and fantasy’s coolest stories are about coming of age — but coming of age, in the end, means losing your innocence and confronting the…

Here’s Exactly Where Mars Curiosity Landed—And the NASA Engineer Who Won That Bet (Updated)

A friend at NASA has sent us this funny document that reveals two things for the first time. One, it shows exactly where Curiosity landed yesterday. The accuracy of the actual landing site compared to the target is impressive!* And two, the NASA guys had a pool on where it would land, called Mars Madness…

Apple Is Removing YouTube from iOS 6

Apple has removed the YouTube app from the latest beta of iOS 6 and has confirmed to the Verge that the native app will not exist at all when iOS 6 officially releases to the public. The YouTube app, if you’ll remember, has been on the iPhone since the original iPhone first released. Right now,…

Should the World Be Scared of Huawei?

China’s Huawei is growing fast, quickly rising to a strong position in the mobile market. But as it pushes abroad, it’s facing a lot of skepticism from other governments and from direct competitors, in part because of its ties to its the country’s People’s Liberation Army. But are those legitimate fears, or are western companies…

Google street view is now available for NASA Kennedy Space Center

We promise today isn’t going to be all about space, but this was just too cool to pass up. NASA recently unveiled Google Street view for the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in recognition of the launch center’s 50th anniversary. Comprising 6,000 panoramic views of the KSC facilities, this location is Google’s largest special collection…

Bryan Singer claims his Battlestar Galactica movie can connect both BSG TV series

It’s been a long time since we had an update on the long-delayed Battlestar Galactica movie. And the latest bit of news is a whopper. Bryan Singer is claiming that his movie’s script, penned by John Orloff (Band of Brothers, Anonymous) will be able to fit in with both the 1978 original, and the reboot…

The Computer for the Apollo Program Used Rope Memory Woven by Little Old Ladies

If you thought the fact that an iPhone was four times as powerful as the on-board computer of the Curiosity Rover was unbelievable, take a look at the meager tech the Apollo Program used to get into space. The computer was so pitiful that the software of the Apollo guidance computer was literally hand woven…

Behold a scene from the nonexistent Shaun of the Dead 1990s arcade game

For Gallery1988’s upcoming Crazy 4 Cult show in New York City, Aled Lewis has combined the classic Nineties beat-em-up game Streets of Rage with the mid-Aughts self-aware zombie flick Shaun of the Dead. 50 prints will be available at the show. Click on the lower-right to expand the entire image; note the weaponized vinyl and…

10 Literary Devices, And Where You Can Find Them in Science Fiction

For thousands of years, humans have been creating stories — and for just as long, they’ve been coming up with words to describe all the tools and techniques that make a story work. But these “literary devices” don’t just show up in classical drama and Anglo-Saxon poetry. They also show up in today’s science fiction.…

How Samsung Maybe Copied Apple’s iOS Icons Just a Tiny Bit

On day three of the Apple versus Samsung patent lawsuit battle to the death extravaganza, Apple presented some pretty convincing evidence that Samsung copied its trademarked iOS icons. Look at the contacts icon above. OK so maybe Samsung’s icon is a horrible orange color and there are two binder rings instead of many, but it…

3 clips from ParaNorman show off the grotesque beauty of stop-motion zombies

You’ve seen plenty of ParaNorman featurettes and behind-the-scenes videos showing the wonder of creating a madcap supernatural adventure, using miniature sets and stop-motion animation. But what about actual footage? Three newly released clips gives you the first real taste of the creepy world which Norman and his friends live in. https://gizmodo.com/the-real-life-ghost-stories-that-inspired-the-stop-moti-5931571 And here are a…

Apple has released iOS 6 beta 4 to devs, with bug fixes and improvements galore. But… can it love? [9to5Mac]

An epic LEGO recreation of the Ringwraiths’ hunt for Hobbits

For a diorama depicting the Nazgûl hunting some hapless Hobbits, builder Xenomurphy transformed their moment of silent self-preservation into a full-blown nature scene. As Xenomurphy explains of this tableau: There is a certain artistic licence involved when I created a steep slope instead of the little hollow that Tolkien described in his book. But more…