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Would You Spend Two Bills to Monitor Your Personal Environment for Boogeymen?

Radiation, Nitrates, and Humidity; oh my! The Lapka Personal Environmental Monitor will be hitting store shelves late this year with a $230 price tag. It will measure the amount of radiation and number of EMF fields penetrating your personal space, while tracking the amount of nitrates (residue from industrial fertilizers) covering your salad, as well…

In elementary school, these eerie dioramas would’ve won you a trip to the child psychiatrist

We tend to stereotype dioramas as two shoebox lids crudely rubber-cemented today, but these miniature scenes here transcend base macaroni art. French sculptor Marc Giai-Miniet crafts tiny tableaus that are equal parts beautiful, industrial, and unnerving. If you look carefully, you can find scant signs of (doll) life, but these traces aren’t promising — imagine…

Ben Affleck to direct the Justice League movie?

Warner Bros. is desperate to find a way to do a Justice League movie to match Marvel’s Avengers. But now that Christopher Nolan has made it clear he’s not going to be dispensing Justice, who’s going to step up and be Warners’ answer to Joss Whedon? Rumor has it, the answer is Daredevil himself, Ben…

How Do You Count Parallel Universes?

Cosmologists have been thinking for years that our universe might be just one bubble amid countless bubbles floating in a formless void. And when they say “countless,” they really mean it. Those universes are damned hard to count. Angels on a pin are nothing to this. There’s no unambiguous way to count items in an…

Study shows that robots suffer from sexism

Robots of the future take note: Humans will stereotype you and assign you gender roles depending on how male or female you look. We know this because a new study conducted by German psychologists demonstrated that people will continue to apply their prejudices even to those objects that are completely devoid of actual sexual traits.…

A Multitool Designed For Any Bartending Emergency

Some might say the only useful tools on a Swiss Army Knife are the bottle opener and corkscrew. And for those people there’s now a multitool designed specifically for alcoholics that incorporates ten useful bartending tools into a single pocket-friendly enabler assistant. Annoyingly called the Bar10der, the $50 multitool (available come October) includes a muddler,…

A Timeline that Shows How Recent Science Fiction Has Changed Future History

You’ve seen lots of timelines of “future history” before — but they tend to be mostly drawing from the classics by people like Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. But over at The Awl, Jane Hu has compiled a future timeline, which draws heavily on recent publications like Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Wind-Up…

This Letter Opener Is Made From All Your Old Junk Mail

If there are any inmates reading the site, you might want to pay attention. Instead of polished steel or gleaming ceramic, this letter opener’s razor-edged blade is made from 100 percent recycled paper mixed with a water-based resin derived from cashew shells. It’s like a $45 prison shank that can be used to open your…

A disease that can literally scare people to death

When you’re startled by a loud noise or sudden movement, you may jump a little bit. But for people with a condition called hyperekplexia, also called “startle disease,” this reaction is so exaggerated that sufferers are often injured and even killed when they’re surprised. It’s also one cause of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Now,…

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Monster hunter spent 26 years seeking the Loch Ness Monster. Here’s his best photo of Nessie

George Edwards has spent 60 hours a week for 26 years of his life, scanning the waters near Urquhart Castle in hopes of catching the Loch Ness Monster. But none of that time has been in vain — for he believes that this is his best photo of Nessie yet. The 60-year-old monster hunter explained…

10 of History’s Most Beautiful Typewriters

Typewriters are intricate machines—complex little boxes that require an abundance of ingenuity to produce. They are often beautiful, and they occasionally find wildly imaginative ways to conduct the delicate dance between the hammers and the keys. So much of the way we interact with machines today—QWERTY keyboard, hello!—directly links to the innovations pushed forth by…

A first look at an upcoming issue of Dark Horse’s psychic espionage comic, Mind MGMT

Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics, here’s an exclusive sneak peek at this November’s issue of author/illustrator Matt Kindt’s psychic warfare series Mind MGMT. Here’s the rundown on Mind MGMT #0 and a brief conversation io9 had with Kindt about his plans for this byzantine comic. Well, lock up your dolphins, shield your brain, and don’t…

Synthetic Food, Smart Pills and… Kangaroo Butlers?

According to Athelstan Spilhaus, writing the comic strip “Our New Age” was his way of slipping a little subliminal education into the Sunday funnies. Each week the strip took a different topic—such as ocean currents or heredity or the moons of Mars—and explained in a very straightforward way just what made that area of scientific…

14 Things That Happened While You Were Blinking

A blink lasts just 1/10 of a second. So what happens when we set our camera shutters to the same length? We see the world that may have been when our eyes were closed. https://gizmodo.com/shooting-challenge-blink-5930874 WINNER: Uh Oh Canon EOS 1000D, 50mm, f1.8, 1/10, ISO 400. Set the camera on a tripod with a locking…

The Best of Recent Fantasy Literature: the Mythopoeic and World Fantasy Awards

Want to find the best fantasy books that have been published recently? Two sets of awards can help you out. The finalists for the World Fantasy Awards were just announced, and the novel finalists are Jo Walton’s Among Others, Stephen King’s 11/22/63, George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons, and Lavie Tidhar’s Osama. Read the…

Newton MV² Racing Flat Review: Hybrid Footwear That’s Halfway Good

Running shoes today tend toward two extremes. You can strap gigantic foam pillows to your feet, or you can don a super thin slice of rubber and pretend you’re running barefoot. (Wait, there’s a third extreme—those neon green Olympics shoes.) https://gizmodo.com/why-are-all-the-olympic-athletes-wearing-bright-green-s-5932768 Some middle ground between those first two types of shoe would be great for…

Nope, these birds are not lesbians

Female Laysan albatrosses have a habit of building nests together and sharing child care responsibilities. Does this make them lesbians? Scientists say no. Still, there have been dozens of news headlines trumpeting the discovery of gay marriage among albatrosses. Now, to fight back, two scientists have done a study on how often the media misrepresents…

Where Is This Beautiful Table Hiding an AirPlay Speaker?

If you hate the thought of having a set of speakers mucking up the minimal aesthetics of your home—but still love to entertain—this simple glass-topped wooden table doubles as an AirPlay compatible speaker. It’s just too bad the cost of keeping your electronics out of sight is a whopping $5,800. You’re probably wondering where the…

Guy Orders TV from Amazon, Gets Giant Assault Rifle Instead

Talk about a dealzmodo! DC resident Seth Horvitz bought a new HDTV on Amazon, but when he opened the peculiarly not-TV-shaped box, he found a $2,000 Sig Sauer SIG716 semi-automatic rifle instead, DCist reports. A mistake has been made. Assault rifles are completely illegal in Washington, but that didn’t stop the accidental delivery. Transporting a…