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This Beautiful App Lets You See the Cell Towers, Wifi Signals, and Satellites Around You

You’re aware that your cell service comes from cell towers. And that your mapping app is made possible by GPS satellites. And that wifi signals deliver your fail videos. But the sight of that invisible world is breathtaking. This summer, a Dutch artist named Richard Vijgen released a video of a project he was working…

Installing This Temporary Basketball Net Is As Easy As a Free Throw

Finding a playground basketball hoop with the net still intact is rarer than spotting Bigfoot. But because there’s nothing quite as satisfying as the swish of a net after a perfect shot, someone has created a temporary one that can be easily installed on any regulation rim. A basketball net isn’t only about that swish…

This Lemur is Our New Mascot for Post-Thanksgiving Naptime

Can we all just take a moment to envy this red-ruffed lemur’s capacity to nap with the most exquisite of balance? Whatcha upto? Image credit: Mark Seton. When it isn’t serving as the mascot for overeating naptime, the red ruffed lemur (Varecia rubra) lives along the northeast coast of Madagascar. They’re exceptionally tidy beasts, with…

The New Trailer for Gundam Thunderbolt Has All the Space Jazz Action We’ve Ever Wanted

Recently, we got our first look at Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, an adaptation of the classic manga of the same name, that might as well be called Mobile Suit Cowboy Bebop. But now we’ve got an extended glimpse, and it’s making us yearn for more space jazz and space robots. CHECK OUT THAT DRUM SOLO.…

The Sinking of the Titanic Inspired Countless Movies and One Great Invention

The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 shocked the world and inspired countless movies. But there was one scientist who was inspired to come up with something no modern ship would be without: sonar. There’s some debate about exactly what influences shaped what was originally known as the Fessenden Oscillator. But we wouldn’t have…

James Gunn Just Shot Down a Tantalizing Rumor About Guardians Of The Galaxy 2!

Steven Moffat reveals why he wanted River Song back on Doctor Who. Mark Hamill talks about the legacy of Star Wars. There’s even more rumors about Game of Thrones’ worst-kept secret. Plus, pictures from the Flash/Arrow crossovers, and Chris Hemsworth wants more jokes in the next Thor. Spoilers Get! Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2…

The Amazingly Creepy Way Mars Will Kill Its Moon

It was a rough month for Phobos, as astronomers decreed—yet again—that Mars is ripping its lumpy moon apart. But apparently, Phobos’ loss is the Red Planet’s gain. After the satellite is torn to pieces, its fragments will fan out into a disk and 20 million years from now, Mars will become a ringed planet. That’s…

Fires Leave Picture-Perfect Scars in the Australian Outback

November 23, 2002: Fire scars cut through the green scrub to the orange dunes below in this view of the Simpson Desert, Australia. The background texture are linear sand dunes angling diagonally across the scene. The green mat of scrub vegetation have tied the dunes into place, tying them down from migrating across the desert.…

Strapping a Leaf Blower To Your Kid’s Power Wheels Is Yard Work Done Right

Buying your kid one of those pricey Power Wheels ride-on toys isn’t so hard to justify when you realize you can strap a gas-powered leaf blower to the back of it and have your toddler deal with the mountain of leaves on your driveway. Rakes are so old-fashioned. But why stop at leaf blowers? Why…

A Rare Glimpse of NASA’s Prettiest Research Airplanes Flying Together

Last week, residents of the Houston area had a rare opportunity to watch a historic aviation event: the formation flight of three WB-57 research aircraft. Why historic? Well, November 19th was the first time that all three of NASA’s WB-57s have been aloft simultaneously since the early 1970s. The WB-57 was developed from the Martin…

This Neural Net Describes the City It Sees in Real-Time

Take one neural network that describes what it sees in an image. Provide it with a webcam feed from the MacBook it’s running on. Then, wander around a city and see what happens. Here are the results of exactly that experiment. That is, more or less, what Kyle McDonald did to create this video. Using…

Phuc Dat Bich is a Massive Phucking Faker

The man claiming to be “Phuc Dat Bich”, the Facebook user who had been denied access to the social network as its “Real Name” policy had deemed him a fake, has revealed that the episode was indeed a prank. Real name Tin Le, a 23-year-old from Melbourne, posted to Facebook, explaining how his screenshot of…

Google’s faster-loading search result pages, part of a project known as AMP, are now scheduled to arrive in early 2016. But as well as cutting mobile data use and page-load times, Google will be making sure all its ads still get served up properly too.

2015 Is Set To Be the Warmest Year on Record

The World Meteorological Organization has announced that, according to the data it’s collected so far this year, 2015 looks let to have the highest global average surface temperature on record. In report published this morning, the Organization points out that it expects the temperature reach a symbolic high that is 1° Celsius above those recorded…

This Tiny Device Can Wirelessly Spoof Magnetic Stripe Readers

This humble-looking piece of circuitry, little larger than a quarter, can be used to wirelessly fool magnetic stripe readers into thinking you’ve swiped your card, by generating hefty magnetic fields that mimic the data held on it. Developed by Samy Kamkar, MagSpoof was developed as a way “to store all of your credit cards and…

A Portable Room-in-a-Box Lets You Move House in an Instant

If you regularly suffer from itchy feet, you might need a room-in-a-box like this. Designed to make it easy to move from city to city with all the basics you need to set up home, the Travelbox is an experiment in nomadic living. Designed by Stefan Juust, the concept was dreamt up to allow people…

FBI Links a Single Hacker to the Theft of 1.2 Billion Stolen Log-Ins 

The FBI has managed to link the theft of a frankly staggering 1.2 billion log-in credentials to a single hacker, after finding a Russian email address within reams of data obtained by security researchers. Reuters reports that documents made public by a federal court in Milwaukee reveal how the FBI has identified the email address…

Is Double-Dipping Actually a Health Risk?

What do you do when you are left with half a chip in your hand after dipping? Admit it, you’ve wondered whether it’s OK to double dip the chip. Maybe you’re the sort who dips their chip only once. Maybe you look around the room before loading your half-eaten chip with a bit more dip,…

These Ice Tools Are Made From…Wood?

Ice climbing is one of those niche sports that pushes the cutting edge of crapping yourself, and materials technology. Equipment has to be light, stiff, flexible enough for shock absorption, and cheap enough for dirtbag climbers. Sounds like a job for nature. Technical ice tools used for climbing waterfalls have traditionally been made of metal,…

The Midwest Snowstorm Seen From Space

If you’re in the Midwest, you probably noticed a lil’ bit of white stuff falling from the sky this weekend. Here’s how that looks from space. The image was taken by the Suomi NPP satellite’s VIIRS instrument on the morning of November 23rd. The snow shows up well, as do the light clusters from cities.…