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Sony Plans to Take Over Toshiba’s Image Sensor Division

Sony has confirmed that it’s currently in negotiations to agree the terms with which it will take over Toshiba’s CMOS image sensor business. The move will see Sony boost its already impressive image sensor division. The takeover of Toshiba’s sensor business will see it acquire fabrication plants, equipment and employee contracts in Oita, Japan. Sony…

Digging New Wells in Africa Could Run Its Aquifers Dry Way Too Soon

The digging of wells in Africa has often been thought of as the solution to helping rural women walking to get water, but they may cause more harm than good. NGOs often punt the digging of wells as the solution to the long distances women in rural areas travel to collect water. These wells do…

Drone Crash Kills Power to Hundreds of LA Residents

Drones: beloved by amateur photographers, scourge of air traffic controllers and firefighters nationwide. Now, you can add power companies to that list. According to the LA Times, a drone crashed into wires lining Larrabee Street and Sunset Boulevard about 1:15 Tuesday afternoon, knocking one of the wires to the ground and cutting power to nearly…

If you ordered a Nexus 6P, and it hasn’t shown up, good news: per Phandroid, Google knows some shipments are delayed, and it’s giving $25 refunds to dry your gadget tears. [Phandroid]

The Library of Congress’s New DRM Rules Are a Victory For Digital Freedom

Copyright law (and therefore DRM, the software companies can use to lock down their products) is controlled by the Library of Congress. Every three years, the Librarian makes decisions on certain critical exemptions. This time around, it looks like they’ve got things right. The rules specifically cover Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,…

The Wayback Machine Is Getting a Search Engine

The Wayback Machine is knowledge storage on a colossal scale: maintained by the Internet Archive, it’s a repository of how everything looked on the internet in the past. But the biggest libraries are the hardest to organize, which is why $2 million is being spent to give the Wayback Machine its very own Google. The…

Dusting the Sky With Diamond is the Latest Crazy Scheme to Cool the Planet

Geoengineering — hacking Earth’s climate system to reverse global warming — often sounds a bit preposterous, whether we’re talking about deploying giant space mirrors or dumping a bunch of iron filings into the ocean. The latest proposal? Dusting the stratosphere with billions of dollars worth of powdered diamond. Yes, you heard that right. It might…

This Week On Blindspot, An App From The Evil Dark Web Will Make You Dead

On Blindspot, NBC introduces its viewing audience to the perils of the Internet! Punk hackerz, dangerous apps made in Hackathons, and words like “blockchain,” “database,” and “Perl” are invoked to explain how The Online is a scary place. But don’t worry, you’re not watching The Big Bang Theory—we still get our meatspace machine gun battles.…

A Reptile With No Penis Just Solved a Baffling Scientific Mystery

The tuatara isn’t actually a lizard. It’s the last survivor of a 250 million year old group of reptiles that mostly went extinct with the dinosaurs. It doesn’t have a penis, and ironically, that’s made it a linchpin for understanding how penises evolved in vertebrates. The tuatara’s penis-less state stands out because the other descendants…

HTC One A9 Review: An iPhone Only In Looks

Let me be blunt. If I lost my iPhone a week ago and needed a new one, I would’ve bought the HTC One A9. It looks great, and upon first glance, works pretty great, too. But I didn’t lose my iPhone, and the A9 is now more expensive than I thought it was. The newest…

How Leatherman President Ben Rivera Designs Your Multitools

You likely have one of Ben Rivera’s designs in your pocket or on your keychain right now. If not, he’s hoping to put one there. This is where Leatherman came from and where it’s going with new, wearable tools like the Tread. IndefinitelyWild: Who are you and what do you do at Leatherman? Ben Rivera:…

This Clever Short Film Reveals the “Truth” About Crop Circles

In Chris Thomas’ deadpan sci-fi comedy Cropped, a brassy, jaded British tour guide runs afoul of her latest group, who aren’t afraid to admit their love of all things extraterrestrial. Naturally, there’s a twist … and it’s not what you’ll expect. Here’s the official description: Cropped is about a group of UFO enthusiasts who clash…

Ancient Greek Warrior’s Tomb Yields Eye-Popping Treasures

An American husband-and-wife team working in Greece has uncovered the 3,500-year-old remains of a prominent ancient warrior who was buried alongside an assortment of riches. It’s being called the most important discovery made in continental Greece in over 65 years. The undisturbed tomb, found in southwestern Greece by University of Cincinnati archaeologists Sharon Stocker and…

What Is CISA?  

The Senate just passed a cybersecurity bill that won’t do shit to prevent hacks. What it will do is help the government spy on its citizens. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) passed Senate today with a vote of 74-21. All five amendments proposed to water down the bill’s broad language and spying permissions failed,…

Crazy Drone Footage Shows a Huge Lake of Melted Ice in Greenland

The New York Times posted a story today about Greenland’s melting ice, which could add another 20 feet to global sea levels. To give us the real scope, they used video shot by a drone, capturing a huge lake of meltwater that’s one of many. It’s stunning, worrying, and strangely beautiful. (Mostly really worrying.) We…

Take the Particle Physics Personality Quiz To Find Your Best Research Fit

So you want to become a particle physicist, but you’re just not sure which area of research is best suited to your temperament. Never fear, special snowflakes! Symmetry magazine now has a fun personality quiz* to help you find out your physics destiny. Unlike getting a PhD in particle physics, the multiple choice quiz is…

Where The Hell is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Force Awakens?

One person was conspicuously absent from last week’s final poster and trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Luke Skywalker is becoming perhaps the most central mystery about Episode VII. The only surprise is that it’s taken so long to start asking: Where is Luke? Warning: Some spoilers and a lot of speculation ahead… When…

Have You Ever Thrown Away Your Phone in a Fit of Frustration?

I’ve seen it happen a million times in movies. Fed up with work/love/undead sorcerers, our main character hurls his/her phone into a river/volcano/garbage bin. But do people really do this in real life? Have you? The one time I threw a piece of tech in a fit of madness, it wasn’t a phone and I…

The World’s Slowest Rube Goldberg Machine Requires All Your Patience

Don’t get too excited about stumbling across another video of a dazzlingly fast-moving, complicated Rube Goldberg machine. While this creation certainly has some clever mechanisms, it’s also billed as the world’s slowest—and that’s actually selling it short. Designed and built by YouTuber Bob Partington, watching a golf ball get from one end of this maze…

Watch a welder turn metal rods into a gunk of metal into an intricate door knocker

Here’s a really lovely process of metal working from Artismia: he melts down these basic metal rods into this metal glob and then stylizes and polishes and shaves down the glob into a beautifully designed door knocker. It’s surprisingly fun to see the entire transformation, like making art from nothing. SPLOID is delicious brain candy.…