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This Laser Camera Can See Around Corners

How can a person see around a blind corner? One answer is to develop X-ray vision. A more mundane approach is to use a mirror. But if neither are an option, a group of scientists led by Genevieve Gariepy have developed a state-of-the-art detector which, with some clever data processing techniques, can turn walls and…

Apple’s New Smart Battery Case Gives Your iPhone 25 Hours of Battery Life

Apple has quietly announced a new official Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S. The case, which costs $100, will provide your phone with as much as 25 hours of battery life. The new case is designed and produced by Apple specifically for the iPhone 6 and 6S. It’s shrouded in soft-touch…

Peer Inside a Beautiful Model of a Spinning Star

It may seem like some kind of delicate flower head, but you’re actually looking at the results of a computational model which is used to predict what happens inside a star when it spins quickly on its axis. Developed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, this models depicts a star that’s about…

The Most Influential Universities, According to Wikipedia

There are many ways to judge the quality of a University: the results of its students, the research it produces, perhaps even the number of Nobel prizes it boasts. But how about using Wikipedia citations instead? That’s what a team of researchers from the University of Franche-Comte in France have done. In a paper published…

World’s First Ibuprofen Patch Can Relieve Pain for 12 Hours Straight

Ibuprofen is an amazingly effective and impressively safe pain killer. Now, researchers have created what they claim to be the first ever ibuprofen patch, that’s able to conform to the skin and provide a steady release of the drug for up to 12 hours. A collaboration between scientists at the University of Warwick in the…

Sony’s new PlayStation Messages app is the messaging companion to its PlayStation app—the equivalent of Messenger to Facebook—for all those times you only want to talk to PlayStation-based friends.

This Tiny Wireless Temperature Sensor Is Powered Only By Radio Waves

This minuscule chip can measure the temperature wherever it’s placed—and it never needs a battery, because it’s powered by the radio waves from the same wireless network that it uses to communicate. The sensor, which is a tiny 2 millimeter square weighing just 1.6 milligrams, communicates the temperature it records to a dedicated router nearby.…

Playing With a Heavy Industrial Simulator Looks Like a Lot of Fun

I’ve always wondered exactly who is buying Train Simulator 2015, because driving around virtual heavy machinery without causing accidents isn’t really my idea of a good afternoon. But if that software is running in a fully immersive high-tech simulator, I start to understand the appeal. YouTuber Tom Scott had the chance to visit Mevea Simulators…

You Can Now Authenticate Logins From Your Smartwatch

Two-factor authentication is the best way to avoid getting hacked, and Google’s offline-capable Authenticator app is probably the most convenient second authentication factor. With the latest version of the Android app, Google’s putting that convenience on your wrist. Compatible Android Wear devices can now run the Authenticator app, meaning you don’t have to fish your…

Kickstarter-Aided Study Finds Most Kickstarters Aren’t Scams

Ever since Kickstarter began funding light-up bathroom accessories, people have warned of the dangers of crowdfunding, and how it’s all basically a bunch of vaporware. According to an independent study of tens of thousands of Kickstarter projects, the numbers aren’t all that bad. The study was conducted by Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University…

AT&T Is Rolling Out Gigabit Fiber to 38 New Cities

AT&T has been offering gigabit-speed fiber internet since 2013, but unless you got very lucky with the internet genie, you probably haven’t been in the service area. Starting today, 38 cities will have the chance to download their Steam games really quite fast. The pilot version started in Austin two years ago, and is currently…

Neat size comparison video compares the size of spaceships from different movies

Whip ‘em out. Which science fiction movie has the biggest spaceship or station or cube thing or star planet? MetaBallStudios made this CGI video detailing the ships across movies like Star Wars and Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey and even included video games like Mass Effect and real life like the ISS to see…

This Philip K. Dick Tribute Is a Work of Mind-Fucking Greatness In Its Own Right

Philip K. Dick has had a huge influence on science fiction literature—but it’s pretty rare that you read a new book that manages to channel Dick’s paranoid, reality-warping mojo. So Black Hole by Bucky Sinister is a delight for all kinds of reasons. Spoilers ahead… Bucky Sinister has been a fixture on San Francisco’s literary…

Trump’s Plan to Fight ISIS Online Is So Fucking Vacant I Can Barely Blog About It 

Pumpkin-flavored arsenic marshmallow Donald Trump gave a speech at the Pearl Harbor Day Rally at the USS Yorktown in South Carolina tonight. After a day of rambling about banning Muslims, Trump offered some hazy suggestions for fighting ISIS’s growing influence online. “We have kids who are watching the internet and they want to be masterminds,”…

The Project To Monitor Bridges and Infrastructure From Space Is Growing 

A few months ago, the European Space Agency and the University of Nottingham described a new project that would use satellites to monitor aging, at-risk piece of infrastructure was at a given moment, right down to the centimeter. Now, more countries want in. Today Global Construction Review reports that the ESA project is in the…

10 Brilliant Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories That You Probably Haven’t Read Yet

Nigerian author Wole Talabi has posted his list of the 10 best African science fiction and fantasy stories of 2015. They include Afro-cyberpunk, a reimagined fairy tale, magical realism, and far-future SF. Definitely worth checking out! [via Metafilter and BoingBoing] Top image: Galen Dara Contact the author at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @CharlieJane

What Life Is Like in Beijing During China’s Worst Pollution Crisis Ever

The “airpocalypse” of smog swirling over Chinese cities has reached its most dangerous levels yet. Beijing issued its first-ever red alert today, closing schools and taking cars off the road. How bad is it? According to EPA guidelines levels are at 6: “Everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.” While the short-term effects of being exposed…

When Will We Finally Get To See Person of Interest Season 5?

Person of Interest is one of the best science fiction TV shows of the past decade—or of all time, really. So we’ve been waiting anxiously to see the fifth season, especially since we heard so much about it at New York Comic-Con. But we’re going to have to keep waiting. CBS announced its spring 2016…

What’s Your Favorite Tech-Centric Book?

Your fave can be a nonfiction book, or a fictional narrative where technology plays a big role. What should we be reading? I just started Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers, which combines two of my preferred topics: Victoriana and technology. I grabbed the…

Creepy, Beautiful, Helpful, Badass: Here Come Futuristic Robots From Japan

The four-day International Robot Exhibition just wrapped up in Japan over the weekend, and the wild machines introduced in Tokyo, one of the world’s biggest robot hubs, did not disappoint. The show attracted 450 companies and 5,000 non-robotic humans. Here’s a look at some of coolest from the show floor. RC Origami Cranes This remote-controlled…