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Brian Staveley Signs On For More Unhewn Throne Novels

We’re big fans of Brian Staveley’s soon-to-be-completed trilogy The Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne: his first two books have marked him as an author to watch. Now, he’s signed with Tor for an additional four novels. According to Staveley, he’ll be writing four standalone novels, and a couple of them will take place in the…

The Best Nerf Gun for Every Kid (At Heart)

As a kid, I strapped a Nerf gun to my bicycle so I could dive bomb the neighborhood kids, while traveling—I imagined—at five times the speed of sound. As an adult, I’ve carried a foam-firing blaster to no fewer than three jobs. But a funny thing happened last year: I realized my old guns weren’t…

How You Should Be Preparing for El Niño

There are people preparing for pretty much anything these days. Solar storms. Zombie apocalypses. And yes, there are even preppers who are getting ready for the gargantuan El Niño set to befall the US this winter. This is their advice. Harvest your rainwater Rainwater capture is often performed by simply diverting the flow of rainwater…

Telephone History Museum Destroyed in Recent California Wildfire

The JKL Museum of Telephony, dedicated to preserving the history of phones, was destroyed last week as one of the worst wildfires of the summer raged across the central valley of California. Located in the town of San Andreas, which was hit hard by Butte fire, the John K. La Rue museum contained thousands of…

Australia is the First Country to Get Tesla’s Powerwall Battery

That’s right, Tesla’s much talked about Powerwall — the battery that can power your entire house — will be available in the Australian market from late this year. Tesla, the company best known for its Model S electric sedan, is launching Tesla Energy in Australia, which will bring products including both the residential Powerwall and…

Fly Low Over Pluto in This Incredible Aerial Tour

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft took hundreds of images of Pluto this summer, and we’ve been getting them all back in one of the most glorious data dumps astro nerds have ever borne witness to. But for some of us, still images simply aren’t enough. We want to fly over Pluto, too, damnit! Thankfully, NASA understands…

Cute animation shows the different ways to make coffee

How do you make coffee? Do you buy it at Starbucks? Support your local coffee shop? Just pour a mug at work? Or are you one of those fancy types who make coffee by roasting their own beans and like, performing high-level science experiments with it? Here’s a fun little animation that shows different ways…

This is How Much the Ground Moved During Chile’s Massive Earthquake

When Chile was hit by a magnitude 8.3 earthquake this week, the very ground shifted. By comparing images before and after the earthquake with an interferogram, geophysicists can measure just how much and where the ground moved. An interferogram is a geophysical tool for tracking changes in surface topography over time. It can be used…

The Best Thing About Nerf’s Modular Dart Gun Is Buying Parts on Amazon

This is ridiculous. Nobody needs this much Nerf gun. But the nice thing about Nerf’s new Modulus blaster is you get to pick just how much you want. The $50 Nerf Modulus ECS-10 is actually a pretty decent blaster. It’s one of the quietest, furthest-shooting magazine-fed, battery-powered, flywheel-driven dart shooting designs you can get without…

This Touching Star Wars Fan Film Will Probably Bring A Tear To Your Eye

With all its rampant speculation and consumerism, we sometimes forget that Star Wars is all about wonder. About that feeling we got first seeing the movies and being transported to somewhere magical. Now, a new short film captures that notion and gives it a little twist. The film is called Summer ‘78 and is directed…

Sand Octopus Turns its Body into a Squirt Gun to Burrow

In another episode of “Cephalopods are Basically the Most Amazing Creatures on Earth,” today we get an inside look at the burrowing habits of the southern sand octopus, the pressurized hose of the animal kingdom. Unlike some of its flashier cousins, the southern sand octopus can’t change color. Instead, when it wants to vanish, the…

We’ll Be Bringing You Google’s Marshmallows (and Nexi?) on September 29th

I don’t suppose you’ve heard the rumors that Google will announce its new Nexus phones on September 29th? That seems pretty damn likely—because we just got invited to a Google event that very day. While the invite doesn’t have any smoking guns like “come see our new Nexus phones,” it sure does sound like an…

The Last Man On Earth Proves That Survival Doesn’t Always Have to Suck

I love a good post-apocalyptic tale. The Road, The Walking Dead, The Leftovers—these are all fine examples of end-times entertainment. But the problem with all these things is that they’re so damn depressing. Why does the demise of humankind have to be so sad? That’s why I was so pleased to discover the show The…

Galactic collision! The Hubble Space Telescopecaptured this beautiful look at NGC 3921, a pair of disk galaxies in the late stages of merger. These galaxies, both about the same size, began merging 700 million years ago, as you can see from the distortions, including loops and tails, caused by the merge.

The Best of Gizmodo This Week

The theme this week on Gizmodo was “survival”—how to survive a natural (or unnatural) disaster, the wilderness, the apocalypse, what have you — including, of course, Apple’s new mobile OS. Here are the highlights from this week. 23 Things You Can Do in iOS 9 That You Couldn’t Do in iOS 8 It may have…

The Most Popular Paid App in the App Store Is Gone

Marco Arment, internet pundit and creator of Instapaper, has decided to stop selling his wildly-popular ad blocker, Peace, for iOS 9. His reason? It “just doesn’t feel good.” But there’s more to it than that. Like many other entrepreneurs, Arment released his ad blocker on Wednesday, when the release of iOS 9 meant Apple mobile…

Watch a stone skip a world record 88 times across a lake

One of the two best feelings a kid can have is that immediate king of the world, I’ve got this life thing all figured out of learning how to skip a stone across a body of water (the other is the freedom of learning of how to ride a bike, I think). But that smug…

Voyager’s Iconic Shot of Earth and Moon Shows How Far Space Photography Has Come

Today marks the anniversary when NASA’s Voyager 1 captured both the Earth and its Moon in a single frame. For the first time, we perfectly captured the two celestial bodies we call home. In the short time we’ve explored space, some of the most “holy shit” shots we’ve taken have been of our Earth and…

This Is How Much Food It Would Take to End World Hunger

There are over 500 million hungry people in the world—but that number only tells part of the story. The other part of it is the amount of the actual food shortfall. So how much food would we need to make up the gap? There’s now an exact number. The latest International Food Security report is…

One of the Most Beautiful Airport Terminals Ever Built Is Being Preserved as a Hotel

The 1960s were a tumultuous decade–but by most accounts, they were a golden age for air travel. The TWA Terminal at JFK, opened in 1962, is a perfect example of that bygone era, but the midcentury masterpiece has sat empty for more than a decade. Now, it will be reborn. After almost 15 years of…