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Apple Said To Be Developing a Person-to-Person Payment Service

According to a new report, Apple is said to be in discussion with banks to build a person-to-person payment system that would allow people to transfer money between phones without the need for cards or checks. The Wall Street Journal reports that the service “would allow consumers to send payments from their checking accounts to…

Samsung’s New High-End Smartphone Chip Is Its First To Be Fully Integrated 

Samsung has just announced its new top-end chipset, the Exynos 8 Octa 8890. Like its Qualcomm competitors, it squeezes everything it needs into a single slab of silicon. In fact, this is the first Samsung flagship system to be fully integrated into a single chip and only the second to be based on the 14-nanometer…

Sound Waves Could Power the Hard Drives of the Future

Our need to store data is growing at an astonishing rate. An estimated 2.7 zettabytes (2.721) of data are currently held worldwide, equivalent to several trillion bytes for every one of the 7 billion people on Earth. Accessing this data quickly and reliably is essential for us to do useful things with it – the…

A Finished Version of Firefox for iOS Is Finally Available on the App Store

It’s been in the planning since the start of the year and testing since September, but the first version of Firefox for iOS is finally available in the App Store. Late to the iOS browser game, Firefox will face some stiff competition with most people having long since settled on Safari, Chrome, Opera or something…

Dumbass Crashes Drone Into Seattle’s Great Wheel

Dumb people doing dumb things with drones is not a new thing. But crashing a DJI Phantom 3 into Seattle’s Great Wheel is a particular kind of dumb. According to KIRO7, the accident happened sometime Wednesday evening. The drone hit somewhere on the wheel, and landed on the patio of an adjacent restaurant. No-one was…

iPad Pro Teardown: Big Screen Doesn’t Mean Easy to Repair

As is tradition with new gadgets, the cruel folks at iFixit have torn the iPad Pro from limb to limb for our entertainment and education. The Pro opens up like other iPads: heat up the glue that holds the screen in place, then use a suction cup to lift it off, granting access to the…

How to Exclude Certain Apps From Android’s Battery-Saving Doze Feature

You may have heard one of the new features in Android Marshmallow is Doze, a standby mode for your apps that slows down background processes and pings to the cloud while your device isn’t being used. While there’s no way to turn Doze itself on or off, you can exclude certain apps from it if…

A Rare Look Inside NY’s Secretive Data Centers

The data centers that run the internet are kept pretty quiet, and for good reason: forget cyberattacks, a few well-placed hatchet swings could kill Snapchat worldwide. But photographer Peter Garritano recently gained access to some of the exchanges and colocation centers that underpin the internet, and brought back these photos. The facilities he visited aren’t…

Brand New Terminator Concept Art Shows How Skynet Will Destroy Your City

It’s long been a recognized fact of existence that the best Terminator concept art is the Judgment Day concept art, or else art showing the war against Skynet in the future. So these brand new art pieces, showing Judgment Day in action, are pure apocalyptic gold. To promote the Terminator Genisys DVD/Blu-ray, Paramount commissioned four…

What the Heck is a Porous Liquid?

Scientists at the Queen’s University Belfast have just invented the world’s first “porous liquid,” and it’s being hailed as a major breakthrough. But what on Earth is it? Porous materials, as their name would suggest, are materials with holes. But we’re not talking swiss cheese or vinyl mesh-type holes. These are materials that look totally…

Super-Sticky Gecko Feet Inspire Strapless Bra Design 

Ladies, don’t say physics never did anything for you. Your days of awkwardly pulling up your slipping strapless bra during a night on the town—thereby ruining the illusion of glamorous savor faire—may finally be over, thanks to the physics of tiny gecko feet. Meet the latest designs from Kellie K Apparel, a start-up company with…

These Alternate Designs For Marvel’s Ant-Man Costume Are Super Cool 

I think most people were happy with the look of Ant-Man in this year’s film. But of course, that wasn’t the initial look. Just as he did with the Wasp, concept artist and Marvel Studios designer Andy Park has posted some alternate looks at the costume. He prefers the original one, but I think I…

Tell Us Your Nightmare Stories of How You Quit Your Terrible IT Job

Or maybe you got fired from an evil place and lived to tell the tale. Either way, we want to hear about IT transitions away from awfulness. When we last published reader IT horror stories, there were several epic comments about getting out of shitty situations. Even then, the nightmare often wasn’t over—many of you…

That Time a Mechanical Mosquito Hovered Far Above the Earth 

What happens when you pair a space station with a space shuttle and tuck them in orbit far above our planet? This oddly insectoid monster machine. On May 24, 2011, the Endeavour space shuttle docked with the International Space Station as it coasted approximately 350 kilometers (220 miles) above the Earth. The photo was captured…

The Real-Life Scientific Dilemma Behind the Latest Episode of Manhattan

On the latest episode of Manhattan, the physicists assigned to developing the gun model design for the atomic bomb hit a major obstacle that threatens to sink the gun model for good. It’s a dilemma ripped straight from the history books, along with the eventual solution. There were two different bomb designs developed as part…

The Star Wars Universe Doesn’t Call Leia “Princess” Anymore And Other New Force Awakens Reveals

By now, hopefully you’ve read this article about some of the crazy Star Wars rumors floated over the past few years. It’s perfect timing too because some new facts about The Force Awakens were also revealed today, bringing balance to the Force. Entertainment Weekly posted a ton of content Wednesday, and are teasing Luke, Snoke…

This Is How Autonomous Cars See The City

In a way, the pace of the self-driving car revolution will really be determined by a single technology: How quickly 3D laser scanners will improve until they’re as good as the old-fashioned 3D scanners in our human eyes. Lots of companies are working specifically on improving that scanning tech, also known as lidar. For a…

Image of astronaut Scott Kelly from the November 6, 2015 spacewalk outside the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA Contact the author at [email protected].

A Vast River Network Once Crisscrossed the Sahara

The Sahara is about the worst place on Earth to find water today, but that wasn’t always the case. Thousands of years ago, its sandy dune fields were lush and verdant. A new scientific paper helps explain why: the Western Sahara used to be irrigated by a vast river network. That’s the fascinating conclusion of…

What it looks like when a ballistic gel body dummy gets shot up with bullets

Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle. That’s what it looks like from afar when a fully automatic glock starts shooting its bullets at the ballistic gel dummy. And it’s almost funny how the gel moves! But then you look a little closer and see the true damage of the gun and it’s a whole lot scarier. The bullets…