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That Apple Car May Be Further Along Than We Thought

Apple seems to want a little piece of everything that could possibly be considered “technology,” and its most ambitious undertaking is its rumored autonomous vehicle—the Apple Car. And now, according to a report from The Guardian, the Apple auto hearsay is becoming more fact than fiction. Basing its report on documents obtained by a public…

Hobb Reveals His Master Plan In A New Clip From The Humans Finale

It’s not looking good for humanity’s A.I. creations in AMC’s Humans. They’ve been captured and at the mercy of Professor Hobb, and it’s up to the Hawkins family to come to their rescue. But just what does Hobb have planned for the Synths? Find out in this exclusive clip from the season finale. Set in…

The White House Interns Have Pretty Good Taste in Music

Mr. President, you have great taste in music. I know this because you have posted a few playlists on a newly-created White House Spotify account. You see? Barry Obama is just a regular guy who isn’t afraid to put Coldplay on a public playlist. If you wanna connect with constituents, you gotta use the socials.…

Why is This Block of Plutonium Glowing Like an Ember?

This block of plutonium appears to be glowing like a hot coal. Not a good sign! The glow is due to a property called pyrophoricity. A pyrophoric material will burst into flames when it comes into contact with everyday materials like water and oxygen. Plutonium has a high level of pyrophoricity—so much that it has…

DC Is Planning a Sitcom That’s “The Office with Superheroes”

At this point the announcement of yet another comic-based TV series is barely news at all, but this one is a little different: DC and NBC are working on a pilot for Powerless, a proposed sitcom set in the DC universe that’s being pitched as “The Office, but with superheroes.” All we know so far…

Seizurecore web 1.0 image-making service Blingee is shutting down. If you have a collection of overwhelming sparkle-laden bits of web kitsch, you’ll need to download your archive by August 25.

Deadpool: Paws Proves Deadpool Can Really Work Outside A Comic Book

The idea of a Deadpool novel is exactly as strange as it sounds: how can one of comics’ most comic-booky heroes work in a medium that’s so completely different? But what’s even stranger is that Deadpool: Paws actually works … when it stops trying to be a comic book without the pictures. Paws is certainly…

The Ghoulishly True (And Still Unsolved!) Tale of the Cleveland Torso Murderer

In the 1930s, a brutal killer stalked the streets of Cleveland, gutting and beheading his victims. Decades later, the butcher’s identity remains a mystery. In September of 1934 a woman’s torso, with thighs still attached, washed up on the shore of Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio. Her skin was red and textured like leather—indicating that…

We Cannot Allow These Awful Sliding Airplane Seats to Become Real

It’s easy to think of ways we could improve airplane seat design. It takes some sick creativity to think of how we could make it worse, though. But the world is full of sick people—like these dudes from North Carolina who want to put airplane seats on wheels and control them with an iPad. Please…

We Should Not Dismiss the Dangers of “Killer Robots” So Quickly

Earlier this summer, more than a thousand prominent thinkers and specialists signed an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous killing machines. Since then, a number of critics have condemned the motion, citing it as both dangerous and useless. Optimization researcher Toby Walsh explains why we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the dangers.…

Scientists Have Hacked Yeast to Produce Narcotics

Yeast, that magical microorganism that provideth bread and beer, can now make narcotics, too. In a much-anticipated update, a team of scientists from Stanford University has engineered a strain of common brewer’s yeast to turn simple sugars into opioid drugs. Last year, bioengineer Christina Smolke announced that her lab had coaxed yeast into producing precursors…

Lego Has Finally Officially Revealed Its New WALL•E Set

A few months after it was accidentally revealed by a UK toy store, and a few days after Amazon started taking pre-orders for it, Lego has officially revealed Pixar animator Angus MacLane’s Lego Ideas WALL•E set—including a brand new photo of the little robot. Available starting September 1 for $50, the 677-piece set includes a…

Those once-a-century food shortage events are about to get a whole lot more frequent. A new report from the US-UK Taskforce on Extreme Weather looks at what extreme weather events of the future are going to do our food supply and determines that by 2040, we’ll be getting up to three each century.

The Newly Proposed High Definition Space Telescope Makes Hubble Look Like a Toy

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will be “in many ways a hundred times” more capable than Hubble, isn’t launching until 2018, but already astrophysicists are thinking about its successor. They’re calling it the High Definition Space Telescope (HDST). That’s it on the far right, towering over both its predecessors. Here’s Ramin Skibba reporting…

How Would You Improve My Bare Essentials First Aid Kit?

This is my fast-and-light, no-backpack first aid kit for minimalist adventures. It needs to deal with emergencies long enough to get me, a friend or Wiley a few hours back to the car and to a hospital. How would you improve it? This is the second in an irregular series — Ask IndefinitelyWild. In the…

Incredible drone footage of a flowing lava river

It looks like a giant fire scaled dragon snaking its body across the scorched Earth. Or like the fire brick road that leads you into Mordor. Any way my imagination tries to spin it, the reality is that it looks awesome. And the reality is that it’s drone footage from Iceland of flowing lava from…

I Spent a Day on the World’s Most Pointless Transit System

The Detroit People Mover, a monorail forming a 2.9-mile, 13-stop clockwise loop around downtown Detroit, is Michigan’s longest municipal rail system. Since moving to Detroit five years ago, I’d ridden the People Mover (henceforth, the DPM) only on those very rare occasions when it was actually a convenience, like when I’d park somewhere for free…

Now That Fables Is Over, Is There a Future for Vertigo Comics?

Last week, the best-selling Vertigo series Fables came to an end with a special book-length final issue, and so did Vertigo’s reign as a top publisher of creator-owned comics. The DC imprint is down to just seven titles, several of which are slated to end soon, leaving the long-running Astro City as the closest thing…

The Blizzard Inside These Bluetooth Star Wars Snow Globes Reacts To Your Music

Late-August is a little early to start setting out your holiday snow globes, except when they’ve got Star Wars characters inside. But these aren’t just ordinary snow globes, they’re also Bluetooth speakers, and the blizzard inside gets more intense as your music does. Available in Darth Vader, Threepio + Artoo, and Stormtrooper versions, these two-pound…

The Awful Air Pollution in China Is Killing 4,000 People Every Day

The layer of thick smog that blankets many of China’s cities is not just making residents sick, it’s also causing premature death. Up to 4,000 people a day are dying due to China’s air pollution. A study by Berkeley Earth that has been accepted for publication by PLOS One took hourly measurements from 1500 stations…