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Instagram Has 80 Million More Users Than Twitter, Yay 

Instagram announced huge growth numbers that show more than 100 million people have joined the app in the last nine months. Twitter? Not so much. In a post, the Facebook-owned Instagram celebrates the 400 million active user milestone and points out that 75% of their community live outside the U.S. It also highlights big names…

Making a crystal chandelier is such a beautifully complicated process

Making and bending and shaping crystal into what you want it to be looks like so much fun. The piping hot crystal (which is made from a mixture of silica sand, lead, potash and other ingredients) is heavier and more sparkling than glass and glows this vibrant hue that doesn’t look like it’s from this…

Woman Fools Local News Into Believing She Crossed a Watermelon With a Tomato, So We Identified What It Is for Them

A woman in Kansas claimed she crossed a watermelon with a cherry tomato plant in her backyard garden to create a “mystery fruit” and the local news was on it—and baffled. Don’t worry guys, we’re here to help. Kansas woman Sherri Miller contacted her local news station yesterday to alert them to the appearance of…

Despite a Constant Plague of Gremlins, This Lady Earned 104 Aviation Records

Everyone has heard of the daring Amelia Earhart, but her British piloting peer Sheila Scott did her part to bust boundaries for ladies in aeronautics. Along with her numerous speed records and first flights, Scott helped NASA prove it could use satellites to track the location of airplanes. In November 1929, all 117 female pilots…

A small federal program that sends fresh fruits and vegetables to the lowest-income schools for snack time has become the site of a large food fight. Politico details the efforts of the lobbies for canned, frozen, dried, and even the beef jerky lobby (yes, it exists) to get a piece of the pie.

The 19 Worst Movies Mystery Science Theater 3000 Ever Riffed

Although Mystery Science Theater 3000 was dedicated to making fun of bad movies, not all the movies the show featured were truly awful. Many were merely crappy, but some of them were so ineptly made, so heinous, so unwatchable that trying to imagine viewing them without Joel, Mike and the ’Bots is terrifying. Here are…

How does 45 layers of bulletproof glass stand up against a firing RPG?

Can 45 layers of bulletproof glass—45 layers that combine to make a 16-inch thick bullet stopping wall, mind you—survive against a RPG-7 rocket launcher? The idea is to find out if it’s possible to use bulletproof glass to armor a tank against anti-tank weapons such as a RPG. Crash Zone did the test and though…

Print Is Back and It’s Trouncing E-Book Sales

Print is not dead. Actually, it’s e-books that are having a rough time right now. The Association of American Publishers says e-book sales slumped about 10 percent in the first five months of 2015. This could be a sign that more people are returning to books with binding, or that more people are hybrid readers,…

Prometheus 2 Won’t Connect to Alien, but Prometheus 4 Might. Wait, What?

When Ridley Scott’s Prometheus hit theaters, it was polarizing for a bunch of reasons. Some of the biggest were its connections to Alien, which created more questions than they answered. The connections, of course, came in the form of the reveal of who was in that Space Jockey suit (the mysterious Engineers) and eventually a…

What’s the Best Way to Tie Your Shoes? Physics May Have the Answer.

The most common mistake when tying your shoelaces is accidentally making a weaker granny knot instead of the stronger square knot. Now, physics can help you tie the perfect knot that stays tight no matter what. While it is well-known that any knot’s strength depends on its configuration, nobody really understands specifically why this should…

The Drivers of SF’s Tech Buses Are Paid So Little They’re Forced to Live in Cars

The buses that shuttle San Francisco tech workers to and from their Silicon Valley jobs each day have been blamed for displacing longtime residents. In a heartbreaking twist, the drivers of those buses are paid so little that they, too, have been priced out of San Francisco–and some of them must live in their cars.…

Here Are Some Essential Survival Skills We’ve Lost From Our Ancient Ancestors

The basic structure of the human brain has remained essentially unaltered for tens of thousands of years, but the information processed within it has changed dramatically over time. Today, we require an entirely new set of skills to get by, but at the expense of our ancient know-how. Here are some essential skills used by…

The Cheater-Catching Service Amber Rose Shills on Instagram Ripped Me Off

Celebrities promote stuff on Instagram all the time, from waist trainers to skinny teas to DIY teeth whitening systems. Products rarely look good, but with Amber Rose’s recent plugs for a sketchy background check website, we’ve reached a dismal new rung of vacuous shilling. Rose is a prolific Instagram hawker, and right now, she’s mostly…

How a Futuristic Super-Assassin Deals With Obnoxious Coworkers

Koko Martstellar, the assassin-turned-brothel-owner, has starred in two futuristic adventure novels thus far, Koko Takes a Holiday and Koko the Mighty. But what was she like back when she was just a struggling young assassin? Here’s an exclusive look at a short story from the early days of Koko. THE MEAT CLOCK By Kieran Shea…

Speed Across Jakku in This Awesome Star Wars Virtual Reality Demo

Now this is awesome. It’s only a scant few months before we get to see Rey race across the sands of Jakku in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But why wait when you can do it yourself with this awesome little VR experience? The nifty little “360 degree experience” was just released on Star Wars’…

These are the ingredients and additives inside your favorite foods

Eating a bag of chips? Delicious right! Great snack. But what you’re really eating are all these weird powders and difficult to pronounce additives and manufactured colors and sticky glue goop. This photo series for the book Ingredients by Dwight Eschliman and Steve Ettlinger reveals what’s inside your favorite foods and displays them each in…

Minority Report Shows Us a World Where the “Smart City” Is Real

The new FOX series Minority Report debuted on Monday, and it promises to be a crazy future tech playground — though whether the plots can sustain the amazing worldbuilding remains to be seen. Set 20 years after the events in the movie Minority Report, the series maintains many of the original touches that came straight…

Facebook and Oculus Will Bring Insane 360-Degree Video to Your News Feed

Working with its recently acquired Oculus VR division, Facebook will soon bring short, immersive, 360-degree videos to your News Feed. That lets you look in any direction within an image, as though you were really there. It’s Facebook’s first project with Oculus to bring VR-like technology to the main service. How will it work? Simply…

Hackers Stole 5.6 Million Sets of Federal Employee Fingerprints 

The Office of Personnel Management hack keeps getting worse. We already know over 21.5 million federal employees had their personal information hijacked from the OPM’s servers. And now the government agency admits that 5.6 million federal employees had their fingerprints stolen. Wired confirmed that OPM’s tally for compromised fingerprints is a lot higher than previously…

It Takes Just Seven Welds to Assemble the Newest Orion Spacecraft

With enough ingenuity, nearly anything is possible. Engineers on NASA’s Orion crew module have found ways to cut down the number of main weld-points from 33 to just 7 in the latest prototype, dramatically reducing mass by the equivalent of several astronauts. Engineers practiced on a full-scale barrel piece in August before starting manufacture on…