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Turn Your New 3DS Into a Retro Game & Watch With This Faceplate

If you follow the New Nintendo 3DS’ family tree back far enough, you’ll eventually end up at a primitive black and white handheld device called the Game & Watch that you can now pay homage to with a functional 3DS faceplate from Columbus Circle. The faceplate is kind of like going out trick or treating…

A New Migration Record for Blue Whales, and Why it’s Important

In 1998, researchers photographed and collected DNA from a female pygmy blue whale off the coast of the Galapagos Islands. Eight years later, another team did the same with a similar-looking whale in the waters off Chile. Turns out, it was the same whale. Here’s Annick Laurent, for Science: That means Isabela (named after the…

Google Is Finally Divorcing from Google+ Accounts

The oft-mocked Google+ is getting stripped of features that’ll be incorporated elsewhere into the Googleverse. Google has decided to “move some features that aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience out of Google+,” according to a post on its official blog today. That includes Google+ Photos elements being phased into the Photos app, and location…

How a New Spacesuit Will Help Us Live on Mars

Amy Ross is an engineer who has been designing and building new spacesuits for NASA since the ‘90s. We sat down with her to find out what the spacesuits of the future will look like, and what we need to do before our spacesuits can let us live our lives on Mars—and maybe beyond. Top…

Research Funding and Sexual Cynicism on Masters of Sex

The book is out, and the reviews are rolling in. Masters of Sex opens this week with Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson reading each other the spectacular praise from the “new books” pages of medical journals and getting really hot about it. Bill thinks this is the triumph that will finally let their sex research…

Fastest AT Ever, Soft Undies, No More Joshua Trees: What’s New Outside

A masochist just ran the entire 2,189 miles of the Appalachian Trail in just 46 days. Another one just did 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. For the rest of us, Patagonia’s got crazy-soft new base layers and MSR has a portable filter that’ll make clean water out of sewage. More goes…

Leading Experts Sign an Open Letter Calling For a Ban On AI Weapons

More than a thousand prominent thinkers and leading AI and robotics researchers have signed an open letter calling for a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.” The letter, which was put together by the Future of Life Institute, was recently presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires,…

SF Crime Is So Bad Police Need Quad Bikes That Transform Into Jet Skis

Cops on Segways are so 1993 and no one takes them seriously. That’s why San Francisco now has cops on quadskis, the ATV that turns into a jet ski that turns whoever’s riding it into a kind of poor man’s James Bond. And at least one of them is being used to patrol the San…

These Videos Show All the Changes Ever Made to the Star Wars Trilogy

Even before George Lucas created his Special Editions, the filmmaker was tinkering with Star Wars. Case in point, if you saw the 1977 original in 1977, it didn’t have an “Episode” or even a title beyond “Star Wars.” That was added in 1981 and ever since then, the changes haven’t stopped. In a series of…

Miniature BTTF II Hoverboard and DeLorean Toys That Really Float

You still can’t actually ride them, but Kids Logic is the first toymaker that can legitimately claim to sell floating hoverboards—even if they’re one-sixth the size of the real thing, and only work over a special magnetic pad. Recently revealed at Kids Logic’s booth at the Ani-Com and Games convention in Hong Kong, the hoverboards,…

The 15 Most Ridiculous Badasses From Warhammer 40K

Yes, Warhammer Fantasy was home to many ridiculously badass heroes and villains. But Warhammer 40k, its sci-fi sister game set in a grim darkness where there is only war? Basically, the entire universe is made up almost solely of over-the-top buttkickers. Here’s just 15 of some of its most ludicrously badass characters. https://gizmodo.com/the-9-most-ridiculous-badasses-of-the-warhammer-fantasy-1716520822 Quick note…

Oh No, an App That Makes It Easy To Shoot Your Own Music Videos

Have you ever watched a music video for a popular song and thought you could’ve done a much better job? Much to the chagrin of all your social media followers, with Triller, a new app for iOS, you can easily shoot and share your own version—no editing skills required. The app lets you select part…

Millions of landmines remain strewn across Angola, remnants of the country’s long civil war. Remarkably, some elephants have learned to sniff out and avoid these hazards, and even alert an entire herd to the danger. Intrigued, the U.S. Army is now testing the ability of elephants to detect chemicals found in landmines—and they’re passing with…

Android Vulnerability Lets Hackers Control Your Phone With One Text

The best defense against any of your gadgets becoming flooded with malware has always been personal vigilance. “Hmm, this app looks sketchy and is from a third-party app store I’ve never heard of. NOPE!” But a new vulnerability, discovered by security experts at Zimperium, can attack your phone with just a text. According to Zimperium…

Here’s the Weird Reason You Get Tartar On Your Teeth

Your body isn’t a finely-tuned machine. It’s a reinforced pile of goo that spends its day trading off costs and benefits. One of those costs is the tartar building up on your teeth because of the surprising source of your saliva. Calcium, and fossilized bacteria, build up on your teeth every day in tartar. (Before…

Video: Crazy semi truck jumps off a ramp and soars into the air

I don’t even think Optimus Prime would dare try and jump off of a dirt ramp. And yet daredevil Gregg Godfrey did with his non-Transformer semi or semi-trailer or big rig or transport or articulate lorry (depending on where you’re from). He set a new record for jumping a semi truck at 166 feet which…

Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking Call for Ban on Autonomous Military Robots

There’s no question that the age of autonomous killing machines is upon us. But some very smart and very influential people would like to turn back the clock. Over 1,000 people from the worlds of tech, space travel, computing, and mathematics have signed an open letter calling for an end to the autonomous weapons arms…

Chief Keef’s Hologram Performances Keep Getting Shut Down 

On Saturday night, police cut power at a concert in Hammond, Indiana, to censor a holographic performance by hip hop artist Chief Keef. The Guardian reports that Chief Keef had just started performing at Craze Fest when police pulled the plug. He wasn’t really there, though. He was performing remotely from California, and appeared to…

The Milky Way Over Yellowstone is Impossibly Beautiful

These photographs of Yellowstone National Park by Dave Lane are so gorgeous it’s difficult to believe they’re from real life. The Abyss Pool in Yellowstone National Park. Image credit: Dave Lane Lane photographed the Abyss Pool in Yellowstone National Park just after a storm had passed the area — you can catch the hint of…

Before the Internet, This Archaic Machine Is How Photos Were Transmitted

Well before the internet made it a breeze to instantly send a photo from one side of the world to the other, this ancient-looking machine, the United Press International UPI Model 16-S, scanned black and white photos and sent them across the globe via phone lines. Used by news agencies from the early 1970s all…