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Climate Change Is Setting the World on Fire

What happens when you mix record-smashing heat and exceptional drought? Fire! Lots of fire! But climate change isn’t just bringing more fires to our doorstep, although it’s accomplishing that quite handily. It’s making fire seasons longer. That’s according to a study published this week in Nature Communications, which shows that fire weather seasons have, on…

Molybdenum Is the Most Important Element You’ve Never Heard of

Too much molybdenum can kill you. Too little molybdenum can kill you. Never heard of molybdenum? You’re not alone. This is probably the most important element that no one knows about. Molybdenum, with its 42 protons and 54 neutrons, sits right in the middle of the periodic table being completely ignored. It’s not useless. In…

Save Wikipedia Articles to Your Phone For Offline Access

As ubiquitous as high-speed data connections have become, there are still occasions when you won’t have as much connectivity as you might like, mostly while traveling and roaming abroad. If you want some reading material to pass the time while you’re squeezed for bandwidth, the official Wikipedia apps for iOS and Android let you save…

What Will Daenerys Learn in the Next Season of Game of Thrones?

Get another teasing look at Neil Blomkamp’s Alien movie. Lego Batman casts its Boy Wonder. The Flash casts a wrestling star as a supervillain. Plus, how Grimm’s next season will change the series, an animated teaser for X-Files’ return, and footage from The Expanse, Fantastic Four and more. Behold, Spoilers! Neil Blomkamp’s Alien Blomkamp has…

A Paper-Thin Solar Panel Can Charge Your Phone on the Go

Solar panels keep getting lighter and tinier—good news for rugged on-the-go types who can charge their devices on the trail with sun-fueled chargers. And this particular solar charger on Kickstarter is so thin, you can slip it in your Lonely Planet while it feeds your phone battery. It’s called Solar Paper: 7.5 inches long, 3.5…

Got Loose Change? 104 Pennies Help This Simple 3D-Printed Toy Walk

Invented in 1981 by John W. Jameson, the Walking Gyro is a simple toy that relies on a spinning flywheel and centrifugal forces to take tiny, but steady, steps. Mattel patented the design, but never actually put it into production. And now that its patent has expired, there’s a free 3D-printable version that anyone can…

Watson Can Now Identify the Attitude in Your Writing

Taking a break from treating cancer and making cocktails, IBM’s Watson is now turning its attention to how people write. The supercomputer has been trained to judge the tone in people’s written messages—and can even give feedback about how to change it. The IBM Watson Tone Analyzer sifts through passages of text to identify the…

The British Geological Survey Is Recreating UK Towns in Minecraft

Someone at the British Geological Survey managed to convince a boss that engaging with the kids via Minecraft might be a good idea, so here we all are reading about accurate maps of West Thurrock, York and Ingleborough that have been built using existing national topography and geology databases. The result is a collection of…

This Super-Stiff Material Is Quite Literally Full of Holes

It might look like grey Swiss cheese, but this is in fact the first ever example of a new kind of material, which sandwiches a metal foam between two layers of carbon. The material, created by researchers from the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, is created in stages. First, the foam is made not by…

When you snooze an email in Google’s Inbox app, it will now work out the best time to remind you about it—so it might remind you of a restaurant booking an hour in advance, or about your flight the day before.

This Is the Other Side of the Sun

Usually you hear people talking about the other side of the Moon—but what about the Sun? Our orbit around the star means one side is out of view, but NASA’s Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory Ahead spacecraft has been collecting images of the side we can’t see right now. This image was captured on July 15th…

How Early Astronomers Managed to Measure Cosmic Distances

The solar system, let alone the Universe, is too big to measure by any conventional means. So how the hell did early astronomers manage to do it without all the fancy kit scientists now have at their disposal? In this video, Crash Course describes how the Universe got measured—from the Ancient Greeks figuring out the…

Windows 10 Will Kill The Installation DVD, Finally

If you’re one of those quaint people who still uses ‘physical media’ to install new versions of operating systems, Windows 10 could have a big shock in store for you: USB drives replacing the clunky old reinstallation DVDs of yore. The idea that Windows 10 would be shipped (mostly) on USB drives rather than traditional…

Thanks to short supply and finicky invite system, getting your hands on the (excellent) OnePlus One has always been a bit of a struggle. For the imminent arrival of the updated OnePlus Two, the company is overhauling its invite system, with much more stock on hand, and a long-overdue reservation list. [OnePlus] Contact the author…

This New X-Files Footage May Be Cryptic, But It Will Still Excite You

Come all ye X-Files faithful, and feast your peepers on this never-before-seen footage that aired during tonight’s Wayward Pines. It’s only 15 seconds, but dammit, I’ll take it. I WANT TO BELIEVE the new X-Files will be amazing! It kicks off with a two-part episode January 24 and 25, 2016 on Fox. Chills when the…

This Map Shows The Frightening Overlap Between Pollution and Poverty

The Enviornmental Protection Agency has a new tool called EJSCREEN, which lets you overlay the agency’s environmental data on a geographic map, along with layers of information showing poverty. The result is as depressing as you’d probably expect. The maps are color-coded to show poverty, and pollution (as measured by fine particle density). Grey is…

The Postmodern Weirdness Of Black Mirror Has Inspired A New Art Show

Black Mirror is one of the most important new science fiction TV shows of the past few years, helping to transform our ideas about the kinds of stories that SF can tell on television. And now, a group of artists has put together a Black Mirror-inspired show for Aperture in New York. Michael Famighetti, editor…

The Los Angeles River Will No Longer Be A Speedway For Terminators

You’ve likely seen plenty of footage of the Los Angeles River—in Terminator 2, Grease, Drive, shall I go on? But unless you’ve poked around the famous watershed in a kayak, or traveled the path that runs alongside it by bike, you probably haven’t seen it like this. Although most know the river best for its…

Only 81% of Seattle Kindergartners Have Been Vaccinated for Polio

“That’s lower than the 2013 polio immunization rates for 1-year-olds in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Algeria, El Salvador, Guyana, Sudan, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Yemen, among other countries, according to data from the World Health Organization,” Seattle public radio station KUOW reports. This in the same state where a woman recently died of measles, marking the first…

The Magnus Effect Is Why a Ball With a Bit of Backspin Goes Like This

Drop a basketball with backspin from a great enough height, and something rather interesting happens. In the video below, Veritasium’s Derek Muller explains the Magnus effect, and why the phenomenon can cause a ball with even a little spin to swerve so dramatically from its expected path. [Veritasium] Contact the author at [email protected].