Latest

There’s now an Outlook app for Apple Watch that lets you see full emails and reply to messages directly from your wrist.

Congress Had a Crazy Plan for Nation-Wide On-Demand Rainstorms

You have to love the optimism of the 1800s. There was nothing people thought they couldn’t do, including irrigating the entire United States by strategically setting fire to parts of it. For three decades in the 1800s, the United States government tried to plant trees. They wanted to plant them in a wide swath, stretching…

Mapping the Rising Poverty of the U.S.

Poverty is increasing in the U.S. A new series of detailed maps created by Justin Palmerplots its rise across the country. As Palmer points out, the City Observatory reports that the number of high-poverty neighborhoods in urban areas across the U.S. has tripled since the 1970s. In the same time period, the number of poor…

For a good long look at how 2015 could very well be the climate change turning point: Eric Holthaus’ “The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here” at Rolling Stone is well worth your time.

We May Already Know Who’s Guest-Starring in The Deadpool Sequel!

Yet another version of the Flash is joining The Flash. Elizabeth Henstridge discusses Simmons’ fate in Agents of SHIELD. Plus, teasers for Doctor Strange’s costume, crazy casting news for Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, and a Doctor-Doom-filled clip from Fantastic Four. Spoilers now! Doctor Strange During a presentation in Africa, Disney showed concept…

A New Wastewater Treatment Captures CO2 and Produces Energy Too

A team of engineers has developed a new kind of wastewater treatment that manages to capture CO2 and produce energy at the same time as cleaning water. The new system has been built by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder. Called Microbial Electrolytic Carbon Capture (MECC), it exploits an electrochemical reaction to clean water…

Even Simple Convection Can Look Beautiful

This looks like it could be a fabric print, but in fact you’re looking at magnified view of a phenomenon known as Rayleigh-Benard convection, as temperature differences drive the motion of silicone oil. Convection occurs when temperatures differences create subtle differences in density in fluids: less dense liquid rises but cools as it does so,…

Would You Eat This Space Lettuce?

It may look unnatural, but this is part of a series of experiments aboard the International Space Station that sees astronauts growing lettuce in space. Codenamed VEGGIE, the hardware see the vegetables take root in planting pillows that provide water and nutrients, while a special rig supplies them with red LED light in the absence…

How We Won the World Robot Soccer Championship

My team from UNSW Australia defeated team B-Human from Germany 3-1 last week to claim back-to-back Robocup SPL World Championships. Here’s how we did it. The competition involves fully autonomous robots, with no remote control, competing against each other in 5-on-5 soccer. Each team uses the same robots, so the competition is focused on software…

Help Put the Amazing Hiroshima Manga Barefoot Gen Into Libraries

Publishing company Last Gasp has an excellent Kickstarter project running right now: it’s raising $36,000 to print 4,000 copies of Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen in the original Japanese) into schools and libraries. Barefoot Gen is a manga first printed in the 1970s, and author Keiji Nakazawa drew on his own life to tell a…

Write Your Own Stories Based on These Public Domain Images

The British Library has used its flickr page to upload over a million obscure images that have passed into the public domain. It is an amazing collection, and I’m going to be featuring a bunch of them in the coming weeks. The aboveimage is from 1893’s The Angel of the Revolution: a tale of the…

SpaceX’s New Hangar Is Looking Good

SpaceX is taking over Launchpad 39A, the iconic pad at Kennedy Space Center that launched all the Apollo missions, and the first and last Shuttles. Things are looking good at the future launchpad for Dragons. To accommodate for the Falcon 9 Heavy rockets SpaceX will be using, the company is building a gigantic hangar —…

This Flamethrowing Helicopter Is Helping Fight California’s Wildfires

Water-bombing aircraft are pretty standard wildfire-fighting equipment. Helicopters that spew fire onto the forest? Not so much. Although flying around an already-burning forest with a flaming propane tank might seem counterintuitive, there is logic to the Apocalypse Now madness. Think back to your fire triangle: by burning tinder that’s in the path of the advancing…

Twitter’s in-Tweet Buy button, previously reservedfor a select few #brands, might be about to see some real action: according to a report from Re/Code, 100,000 merchants from the Shopify network will get access to the Buy button in the near future. Prepare yourself for some RT capitalism. [Re/Code]

Don’t Buy The $15 DVD Player App For Windows 10

Windows 10 doesn’t ship with the software to play DVDs. If you want to make that happen, Microsoft thinks you should spend $15 on a Microsoft DVD-playing app from the App Store. Don’t do that. It’s kind of a shame that there’s no built-in software to play DVDs on Windows 10 — one more thing…

Why CGI doesn’t actually suck

It’s popular to poke fun of CG and whine about the overuse of CG special effects in movies and wish for the old days when everything was done with practical effects but that’s not really the case. What’s great about good CG is that it’s totally unnoticeable, so many movies implement CG that you don’t…

I Love These Nonsense Signs That Don’t Tell New Yorkers To Do Anything

In our quest to keep our cities neat and orderly, our streets have become cluttered with signage prohibiting everything. No Stopping. No Parking. No Loading. No Unloading. How refreshing, then, are these official city signs which don’t really tell residents to do anything at all? The signs are by artist Stephen Powers, who has painted…

This Is How Much San Franciscans Hate Burning Man Now

Every year, San Francisco empties out during Burning Man week. Suddenly there are no lines at the cargo container ice cream shop. Nobody is wearing an “interesting” hat to make a statement about self-actualization. We are at peace. That’s why a group of comedians are crowdsourcing a Great Wall of San Francisco. I think this…

A helicopter closely chases a race car in this truly insane stunt

You see the word insane get thrown around on the Internet a lot. It’s a good word! But few things actually deserve the word insane. This stunt does though. Felix Baumgartner (the dude who jumped from space) pilots a Bolkov BO105 aerobatic helicopter that is basically having a movie car chase scene with a race…

There May Be Dozens of ‘Mini Moons’ Zipping Around the Earth

While Earth’s official Moonis busy photobombing us, a bunch of smaller upstarts are vying to become Moon #2. That’s right — Earth may have a rotating entourage of ‘mini moons’, and astronomers are determined to find them. “Only one is known,” Robert Jedicke said August 3 at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, according…