Latest

This Massive Solar Farm Shows That Some Things Can Grow In The Desert

China began construction on its first large-scale solar power station in August 2009. These striking before-and-after satellite images show the extent to which this solar farm has expanded in the Gobi Desert over the course of that time. These solar farms are located on the outskirts of Dunhuang in northwestern China’s Gansu Province. The image…

How This Simple Landscaping Project Quiets an Airport’s Roar

Two years ago in the Netherlands, artist Paul de Kort designed an 81-acre park near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. His assignment? To use nothing but landscaping to dampen the noise of airplanes. Such a project had never been attempted—and a crucial element of the design was discovered almost by accident. I live about 15 miles from…

The Portal gameplay in Lego Dimensions has those mind-melting puzzles

Besides an excuse to buy more building sets, the most exciting thing about the upcoming Lego Dimensions game is the gameplay caters to whichever characters you’ve chosen. Yesterday, at E3, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment released a new trailer for the game revealing its Portal level, and it looks like it includes the same kinds of…

A Life-Sized Terminator Can Be Yours, For Just $7,000

A while ago, Chronicle unveiled a life-sized severed Terminator head for you to put on your shelf. Naturally, they thought the next best step would to be to attach an entire body to that head and go nuts, which is why they’re now selling you an actual life-sized Terminator for a mere seven grand. https://gizmodo.com/heres-a-severed-terminator-head-perfect-for-your-mantl-1686732686…

Why Police Need a Warrant to Track Your Cell Phone Location Records

Across the country, a vigorous debate is taking place in federal and state courthouses about how privacy protections should apply to modern technologies. One of the most spirited issues in this debate is whether the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement to get a warrant to track a person’s location via their cell phone. This week…

This Fungus Was A Medieval Mass Murderer

St Anthony’s Fire was one of the things that made the Middle Ages a horrible time in which to live. People would feel a pricking sensation in their arms or legs. This would turn to burning pain, and the arm would swell and redden before turning gangrenous and dropping off. You were lucky if the…

Watch Humidity Power a Miniature Car

Summer is upon us, so it’s cool to know that humidity could weirdly be a force for good: Scientists have powered a tiny vehicle by using humidity as their fuel. That means evaporation could be an energy source for gadgets in the future. According to a study published yesterday in Nature Communications, a team at…

Watch a pilot eject from his fighter jet during a crash landing

Whoa. Foxtrot Alpha says that this pilot ejected from his Hungarian Air Force JAS-39C single seat Gripen jet as it crash landed. The nose gear in the fighter jet had failed the pilot and he was forced to belly land the plane. When the plane hit the runway, the pilot ejected himself before things got…

Noted Artist Pleads Guilty To Bank Robbery He Filmed Himself Committing

A desperate man driven to crime, an experimental filmmaker gathering material — or both? This week, acclaimed avante garde artist and former MIT lecturer Joe Gibbons pled guilty to robbing a New York bank, a heist he captured on film with the apparent intention of using the footage in an upcoming project. Reports the Boston…

One Actor Is A Hot Favorite To Replace Daniel Craig As James Bond

Robert Downey Jr. Wants the Hulk In Captain America: Civil War. Aquaman and The Flash may make cameos in Batman v Superman. Plus, the first clip from Terminator Genisys, Grant Bowler talks Defiance, more Fear The Walking Dead and Shadowhunters casting, and X-Files set pictures. So many Spoilers! Captain America: Civil War Mark Ruffalo says…

This Heart-on-a-Chip Uses Gravity to Mimic a Human Pulse

This small, clear block may not look much, but it uses some of the world’s most basic physics to accurately recreate the rhythms of the human heart in the laboratory. This certainly isn’t the first heart-on-a-chip to be created. But microfluidic devices like it have in the past required mechanical pumps or hand-driven syringes to…

Human Experiments: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Research involving human subjects is littered with a history of scandal that often shapes people’s views of the ethics of research. Often the earliest cited case is English physician Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796, where he injected an eight-year-old child with the pus taken from a cowpox infection and then deliberately…

You can now order an Apple Watch online then pick it up in-store using the company’s “Reserve & Pickup” system.

Showtime’s renewed Penny Dreadful for a third season. The third season will be nine episodes long. [Variety]

Watch This Lovely Profile of a TV Repairman Turned Artist

Bill Czappa is a TV repairman. But he’s no ordinary TV repairman: he creates sculptures from the discarded components and materials that he collects during his day job. This video tells his story. Czappa’s repair shop is also a studio and gallery, a space where he builds and displays his art as well as mending…

This Is Where Philae Phones Home

Earlier this week, the Philae lander finally woke up after seven months in hibernation on Comet 67P. And this is rather plain desk where the messages arrived. Well, what were you expecting? The European Space Agency released this wonderfully normal photograph yesterday, and it’s a lovely reminder that very normal people do very exciting science…

This Official Raspberry Pi Case Houses Your Mini PC for $8

If you love your little Raspberry Pi computer dearly, you can now provide it with a little more protection using this official case for the device. And the good news is that it only costs $8. While many people have already crafted their own cases for the devices—in particular using Lego—this one has been designed…

Watch Chris Pratt Be Unexpectedly Confronted By Robot Dinosaurs

SA Wardega, who was behind the Spider Dog, picked a new victim: Chris Pratt. Surprised by a pair of very real looking dinosaur robot puppets, Pratt does not channel his Jurassic World character. He does what we’d all do: have a near heart attack. The team didn’t use all that hard work on just one…

Left in the Brain: The Potentially Toxic Residue from MRI Drugs

Researchers raise alarms about unknown health risks of GE’s Omniscan and Bayer’s Magnevist, drugs injected to get better MRI pictures that contain the heavy metal gadolinium. With a family history of breast cancer, Marcie Jacobs decided in June 2001 that an MRI screening was her best preventive option. As is common with MRIs, Jacobs was…

Eli Roth May Direct Warner Bros.’ Giant Prehistoric Shark Movie

After being stuck in development purgatory for twenty years, Warner Bros. is finally moving forward with Meg, about a giant prehistoric shark terrorizing the coast. Variety reports that Warner Bros. is in talks to have Eli Roth direct the movie based on the 1997 book Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten. Variety…