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Microsoft Has Patched FREAK on Windows PCs

Last week, it came to light that the decades-old FREAK security flaw affected every version of Windows. Now, a day after Apple, Microsoft has released patches for PCs running its operating system. The FREAK flaw is found in a poor implementation of the encrypted links between browsers and websites. A team of security researchers were…

This Liquid Metal Motor Moves Under Its Own Power

In Terminator 2, T-1000 was that science fiction dream-come-nightmare: a shape-shifting robot made from liquid metal. Now, scientists have actually developed a self-powered liquid metal motor. It isn’t anything fancy, as New Scientist reports: just a small drop of a metal alloy, whose constituents are gallium (which is liquid below above 30 °C), indium and tin.…

Like Marty, a Back to the Future Documentary Will Arrive in October 2015

Back In Time, a documentary that started life as a small film about Back to the Future from the point of view of the Delorean, has expanded far beyond its original brief. Just from the trailer you can see just how perfect a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Back to the Future the documentary…

Impossibly, the Veil Nebula Appears to Flutter In Space

Only a small portion of the Veil Nebula — located in the constellation Cygnus — is only partly visible to the Hubble Telescope. But what can be photographed is fairly impressive. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA) – ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State Univ.) This is the “south-eastern knot” of the Veil Nebula, which…

We Have New Neighbours: Dwarf Galaxies Found Orbiting The Milky Way

Thanks to decades of work from scientists around the world (and the Hubble telescope’s pretty pictures, of course), it feels like there’s little left unknown in the universe. Which is probably why the casual discovery of, I don’t know, nine new nearby galaxies came as something of a shock. Using the results of the Dark…

Solar Impulse Just Broke A World Record For Solar-Powered Flight

The Solar Impulse plane took off on its mission to fly around the world without using any fuel on Monday morning, and it’s already breaking records. As part of the journey from Oman to India, it flew the longest ever distance for a solar powered plane going point-to-point. The plane took off from Muscat, Oman…

People turn invisible in these awesome body paint photographs (NSFW)

Artist Natalie Fletcher masterfully blends people’s bodies into the surrounding landscapes with body paint. I love her work because she sometimes leaves the head or eyes of the model untouched which creates a jarring image of a floating body part. Every other body part is painted so well it fades into the background. Natalie Fletcher…

Watch A Drone Flight Through Cavernous Underground Tunnels

TheCrossrail project that’s digging London a new subway system is nearly finished — which means there’s a bunch of freshly-dug tunnels lying there, devoid of trains and just begging for a drone to fly through. Thankfully, the BBC was on hand with a spare quadrotor or two. Following four months of negotiation — man, those…

New Clips from iZombie Show How Hard “Full On Zombie Mode” Is

Next week we finally get to see the premiere of iZombie, the CW’s latest foray in the realm of supernatural television. With these two new clips, we’re pretty enchanted with the show’s protagonist, Liv (Rose McIver). The clip above has Liv meeting Clive Babinaux, in a way that does not seem to indicate that he’d…

Neuroscientists have implanted false memories into the brains of sleeping mice, creating artificial associative memories that persisted while the animals slept and influenced their behavior upon waking. The results, the latest to spring from this burgeoning field of neuroscience, appear this week inNature Neuroscience.

Video: The skilled beauty of making croissants

One of my favorite things I love to see get made is croissants. Mostly because of the ungodly amount of butter that gets used but also because the idea of folding something so flat into something so scrumptious is a lot fun and I love seeing the golden, flaky finished product. This video has two…

This Electric Skateboard Has Motors Inside Its Wheels

I’ve ridden more than a few electric skateboards in my time, but they all have the same problems: they all feel too electric and not enough skateboard. They’re often too thick to accommodate batteries and motors, and too heavy to push if the battery dies. Can’t we do better? Inboard Sports thinks so: it’s building…

This opera filmed inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider looks quite epic

Symmetry is a dance and opera film that was directed by Ruben van Leer and was shot inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider. It looks pretty epic and totally intriguing with some scenes feeling a little bit like Interstellar. The film will premiere on March 15 in Amsterdam. Symmetry is a dance and opera film…

Wow, People Really Suck at Drawing Apple’s Logo From Memory 

Do you know what Apple’s oh-so-ubiquitous logo looks like? Do you really? UCLA psychologists asked 85 undergrads to draw the Apple logo from memory, and only one got it right. The rest of the results are hilarious and incorrectly lopsided. Okay, so not all of us are artists. I do not have much faith in…

This Is the Rocket Booster That May Put Humans on Mars

This is the most powerful booster ever built by man, and it will be the driving force behind NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the vehicle that will one day put humans on Mars. This engineering marvel will have its first major ground test tomorrow (Wednesday) at 11am EDT. According to NASA, this test fire tomorrow…

In the Season Finale of Haphead, an Unexpected Twist

io9 is proud to be presenting the final episode of season 1 of Haphead, the series about gamers in a dystopian future Toronto. Maxine finally discovers how her father died — and it’s a very interesting twist that I didn’t see coming. Plus we get a peek into the future world of biohacking, which is…

The World’s Oldest Mummies Are Suddenly Turning Into Black Goo

Having survived 8,000 years, the Chinchorro mummies found in modern-day Chile and Peru have started decaying more quickly than ever before—in some cases even melting into gelatinous “black ooze.” Scientists at Harvard think they’ve found the reason why. The mummies, the oldest manmade ones in the world, originate with the Chinchorro people, who preserved their…

Marvel At The Variety Of Sea Ice Along The Northwest Passage

Not all ice is created equal: this view of the Amundsen Gulf has open ocean, older thick ice, young thin ice, fresh snow and even broken brash ice adrift at sea. Top image: Ice in the Amundsen Gulf on June 21, 2014. Credit: NASA This chunk of ice is along the Amundsen Gulf, the westernmost…

New Printing Tech Allows the Blind to Touch Priceless Paintings

Walking into a museum and putting your hands on a priceless painting is normally, uh, frowned upon. But in Madrid right now, an unusual exhibit is inviting visitors to touch some of the most famous paintings in the world—so that the visually impaired can experience them, too. Visitors aren’t touching the original paintings themselves, exactly.…

Syfy Confirms That Ascension Is Dead

Ascension looked like a return to Syfy’s glory days of Battlestar Galactica-style dark space opera. But thanks to some ill-conceived twists, it ended up feeling kind of pointless, instead. And now, Syfy has confirmed that Ascension will never return. Ascension ran as a three-night miniseries, with the possibility that it could launch an ongoing series…