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A Room-Sized 3D Printer Will Make Freeform Concrete Design Easy

Concrete is an amazing building material: cheap to create, strong when used correctly, and hard-wearing, too. But turning it into exotic and shapely forms can be prohibitively complex and expensive. Now, a 3D printer capable of producing one-off moulds as large as a phone booth could help turn architectural dreamw into affordable reality. The Engineer…

You’d Never Guess That This Space-Age Gadget Was a Microscope

This beautiful piece of shiny scientific instrumentation is a brand new class X-ray microscope sitting inside a vacuum chamber at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Things have sure changed since we were at school. More precisely, its’a a multi-layer Laue lens module inside the vacuum chamber of the microscope installed at the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe beamline at…

If you include its atmosphere, Pluto is larger than Earth. Michael Simons at New Horizonsexplains how this can be.

Ericsson Is Suing to Block Sales of iPhones in the U.S.

Ericsson has announced that it’s filing seven new lawsuits in a U.S. court against Apple for infringing its patents—and it’s asking the U.S. International Trade Commission to block iPhones from sale, too. All told, Ericsson claims that Apple infringes a total of 41 of its patents. They describe some of the fundamental ways mobile devices…

Seriously, Another Robin Hood Movie Is Being Written

This makes three. Three Robin Hood movies. Unless he’s a cartoon fox, I’m out. This time, Joby Harold, the same guy writing the giant multi-part King Arthur epic for Guy Ritchie, is writing a “gritty” version of Robin Hood called Robin Hood: Origins. Which is bound to give people X-Men: Origins flashbacks. His peers are…

Amazon Wants to 3D Print Your Purchase in the Back of Its Delivery Van

Amazon is a keen experimenter, especially when it comes to delivery. Now though, a new patent suggests that it’s thinking of 3D-printing its products as they make their way to you. 3Dprint has unearthed a patent which explains that it could print three-dimensional goods on-demand for customers—which it already does—even from the inside if its…

At Least We Got a New Optical Illusion Out of That Goddamn Dress

Never has the color of a dress prompted so much excitement on the Internet. But now, along with some fascinating insights into the science of vision and lessons in overexposure, we have an enduring reminder of the meme, in the shape of an optical illusion truly for the modern age.[XKCD] https://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-real-color-of-that-goddamn-white-and-gold-d-1688381523

The Colour Of That Dress Poses The Same Problem As Colour on Mars

Human wetware is astonishingly good at pattern recognition and interpreting complex, noisy data, but it’s also painfully buggy. Today, the internet came to a screeching halt debating a dress’s colour, but the same optical illusion is responsible for how uncertain we are about interpreting colours on Mars. When we send robotic explorers to Mars, we…

The CW’s Making a Crossover Show With Atom, Firestorm, and Sara Lance?!

Rather than add a whole bunch of superhero shows to its line-up, the CW is currently developing a show which’ll bring a number of the recurring heroes from The Flash and Arrow into one show. On deck? Brandon Routh, Victor Garber, Wentworth Miller and Caity Lotz. Wait. Caity “Sara Lance” Lotz? So that’s the Atom,…

The “What Color Is This Goddamn Dress?” Debate Explained By Science

A rift is tearing the internet apart. And it’s the question of what color this dress is. Society has been split into the white/golds and the blue/blacks. Thankfully some people have stepped up to explain, scientifically, what color this goddamn dress is. If you’ve somehow missed it, it started on tumblr when Swiked posted this…

Case solved: This is the true color of that goddamn white and gold dress

In what may be the biggest case of mass hysteria ever experienced in the history of the internet, everyone in the planet speculated tonight about what’s the color of a stupid dress. Some people even claimed it changed color.* Others looked for Photoshop analysis or scientific explanations. Here is the true color. The dress is…

Update: These images are not computer graphics

Update: This was all a hoax. David O’Reilly and Kim Laughton curate a wonderful head innards shaking website, Hyper Real CG, that shows a collection of pictures that look completely real but are actually just hyper real 3D art made from CG. It’s really crazy how close to real life we can get with art.…

Why Relativity Would Mess Up Car Headlights

The crew over at Vsauce has set out to answer a very important and critical question: would car headlights work at the speed of light? Unsurprisingly, the answer is not simple, but in the process, you do learn a lot about general relativity and photons and other sciencey stuff. As Vsauce explains, you could never…

Watch James Cameron Walk Through His Real Life Avatar Theme Park

Here’s a sneak peak of Avatar Land! At some point Disney will add Avatar Land to their Animal Kingdom in Orlando Florida but for now watch the film’s director James Cameron walk through the fluorescent, light up forest. The concept art that starts off the videos appear to be the floating rocks from the movie,…

What The Hell Is Wrong With Your Eyes? A Dress Explainer

At some point this evening your flatmate or loved one probably ran headfirst into the room, iPad in tow, screaming about how YOU HAVE TO TELL ME WHAT COLOR THIS DRESS IS, and then subsequently disowning you when you said blue/black. What the fuck is going on? Here’s an educated guess. According to a few…

Prisoners‘ Denis Villeneuve In Talks to Direct the Blade Runner Sequel

Well, now we know who may replace Ridley Scott in the director’s chair for the Blade Runner sequel: Denis Villeneuve, director of the Academy Award-nominated Prisoners. We’ve known for a while that Scott’s schedule made it nearly impossible for him to fit this in and Scott admitted a while back that he wouldn’t be doing…

Humans possess a remarkably keen sense of smell (a recent estimate puts forth that we can discriminate more thana trillion different odors) – so why are we so bad at describing smells? At The New Yorker, Alastair Gee explores several theories as to why our scent lexicon is so lacking.

My taste buds melted after watching this dessert get made

I don’t especially love pistachio. I don’t go crazy over tiramisu. Heck, I don’t always have the sweet tooth hankering normal humans have for dessert and yet after watching this pistachio tiramisu get made, I can’t help but feel as if my taste buds have all banded together demanding that I eat this right now.…

The Latest Twitter Update Tries To Address Doxxing

Doxxing, and the death threats and swatting that almost invariably follow, is one of the nastiest tools of internet trolls worldwide. Twitter is on the front lines of the online abuse problem, but thus far they’ve been fighting a fairly pathetic losing battle. The company’s latest update hopes to turn that around. Earlier today, Twitter…

Concept Art Writing Prompt: The Kid Who Paints The Moon

The phases of the moon get a bit fanciful in this week’s writing prompt, by artist Goro Fujita. Tell us your tale about this character and their rather unusual lunar job. As always, we invite you to write a story about this image, Fujita’s “Half Moon” and share it in the comments. Is this Earth’s…