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This Week’s Puzzle Is As Easy As Pie

You can solve this week’s puzzle with a pie (traditional or pizza) and slicer, a pen and paper, or a little math. The choice is yours. Sunday Puzzle #21: Slicing Pie One straight slice through one whole pie divides the pie into two pieces. Simple enough. A second straight cut, crossing the first, will produce…

How Can Space Travel Faster Than The Speed Of Light?

Light speed is often spoken of as a cosmic speed limit … but not everything plays by these rules. In fact, space itself can expand faster than a photon could ever hope to travel. Cosmologists are intellectual time travelers. Looking back over billions of years, these scientists are able to trace the evolution of our…

China used more concrete in 3 years than the US in 100 years

Bill Gates has an incredible statistic: According the USGS’ cement statistics, China has used more concrete from 2011 to 2013 (6.6 gigatons) than the United States in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons). It blows my mind but, then again, as Gates point out, look at Shanghai’s evolution in just 20 years… …and now imagine…

Ro-Bow Is a Violin-Playing Robot That Actually Sounds Pretty Good 

Described as a kinetic sculpture, Ro-Bow (as the name suggests) is a violin-playing robot that uses electromagnetic actuators to play digital files. Yeah, it won’t be the first chair at the London Philharmonic any time soon, but its pretty amazing to watch all the machine’s parts work in unison to produce some pretty decent tunes.…

Beautiful aerial photo of New York surrounded by ice

Impressive aerial photo of New York surrounded by ice taken from the southern tip of Manhattan—tiny icebergs and ice plaques floating along the Hudson, the East River and New York bay. CBS has video here. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

A Creepy-Cute Vintage Illustration Of A Vampire Bat

From the British Library archives comes this delightful plate from naturalist J. Leyland’s “Adventures in the far interior of South Africa; including a journey to Lake Ngami, and rambles in Honduras,” circa 1866.

New Documents Show Leading Climate Change Denier Is Full of Shit

New documents obtained by Greenpeace via freedom of information filings show that a leading climate change denier, Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, allegedly accepted $1.2 million over the past 14 years from energy companies and additionally failed to report conflicts of interest in his own research. Soon is a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for…

Update: Science Fiction Bookstore Borderlands Will Stay Open!

Here’s a huge chunk of happy news to brighten your Sunday: San Francisco’s scifi and fantasy bookstore, Borderlands, will stay open for at least another year thanks to a successful sponsorship campaign. YAY! If you’ll recall, the beloved institution (which we here at io9 are huge fans of, for many obvious reasons … and the…

Leaked Renders Show HTC’s New Flagship Phone From All Angles

HTC’s flagship phone, the One M9, is due to be announced a little over a week from now at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. You don’t have to wait to see it though, a new leak from Mobile Geeks looks to be preeeeetty on the money. The new images came from a few early online…

CastAR’s Vision of Augmented Reality Is Fun for the Whole Family

CastAR’s projected augmented reality specs have come a long way. Back in May 2013, the headset was little more than a hacked together idea by ex-Valve engineers, formed under the new company Technical Illusions. Then that idea grew with a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, and now the company has shipped its first developer headsets. To…

The Troubled Future of the World’s First Commercial Spaceport

Completed in October 2011, Spaceport America is an 18,000 acre commercial spaceport—the first of its kind in the world—that was going to be a major hub for SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, as each company toils away on developing the future of private spaceflight. It’s been more than three years since opening, and New Mexico is…

This Abandoned Hospital Isn’t From A Zombie Movie

Although this photo might look like a screengrab from a dystopian video game, or a made-for-TV zombie film, it’s actually taken in the middle of a bustling city in the UK. Mansfield General hospital opened for business in 1890, but the old hospital shut down in 1992. Although the site was sold off successfully, nothing…

There’s Still Plenty Of Time To Celebrate World Pangolin Day!

It’s the third Saturday in February, which means … it’s World Pangolin Day! (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati) This CNN post offers some ways to celebrate (get a pangolin tattoo!), with a link to this clip of Randall (the guy who let the world know that honey badgers don’t care) sharing some fun facts about everyone’s favorite…

Did an asteroid hasten the spread of black death in Europe? Dendrochronologist and author Mike Baillie says that tree rings “reveal a major event just before 1350. Something catastrophic,” similar to the Tunguska event, changed “the composition of the atmosphere and provided ideal conditions for a lethal infection to spread,” making the population more vulnerable…

This Crazy Chair Builds Itself

Building flat-pack furniture is a major pain in the ass, so much so that a MIT team has spent years and millions of dollars solving the problem. Actually, that’s not quite true: the problem they’re trying to solve is actually a far more exciting one, even if it won’t benefit Ikea quite yet. Wired has…

Scan Reveals This Buddha Statue Has A Mummy Inside

This is no ordinary Buddha statue. As the CT scan at the right clearly shows, there’s a mummy concealed inside! This fascinating artifact is currently on display as part of a mummy-themed exhibit at the Netherlands’ Drents Museum (link also offers a glimpse of a particularly rad cat mummy). It’s the first time the “Buddha…

Astronauts Take 7-Hour Spacewalk To Prepare ISS For Space Taxis

What’s worse than fiddling with cables? Trying to do it in vacuum, wearing gloves, with the sun setting every hour. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Tery Virts spent nearly seven hours to run just over 100 meters of cable reconfiguring the space station for the commercial crew program. Astronaut Terry Virts running cabling on the outside…

A Clever Push Pin Doesn’t Make Holes

Push pins and a corkboard are the most basic organisational tool around, but they kinda suck for photos — in order to stick them up, you stab a tiny hole through your grandma’s face. This neat alternative tries to solve that. Pon is a Kickstarter project that basically marries a paperclip to a thumbtack, meaning…

A World-Weary Puppy In Antarctica, Circa 1912

This poignant image (cheer up, buddy!) of a pup named “Blizzard” was taken in 1912 by Antarctic adventurer Frank Hurley, who two years later would be the photographer on Ernest Shackleton’s famed Endurance Expedition. This shot is from the First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1911. Over a period of years, Hurley visited…

How ‘Defensive Architecture’ Is Ruining Our Cities

Cities have always struggled with the tension between the different needs of social classes who share the space. But as The Guardian documents, a new trend of defensive — and some times overtly hostile — architecture is changing the urban landscape, and not in a good way. Defensive architecture refers to modifications of buildings and…