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Some Crazy Genius Hid a Cat in Google Maps

If you’ve been exploring the fine town of Auckland, New Zealand on Google Maps lately, you might’ve spotted a strange shape just north of the Parnell Cricket Club. It’s a cat. (Or at least, it was cat.) Google’s not exactly sure how it got there. “We were aware that cats were trying to take over…

Yes, Sign Language Has Accents

American Sign Language isn’t a translation of English. It’s a language with its own grammar and idioms. Sign language speakers also have their own accents. Learn how this language, like every other, undergoes regionalization and shifts in tone. To understand how sign language speakers have accents, we have to realize what causes accents. Accents spring…

See Darth Vader Make His Debut On Star Wars: Rebels

Did you miss the special ABC broadcast of the Star Wars: Rebels cartoon premiere? You know, the one with the special new Darth Vader scene? If you did, no worries — here’s Vader, telling the new villain the Inquisitor to… go out and murder children. Look, Anakin, we get it. You hate children in general…

10 Cool Sci-Fi Technologies Invading Our Reality

Cool technologies that were once reserved for science fiction are invading our reality at an accelerating pace. In some cases, our Earth-bound scientists have proven that seemingly impossible technologies can be developed, but they still have some obstacles to overcome first. In other cases, those technologies are already here. 10. Squishy Robots Photo credit: MIT…

Amazon’s New Chromecast Competitor Is Just $20 Until Wednesday

Amazon just announced its very own (crazy cheap) $40 Chromecast competitor, the Fire TV Stick. And if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you have until Wednesday to pick one up for a mere $19. More specifically, Prime members have 40 hours—or until 9am ET on Wednesday—to pick up what’s actually a pretty sweet deal, considering…

And so it has come to this: A Neighbours Zombie series

The week leading up to Halloween is always a time of everyone and their uncle getting in on the spooky fun, but this might be one of the weirdest of Halloween 2014 so far: The hit Australian soap opera Neighbours is running a week-long webseries that puts the residents of Ramsey Street into the Zombie…

Is Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor Going To Star In Suicide Squad?

Tons of rumors suggest Terminator Genisys will be so bad, it’ll put “the final nail in the coffin” of the Terminator series. Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance will star in the Childhood’s End miniseries. Plus a ton of information about what’s happening on The Flash. Spoilers now! Top image: Suicide Squad/DC/Batman v. Superman Deadline is…

Fitbit Charge Finally Arrives, Charge HR and Surge Land in 2015

The worst-kept gadget secret in recent history is no longer secret at all. The new Fitbit Charge, Charge HR, and Surge fitness trackers are official. Here’s everything you need to know. First off, you can only buy one of them today: the $130 Fitbit Charge. (The other two are coming “early 2015”). And the Charge…

OK Go’s New Video Is a Spectacular Self-Balancing Unicycle Ride

How do you make an OK Go video even more fun than ever? Give the guys Honda’s crazy self-balancing unicycle is how. https://gizmodo.com/hondas-self-balancing-unicycle-a-segway-for-sitters-5867577 This new video, for the single I Won’t Let You Down, was shot in Japan recently, with more than a little help from Honda. For a start, OK go are all riding…

How They Get Teflon to Stick to Pans

Saving us from soaking, scraping and scrubbing, Teflon has been a lifesaver (or at least a hand-saver) for home cooks for the last 50 years. But how do they get it to stick to the pan in the first place? Comprised of a unique polymer that actually repels nearly every other material (the only known…

This Is How Hungarians Are Protesting Against Proposed Internet Tax

There was something strange in the air in Budapest on Sunday evening. Mostly, it was computer parts and outdated peripherals—flying through the closed windows of the headquarters of the ruling political party, called Fidesz. You may ask why that’s happening in Hungary, a democratic member of the European Union and part of NATO, ally of…

What a Comet Smells Like (Spoiler: Real Bad)

Now we’ve gotten closer than ever to a comet in space, we can start answering serous scientific questions, like… err, what such a thing smells like? https://gizmodo.com/this-is-where-rosettas-lander-may-touch-down-on-its-com-1626836506 Since August, Rosetta’s two mass spectrometers have been sniffing out what 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko smells of. Scientifically speaking, that means detecting the most volatile molecules released via sublimation. But really,…

Jim Carrey spoofs McConaughey’s ads for Lincoln in hilarious SNL sketch

I genuinely enjoyed Matthew McConaughey’s True-Detectivesque ads for Lincoln. But not as much as Jim Carrey’s spoof commercials on last Saturday Night Live. Not only they are hilarious, but also Carrey’s impression of McConaughey is so perfect that I couldn’t take my eyes off him during the whole video. SPLOID is a new blog about…

On Resurrection: Being One of the Undead Is a Choice

Last night was a bunch of smaller moments with one major revelation: Apparently, coming back from the dead is a choice you can make. And the only one who knows that is Grandma Langston, who continues to be the creepiest person in Arcadia. Spoilers… First things first, we’ve got our first service at Pastor Tom’s…

Elon Musk’s warnings about A.I. are becoming more dire. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” he recently said. “You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like… yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out.”

Xbox One Is $50 Cheaper For the Holidays

Microsoft has just announced that the Xbox One is going to be $50 cheaper over the holiday season—which means you can pick the console up for just $350. The price drop applies across the range and different bundle types, so you should be able to pick up a Kinect-free console for $350—or the Special Edition…

The Court of Justice of the European Union has declared that embedding a copyrighted YouTube video on another website is not copyright infringement. Well, duh.

I Want to Sit In This Childish Chair All Day Long

If this chair looks like ramshackle mess, that’s because it’s supposed to. Inspired by the childhood forts we all used to make out of blankets and furniture and whatever else we could find, this chair is design for adults to play instead. The brainchild of Czech designer Michael Tomalik, the Idol Chair is designed to…

On Halloween, Don’t Go to the House at the End of the Road

This work by olga-idealist on deviantART makes for an excellent Halloween wallpaper. The full work is below.

We always knew those server racks in the cupboard could be put to better use. [XKCD]