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Glorious lunatics overdrive toaster to make toasts in under 10 seconds

Those awesome madmen at Photonicinduction got a regular toaster and plugged it into one of their giant power supplies to drastically push the voltage and watts up and see if they could make a toast in just 10 seconds. Mission accomplished. I wish I had this at breakfast time every morning. SPLOID is a new…

This Eruption Spells Gently Impending Doom For A Hawaiian Suburb

Hawaii is a tropical island of picturesque eruptions. While usually the eruptions are mostly harmless, an offshoot of a new lava flow has been inching towards suburb since June. Now the residents of Puna are settling in to watch the slowly creeping doom. https://gizmodo.com/boiling-coke-with-a-lava-flow-1581427619 Top image: A peek through a skylight into the lava tube…

A Single Breakthrough That Could Cut Costs on Solar Energy by 25%

Costs on solar are coming down steeply, and now they’re about to get even cheaper. A group of chemists at Ohio State University has invented a solar panel that stores energy without an external battery. The self-contained tuner/capacitor panels are already being licensed to industry. Above, you can see a scanning electron microscope image of…

FCC Investigating High-Frequency Next-Gen Wireless Networks

If you’ve ever thought that 4G was a little slow for your liking, not to fear — everyone’s favorite federal communications regulator has got your back. The FCC has issued a statement saying that it’s looking into using super-high-frequency radio spectrums for future mobile broadband networks. The FCC statement says that previous limitations on uses…

The Wall-E version of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar

It’s no surprise that I love this. This movie trailer uses footage from Wall-E, my favorite Pixar movie ever, and transforms the story to match the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, which from what we’ve seen so far, is going to be fantastic. The result? An absolute thrill ride. SPLOID is a new blog about…

Is This UFO Commuting Between Canada and Peru?

This terrifying, greenish UFO appeared hovering over Montréal last week, right in the middle of an evening newscast. It appeared to change shape and plunge to earth. Now there are reports of the same “mysterious ball” cropping up in Lima, Peru. What is this thing, and what is it doing? Inexplicata reports on the action…

Sony’s Smartwatch 3 has popped up in the Google Play store, listed for an about-average $250. For that, you’ll get all your normal Android Wear features, plus 4GB of onboard storage to let you stream music without the need for a phone. If that tickles your fancy, you’ll have to wait a little — it’s…

Neat video illustrates how much Shanghai has changed over the years

Over the past thirty years, few cities have undergone the transformation of Shanghai—from flat city filled with greenery to mutant New York on speed and steroids. Claire and Max illustrate how much has changed in this neat video. They eliminated the current buildings from the skyline and then drawing them in and putting them back.…

Check Out the 148-Story View from the World’s Highest Observation Deck

As long as architects keep building up (and up, and up), folks are going to want to check out the view from way up in the air. Well: The Burj Khalifa just unveiled a new observation deck that gets visitors a little closer to heaven on the 148th floor—that’s about 1,821 feet. Gulp. At the…

In a World Where Don LaFontaine Is A Woman

Friday night. You could rally and go out for beers, or you could remain pantsless and stay home for beers, while watching a delightful film about the film industry—specifically, voiceover actors in the biz of narrating trailers. It begins: In a World… Lake Bell plays a somewhat wayward 31-year-old vocal coach living in the booming…

What If You Had To Keep Paying A Life Support Machine To Stay Alive?

This short proof-of-concept film takes aim at for-profit healthcare. A woman copes with a terminal illness while a machine keeps her alive. And whenever time is up, her lover must pump more money into the machine. Director Jason Ho and his co-writer Andrew Post are hoping to turn Into Dusk into a longer film. As…

Retina iMac Teardown: New Face, Same Guts

The folks over at iFixit have done their usual job of tearing exciting new bits of technology to pieces, this time with the new Retina iMac as their unlucky victim. Conclusion: apart from that pretty new screen, everything’s more or less the same. Overall, they found that once you take a scalpel to the edge…

See the difference that one missing ingredient can have in baking a cake

Baking a cake is a labor of love but also just basic chemistry, you’re mixing ingredients together and making it react into something delicious. But each ingredient is important! Leaving out eggs or baking powder or butter can change the cake dramatically. Here’s what a cake looks like without one of those ingredients. The baking…

The Fungus Was Spreading

The shrouded figures with their chemical sprays didn’t seem to have faces. We could see them from our tents near the fields. They walked among the glowing fungi that had suddenly appeared everywhere — tending them, or perhaps killing them. We had no idea. Nobody told us anything. This haunting image is by graphic designer…

Short Film Flesh Computer Is A Lot More Flesh Than It Is Computer

Directed by Ethan Shaftel, Flesh Computer is one part Videodrome and two parts fleshy computer bits. Not sure what to make of this particular picture, but it’s weird. Very weird. It may not make a whole heap of sense, but we like the stuff that directly pertains to both the flesh and the computer. [via…

Thank God The Sheriff From Eureka Is Cleaning Up The Vampire Diaries

Here’s the most brilliant, happy-making, fist-pumping “fuck yeah” moment from last night’s Vampire Diaries. In which my two favorite characters team up and take out the trash. Booyah! Of course, this being Vampire Diaries, Tripp (aka the Sheriff from Eureka) is the Bad Guy because he wants to kill vampires — particularly vampires who go…

Your Weight Doesn’t Just Depend on What You Eat, But When You Eat It

We all know that diet can dramatically affect our health, both mentally and physically. But a new study shows that an off-kilter eating schedule could also affect well-being, too. Here’s why. Illustration from a poster by Abram Games Our sleep cycles are governed by a complex biological mechanism called circadian rhythms. Put simply, all your…

Pantomime Could Be Your iPad Window Into Virtual Worlds

Remember the amazing app that made your iPad practically invisible? The man who made it is back, and now he intends to tackle virtual reality with a new company — and app — called Pantomime. Just like Invisibility, you start out by taking a picture of your tabletop, and the iPad mimics that surface as…

This Is The Episode That Finally Made Me A Fan

Some shows reel you in slowly, making you invest in the story before you decide that you love it. Sometimes, however, you can pinpoint your love of a show to a single character, a single storyline, or even a single episode. In response to this piece, on how to convert your friends into fans of…

Top-Secret Space Plane Lands After Almost 2 Years In Orbit

The U.S. Air Force’s top secret X-37B Space Plane made a not-so-secret return to Earth this morning, landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California after an impressive 674 days in orbit. Of course, the closely held secret of the X-37B Space Plane – which looks like a miniature version of one of NASA’s Space…