Latest

The Artist Making Beautiful Snow Art With Simple Math and Footprints

You’ve probably seen Simon Beck’s masterpieces floating around the internet. Up close it looks like an army’s marched through the snow. But when you step back — way back — the texture turns into an extravagant design. Some look like snowflakes, some like elaborate fractals. They’re all made with just a compass, Beck’s feet, and…

New Rainbow Brite Trailer Is A Mess

1980s power cartoon Rainbow Brite has been rebooted in a brand-new animated miniseries with Molly Ringwald attached to voice the villain. Needless to say we were pretty excited—and then we saw this trailer. Truth talk: This is just not a very good trailer. We can get on board with a redesign and we like the…

How to get into China Miéville. Over at Tor.com, there’s an introduction to Miéville’s strange and powerful books, including a rundown of which books to try first. Do you agree with their recommendations?

New Gulfstream jets’ flight deck looks like a sci-fi spaceship cockpit

Gulfstream has new jets, the G500 and G600. They can fly at almost supersonic speed and come with lots of new cool stuff, like a new cabin that is supposed to make you feel like you are not flying or this new glass cockpit called Symmetry—which looks out of some sci-fi movie. It looks to…

Pick Up Your Dog’s Poo. It’s Important for Public Health!

You’re supposed to pick up after your dog. You know this. Everybody does. But it’s late and you’re tired and Fido just left a particularly nasty looking pile. Nobody’s looking. Just leave it there. What’s the worst that can happen? Infection with a zoonotic disease, that’s what. At least, that’s according to US Environmental Protection…

How to Get All of Your Social Media Updates in One Place

You log into Facebook and check your updates, switch to Twitter to do the same, then to Snapchat, then Instagram, then Tumblr, then WhatsApp, then two or three more. Save yourself from social media fatigue and earn back some productivity points by consolidating all your incoming feeds into one place—here are some ideas about how…

Sleepy Hollow Gets its Most Awkward Artifact Yet

Welcome back to Sleepy Hollow, the show determined to condense a season’s worth of X-Files Across America’s monster-of-the-week episodes into the environs of a single town! In “Go Where I Send Thee”, we get The Pied Piper and his bone flute. For serious. When the show got a longer second-season order, there was concern that…

Chargers For Any Situation, Perfect Frozen Drinks, and More Deals

We posted this deal yesterday, but it got derailed by a price mistake. If you missed out, the original deal (which is actually quite good) is back today with new promo codes. The Power Castle external charger is actually the Wirecutter’s favorite, and the various bundled items all have great reviews as well. Just be…

What Would Happen If the 20 Biggest US Cities Were Wiped Out With Nukes

Wiping out an American city, much less the largest ones, requires either blast yields well beyond the capability of any terrorist organization, or numbers of nuclear weapons that would make the terrorist organization one of the largest nuclear powers on the planet. This is particularly true of major cities such as Atlanta, Houston, and LA,…

10 Grammar Mistakes People Love To Correct (That Aren’t Actually Wrong)

Are you the sort of person who just loves correcting other people’s grammar? Are you sure that you’re doing it right? Some things that people have been taught are rules of English grammar are really not rules at all—and some of them are flat-out wrong. There’s actually a word for this phenomenon: hypercorrection. It’s what…

Tuesday Game Room: The Pre-Sequel Edition

The October game deluge continues! A veritable swathe of titles this week means there’s something for everyone – especially if you’re a fan of horror or of insanely funny robots. Picking a new game up this week? Playing something else? Come let us know in the latest edition of Tuesday Game Room! What have you…

I don’t know what’s going on in this trippy music video but I love it

Pump up the zolpidem tartrate and fire up those speakers up to eleven before watching this new video for Source, the second track of Fever The Ghost’s EP Crab In Honey. Fever The Ghost is a Los Angeles-based band. Their EP Crab in Honey—mastered by Mastered by Bob Ludwig (David Bowie, Nirvana, Radiohead)—sounds delicious. You…

Who Needs Sleight of Hand When You Have a Playing Card Slingshot?

Being able to send a playing card whizzing across a room with a quick flick of the wrist is a neat party trick, but Joerg Sprave has always been more interested in slicing open targets than impressing party guests. So he used his mastery of the slingshot to design and build a weapon that uses…

Amazing wormhole opens in Norway—or maybe it’s just an aurora

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is featuring a stunning Auroral Corona over some beautiful Norwegian islands, masterfully photographed by Harald Albrigtsen last month in Kvaløya, Tromsø. If you told me this is how wormholes look like, I would believe you. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook

Holy Crap, New York Comic-Con Is Bigger Than San Diego Comic-Con

It’s happened! The recently wrapped New York Comic-Con has just dethroned the San Diego Comic-Con as the biggest comic convention in America, with over 150,000 attendees this past weekend — as compared to San Diego’s perennial max of 130,000. As Comics Alliance points out, this jump in the NYCC attendance was likely bolstered by this…

The Sony Z3 Compact Is Android’s Best Kept Secret

Small and powerful smartphones are an endangered species, like the California Condor of the mobile world. If you want a top-tier phone that fits in a normal hand, the iPhone 6 is practically your only stateside option. But you know what? An exotic handset designed for Japan and Europe could have everything you’ve ever craved.…

Why Conspiracy Theorists Are So Obsessed With JFK’s “Umbrella Man”

At the moment when bullets were being fired into JFK’s motorcade, a man can be seen standing on the side of the road near the car holding an open black umbrella. But it wasn’t raining. This is exactly the kind of detail that sets a fire under conspiracy theorists — and here’s why. Indeed, it…

Our planet just experienced the warmest six-month stretch ever recorded. NASA GISS just announced that the previous month was the warmest September on record and that 2014 is poised to go down as the hottest year humans have ever experienced. Discouragingly, September 2014 saw global surface temperatures that were 0.77 degrees C hotter than the…

Fitbit’s New “Charge” Could Track Your Heart and Get Phone Notifications

It’s been over half a year since Fitbit recalled all of its latest Force wristbands, but it finally looks like a replacement is right around the corner. Of course, Fitbit isn’t just releasing a new version of the Force. New FCC and patent filings suggest that the new Fitbit is something new and better. Leaked…

The Pentagon’s New Climate Change Report Won’t Change A Damn Thing

A report released by the Defense Department warns that climate change threatens to intensify global instability, disease and poverty, while undermining U.S. military readiness. But judging from the events of the past year, Congress will not only disregard the report’s findings, but actively block its recommendations. The 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap anticipates that rising…