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These ads are so quirky and stupid they made me laugh hard

Man, watching these sweaters dance made me laugh hard. I confess I’m a sucker for quirky humor and these ads—for this year’s Gap gift guide—are without a doubt the quirkiest I’ve seen in a long while. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Could Terminator Actually Happen?

Robots are smart and getting smarter. But will they ever actually manage to become sentient and go all Terminator on us? This video investigates that question. https://gizmodo.com/on-site-at-the-machine-olympics-of-darpas-robotics-cha-1487282165 Charting the likely course of AI, Hannah Fry ponders the steps required to shift to sentience. I’ll let her explain the conclusions. [Head Squeeze]

Aereo Has Filed for Bankruptcy

The struggling Aereo, which closed its Boston offices but refused to actually shut down, is now filing for Chapter 11 reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. https://gizmodo.com/aereos-latest-death-rattle-comes-as-boston-office-shutt-1655599827 In a company blog post, CEO and founder Chet Kanojia explained: While we had significant victories in the federal district courts…

This radar image of Tokyo was acquired by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1A satellite earlier this year. The data is so accurate that it can monitor ground movements down to a few millimetres—which helps urban planners know where they can and can’t build. [ESA]

The Stand Is Going to Be Four Movies

After Stephen King said not to count on The Stand being only one film, writer-director Josh Boone confirms that it won’t. It’s going to be four. Boone let a lot details loose in his appearance on Kevin Smith’s Hollywood Babble-On podcast. Boone said he wasn’t a fan of the scripts he was given, so he…

The UK Now Has Poop-Powered Buses

America has the Tesla electric car, Britain has… a poop bus. Bristol Airport now has a bus that will shuttle people to Bath city centre, powered solely by human and food waste. To be specific, it’s the biomethane gas produced by the anaerobic digestion treatment of said waste that the bus runs on. Anaerobic digestion…

How You Can Get Temperatures Below Absolute Zero

It used to be that scientists all agreed that it was impossible to achieve temperatures below absolute zero, but now they realise that’s not entirely true. This video explains how you can reach temperatures below absolute zero. The phenomenon is made possible by playing with entropy and energy, to change the way groups of particles…

Matt Smith And Natalie Dormer Will Fight Extinction in Patient Zero

Sadly, it’s not a crossover. Instead, Matt Smith’s signed on to star in Patient Zero with Natalie Dormer. And they’ll be fighting a pandemic that’s resulted in a violent new species. Patient Zero will be directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky from a script by Mike Le. It takes place when an new rabies strain has resulted…

Can You Ignore Your Own Voice?

We listen to our own voice when we talk – it helps us monitor what we’re saying. But simultaneous interpreters have to translate one language into another in real time, so they learn to ignore themselves. In the 1990s Franco Fabbro and colleagues at the University of Trieste in Italy asked students to recite the…

Report: Amazon Is Planning to Launch a Travel Site With Hotel Bookings

Looking to get away? Maybe you should just add a trip to your Wish List in the hope someone buys it for you. At least, that’s what you might be able to do soon, if reports of Amazon branching out into travel are accurate. The travel news site Skift reports that Amazon has been working…

Hold a Perfectly Accurate Supermoon In the Palm of Your Hand

This LED lamp was designed by Nosigner and is based on the March 19th, 2011 Supermoon, where the moon appeared 14% bigger and 30% brighter. It’s also completely accurate to the actual moon. The design team of Nosigner created the lamp with data from the Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya. [Bored Panda.es via Bored Panda]

It’s A Weirdly Calm Week On The Space Station

With only three astronauts and three spacecraft, the station seems awfully empty. About the most exciting activity was garbage day, with the Progress M-24M that kicked off from the station in late October finally burning up during a destructive reentry. https://gizmodo.com/the-space-station-has-the-most-beautiful-garbage-day-1623444197 Top image: Progress M-24M probably looked very similar detaching from the station in October…

This hand drawn Big Hero 6 trailer is so simple but so lovely

CGI is wonderful and I love it when excellent animators use it for their films but there’s something about the ol’ trusty pen and pencil way of hand drawing (even if it’s not done with a pen and pencil) that always makes me smile. It’s like doing things simpler is sometimes better. This hand drawn…

Bangkok Won’t Show Mockingjay After Protestors Use Katniss’ Salute

The three-fingered salute used by Katniss and the other rebels in The Hunger Games have been adopted by pro-democracy activists in Thailand. And as a result, a movie chain in Bangkok has cancelled screenings of Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. Photo Credit: AP Images Thailand’s been under military rule since May, and protestors have started…

Big Hero 6 Could’ve Had Roving Gangs Of Baseball Ninjas—BASEBALL NINJAS

There are a lot of really neat ideas that never made it into Big Hero 6, including Rocket Cat and Honey Lemon as a superhero catgirl. And one proposed iteration of the film has a The Warriors feel to it, with gangs whose members dressed like ninja baseball players and shark-mouthed airplanes. https://gizmodo.com/big-hero-6-supersuits-that-didnt-make-the-cut-like-catg-1660767961 Artist Kevin…

Watching this Kaiseki chef putting food on plates is fascinating

Food all goes down the same but there’s so much beauty in food and each ingredient that chefs like Niki Nakayam of Los Angeles Japanese Kaiseki restaurant n/naka turn the idea of putting plate of food into an art form. You’re no longer eating protein and vegetables, but edible art on a plate. It’s the…

An Incredibly Detailed Geologic Map Of Giant Asteroid Vesta

Appearing in the December issue of the journal Icarus, this beautiful geologic map of big ol’ asteroid/minor-planet Vesta was created by a team led by planetary scientist David Williams, from data collected by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft during its 15-month orbit of the oblong object between 2011 and 2012. https://gizmodo.com/could-giant-asteroid-vesta-actually-be-a-planet-5895973 The researchers use the geologic map…

The process of turning raw cow hide into leather is really gross

Leather is beautiful and luxurious and natural and one of the great materials of the world. However, it’s absolutely gross to make. Here’s the process of tanning raw hide into high quality leather. You’ll see gray goops, a lot of residue, dumps of bizarre liquids and more. Worth it? I guess. Here are some of…

RIP R.A. Montgomery, Creator Of The “Choose Your Own Adventure” Books

Few book series celebrated narrative possibility and experimented with branching storytelling in as unique a way as the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. They were largely the work of R.A. Montgomery, who died aged 78 on Nov. 8. The Choose Your Own Adventure blog has a great account of how the series got started: In…

2014 Will Almost Certainly Be The Warmest Year On Record

It may be the snowpocalypse in Buffalo, but the latest global analysis from NOAA’s National Climate Data Center reports global temperatures since January to be the warmest ten calendar months on record. November 2013 to October 2014 was also the warmest 12-month period since bookkeeping began in 1880. Meanwhile, combined sea and land temperatures in…