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Obsessed Engineer Devises The Perfect Scooper for Rock Hard Ice Cream

Ice cream is a dish best served cold, but liberating it from its carton is an exercise in bent spoons and throbbing wrists. Kickstarter’s Michael Chou spent years striving for the perfect solution, and here it is: The Midnight Scoop, shaped to engage your most powerful arm muscles in the quest for deliciousness. The trick…

Meet the Rocketman Who Made Jet Fighters and Car Crashes Survivable

In the early jet fighter days, nobody knew how much G-force the human body could withstand. Testing the limits of survivability came down to human testing. Today, we owe much of that knowledge to Dr. John Paul Stapp, who strapped himself into a crazy rocket sled to see just what the human body could endure.…

Japanese Volcano Violently Erupts, Sending Hikers Racing To Safety

Mount Ontake violently erupted without warning Saturday morning in Japan. Unbelievably, hikers not only survived, but recorded the pyroclastic flows racing towards them. Here’s the science of what happened. Top image: Mount Ontake eruption at 11:53 am on September 27, 2014. Credit: AP Photo/Yomiuri Shimbun/Toshihiko Kawaguchi https://gizmodo.com/violent-eruption-traps-hikers-at-mount-ontake-japan-1639813357

Here’s The Science Of The Violent Eruption That Stranded Japanese Hikers

This is the science behind Mount Ontake’s violent eruption in Japan on Saturday morning. Unbelievably, many hikers survived, documenting their perspective of the pyroclastic flow and trekking out of the volcanic wasteland. Left: Hikers evacuating after the eruption. Credit: @mori____mori. Right: Aerial view of the Mount Ontake eruption. Credit: NHK The eruption occurred mid-morning on…

Only A Russian Billionaire Could Come Up With This Hospital Design

Vasily Klyukin is the Monaco-based Russian co-owner of Sovcombank, a Russian commercial bank. He is also, if these sketches of his latest architecture project are anything to go by, a little insane. The White Sails hospital concept is a design for a hospital and spa, to be built in the budding Tunisia Economic City. The…

This Tweet By Katy Manning Will Make Your Weekend

And now I absolutely want to see a Twelfth Doctor/Jo adventure…

Coke’s Making Wi-Fi Enabled Coke Machines Because Of Course It Is

Soft drink vending machines are one of those unobtrusive, inoffensive bits of life that can be placed almost anywhere without anyone noticing or complaining (apart from the occasional anti-obesity protester. Coke’s trying to harness that unseen power (and sell more Coke!) by sticking Wi-Fi hotspots inside some South African vending machines. The Coke machines will…

Sierra Nevada Corporation, which was beaten to NASA’s multi-billion dollar contract recently, has just filed a legal challenge against NASA, claiming that their mini-space shuttle proposal was significantly cheaper. This comes a day after Sierra Nevada laid off 100 staff who were working on the (appropriately-named) Dream Chaser project. [Sierra Nevada]

Watch a master pizza maker make deliciously perfect pizza

A.W. Mangieri is the chef at famed Una Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco and he makes pizzas. Fantastic, simple and delicious 12-inch Neapolitan pizzas that look absolutely perfect. I’ve never had them but I can totally smell and taste them through this video. Plus, Mangieri seems a little crazy about pizza so they must be…

A Real Space Battle Wouldn’t Look Anything Like The Movies

In the event that we ever end up going toe-to-toe in outer space, it turns out that things wouldn’t look anything like Star Wars. No, an actual space battle would probably be very fast, very boring, and extremely quiet, as PBS points out. In an episode of the online series It’s Okay To Be Smart,…

Skateboarder zips down mountains and flies by cars at insane speeds

He’s going down the mountain road so fast that it looks like he’s about to hit warp drive or something. I mean, damn. It seems like one little pebble on the road or one little shift in the wrong direction and he’d be catapulted off the side of the road. But he manages to hang…

Consumer Reports Bend Test Pits iPhone 6 Plus Against the Competition

Sure, Apple’s only received nine reports of bent iPhones and we highly doubt you’ll have any reason to worry about your own, but do Apple’s new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus handle the pressure any better than competing models? Consumer Reports put that to the test, pitting the new iPhones against other giant handsets…

This Mid-Century Legend Made Sculptural Magic Out Of Plain Paper

There’s a whole world of potential in a blank sheet of paper, but few folks can turn something flimsy and flat into 3D magic like Irving Harper. The creative legend—now 98 years-old!—did industrial and graphic design for Herman Miller during its dynamic mid-century era, but his legacy also includes an incredible personal collection of paper…

Here’s how all the Pixar movies are connected in one universe

Maybe you’ve heard of The Pixar Theory by Jon Negroni that showed how all the characters of the Pixar movies are connected to each other in one universe. The evidence was undeniable! Bloop Animation shows how it all ties together in the video below. I want to believe! The theory is encompasses all of Pixar’s…

Creepy Idea For A TV Show: Doctor Battles “Demonic Contagion”

We’re pretty sick of supernatural medical dramas, but the new show that NBC just gave a green light sounds pretty different. In Maidenhead, a scientist goes to a Connecticut suburb to examine a teen girl, only to find that demonic influence is an epidemic spreading like wildfire. https://gizmodo.com/10-weird-tv-show-ideas-that-the-networks-keep-trying-ov-1634038465 It doesn’t hurt that the pilot of…

Yahoo Very Quietly Kills Off Yahoo

As part of Yahoo’s ongoing mid-life crisis, the company very quietly announced today that it’s killing off the original internet directory that gave the company its name. Back in 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, Stanford Grad students, launched “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, a categorized, curated list of everything that’s on the internet. Obviously,…

This Bizarre “Aragonite Flower” Grows from the Damp Ceilings of Caves

It looks like an alien flower, but this spiny tentacle is actually a geological formation. The most awe-inspiring specimens are found in Brazil’s limestone cave Caverna da Torrinha. This photograph was taken by Coen Wubbels, and you can see more of his incredible shots inside the Brazilian caves where these rock formations are found over…

A Simple Chart to Help You Understand How Birds Evolved from Dinosaurs

The more evidence we gather about the evolution of birds, the more likely it seems that they evolved from dinosaurs. But when, exactly, did birds split from their awe-inspiring cousins? A new discovery will help you imagine what it was like to live during the age of birds and dinosaurs. As Brian Switek explains over…

Protect Against Sneaky Webcam Spies With This Little Pair of Magnets

I have had a teensy, torn bit of paper taped over the camera of my MacBook Air for years now because even before I knew the FBI could activate that thing without the indicator light, it always bugged me out that someone might be secretly snooping. The teensy, torn bit of paper looks janky as…

How Days Of Future Past Pulled Off Those Amazing Quicksilver VFX

One of the coolest special effects in X-Men: Days of Future Past was the Quicksilver “frozen time” effect where the character is moving so quickly that everything around him seems to move in super slow-motion. In this video, director Bryan Singer explains how they achieved the effect. Unfortunately, this video doesn’t go into quite as…