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The number of coral species with protected status just took their biggest jump ever, from just two species to 22. NOAA described the drastically updated list as their “most extensive rulemaking ever undertaken.” You can check out all 22 threatened species right here. Image: Orbicella Faveolatta, NOAA

Louisiana loses a football field of land every hour to the ocean

If you compare a map of the Louisiana coastline in the 1920s to today, the difference is striking. About 1,883 square miles of land has just disappeared — swallowed into the Gulf of Mexico. And each year Louisiana loses more. In fact, roughly a football field’s worth of land is lost every hour. From ProPublica:…

British Police Investigate A Programmer Developing A Nuclear War Game

Henry Smith, a software engineer from Bristol, has been working on a game called — wait for it, 1980s movie fans — “Global Thermonuclear War.” He was drawing concepts on a whiteboard, which proved to be unfortunate, since someone mistook it for a plan to nuke Washington, D.C. The sketches caught the attention of Smith’s…

This Cork Pot Holder Secretly Serves As a Ping Pong Net For After Dinner

Once you remove the placemats and centerpieces, your dining room table becomes the perfect stand-in for a ping-pong table. The only thing missing is a net, and that soon could also be just a quick transformation away if this convertible CorkNet pot holder is successful on Kickstarter. When you’re prepping dinner, the two triangular cork…

What Lit Up The Universe? Astronomers May Be On The Brink Of An Answer

Most scientists can see, hear, smell, touch or even taste their research. But astronomers can only study light — photons traveling billions of light-years across the cosmos before getting scooped up by an array of radio dishes or a single parabolic mirror orbiting the Earth. Above: A computer model shows one scenario for how light…

Apple’s iPhone Event Will Be Sept 9th (And We’ll Be There)

Apple has just sent out its invitations to an event on September 9th. You can expect at least one iPhone, and possibly an iWatch as well. And hey… we’ll be there! As always happens in the last week or so before a new iPhone announcement, rumors abound! What seems beyond a doubt is that we’ll…

States That Legalize Medical Marijuana See Fewer Painkiller Overdoses

As the number of patients who receive opioid prescriptions to treat non-cancer pain has increased in the past decade, so too have the number of overdoses. A new study, however, finds that states that legalized medical marijuana between 1999 and 2010 had 25% fewer annual overdose deaths than the rest of the U.S. More specifically,…

How An App Helped Me (And 20,000 Other Women) Get Pregnant

Last summer I sat in the bathroom of an Irish pub, trying desperately to solve a math equation. I had abandoned my friends at the bar, where I’d been pretending to drink an IPA, to tend to this pressing arithmetic in private. If I solved correctly for ‘x,’ the answer would provide me with some…

A Simple Trick to Protect Your PIN From Thieves With Thermal Cameras

Thermal cameras were once expensive and bulky hunks of equipment that very few people could get their hands on. No longer. With FLIR’s new iPhone case thermal imaging cameras are now both affordable and incredibly discreet, which means that evil-doers can use it to see the thermal signature your fingers leave on a keypad and…

Is Dyson About To Unveil A Robot Vacuum Cleaner With Computer Vision?

British appliance company Dyson has released an intriguing teaser video to promote its latest product. We’re not entirely sure what it is, but this RoboCop-inspired ad has us thinking it’s a robotic vacuum cleaner equipped with computer vision. A Roomba-like vacuum cleaner is probably a good guess. Earlier this year, Dyson poured £5 million (USD$8.2…

Blue Vampires With Guns Rejoice, Underworld Is Getting A Total Reboot

The Underworld movie franchise is getting a reboot. Because vampires doing flips in leather catsuits sell movie tickets, dammit. THR is reporting that Lakeshore Entertainment is going to reboot the entire Underworld vampire franchise. Probably because they’ve run out of stories for Kate Beckinsale to roundhouse through while shooting silver bullets in a blue filter.…

Apple Now Has a Design Patent for Its Giant Glass Cube

Apple’s been on a tear to protect the look of its retail experiences, trademarking the design of its stores and patenting its proprietary see-through staircases. Now its glass cube flagship store in Manhattan is officially a patented design in the U.S., with “Steve P. Jobs” listed as one of the inventors. The patent for the…

Cool Texas Megachurch Explains How Predator Drones Are Just Like God

It sees your every move. It can stamp out your life in a millisecond. You can neither see nor hear it, but it’s always above you. Watching. If you’re struggling to understand God, allow a Dallas pastor to offer a more relatable metaphor: Drones. Cool pastor/skinny jeans enthusiast Ed Young, author of New York Times…

App Turns Your Phone’s Camera Into a Jaundice-Detecting Pediatrician

Infant jaundice, where a baby’s liver can’t remove blood toxins, is potentially fatal. Doctors recognize it as an unusual yellow hue in a baby’s skin and eyes, but what if you’re a nervous parent far from a pediatrician? This experimental app turns your phone’s camera into a doctor’s trained eye. BiliCam‘s premise is simple: Just…

The U.S. Southwest Could Soon Experience Decades-Long “Megadroughts”

During the 1930s, America’s High Plains were ravaged by an 8-year long drought, resulting in the dreaded Dust Bowl. Scientists now warn that, owing to global warming, this could happen again — and that by next century many parts of the world could experience “megadroughts” lasting for several decades. The new study, which was conducted…

A Squirt of Flame Forms a Fiery Jellyfish in Microgravity

You haven’t forgotten how amazing flames on the International Space Station are, right? We’ve got yet another peek at amorphous jellyfish of flames in microgravity, and they’re still beautiful. https://gizmodo.com/question-what-is-the-best-kind-of-fire-1597490341 https://gizmodo.com/spheres-of-flame-are-one-of-the-surreal-wonders-of-livi-1607600424 Image credit: NASA/ESA/Alexander Gerst These photographs were taken during the Burning and Suppression of Solids (BASS) combustion experiments on the International Space Station. The…

There’s a Miniature Ocean Trapped Inside This Kitchen Island

Forget about wasting all that valuable space underneath a kitchen island by filling it with pots, pans, and other bakeware. Designer Robert Kolenik has a much better idea: turn it into a gigantic saltwater aquarium that seemingly doubles as the perfect place to toss food scraps. But here’s the most impressive part, you don’t actually…

Leap Motion Wants to Bring Your Hands Into Virtual Reality

Virtual reality via headsets like Oculus Rift is getting really good, but the experiences are lacking a critical facet for the most part: Your hands. Leap Motion wants to use its 3D motion sensor technology to bring your hands into the game. Until now, Leap Motion is known primarily for its effort to create a…

Dyson Teases Upcoming Secret Project (It’s Probably a Robot Vacuum)

Dyson just released this video teasing its upcoming project, codenamed N223. They might as well have codenamed it “We’re going to destroy the Roomba” because it’s very probably a robotic vacuum cleaner. The only thing the video actually confirms is that someone at Dyson has a boner for wide angle lenses, but we do get…

What Fashions Surprised You By Coming Back?

Fashion is cyclical. Like a zombie, a trend rarely dies without its reanimated corpse popping back up for a second round — and sometimes you’re around for it both times. Today we want to know about the fashion trends that passed out of your life, and then showed up again. Tell us what the trend…