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Photoshop Contest: Give Stormtroopers A Slick New Look For Episode VII!

The big Star Wars rumor swirling about the Internet this week is that some Stormtroopers will appear in Episode VII with a major makeover. Folks, we think you can do better. Use your image editing skills to dream up the Stormtroopers you’d like to see in the next movie. https://gizmodo.com/are-the-stormtroopers-getting-a-big-makeover-in-star-wa-1639409561 Top image: Star Wars original…

Marvel Dice Masters Is Like Magic: The Gathering, But With Superheroes

Marvel Dice Masters is like a deckbuilding game with Magic: The Gathering style creature attacks, but using dice. Unfortunately, the parts don’t add up to a very compelling game. Marvel Dice Masters is based on Wizkids earlier dice game, Quarriors. When it first came out, Marvel Dice Masters was so popular there were serious supply…

A Specimen Box Full of Tiny Paper Airplanes Instead of Bugs

It’s hard to understand the appeal of displaying the corpses of dead insects and other small creatures on pins in a specimen box, but tiny paper airplane versions of famous aircraft? That deserves to hang in the Louvre, or your home office as a second best scenario. Working from detailed schematics of the planes, Markus…

This A.I. Can Tell Which Neighborhood Is Safe Better Than You Can

Imagine you’re dropped in the middle of an unknown city and you need to find a restaurant in a safe area using only the visual cues around you. Sounds hard, right? Well, researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm that can do it — and it consistently outperforms humans. Looking at the image above, can…

Trek Lync Review: Built-In Bike Lights Are Great (When They’re Charged)

Wouldn’t life would be easier if all bikes came with lights built into the frame? The typical removable ones are as easy to forget as they are to steal, either of which will ruin your evening. Well: Trek’s new Lync models come with built-in lights! This matte black beaut is fully equipped with powerful LEDs…

How Comic Book The Fuse Moves The American Cop Drama To A Space Station

In the future world of The Fuse, half a million people live inside a space station orbiting the Earth. It’s a place with its own government, its own crime, and its own detectives. We spoke with The Fuse creator and writer Antony Johnston about why he decided set his police procedural in space. In knew…

New LEDs Promise to Make Your Smartphone Screen 400 Percent Clearer

The most advanced LED screens look amazing compared to what was on the market even a couple of years ago. But a Princeton engineer found a cheap new way of making LEDs not only brighter and more efficient, but also five times as clear. It even makes them last longer. Professor Stephen Chou is renowned…

The Case for Staying Home from Work

We’ve all been there. We head to work even though we’re under the weather. It’s such a big problem that it’s gotten a name — “presenteeism” — and it’s costing companies billions of dollars. Here’s why you should just stay home when you’re ill, and why it’s in your boss’s best interest. Illustration by Tara…

How to Find Long-Lost Passwords Hiding In Your Browser

Wait just a second before clicking that ‘Forgot password?’ link—chances are that your browser has your password stored somewhere in the depths of its memory. Head to your browser’s cache of login details if you can’t recall your credentials, or you’re signing in on a new device altogether. If you’ve switched on the magical password…

io9 Newsstand: Best Stories of the Week for September 22 – 27

There’s a vast trove of excellent fiction published in years or decades past that would be inaccessible to most readers, if it weren’t for reprint anthologies and magazine editors. Luckily, a lot of anthologies are available as ebooks (like the fairy tale anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling!) Plus online magazines are doing…

Watch How New York’s Enormous Organic Garbage System Works

The process of throwing out garbage in New York City is much more complicated than any of the millions of people living there could ever realize. A mini-documentary by the New York Times does a full observation of the $300 million dollar service top to bottom. As the second installment of a video series titled…

Inside the Forensic Lab That Fights Crime and Counterfeits With DNA

What you’re looking at is me, being blasted by a fog machine. It’s not a prop for a rave or a haunted house; it’s vapor laced with custom DNA particles that could prove I was at the scene of a crime. And it’s just one way a cutting-edge security firm is using life’s building blocks…

Watch This Leopard Dive Bomb An Impala From An Impossible Height

Leopards often pounce on their unsuspecting prey from trees. But as a group of tourists visiting Botswana recently found out, these brazen felines are capable of launching their attacks from remarkable heights. Either that, or this leopard is completely nuts. Here’s the complete video via Africa Geographic: Yasmin Tajik saw the whole thing unfold before…

iOttie’s New Dash Mount, Surf While You Bike, Wireless Audio [Deals]

The iOttie One Touch was your favorite smartphone car mount (and my favorite as well), and its follow-up is heavily discounted today on Amazon for the first time. The new design adds a telescoping arm to bring the screen two inches closer to you, and the redesigned cradle accommodates phones up to 3.2″ wide, including…

Shadow of Mordor, Breaking Bad Barrel, Guardians of the Galaxy [Deals]

The Breaking Bad Complete Series Barrel is back for 2014, with new Better Call Saul inclusions. It’s one of the cooler special editions for a TV series we’ve ever brought your way, and we’re glad to see it come back. Currently heavily discounted. [Breaking Bad] Watching Guardians Of The Galaxy is like getting back part…

15 Other Ridiculous Ways We Could Meet New Batman Characters On Gotham

Poison Ivy as a plant-toting tot? The Riddler as a medical examiner? Gotham’s taken some weird liberties with the Batman mythos in its new TV series, but there are plenty more villains as well as heroes Gotham has yet to give us! Here are our surmises for how Gotham will reimagine these 15 prominent Bat-characters.…

Why Screws Tighten Clockwise

One of the six simple machines, a screw is nothing more than an inclined plane wrapped around a center pole. While today screws come in standard sizes, and typically are tightened by turning clockwise (and loosened by turning counterclockwise), this is a recent invention. A great example of how things that seem simple can be…

Crowdfund a Space Elevator documentary, Robot adventure comics and more

This week’s look at the latest in crowdfunding fun features a comic about two bickering robots on an adventure, but that’s not all – there’s a crazy fantasy video game that blends elements of Cooking Mama with Avatar: The Last Airbender, documentaries about Space Elevators, and sand. Lots and lots of sand. Header Image Credit:…

Astronaut Alex Gerst recently captured this glorious photo from the International Space Station. It shows a series of towering thunderstorms rising up from a Saharan dust storm. The ISS was over Libya at the time as Gerst watched the anvil-like structures protrude above the dusty layer. (Credit: NASA/JSC/Gerst)

Why Android Phones Now Come With So Many More Google Apps Than Before

Google’s apps are front-and-center on newer Android phones for a reason: Google wants you to use its services on Android, and it has contracts in place to that end. According to confidential contracts obtained by The Information, phonemakers like Samsung and HTC need to include a whole lot of Google-branded widgets and icons to be…