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Is the New McDonald’s Mascot Really Just a Despicable Me Minion?

Yes. Yes he is. Happy is the mascot for McDonald’s happy meals in France and Latin America, and he’s coming to the United States now. And much like Despicable Me’s Minions, he has bulging eyes, big ol’ teeth, and some rubbery arms. On top of that, watching Happy in action is like watching any of…

The Plot To Jurassic World Sounds Impressively Ridiculous

Is this the plot to the fourth installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, the Chris Pratt-starring Jurassic World? Find your local purveyor of salt, buy some, and then take it; but if it is real, then people are still making some impressively horrible dinosaur-cloning decisions. According to JoBlo, Jurassic Park is back in business, but…

Shutterstock, the subscription-based stock photo company behind a lot of the generic (or weird) stock photography you see online, is now offering stock music for video producers and the like. [Shutterstock via Mashable]

Shape-Shifting Robots Designed To Build Furniture When You Need It

Before the nightmare of having to build it all yourself begins, wandering through Ikea and deciding what furniture to buy is actually kind of fun. But researchers at EPFL are working on a better approach. Instead of deciding on a specific piece of furniture, they’re working on tiny modular robots that simply assemble into whatever…

Spitzer’s Newest Nebula is a Rorschach Inkblot Test in the Stars

The Spitzer Space Telescope team released a 360 infrared map of the Milky Way and invited us to hunt through it at home. Now nebulas previously known only by catalogue numbers are earning all sorts of creative names. https://gizmodo.com/an-interactive-map-that-lets-you-spin-around-the-milky-1548368234 https://gizmodo.com/at-home-astrophotography-1557232014 The image is taken by Spitzer’s InfraRed Array Camera as part of the Galactic Legacy…

What’s the Single Weirdest YouTube Video You’ve Ever Seen?

Beneath the internet’s cat and listicle-embedded candy coating is an abundance of dark, seedy underbellies just bursting with some of the weirdest, most bizarre creations mankind hath ever wrought. And what better repository for the madness than YouTube? If you make your way past the laughing babies and Roomba-riding pets, you’ll likely happen upon quite…

This cool concept will let you escape a fire like a SWAT commando

Jonathan Lowe—a product design student from Staffordshire University in the UK—came up with Xitus, a clever gadget that helps you escape from a building on fire when the only way out is trough the window. Place it on the edge of the window, climb over and a controlled descent device will take you to the…

Hugh Jackman: The Ultimate io9 Interview

Over Hugh Jackman’s 14 years as Wolverine, he’s seen the X-Men rise and fall, and he’s doing it again in X-Men:Days of Future Past. In our exclusive interview, Jackman explains what makes a good X-Men movie, his opinions on the new, younger group of mutants and the complex math behind delivering Wolverine’s signature line “Bub.”…

Watch five skydivers in wingsuits soar over NYC in this rare flight

This is a rare view: Five skydivers in wingsuits soar over New York City, beginning their journey at 8,200 feet above the southern tip of Manhattan. They reached speeds of 120mph as they flew past the financial district before deploying parachutes and landing on a barge in the Hudson River. A point of view head…

How to Choose the Right Bike For You

What kind of bike do you need? The short answer is: Any kind. It doesn’t matter, so long as you can ride it. The longer answer is: You need a bike that fits you, that can be kept in good repair, that is suited to your life and the terrain you’ll be bicycling over, and…

After 15 Years of Study, a New Theory of What Causes Fairy Circles

In Namibia, at the boundaries between grassland and desert, a strange phenomenon has puzzled people for centuries. Mysterious circles of barren land form in the middle of rich, thick grasses. Dubbed “fairy circles,” their formation has been attributed to everything from termites to poison gas. Now, a group of scientists has a new theory. Photo…

The Surface Pro 3 Has a Big, Beautiful 12-Inch Screen

The rumors for today’s big Surface event mostly hinted at something Mini, but instead Microsoft decided to size up. The Surface Pro is also getting stretched into a larger 12-inch version for its third iteration. It actually looks pretty great. The new stretch to 12 inches diagonal also brings the Surface Pro 3 up to…

A Trove Of 400,000 Images From The Met That You Can Use For Free

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put a collection of 400,000 (and growing) images online and made it all available for free use. Image: One of the now freely available images: View of Toledo, El Greco / The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. You can…

Google+ Stories Might Actually Make Photo Albums Beautiful (and Easy)

Raise your hand if you’ve ever gone on a vacation (or even to an event for a day), taken a bunch of photos, sworn you’ll put them in an album for your friends and family to see, only to leave them languishing on phone or SD card for many months. I do it pretty much…

The best optical illusions of 2014 are truly mind-bending stuff

Each year, the Neural Correlate Society holds a contest among experts on perception and visual illusions. The top ten entries get selected by a panel, and the three best are then picked in an international gathering that I imagine as some sort of wizards convention. Here are are the winners. 1. The Dynamic Ebbinghaus The…

Giroptic’s Egg-Shaped 360cam Captures Perfect HD Video Spheres

The little palm-sized egg above looks like a kitchen timer, but it’s really a powerful video camera that records 360 degree video. It’s rugged like an action camera, loaded with connectivity options, and designed to work out of the box without any proprietary kinks. Giroptic has been in the 360 video game for years, but…

Physicists Design A Collider That Turns Light Into Matter

Scientists have worked out an easy way of turning light into matter, a process thought to be impossible when first proposed 80 years ago. The proposed experiment would recreate events that occurred in the first 100 seconds of the Big Bang. In 1934, scientists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler suggested light can be converted into…

A Hammock In a Backpack Is All You Really Need For Camping

When you think of everything you really need for a weekend of camping, what comes to mind? Food? A change of clothing? A guitar? Wrong, wrong, wrong. All you really need is a comfy place to nap away the hours. So Nick Scroggs and Fred Bane created the HackedPack, a backpack featuring the most important…

How Much It Costs the NSA to Store an Entire Country’s Phone Calls

On Monday, we learned that the NSA is recording every single phone call in the Bahamas and storing the data for a month. This news arrives just six weeks after we learned that the NSA was recording every single phone call, text, and email in Iraq. In fact, the spy agency is engaged in similar…

Watch Snake Venom Turn a Dish of Blood To Jelly In Seconds!

If you want to see what snake venom — or at least Russell’s viper venom — does to blood take a look at this chilling video. A drop of venom, and a quick swish of the dish of blood, and you get big hunk of solid blood jelly. Russell’s vipers do a number of unpleasant…