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Obi-Wan Is Joining The Cast Of Star Wars: Rebels And Maybe Lando, Too

Looks like Disney was pretty serious about Star Wars: Rebels being part of the new official canon. Obi-Wan Kenobi will be showing up in some fashion on the new Disney XD cartoon series, and rumor is a young Lando Calrissian might be as well. Here’s the deal: Jedi News spotted Obi-Wan among the Rebels character…

5 Crowdfunded Projects That Defy All Logic and Reason

The online fund-begging havens of Kickstarter and Indiegogo (among quite a few others) are bursting with wild, fantastical visions of things once thought impossible. Some of them are awesome, some outlandish, some flat-out insane. These are but a few. Whether these craziest of projects are scams or the masterminds behind them have actually lost their…

Agents Of SHIELD‘s Monster Is A Man Who Equates Strength With Survival

Last night’s episode of Agents of SHIELD delved into the season’s big bad, John Garrett, and gave Bill Paxton tons of material to chew on. And we saw how Garrett “mentored” Grant Ward into becoming the psycho he is today. Most fascinatingly, Garrett constantly warns Ward against weakness — but Garrett is weak as hell.…

TNT Is Making A Supernatural Medical Drama, Proof

What if Grey’s Anatomy and House had more supernatural stuff? Well, then they would be TNT’s new medical drama Proof, which sounds like all the other medical dramas ever made, but with brief pauses for doctors to look inside the chest cavities of their patients and shout “Any ghosts in there?” TNT just sent out…

Smartphone Time-Lapses, Portable Solar Power, Wireless Flash Drives

A plethora of portable pocketable power promotions per your purchasing pleasure if you please. First up is the Anker Astro Mini, my personal favorite external battery, because it’s the one I’ll actually carry around. Anker is the favorite external battery brand of our readers and our team, in fact their Anker 3E was our 7th…

You Can Recycle These New Circuit Boards by Dunking Them in Hot Water

It almost seems too easy. With government funding, a trio of British companies recently developed a new way to build circuit boards that makes them 90-percent recyclable. In fact, all you have to do to recycle them is dunk them in hot water and scrape off the circuits with a business card. The innovation was…

Shooting Challenge: Lone Survivor

A virus has wiped out the population of earth…minus one. You’re the last person, living in a world built for billions. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, capture this feeling by featuring just one subject in a vast urban or natural landscape. The Challenge Take a photo in which just one person is featured in a…

Why a Raleigh neighborhood wants to tear down a modern house. How a suburb in Cleveland eradicated the school bus. Where Millennials are moving (hint: wherever the transit is). Plus Los Angeles’s Instagramming mayor and Vegas’s quest to legalize weed, all in this week’s Urban Reads. Neighborhood politics at their worst: A halfway constructed home…

A Path of Tornado Destruction

On April 27th, a tornado cut through Mayflower and Vilonia, Arkansas. The EF4 storm had winds raging at between 267 and 322 kilometers per hour, wrecking devastation. A new satellite image reveals the 66 kilometer path of destruction. The tornado ripped up vegetation, tossed around debris, and destroyed structures all along the brown band in…

Internment of Japanese-Americans, Seen Through The Lens Of Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams is renowned for his stunning, black-and-white photographs of landscapes in the American West. But, in 1943, he documented one of the most shameful events in U.S. history. In commemoration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the Library of Congress (LOC) blog directs readers to an online set of rare photographs that Adams donated…

A Bike Lawyer is Here to Answer All Your Cycling-Related Legal Questions

Biking is a beautiful thing until you get doored. Or hit. Accidents are scary and it can be tough to know your rights as a cyclist and what to do after you pound the pavement. Josh Zisson is a Boston-based bike lawyer, and he’s here this afternoon to answer your questions. Before we get into…

Watch The Most Detailed Simulation Of the Universe Ever Created

This simulation — the most detailed look at the structure of the universe yet — carries us through over 13 billion years in the life of the universe (picking up just under half a billion years after the Big Bang) in just two minutes. The Illustris Simulation is the work of a team led by…

ISS Still Streaming HD, Still Gorgeous

The live stream from the International Space Station has become my new default “Stare into Space” activity. From the over 300,000 other people in the room with me right now, I’m not the only one fascinated! Fair warning: the group chat can collect people who wouldn’t know wonder if it poked them in the eye…

The Most Radioactive Place in New York City Is a Garage In Queens

Like so many NYC businesses, Primo Flat Fix occupies a nearly 100-year-old building. But this Queens, garage sits on a very peculiar piece of dirt: The former site of Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, a rare-earth supplier that furnished the Atomic Energy Commission with radioactive thorium—when it wasn’t dumping the toxic material in the sewer. That makes…

Crosswind take-offs suck even if you’re riding a fighter jet

Landing or taking off in heavy crosswinds really sucks no matter which plane you’re in. It could be the biggest airliner in the world, a prop plane, or these F-18s taking off in 30 to 40-knot crosswinds—it looks fun from the outside, but it really sucks for the pilot and everyone else inside. SPLOID is…

This Apocalypse-Ready Solar Charging Station Folds Up Behind a Bike

At the Bike Expo New York over the weekend, I got the chance to meet Jeff Crystal of Voltaic Systems, a New York-based maker of photovoltaic systems. Crystal built a mobile charging station on the back of his bike that can supply devices with a charge within minutes. If there ever was an apocalypse–this is…

A Solar Flare in Unprecedented Detail

On March 29th, the sun released an X-class flare. It was caught by five high-quality solar observatories on the ground and in space, creating the most detailed observations of an intense flare in history. This beautiful, rich data will help researchers better understand what triggers flares. Composite of data sources capturing the flare: SDO [bottom/left],…

Behold ‘Pinocchio Rex’ — An Entirely New Breed Of Tyrannosaur

Introducing Qianzhousaurus sinensis — a new confirmed species of long-snouted tyrannosaur that menaced the Earth 66 million years ago. The recent discovery of its fossilized remains confirms a longstanding theory about tyrannosaurs. This slender, 30-foot-long dinosaur lived during the late Cretaceous. It belonged to the same family as Tyrannosaurus rex, but its skull was markedly…

Are We At The Dawn Of The Age of Epidemics?

Over the past several weeks and months, we’ve seen a startling number of disease outbreaks pop up around the globe. It’s a trend that’s not completely surprising — one that could characterize the coming decades as the Age of Epidemics. Here are some of the scariest new diseases you need to know about. The First…

The First TMNT Movie Figures Reveal Pretty Much Everybody

They could be worse! Sure, most of Splinter’s snout is disturbingly pink and you can still see his little Fu Manchu mustache, but Shredder’s armor is appropriately ridiculous. Also, the Turtles’ weird noses are less noticeable on the figures (if they were even sculpted), and that’s definitely an improvement. In fact, my only problem is…