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This Old-School Firestarting Kit Will Make You Feel Like Survivorman

At one point in time, camping was truly about getting away from it all and only relying on nature for everything you needed. But these days, most new camping gear pertains to keeping your smartphone charged. Not Francesco Faccin’s Re-Fire kit, though. It’s designed to make camping a little more rugged again—by letting you start…

We might be destroying the universe just by looking at it

It’s not often that astronomy goes well with the book of Genesis. But this is a theory that evokes the line, “But of the tree of the knowledge, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” In this theory, knowledge doesn’t just kill you —…

All the Gear an Olympic Photographer Is Bringing to Sochi

Jeff Cable is a Bay Area photographer who has travelled the globe taking pictures, including coverage of the last three Olympic Games in Beijing, Vancouver, and London. Cable is about to head to Sochi to cover the 2014 Winter Olympics, where he’ll be blogging about his experience. To kick things off, Jeff published a rundown…

Check out the first complete globe of the planet Mercury

Attention fellow globe-enthusiasts: The good folks at Sky & Telescope Magazine have collaborated with members with NASA’s Mercury-mapping MESSENGER team to create the first complete globe of our solar system’s innermost planet, and it’s beautiful. Do want! Via Sky & Telescope: For centuries, our solar system’s innermost planet was shrouded in mystery. Now, for the…

10 more clever bets guaranteed to outsmart your friends

The only thing more satisfying than winning money from your friends on a bet is pranking them in the process. Deep down we all want to be conmen, and Richard Wiseman is back with ten more bets that will let you outsmart anyone. Just make sure that in addition to outsmarting your friends you can…

More than 300 years ago, settlers traveling up the St. Lawrence River founded the small town of Verchères. To commemorate the landing, Quebec architects Les Ateliers Guyon recently installed these elegant outdoor seats along the river’s banks. The idea is to transport the “to the seventeenth century, a time without roads; when the only means…

This mathematician’s life could be an epic action movie!

It’s not often that a person’s life has the three-part structure of a perfect action movie. It’s even less often that that person is a mathematician. That’s why we need to really appreciate it when we see it. Enjoy the kickass action movie that was the life of Tartaglia Act One: The Boy in the…

Scientists Are Going to Create the Coldest Spot in the Known Universe

The universe is freezing. In spots like the Boomerang Nebula the temperature drops all the way down to one degree Kelvin. But if NASA scientists have their way, the known universe will have a new coldest place, and it’s going to be inside the International Space Station. The Cold Atom Lab will be an atomic…

All the screen-Caps you need from the new Captain America 2 trailer

If there was a winner for the best movie trailer that aired during last night’s Super Bowl, it would be the new Captain America: The Winter Soldier trailer, hands down. It was packed with new shots, new faces and new info — as you can see in our immense screencap breakdown below! The Winter Soldier’s…

Zoom into the Orion Nebula with this new awesome time-lapse video

In an amazing twist on timelapse videos of the night sky, physicist and photographer Isidro Villo outfitted his camera with an automated mega-zoom lens, and captured the journey from the ground to the great Orion Nebula in this video found on DIY Photography and Petapixel. Villo spent a couple of years developing the perfect rig…

A Hacker Found GPS Data in the Audio of This Police Chase Video

It’s incredibly noisy in the cockpit of a helicopter, and you’d assume the sounds you hear in any YouTube police chase video were just the deafening whine of the chopper’s engine. But as one hacker discovered, that monotonous drone can actually hide some useful data, like the helicopter’s GPS coordinates. Watching cockpit footage of a…

The 8 Worst Mistakes Made by the Axis During World War II

The three major Axis powers — Germany, Japan, and Italy — committed a host of catastrophic errors during the war. But some of these miscalculations were considerably worse than others. Here are the most significant blunders made by the Axis during WWII. Above: German soldiers fighting in Russia. Late last year we told you about…

The Kentucky Senate has passed a bill that will allow computer programming classes to fulfill students’ foreign-language requirements. According to Senator David Givens, the goal is to equip Kentucky students with the language skills needed to compete for jobs in the tech sector. Comparative literature, indeed.

Every Super Bowl Tech Ad, Ranked

Unlike recent years, 2014 saw some Super Bowl ads for tech companies that were actually… good? Inconceivable! We’ve gathered them all here, in easily processed ranking form. As always, all rankings are totally subjective and legally binding. 15. Sprint – “Sprint Framily Plan – Band” This is the exact same as Sprint’s previous Framily Plan…

It Took More Than Just iPhones to Shoot Apple’s New Ad

With Macintosh turning 30 this year, you’d think Apple would go big. Maybe they’d spring for another Super Bowl commercial like the 1984 ad that changed the way the world thinks about computers. Nah… they just made an Apple promo reel that was shot entirely on iPhones—with a little help, of course. Don’t get me…

The surreal, disturbing and sometimes erotic worlds of Rachel Baran

I love the surreal worlds of Rachel Baran, a self-taught, 20-year-old photographer who creates beautiful images—sometimes disturbing, sometimes erotic, always hypnotizing. This is Rachel in her own words, as she told me in an email: I’ve been practicing photography as a hobby for somewhere around four years, but as of now I still haven’t gotten…

This Is What HIV Looks Like When It Infects Living Cells

This monochrome image of living tissue has some extremely unwelcome visitors lurking within it. Taken from some of the first ever 3D images of HIV at work, those little blue circles show the virus infecting the surrounding cells. The electron microscope images show HIV-1 virions in bright blue, embedded in the gut tissue of a…

32 Mesmerizing Photos of Vortices, From Soap Bubbles to Spiral Galaxies

Vortices are beautiful and mysterious, found at every imaginable scale—from soap bubbles to black holes. They’re so ubiquitous, in fact, that we tend to overlook them. But new research shows that studying the simplest vortices could glean surprising scientific insights. Just look at the wonderful vortex shining in rainbow colors in the photo above. It…

This Week’s TV: The Walking Dead is back! And an Arrow family reunion!

The Walking Dead returns after December’s brutal fall finale. What’s ahead for our survivors? Plus, the Person of Interest team is back together for a dangerous heist. Meanwhile, Alex Kingston’s Dinah Lance returns to Arrow and Stan Lee pops up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And check out clips from this week’s Almost Human, Helix, and…

Behold One of the Biggest Controlled Skyscraper Implosions Ever

It took more than 2,000 pounds of explosives to bring down this 32-story tower in Frankfurt yesterday—roughly the same amount as a Mark 84 bomb. Thankfully, since we live in the age of YouTube, there are plenty of astounding videos of the demo. A controlled implosion like this is way more difficult than it sounds.…