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A Massive Road-Building Initiative Is Transforming Africa’s Landscape

Africa is home to some of the poorest road networks in the world, which act as a major barrier for trade, education and healthcare. Not for long, though—as it’s embarking on a frenetic road-building exercise that could revolutionize the entire continent. You only need look at the numbers to realize that Africa’s roads need attention.…

Remote Control Sneaker Lights Blind Your Friends With Awesomeness

These days, a set of velcro straps across the top of your kicks just isn’t enough to impress your sneaker freak friends. To guarantee you’re the envy of everyone on your block, forget about dropping hundreds on the latest pair of Nikes—instead, strap a pair of these Light Kicks LED strips to your feet. https://gizmodo.com/nike-has-put-the-best-thing-from-the-1980s-into-a-set-o-1468198892…

It’s the perfect time for a GIF Party, so let’s have one now!

After a stormy couple days, it looks like we might be on our way to thawing out soon, just in time for the GIF Party! How was your week? Did you spend it shoveling snow, clearing out your Netflix queue, and testing the outer limits of how many sweaters can be worn at once? Or,…

Last week, we learned that digital music sales dropped for the first time since iTunes in 2013. Thanks to Billboard and Nielsen’s fresh year-end music report, we now know that there was significant 32 percent uptick in music streams in 2013. This doesn’t prove that Spotify and the like are killing music sales, but it…

Target Hackers Also Swiped Personal Info of 70 Million Customers

So remember a few weeks ago when Target admitted that hackers had swiped the data of 40 million customers, but no one needed to worry because it was all encrypted? Well, Target’s starting to realize that quite a bit more data was swiped than it previously thought—specifically, the names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail…

We Can’t Blame Obesity On Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors Anymore

One popular idea to explain the current obesity epidemic proposes that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a fat-storing adaptation, which allowed them to survive frequent famines. Today, with our overabundance of food, this adaptation is causing us to get fat. There’s just one problem with this idea — research now shows that hunter-gatherer societies aren’t necessarily…

Kirk and crew derp it up in the blooperized Star Trek trailer

OneMinuteGalactica is back with another movie trailer culled together from the film’s blooper reel, and the subject is the first Star Trek reboot. The crew of the Enterprise are no longer just young and inexperienced, now they’re also idiots who are liable to break out into dance at any moment. Fun stuff, but it is…

Plumen’s Beautiful New Bulbs Make Low-Energy Into High Art

A bulb is a bulb is a bulb. Wait, no, not—not when it looks like this it isn’t. These energy-efficient bulbs make low power consumption a form of high art. Designed by Plumen, which arguably created the first nice-looking energy efficient bulb back in 2011, this is the second model: Plumen 002. And, as every-day,…

Could Doctor Who soon be seeing the return of River Song?

Check out the first look at Quicksilver in the new X-Men movie! Plus find out why Guardians of the Galaxy won’t look like anything you’ve seen lately. M. Night Shyamalan wants his show Wayward Pines to follow in Twin Peaks’ footsteps, and Ron Moore says Outlander is building on Game of Thrones. Spoilers right now!…

8 Amazing Museums Where You Can Bring a Sleeping Bag and Stay the Night

Have you ever slept beneath the bones of a T-Rex? What about next to the Declaration of Independence? It’s been nearly three decades since I read From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but the plot—two kids run away from home and take up residence at the Met, eventually solving a mystery,…

Magnetic Levitation Looks Magical in Slow Motion

What do you get if you take some magnets, superconductors, and liquid nitrogen, and a slow-mo camera to film them with? This kind of magical footage is what. This little demonstration of magnetic levitation isn’t much new—we’ve all heard of it, and maybe even seen it—but the video includes some magical footage. It’s mesmerising, it…

The Science of Why Your Pasta Boils Over

We’ve all done it: you put the pasta on to boil, turn your back for a few minutes to wipe off the counter or read the newest Today I Found Out article, and suddenly you hear that foreboding hissing sound of water boiling over. (Perhaps if you simply subscribed to our Daily Knowledge podcast and…

PlayStation Now—the streaming game service—will, weirdly, require a proprietary DualShock controller to play PS3 games on TVs, phones and tablets.

Mesmerizing video of a man melting a car’s ice sculpture in reverse

I hate the Porsche Panamera with a vengeance* but this video of a man melting its ice sculpture in reverse is quite pretty. I find the illusion of the ice being created from flames quite mesmerizing. * Porsches are for two people only—sorry frustrated rich parents with no taste. SPLOID is a new blog about…

NASA captures the Flaming Fist of God 17,000 light-years away from us

Humans like to see things where there’s nothing but visual patterns. Even NASA: the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured an “image [that] shows the energized remains of a dead star, a structure nicknamed the Hand of God after its resemblance to a hand.” Except now it looks more like The Flaming Fist of…

How to Stop Google From Letting Strangers Send You Email

Google has updated Gmail with a feature that some of you might not appreciate. Now, simply typing in someone’s name into the ‘To’ field will automatically grab their address from Google+, and, worse, the service is applied to your account by default. Google announced the feature on its Gmail blog yesterday, and have clarified to…

Why You Sleep at Night

It’s not just because it’s dark. Well, it partly is, but more accurately it’s a result of a complex series of biological processes which give rise to something called circadian rhythms. This video by Sci Show explains how they work—and how they regulate all kinds of different processes in our bodies, from eating to behavior.…

China’s Smog Is So Bad That Hotels Now Give Guests Gas Masks

It’s no secret that China is choking on smog, but the problem has gotten so bad recently that hotels have started issuing guests with gas masks to use during their stay. For real. https://gizmodo.com/beijing-is-choking-on-smog-5976356 Redditor Mthomaseddy posted this picture of an elegantly packaged gas mask, which was sat in his room when he arrived at…

Why Is the Solar System Flat?

When our solar system formed from a swirling cloud of dust, it happened to form in such a way that all planets sit on a single plane. But with all of 3D space to choose from, why did it turn out flat? Noticing that plenty of other structures in the Universe are flat, too, this…

Headphones Are a Social Panacea

Headphones can transform any awkward social situation. Fact. [Doghouse Diaries]