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Are we running out of water? Absolutely not.

We hear a lot about how drinking water is drying up around the world. But the fact is that we have a “theoretically limitless” supply of drinking water, according to hydraulics engineers. The real problem is economic. Over on Quora, subsea hydraulics engineer Ryan Carlyle answers whether scientists have determined how much water is left…

These Are the Brains of the Next Bitcoin Mining Monster

In just a few short years, bitcoin mining has come a long way, from CPUs, to GPUs, to specialized, single purpose, system-on-a-chip beasts. There’s still progress to be made, though, more efficient mining marvels to build. This is that progress. Meet the (prototype) brains of an insane digital drill. What you see above is part…

Reddit Has a Burgeoning Gun Market and Its Sales Numbers Are Shocking

Reddit’s great for many things: funny pictures, interesting factoids, revealing crowd-sourced interviews. Also, assault rifles. Mother Jones just published an unnerving investigation into the little known gun market tucked into the GunsForSale subreddit, and the numbers are disturbing. According to the magazine’s research, the site has hosted at least 159 transactions since last June, nearly…

This Clever Gravity-Powered Hook Holds Your Coat Like a Robot Butler

Coat hooks come in two varieties: dainty things that fling your jacket to the floor whenever someone walks by, and torture devices that take five minutes to snake through the loop in your collar. Leave it to the Swedes to come up with the perfect solution, an articulated pincher that’s deployed by the weight of…

How a Science Fiction Book Cover Became a $5.7 Million Painting

What’s the difference between these two images? On the left is a book cover by legendary artist Chris Foss for Asimov’s Stars Like Dust. On the right is a painting by artist Glenn Brown, which just sold at auction for roughly $5.7 million, way more than it sold for in 2002. How did this happen?…

iPad Busker

Fox grabs scifi thriller Influx for a movie adaptation

In Daniel Suarez’s upcoming book Influx, someone is imprisoning the world’s technological geniuses to keep technology from advancing too far. It’s an intriguing premise, and clearly Fox agrees, as they’ve optioned it before the book’s release on February 20th. Here’s the book’s official description from Amazon: Are smart phones really humanity’s most significant innovation since…

I just can’t believe this is an actual video game

The future of gaming is here. For real. I know that we’ve heard it so many times that the phrase has become a tired cliché. But now, for the first time, we are seeing it: Games that can be confused with reality using devices that make our brains believe we are immersed in that reality.…

Inside the Highest Hotel Rooms on Earth

Hey there, thrill-seeker. Do you like altitude? Do you like views? Well, why not book a night in one of the tallest hotels on Earth? The tallest hotel in the U.S. opened up in Times Square this week, spurring us to take a peek at the tallest rentable rooms in the world. The 68-stories of…

Is your roulette hot streak based on more than random chance?

When stepping into a casino, it can be useful to have a clear sense of how probability works and how it applies to the games that you’re playing. In today’s discussion about gambling however, we’re reminded that a gambler’s fortune can depend on more than just random odds. Today’s post on the Gambler’s Fallacy relates…

Strap This Wind Turbine To Your Electric Car To Stay Juiced in Park

Electricity-generating windmills churn out free energy as long as the wind is blowing. So strapping one to the roof of your car where there’s always a breeze as long as you’re driving just seems obvious. The Transport Turbine—seen here as a 3D printed proof of concept—puts four small wind turbines on the roof of your…

Powerful new planet finder snaps a direct image of an exoplanet

After 10 years of painstaking development, the Gemini Planet Imager has returned its first image of a distant exoplanet. Behold Beta Pictoris b, a massive planet several times larger than Jupiter — and over 63 light-years from Earth. It’s almost impossible to think that we could snap a pic like this of a planet so…

Official photos of the Lego Simpsons House—one of the best sets ever

Here you have it! The perfect mix of two of the most iconic culture objects in the history of mankind: Lego, perhaps the most popular toy in the world, and The Simpsons, perhaps the most popular TV series of all time. And it’s only $199. We got a ton of high resolution official images and…

The Machine speaks on Person of Interest

Last night’s mid-season premiere of Person of Interest was pretty damn exciting, and brought back one of the show’s most mysterious Big Bads. Plus, we finally heard the Machine speaking for itself, and its message was . . . a little terrifying. Spoilers ahead! The episode picked up pretty much exactly at the cliffhanger point…

The Military Wanted Walt Disney to Build Real-Life Iron Man Suits

In 1965 the American military approached Walt Disney for a very special project. They wanted Disney engineers to build them an exoskeleton—basically a real-life Iron Man suit. The Navy sent a request for proposals to WED Enterprises—Disney’s design and architecture shop, now called Walt Disney Imagineering—hoping that they’d jump at the opportunity. But unfortunately for…

T-Mobile Will Pay Your Early Termination Fee If You Switch

Today T-Mobile isn’t crashing any parties. Well, not directly. But the magenta carrier has found another way to get up in the faces of its competitors. Ultimately, it’s a move that may make the other carriers prefer the party-crashing: It’s going to pay for you to move away from its rivals. The carrier thing is…

The deepest view of the Universe ever captured is truly overwhelming

The universe is vast, seemingly infinite thing, and the Hubble Telescope is here with the latest reminder of that fact in the form of eye candy. This is the first photo from NASA’s Frontier Fields project, and it’s the deepest we’ve ever seen into space. The only thing more impressive than the image itself is…

Mike and Sulley are going back to Monsters University

Monsters University wasn’t the last you’ve seen of college-aged Mike and Sulley. Turns out the monstrous duo are returning for one very special MU reunion. Attached to the Muppets Most Wanted release (in theaters March 21st) is a Pixar short featuring the members of Oozma Kappa throwing a party. Here’s the official rundown: Mike and…

This stop-motion horror film was crafted by one animator over 4 years

Takahide Hori spent four years making the 30-minute film Junk Head 1, and you can see the love that went into crafting its grimy subterranean future and sculpting the bizarre creatures that inhabit it. It follows a human sent underground to investigate a world filled with freakish people and vicious monsters. You can read the…

PlayStation Now Hands On: Hey This Thing Actually Works

So PlayStation Now works. Like really. Like what the heck are you sure there isn’t a PlayStation tucked away behind this TV and hidden somehow behind this Vita works. It’s incredible because it doesn’t feel incredible, if that makes any sense. You can play streaming games without any game console, and that’s pretty damn impressive.…