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How Teeth Whitening Strips Attack Stains Like Tiny Spaceships

You pop on a goopy strip, and a short while later you’ve got teeth as white and gleaming as polished tile. But how do those strips work? Wired explains, and when you zoom in to the individual ions flying around, it looks a lot like a sci-fi space attack. Turns out, there’s a lot of…

The car that I would like to drive through Neo Tokyo one day

I love this beautiful silver bullet even while I hate Mercedes cars—their Gran Turismo Vision. Sadly, it’s just a prototype. Jalopnik has a neat 360-degree GIF taken at the Tokyo Motor Show 2013. https://jalopnik.com/heres-the-mercedes-gran-turismo-vision-in-360-view-1469714183

Antarctica looks so incredibly huge from space

Oh wow. This incredible view of Antarctica shows it with its sea ice at its maximum, in the month of September. I never imagined it would look so goddamn huge. This image shows a view of Earth on September 21, 2005, made from the data taken by the AMSR-E instrument, a device designed to capture…

Turn out the lights (NSFW)

One man’s nocturnal emission into the pulsating streets of Paris. Drinks will be had, porn will be stolen, and balls will be played with in this night of electronic debauchery. Click through for the video with a very NSFW splash screen. Turn Out the Lights is the latest single and title track from Tom Dinsdale’s…

Watch what happens when graffiti artists are given a giant blank room

When you give graffiti artists a giant empty warehouse with blank walls, what do you get? So much good stuff. It’s like opening up an incredible Pandora’s box of visual delight that makes you believe in magic and makes you wonder why don’t we give artists more space to spray. The art was created by…

This Instagram movie proves that every Instagram picture is the same

So this is cool: Filmmaker Thomas Jullien created a pretty sweet short movie by weaving together random strangers’ Instagram pictures to form a story. It starts with a bike ride to Paris and zaps you to New York and pretty much everywhere else in between. 852 Instagram pictures from 852 Instagram users come together for…

Would you want to sit in these morphing airplane seats?

It has more or less become fact that when you pay money to travel on an airplane, you’re subscribing yourself to probable gropage, uncomfortable seats, shoddy service, a few degrees of recline comfort and nuked sludge as food (if there is food). It’s not pleasant. It’s not futuristic. It’s not fun. What if airplanes were…

This Dune Concept Art is the Mind-Blower

The Dune movie is in limbo, and we may never even get to see the tons of gorgeous concept art that people created for it. But here’s one hell of a consolation prize: artist Feng Zhu has posted a ton of art he created for a Dune video game that also never happened. https://gizmodo.com/paramount-gives-up-on-the-dune-remake-5784749 Update:…

Reason for Conspiracy? 5 Mysterious Details From JFK’s Autopsy

It goes without saying that, for the past 50 years, there’s been a bevy of confusion surrounding the events of JFK’s assassination. Much of it has stemmed from inconsistencies in his medical records, which have long been employed to justify errant conspiracy theories putting responsibility for the fatal shot in the hands of everyone from…

Wow, Vampire Diaries really IS copying Buffy Season 4!

We thought the similarities between the “going off to college” storylines on Buffy the Vampire Slayer season four and Vampire Diaries season five were all just on the surface… until we saw last night’s episode. Holy cow, this show is biting Buffy’s ideas big time. Spoilers ahead… So just like on Buffy, it turns out…

Most Beautiful Items: November 16 – 22, 2013

Oh, my. Our most beautiful items this week really run the gamut. From stadiums shaped like vagianas, to crazy digital fabrication, to a beautiful futuristic speedboats, we’re really going for it this time around. Enjoy some of our favorite posts from the worlds of art, architecture, and design in the past week: The most beautiful…

Eyes (Not Ears) on the Street (via Gizmodo)

Meet the “Angels of Silence.” Adam Clark Estes reports on a project in Oaxaca, Mexico, employing the deaf to observe surveillance footage. It’s especially interesting because surveillance of image and sound are legislated differently, meaning the need for experienced “silent observation” is hard-coded into the law. Estes directs readers to additional coverage at theatlanticcities.com (“The…

A map of what the state boundaries in the U.S. might have been

In the nineteenth century, a geologist named John Wesley Powell suggested that the United States should draw state lines based on watersheds. It would prevent conflicts over water, and make agricultural projects more successful. Now, a land use planner has created a map that matches Powell’s vision. It’s a different world. This is a great…

What the world must look like to a flying bird (hint: awesome)

Claytonias F. traveled around America the past few months and documented it all with a quadcopter drone, a Phantom and a GoPro. The aerial views of our wonderful country are incredible to us foot worn humans but probably just a normal Wednesday for flying birds. This is probably the closest we’ll come to flying. And…

Now Available: Lumia 1520, Lumia 2520 . . . Oh Yeah, and Xbox One

A few new gadgets hit the shelves this week. Two of them are glossy and colorful, and one of them is black and came with tons of hype. You know which one we’re talking about. Nokia Lumia 1520 Is a device with a 6-inch display even a smartphone anymore? The Lumia 1520 is so comically…

I was a Hunger Games hater

Today’s comment of the day comes to you down the treacherous (and often unwalked!) path all the way from boredom to fandom. In a review of the second movie in the Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire, commenter HighWiredSith shared the story of going from disinterest, to giving it a shot, to becoming a fan: https://gizmodo.com/hunger-games-catching-fire-is-a-captivating-tale-of-pr-1469527675…

The scientific secret of “aura” photography

Yer a wizard, Harry! This hand looks like it is gathering the force necessary to hurl a fireball. Actually, it’s just giving off regular body heat in a special type of photograph that manages to capture changes in air density. Here we have an example of a schlieren photograph. Schlieren photography manages to capture differences…

Listen To 100 White Albums Played At Once

Rutherford Chang is a vinyl collector with a singular focus: The White Album. The New York-based artist has built up an impressive catalog of almost 700 (!) numbered copies of the 1968 double album. Taken together, his findings have become a kind of beautiful exhibition, but Chang has also recorded audio from 100 pressings, and…

Dr. Hornwell Hart, professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr, declares that babies born in the year 2000 will attain the ripe old age of 200. – January 7, 1926 Anaconda Standard in Montana

There is now an asteroid named after Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is one of the most celebrated literary science fiction authors of the past half-century, largely because of his masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow. And now Pynchon’s been given the greatest honor of all — astronomer Ernesto Guido has named an asteroid after him. On his observatory’s blog, Guido writes that he’s found a number of…