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Taste Virtual Food By Touching This Silver Electrode To Your Tongue

Amazon lets you flip through many of the books in their online store, while iTunes lets you listen to a preview of a song you’re thinking of downloading. And soon, online grocery stores could let you sample their wares as well, thanks to this unique synthesizer that can simulate various tastes on your tongue. Developed…

Explore The Smithsonian’s Online Design Museum Through Color

The Smithsonian’s design museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, is taking a different tack with a new website: it wants you to explore its digital collection by color. Clicking on any one of a grid of 117 colors lets you view a list of items that share that specific shade. The Cooper-Hewitt explains: Objects with images now have…

The University of Nicosia in Cyprus has just become the world’s first accredited university to accept payments from students for tuition in Bitcoin.

This New Li-On Battery Packs More Power and Is Way Safer, Too

Li-on batteries are great and all, but there’s a barrier preventing them from storing much more power: they, um, tend to catch fire. But a company called Solid Energy claims to have developed a technology which makes the power source both more energy dense and safer, too. https://gizmodo.com/why-smartphone-laptop-and-airplane-batteries-explode-5985410 The company, spun out of MIT, wants…

The Science of Doctor Who’s Sonic Screwdriver

Ahead of this weekend’s 50th anniversary of Doctor Who’s first appearance on the small screen, the guys at Headsqueeze have taken a look at his famous Sonic Screwdriver—and asked if it could ever be, you know, scientifically possible. Cue some live experiments, fire, and real-world acoustics. As for whether a real Sonic Screwdriver will ever…

You’ve Never Seen GPS Data Look This Beautiful

It might look like a talented artist has been enthusiastically scribbling over an aerial photograph, but this is in fact a set of GPS data looking more beautiful than you could ever have imagined. The data was actually gathered from a crop-dusting aircraft, hence all these beautiful, looping routes. Put together by MapBox, which marries…

How Squinching Will Make You Look Good in Photos

If you—or the people you take photographs of—always look bad in images, then help is at hand. Professional portrait photographer Peter Hurley suggests you squinch next time you have your picture taken. If you’re unaware what squinching is, join the club! Merriam Webster defines it as: SQUINCH transitive verb 1: to screw up (the eyes…

Vint Cerf: “Privacy May Actually Be an Anomaly”

Vint Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist, is famous for having some, um, strong views. He’s just unleashed a cracker, though: he thinks that “privacy may actually be an anomaly.” https://gizmodo.com/vint-cerf-dreams-of-an-internet-that-connects-humans-to-5987788 Speaking at an FTC event, Cerf was attempting to explain that privacy is a fairly new—and perhaps unsustainable—development. “In a town of 3,000 people there…

Following the decision of the FAA to allow the use of electronics throughout your flight, Southwest is really upping the ante: it will provide Wi-Fi gate-to-gate. You need never be without cat videos when you fly.

Atomic (Size) Radio (via Gizmodo)

How tiny is this experimental radio, reports Robert Sorokanich of Gizmodo? “At its heart is a micrometer-sized oscillator powered by one-atom-thick graphene.” https://gizmodo.com/what-is-this-a-radio-for-ants-1468429458

What the hell is this underwater unicorn from the infernal deeps?

Scientists have identified a mysterious animal captured in the arctic waters of Canada’s Hudson Strait region. They thought this gelatinous beast was a goblin shark, but now they claim it’s a Rhinochimaeridae—commonly known as “long-nosed chimaera” or “underwater unicorn from the infernal deeps die you bloody bastard die” fish. Some people thought this was a…

These are all the deaths in Game of Thrones

Redditor Ma Petit Choufleur did something really cool: mark all the deaths in the Game of Thrones novels and then take this cool photo. Yeah, that’s lots of deaths. “All the marked deaths are present tense confirmed deaths. No flashbacks, and no implied deaths,” he says.

The International Space Station looks so cool when astronauts sleep

I’ve never seen the International Space Station at “night,” when astronauts and cosmonauts go to sleep, so when I saw that I immediately though “that’s so damn cool!” “The dots near the hatch point to Soyuz if we have an emergency,” says astronaut Mike Hopkins.

The Weirdest Thing on the Internet Tonight: 48 Hour Duck

Faced with a long, cold winter of starvation, one samurai must make the ultimate sacrifice for his family. Who would have thought that sepuku took so much out of you?

Lumia 2520 Review: Not Much More Than a Pretty Face

Up until now, pretty much your only option for a Windows RT tablet was the Surface 2. But now Nokia is giving you another choice, in the form of the Lumia 2520, a colorful line of tablets that look even larger versions of its rainbow phones. https://gizmodo.com/surface-2-review-one-step-forward-two-steps-behind-1448865506 What Is It? A colorful Nokia tablet running…

Watch a volcano birth an entire new island

Off the coast of Japan, an exploding volcano has formed a new island about 650 meters in diameter. You can see it spewing and spouting black volcanic ash all around as it fills itself out. Pretty cool. Fuji News Network says the island is forming near the Nishinoshima Volcano. The footage below was captured by…

Ew, this human cheese was made with belly button and toe bacteria

Get ready to hold a little vom down in your throat. These carpet-looking thingamajigs are actually cheese made with human bacteria, such as the kind you’d find in your belly button or in your nose or in your salty tears or on your skin or on your toe. It’s beyond gross and, if you really…

One chart exposes the racial preferences of online dating

Quartz has dug up a rather sad chart that reveals the racial preferences of online daters. Judging from data from Facebook dating app Are You Interested, you can see how different races respond to each other under the veil of the Internet. Most women respond positively to white men, while most men respond positively to…

Why Agents of SHIELD‘s Marvel Movie Connection is Kind of a Problem

Last night’s Agents of SHIELD was billed as being a quasi-sequel to Thor: the Dark World. As if Coulson’s squad would be spending the whole episode cleaning up the aftermath of Thor’s fight with Malekith. In fact, it was much more a standalone affair — which pointed to one problem with the shared continuity. Spoilers…

Something deeply strange is happening to these cars

The boss said, “Go get my car from the basketball court.” This wasn’t exactly what I expected to find. These floating cars, ripped out of my dreams, were created by Chris Labrooy. You can see more of his goofy, evocative work on his website.