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Thanks for the Warm Welcome

Very excited to be bringing Disquiet.com coverage of sound culture under the Gizmodo umbrella. https://gizmodo.com/say-hello-to-3-new-subdomains-on-gizmodo-1471838219

Why you really get sick on planes – and how to prevent it

If you’re about to fly somewhere for Thanksgiving, you’re probably dreading the possibility that you’ll catch a bug along the way. And with good reason: Many people come down with something nasty in the days following an airplane flight. Why does this happen, and how can you keep yourself from getting sick? A couple I…

Man Swaps Head For iPad. Has No Regrets.

This superb illusion doesn’t use Photoshop. So how did photographer Nils Bertrand pull it off? In response to last week’s Shooting Challenge, Nils was one of our only readers who took the bait—to take a photograph that itself contained a photographic illusion (basically, photo within the photo, held in place to replace part of the…

Beauty and the Beast is sort of okay, except for its main characters

And it’s like this show is trying to give us bland protagonists on purpose. But we’ll get to everything that’s gone wrong so far this season after we discuss the yawner of a plot. Spoilers… This was the midseason finale, and, boy, was it boring. Obviously, Vincent didn’t die in last week’s explosion. Instead, he…

Kindle Fire HD For $100, The Best Electric Razor, Nexus 7 [Deals]

In our guide to The Shaving Gear Worth Your Money, we let you know the Braun 760cc was The Commerce Team’s electric razor of choice, and also The Wirecutter’s pick, and a contender in Gizmodo’s Electric Razor Battlemodo. Today you can get it’s big brother, the 790cc, with its extra features for the same price…

This Robotic Sea Turtle Is Built to Find Hidden Treasure in Shipwrecks

Thanks to millions and millions of years of evolution, sea turtles work. They work well. They can swim stealthily around the ocean, sliding between chunks of coral if necessary. That in mind, it’s no wonder the sea creatures are the inspiration for the latest underwater robots. The U-CAT hails from Estonia, but it’s bound for…

US taunts China by flying two B-52 bombers over restricted airspace

The United States has officially announced that it flew two B-52 strategic bombers over Chinese defense airspace in direct challenge to Beijing. China unilaterally declared the area as “restricted space” last Saturday, following a long territorial dispute over its islands, now administered by Japan. Good luck, everyone! In an unprecedented move, the bombers flew from…

Are there more stars than grains of sand on the Earth’s beaches?

Carl Sagan is famous for saying there are more stars in our Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. But is this actually possible? It’s an awesome question — and a great excuse to do some math. We know there are 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky…

The 7 Biggest Airlines, Ranked by Thanksgiving Week Suckiness

With the East Coast on the verge of an ill-timed storm, worse than usual holiday delays seem inevitable, and there’s one question on everyone’s mind: How long am I going to be stuck in airort purgatory? Depends who you fly. Since not all airlines are created equal, we’ve averaged together Thanksgiving week airline data from…

This mechanic barely escapes being crushed by the car he tries to save

When you’re raising an expensive luxury sedan onto a lift—especially one that costs more than your annual salary—it’s probably a good idea to make sure the handbrake is on. But if you forget, just try and remember that no amount of adrenaline or panic will make you strong enough to stop the car from rolling…

Say Hello to 3 New Subdomains on Gizmodo

We’ve added three subdomains to the greater Gizmodo umbrella this week, three awesome blogs that have long been carving out a niche for themselves elsewhere. So here’s a hearty welcome to Southland, Abler, and Disquiet. Southland Southland comes to Gizmodo as part of an exciting new content partnership with the USC Libraries, specifically the member…

10 Most Unintentionally Funny Lines in All of Star Trek

Star Trek is full of quotable sayings and inspiring moments. But there are also some pieces of dialogue that cross the wrong final frontier. Here are the 10 most unintentionally hilarious bits of dialogue in all of Star Trek. 10) “I’m with Starfleet. We don’t lie” — TNG, “Justice” 9) “Storage compartment? Storage compartment?” —…

Neurosurgeons Use Water to Map Connections in the Brain

See that walnut-like object in this brain scan? It’s a tumor that needs to be removed. But to avoid damaging critical functions like speech and vision, surgeons have to see the brain’s tangled web of connections. The solution? Just add water. This brain scanning technique, called tractography or diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), has been around…

Google Street View Now Shows You the Inside of Airports

To make your holiday travels easier, Google Street View now takes you inside 16 international airports and over 50 train stations around the world. So don’t worry about finding the baggage check using archaic methods like looking at signs. Now you can map it! While the utility of these new transit hub tours remains to…

The experiment that proved spiders don’t like human urine

A 1955 experiment attempted to prove that spiders could be used to diagnose schizophrenia. Although upsetting for everyone involved, the experiment was even less pleasant for the spiders than it was for the humans. It began when scientists at the Friedmatt Sanatorium and Nursing Home in Switzerland wondered what else might affect a spider’s web-building…

World’s Largest Landfill Will Soon Be NYC’s Biggest Solar Facility

At one time, Freshkills Park was the world’s largest landfill, receiving the majority of NYC’s waste. Now, it’s being made into a park nearly three times the size of Central Park, and Mayor Bloomberg announced yesterday it will soon include the city’s largest solar energy installation. The proposed solar facility will provide 10 megawatts of…

Samsung is fixing a big drawback of the Galaxy Gear smartwatch, allowing it to display notifications from third-party apps. This week, Gear wearers will get to read Gmail, Facebook Messenger, Twitter and other notifications on their wrist, rather than having to fish out their phone. [Engadget via 9to5Google]

Hello, World / Hello, Gizmodo

These are two things that I think Geoff Manaugh, editor-in-chief of the technology and design blog Gizmodo.com, didn’t know about me when he asked if I’d consider bringing Disquiet.com beneath his website’s expanding umbrella. 1: My “to re-blog” bookmark file has been packed in recent months with scores of items from pretty much all of…

Tiny forest planet traveling across the never-ending galaxy

I’ve seen many of these spherical panorama photos in the past, but I love this one because it looks like a tiny Little Prince forest planet happily traveling across the Milky Way. Photographer Thomas o’Brien explains how this classic panorama technique is done: I shot 32 vertical images with the camera mounted to a panoramic…

THIS is how you photograph a pride of lions

It’s hard to get more up close and personal than this – but how does one go about capturing such spectacular photographs? Screenshots captured from “Car-L meets the lions”. The answer: by strapping a DSLR inside a heavy duty, radio-controlled camera buggy and driving it right up next to a pride of very curious lions.…