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Gift Ideas for the 10 Major Species of Science Fiction Fan

Buying presents for the science fiction and fantasy fan in your life can be a major challenge — because no two fans are the same. It’s just not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Some people love Star Trek, others love Superman. So here’s our gift guide for the 10 major species of fans! Gift Ideas for Star…

David Goyer pitches a Sandman movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as lead?

Okay, let me clarify that: David Goyer is definitely pitching a Sandman movie, and Badass Digest is reporting that The Dark Knight’s Rises’ Joseph Gordon-Levitt is somehow involved. It’s possible that JGL wants to direct it, but it seems much more likely that might play Dream in such an adaptation (or both, hell). This is…

Shooting Challenge: Real World Photoshop

Photoshop allows you to insert anything you’d like into an image. But for this week’s Shooting Challenge, we want you to do it analog style. Print a photo and hold it within a scene—then take a photo of that. The Challenge Take a photo of a scene that’s been augmented by another photo being placed…

Five crazy buildings that were actually made by Russians, not aliens

English Russia has a splendid selection of the Top 25 Fantastic Soviet Buildings. I think the word they were looking for wasn’t fantastic but crazymadmegalomaniacal. They look straight from the imagination of a sci-fi writer with double utopian-dystopian personality. It was hard to pick, but here are my five favorites: 5. Crematorium in Kiev, Ukraine.…

What Is This? A Radio for Ants?

A group of mechanical engineers at Columbia University have produced the world’s tiniest FM radio transmitter. At its heart is a micrometer-sized oscillator powered by one-atom-thick graphene. But more than serving as a lilliputian proof of concept for tiny broadcasting equipment, this could help revolutionize smartphones and other gadgets. The research, published this week in…

Glowing Arc Reactor Coasters Are Just Enabling Tony Stark

It wasn’t dealt with much in the movies, but in the Iron Man comic books Tony Stark is constantly battling alcoholism. And that’s what makes these light-up glowing coasters ironic. On the big screen, he used the technology he developed to fight crime and make the world a better place. But in the comics, he…

The post-antibiotic world of tomorrow looks an awful lot like the past

And that should scare you. Back in September, the CDC issued its first ever report on the threats posed by antibiotic-resistant organisms. “If we are not careful,” said CDC director Tom Frieden at the time, “we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era.” But what would such an era hold? https://gizmodo.com/the-cdc-warns-of-the-impending-post-antibiotic-era-1334244964 https://gizmodo.com/can-we-avoid-an-antibiotic-apocalypse-472657488 Image Credit: Brian…

Nike FuelBand SE Review: More Style Than Smarts

The FuelBand was Nike’s first foray in fitness trackers, a sleek, stylish piece of wristwear that served as a constant reminder to be less lazy. The FuelBand SE is its wearable tech successor. But aside from a new splash of color on the band, it doesn’t offer many more ways to make you move your…

Swappable Heads Make This Torch Six Flashlights-In-One

With the right app, our phones can become almost any device we need, and Light & Motion is taking a similar approach with its new GoBe flashlight. Except that instead of software, it uses a set of six swappable heads that allow you to customize the flashlight’s beam for specific needs—like a wide bright light…

iRiver On Review: When Bad Apps Ruin Great Fitness Gadgets

Getting detailed data about your workouts is great and all, except there’s so much cumbersome gear involved. A chest strap for your heart rate, your phone to track distance and play music, some headphones so you can listen to music in the first place and hear your training app’s voice prompts. The iRiver ON was…

What is the furthest anyone has ever been from every other living person? XKCD’s Randal Munroe thinksthe most likely candidates are the Apollo command module pilots, who were about 2,227 miles from the nearest humans (i.e. astronauts on the lunar surface) during the Apollo moon landings. That may be the obvious answer, but as Munroe…

Watch how a paralyzed man can use a quadrotor drone to fly

It’s all drones all week at TED, with experts asking if these things will save us or destroy us. But as shown in this remarkable talk delivered teleremotely by quadriplegic Henry Evens, they have the potential to expand the worlds of bedridden people by giving them the sense of flight. Henry Evans became a mute…

How to Build Los Angeles in 2094 A.D.

One can never have too many post-apocalyptic visions of Los Angeles, right? This future L.A. is better known as Mega-City Two, a late 21st-century megalopolis that comes to us thanks to a new Judge Dredd comic, Mega-City Two: City of Courts, which hits shelves in January 2014. Like Chris Burden’s Metropolis II sculpture crossed with…

Responding to this situation on a ‘medivac’ hopper, two other lunar base crew members employ a portable CAT-scan device, a holographic display, and helmet-mounted heads-up displays to determine the severity of the injury. – 1992 vision of future lunar missions [Illustration by Pat Rawlings for NASA]

After celebrating its 15th birthday last year, AOL-owned Winamp announced today that it will be shutting its doors on December 20. Pour one out for everybody’s favorite forgotten MP3 player. [Ars]

What Happens When F1 Car Designers Build Architectural Models

Gizmodo EIC Geoff Manaugh and U.K. architects Smout Allen tapped an unlikely source to help create their new exhibition in London: Williams F1. But, in this case, the engineers at Williams weren’t building the advanced race cars they’re well-known for—they were 3D-printing the parts for an intricate model of an experimental energy storage park. http://bldgblog.gizmodo.com/the-british-exploratory-land-archive-1465483958…

​Nokia MixRadio Is the Easiest Streaming Music Service Yet

Sometimes all you want to do is press play on a magical big red button and hear the music you like. That one-touch startup has never been done as simply as has been in Nokia Music’s overhauled Windows Phone app, MixRadio. You turn it on, and it plays a station that’s perfectly tailored to all…

In the Future, Malls Will Be Halls Full of Screens

Westfield Labs is partnering with eBay this holiday season to offer the world a sneak peek at the mall of the future. And it’s just a bunch of touchscreens. Sony, Toms, and Rebecca Minkoff are all simulating the experience of shopping online by offering digital storefronts that amount to heavily branded kiosks where you can…

James Marsters reveals the secrets of his dark new Spike comic

After Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel ended, there were persistent rumors that Director Joss Whedon was going to make a Spike movie with actor James Marsters reprising his role as the fan-favorite vampire. It never happened, but now the movie is taking new life as a comic book called Into the Light, written by…

This Stilted Shanghai Office Building is a Bridge Amongst The Trees

China’s grim (and growing) air pollution problems cast some pretty dark shadows on the country’s urban hubs, which often look like they’ve been photographed using a “muddy water” filter. That makes these crisp and sunny pics of the Huaxin Business Center in Shanghai’s Xuhui District all the more surprising. The stilted, four-building complex, designed by…