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This Clever Egg Washer Could Save 90 Million Chickens a Year

Regardless of which came first, chickens and their eggs are big business. In the US alone, we raise nine billion fowl—more than the total number of humans on Earth—every single year. Problem is, eggs have a natural failure rate (due to bacterial infections and such) of one percent—90 million birds annually—and our best methods of…

Sound advice for smart humans: “Be ignorant, be silent, be thick”

At Wellesley College’s 2012 Commencement Ceremony, political scientist and MSNBC television host Melissa Harris-Perry offered the gathered graduates three pieces of invaluable advice. “Be ignorant,” she urged them them, “be silent, and be thick.” Harris-Perry’s speech is really worth watching in its entirety, but her three-part exploration of sensible humility, mindfulness and boldness – which…

Gold Nanoparticles Give Plastic Skin Life-Like Senses

Human skin may very well be one of the world’s most impressive sensor arrays. Able to detect temperature, pressure, touch and pain simultaneously, your skin’s sensory receptors feed you a constant data stream about the environment around you. Now, researchers have given much of that sensing ability to plastic e-skin. Unlike prior skin-mimicking systems that…

A Hotel Full of Secret Rooms Invites an Epic Game of Hide-and-Seek

The Suitcase House Hotel is the perfect place to hide out. It has an entire network of rooms hidden beneath the floorboards, like an architectural Swiss Army knife. Check out these amazing hiding places—or, as the hotel probably refers to them, the places where you brush your teeth and sleep. Created by Hong Kong-based architect…

Smart Diaper: How Pee-Soaked QR Codes Could Benefit Babies Everywhere

Smart diapers won’t check your email or tweet about their contents (thank god), but they can collect data for an area of baby-health that’s severely lacking. As silly as it might sound, these prototype pampers use QR codes and an iPhone app to keep your baby peein’ pain-free. Unless you’re a parent you might not…

Report: Amazon’s Tablets Will Get Sharper Displays and a New Design

BGR claims it’s got exclusive details about the Amazon Kindle Fire tablets that will be released this fall. It’s more or less what we could expect from a yearly iteration of a tablet. Here’s the skinny. First up, the basic seven-inch Kindle Fire will get a display spec bump from a 1,024 x 600 screen…

10 Movie Flops That Totally Deserved It

Lone Ranger got treated to some rough justice at the box office this last weekend, and nobody shed a tear. But it’s not the first flop that actually deserved its fate. Even though plenty of decent movies tank for dumb reasons, sometimes justice really is served. Here are 10 movies that bombed because they were…

Throwable Camera Prototype Guarantees Pitch Perfect Photography

It turns out that making a throwable camera isn’t that tricky. But making a throwable camera that doesn’t capture random obscure images, or spinning video that induces motion sickness, is kind of hard. In fact it’s taken Steve Hollinger years to develop such a camera, but with the Squito—his latest prototype—it looks like he’s almost…

‘Blitzars’ could explain those mysterious intergalactic radio bursts

Late last week we told you about those unexplained — but extremely powerful — radio bursts that originated from another galaxy. A number of theories have been proposed to account for the phenomenon, but there’s one in particular that caught our attention: Blitzars — the final stage of a supramassive neutron star. Cosmologists have been…

ISS Astronauts Are Spacewalking Now and You Can Watch It Here Live

NASA’s Chris Cassidy and his colleague from the European Space Agency Luca Parmitano are currently in the middle of a six-hour spacewalk. This is the first of two spacewalks the Cassidy-Parmitano duo will make this month as they prepare the ISS for a Russian laboratory module that will be installed at the end of the…

Watch today’s spacewalk, live on io9!

NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano are scheduled to spend close to seven hours outside the International Space Station today, where they will venture in the first of two scheduled spacewalks for this month. Here’s your chance to watch it live! The space walk kicked off at 8:10 a.m. ET, and is…

The Most Insanely Fantastic Toys Coming to Comic-Con 2013

I hope you’ve been saving up, because this is going to be expensive. Here’s all the action figures, statues, and other merchandise you’ll be getting at next week’s San Diego Comic-Con and nowhere else (…except maybe on eBay later for an exorbitant price). G.I. Joe Vs. Transformers, Hasbro This massive set includes the G.I. Joe…

The Key To Never Forgetting Your iPhone’s Charging Cable

Key-shaped USB flash drives have guaranteed we never forget to bring our important files ever again. And taking the same approach, Bluelounge’s Kii guarantees you always have an emergency iPhone or iPad charger on hand—as long as you remembered to lock your home and bring your keys. A 30-pin dock connector version of the Kii,…

Old KGB Radio Intercept Stations Are Still Operational and Listening

We recently learned that the NSA is definitely watching us, and as it turns out, our Soviet Big Brother is spying on us too. Intelligence historian Matthew Aid discovered through declassified CIA documents that Russia still has a massive network of former KGB listening stations that are actively eavesdropping. And here’s where they are. While…

Finally: An epic, original science rap that’s actually really good

Science raps have this habit of being forgivably bad, in that this-isn’t-really-a-rap-but-we’ll-let-it-slide-because-you’re-scientists-and-you’re-clearly-trying sort of way. But this original piece from Jabari Johnson, a senior at Harlem Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts, needs no such pardon. Johnson’s rap, titled “Quest for Joulelry,” is the winner of this year’s Science Genius Rap B.A.T.T.L.E.S., held last…

Google has apparently plugged the massive, 4-year-old security hole in Android that allowed malware to make its way on to your phone. Now you just need to wait for your phone manufacturer to pass it on to you.

The Best Digital Tools for Organizing Your RPG Campaign

Plenty of gamemasters still use graph paper and three-ring binders to organize their role-playing campaigns, but there’s an arsenal of tools available to the tech-savvy GM. I talked to a bunch of experienced GMs to find out how they use digital tools to create and track their RPG adventures. Aside from a twisted, devious imagination,…

Batgirl and Nightwing’s Wedding Shames All Other Geek Weddings

Holy insanely detailed comic book wedding, Batman! We cannot believe the amount of detail that was put into this Batgirl and Nightwing-themed wedding. Their photo booth was a GOTHAM MUG SHOT! Laura and Seth’s wedding at Scoggins Farms in Charlotte, NC, is amazing. In fact, this might be the most detail-orientated geek wedding we’ve ever…

If you’re in the mood for something… different, David Lynch has offered up a free stream of his new album The Big Dream on Pitchfork. Weirdness guaranteed.

An ancient underwater forest has been discovered in the Gulf of Mexico

Scuba divers have found a 50,000 year-old Bald Cypress forest that was likely uncovered when Hurricane Katrina swept through the region back in 2005. Top image: A sonar map reveals a primeval underwater ocean and forest. Credit: Grant Harley, Kristine DeLong via LiveScience. The forest had been buried under ocean sediments, creating a protective, oxygen-free…