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In the App Store Economy, Only Suckers Pay Retail

On the off chance you missed it, you might be interested to know that there’s anunprecedented sale going on right now in the App Store. Apps that yesterday were 10 or 20 dollars are free today. Your first reaction is great. Your second, if you’re anything like me, is but I just bought these. And…

Donald Glover will only appear in 5 out of 13 Community episodes

We celebrated when Dan Harmon, surprisingly, returned to the new season of Community. But now is the time to weep. Donald Glover has greatly cut back his on screen time for the new season. Our whole brain is crying. Vulture is reporting that Troy Barnes will only appear in just five of the show’s upcoming…

A Look Inside Nokia’s Absurd Phone Testing Labs

Nokia phones are pretty sturdy. Sturdier than most, actually. And while all phones go through similar stress tests, we’ve got a look into Nokia’s specifically. It’s petty impressive! Tumbling in boxes of dust, dropped on steel floors hundreds of times, splashed with rain and baked in tropical conditions. And the phones mostly come out just…

Watch a Swirling Alien World Magically Appear in a Test Tube

A lot of your more flashy chemistry experiments are explosion-centric, but there are a few quieter ones that are just as mesmerizing. A mixture of copper sulfate and ammonia, for instance, looks like the surface of an alien gas giant. And when it’s in slow motion, it’s positively hypnotic. When you pour ammonia into a…

Learn the ancient secrets of DVD-bending in This Week’s DVDs!

Okay, you’re not really going to learn how to control DVDs with your mind by reading this week’s list of DVD and Blu-ray releases. But if referring to purchasing The Legend of Korra on home video as DVD-bending is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right. • The Legend of Korra – Book One: Air…

Living People Linked to 5,500 Year-old DNA

Back in the 1980s, the 5,500 year-old remains of an aboriginal woman were found on a British Columbia island. Now, using a powerful new genetic scanning technique, her remains have been linked to actual living relatives — a span of about 200 generations. Top image: Members of the Metlakatla community recently collaborated with scientists in…

This Crazy Exoskeleton Suit Gives Schoolgirls (or Anyone) Super Powers

There are two paths to gaining super powers that don’t involve mutations, radiation, or intergalactic origins. You can go the RoboCop route, where your body—or what’s left of it—is permanently melded to a robotic frame. Or the Iron Man route, where you temporarily don a robotic supersuit and kick ass. The latter approach is, of…

How America Could Have Ruled the Earth in 1898

In every war, inventors inundate the military with thousands of crackpot ideas for super-weapons. But even among these, there is one standout: Newton Harrieson. When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, he proposed a simple way to defeat the Spanish: tip the Earth onto its side and freeze them. Harrieson was…

Russia’s Surprisingly Sane Plan to Build a Floating Nuclear Power Plant

Nuclear-powered submarines, aircraft carriers, and even icebreakers have been in operation for over 50 years now with a remarkable success rate. So Russia is planning to further commercialize that technology by building a fleet of floating nuclear power plants that will provide electricity to remote areas where building a permanent reactor is either too expensive,…

British Astronomers to Join Search for Intelligent Alien Life

Astronomers in the UK have announced plans to join in on the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence. The search would rely on observations from seven major telescopes located across the UK, making Britain “the second largest centre for alien hunting in the world after the US,” according to The Guardian’s Ian Sample. Collectively, the telescopes go…

Why Pacific Rim Doesn’t Look Like Any Movie You’ve Ever Seen Before

Pacific Rim pays tribute to classic monster movies and films about massive mechanical gladiators — but at the same time, this movie looks totally different than anything you’ve ever seen. We talked exclusively to the head creature designer, the legendary Wayne Barlowe, and VFX supervisor John Knoll, to find out why. The thing that comes…

Nokia Lumia 1020 Photos Spotted In the Wild Are Impressive (If Real)

A pair of photos posted to the Flickr account of Microsoft’s Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore appear to be the first real-world samples taken with the Nokia Lumia 1020. Rumor has it the photography-oriented phone will be announced at an event in New York on Thursday. From what we can see in these images, the…

A Magical Window That Blocks Noise But Lets Breezes Pass Through

It’s a warm summer night in the city, but instead of sleeping with the windows open to let a breeze in, you’ve got them all closed to keep your bedroom quiet. It’s a ‘lesser of two evils’ decision that people living in crowded urban centers might soon not have to make. Researchers in South Korea…

The IRS Just Accidentally Published Thousands of SSNs Online

You’d think the IRS would be the one organization it might be safe to trust with your precious Social Security Number. Think again. Thanks to a cock-up, the agency just put tens of thousands of the numbers out on the Internet for anyone and everyone to see. Fantastic. It seems that when the IRS went…

Escape from Roswell with Google’s Intergalactic Point-and-Click Doodle

Today is the 66th anniversary of Roswell, whatever Roswell really was. But according to a festive Google Doodle, it was definitely an alien crash-landing. And also a point-and-click adventure. If you can spare a few minutes—you can spare a few minutes—it’s worth investigating, with or without a crew of federal agents. [Google]

Hank turns supervillain in a family bombshell-dropping Venture Bros.

See this picture? This is Hank, dressed as a supervillain, breaking into a bank in order to get thrown into an insane asylum for criminals. So you may not believe me when I say that Hank is, without any doubt, the most well-adjusted member of the Venture family at the moment. Disagree? Read this recap,…

Windows 8.1 will be finalized by August, according to the Windows Team blog. That doesn’t mean all your computers will work perfectly with it by then (OEMs need to to fix their drivers, etc.), but we should see a final release with a month or two. Windows 8 took just over two months to release…

Incredible time-lapse of fog flowing over San Francisco for 2 years

There is nothing more beautiful than watching the fog roll in over San Francisco. Often it looks like water flowing in slow motion. And now, in this mesmerizing time-lapse film, you can see just how similar the fog’s motion really is to an airborne flood. Writes filmmaker Simon Christen: The weather conditions have to be…

An in-depth tour of the suit astronauts use to make repairs in space

If you’ve ever watched footage of a spacewalk, you’ve seen an astronaut outfitted in an extravehicular mobility unit (EMU), the spacesuit specially designed for astronauts working outside of spacecraft orbiting Earthat 17,220 miles per hour. In a recent episode of Tested, Norm met up with Terry Dunn, Training Operations Manager at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab,…

Pantsload of Conjuring clips will scare the crap out of ya

We’re so excited for the latest jump-scare epic from James Wan, director of Insidious. Summer horror is your best possible escape from swamp-ass and busted AC. Behold a collection of Conjuring clips that are chilling enough to make you forget about the heat. We have all our fingers and toes crossed that this movie will…