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27 Radiant Photos Of Rust

Rust is the worst enemy of any classic car owner, but it’s also evidence of nature in the industrial age—an urban rot with occasionally beautiful side effects. https://gizmodo.com/shooting-challenge-rust-514261946 WINNER: Sandstone Camera: Nokia Lumia 920 ISO: 100 F 2.0 Shutter Speed: 1/400 This is my first submission but I’ve been a long time reader of Gizmodo.…

This Guy Has an Invisible Headphone Implanted In His Ear

Rich Lee has freed himself from the frustrations of misplacing or having to untangle his headphones ever again. How? He’s what’s known as a grinder: someone who experiments with surgical implants or body-enhancements, and he’s come up with a doozie. Implanted in his tragus—the stiff protrusion just in front of your ear canal—is a small…

This Photo Makes Me Want to Go to Mars Right Now

NASA just has released this photo captured almost two weeks ago during spacesuit check tests at the Orion Crew Module mockup. I cannot stop staring at it in awe – it is almost the real thing, it gives you a heavy deja vu, because you saw such scenes billion times when you crawled through the…

10 Essential Elements of a Great Escapist Hero

A grand adventure needs an inspirational hero. Not just a cool person in a fancy suit, but someone to believe in. It’s not quite true that a science fiction or fantasy story is only as good as its hero, but the hero’s greatness is certainly a limiting factor. Here are 10 essential qualities a hero…

We’ve Grappled With Televised Death Since The First TV Suicide in 1938

The family of a Phoenix man who committed suicide this past September has filed a lawsuit against Fox News over the live broadcast of the event. Understandably, the family says that they suffered emotional distress after the broadcast, which was seen on TV sets and computer screens all over the world. Anchor Shepard Smith apologized…

The Strange Story of the Man Who Invented the Space Gun

In 1937, Princeton engineering professor Edward Fitch Northrup published a book called Zero to Eighty. And, in what must be one of the strangest scifi novels ever written, Northrup developed the idea of the modern “mass driver,” or rail gun. Northrup was a respected professor of electrothermic engineering. Among his 104 patents was an induction…

Foursquare’s latest update to its iOS app now lets you check friends in, so you’re not all blankly staring at your phones and ignoring each other. Don’t worry, you’ll have to give your friends explicit permission to do so. Just check under the settings tab. [Foursquare]

A Photographer’s Rare Trip Aboard One of the World’s Largest Ships

The seven-year-old Emma Mærsk can carry more cargo than a 41-mile-long train and has a turning radius of almost a mile. Even compared to oil tankers, she’s more like a city than a boat—albeit a city that few people ever get to explore. But in 2010, a young photographer named Jakob Wagner became one of…

Recreation of ancient beer suggests it was really, really gross

A team of experts from Ohio’s Great Lakes Brewing Company, along with archaeologists from the University of Chicago, have replicated 5,500-year-old beer from Mesopotamia using clay vessels, a wooden spoon, and an ancient recipe. But the end result left much to be desired. As reported in the New York Times, the ancient Sumerians didn’t exactly…

YouTube Tackles Immense Annoyance of Slow-Loading Videos

What is the saddest thing? For millions of people who fool around on the Internet all day while other people do the work, the saddest thing is a web video that’s slow to load. YouTube is on the case, and Gizmodo has an exclusive look at how online video will change forever.

Report: Xbox Music Will Leave Its Windows 8 Prison and Hit the Web

According to The Verge, Microsoft’s Xbox Music service will launch in the form of a web-based version accessible across platforms next week. That would make sense given that Microsoft’s Build developer shebang happens, uh, tomorrow. Maybe more importantly, move makes sense given the big Xbox push the company is set to make at the end…

New Melanoma Test Sniffs Out Skin Cancer Based on Odor Alone

We’ve known for awhile that certain illnesses can have a very, er, special smell for the olfactory-inclined, but even us humans (with the help of smell-sensitive technology) could soon be diagnosing diseases with nothing but our nose. Thanks to a nanotechnology-based sensor, we’re now able to differentiate between normal skin cells and melanoma cells based…

Inside YouTube’s Master Plan to Kill Lag Dead

There is a moment between when you click on a video and when it starts playing. That moment is the worst part of your day. The agony of waiting! The torture of anticipation! YouTube understands that, and on a visit to YouTube HQ in San Bruno, CA, we got a look at what’s coming to…

Confirmed: A Star System with Three Potentially Habitable Planets!

Late last year, Canadian astronomer Philip Gregory made the controversial claim that there are three habitable zone super-Earths orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 667C. Now, in a separate study, a group of European astronomers are saying he was right. When we reported on Gregory’s claim back in December, we spoke to Abel Méndez, an…

Supreme Court Decides Racist States Free To Change Voting Laws Again

By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The states with long histories of racism—specifically, the southern states where black humans were kept as slaves who could be legally bought, sold, raped and murdered—have had federal oversight since 1965 to protect minority voters. That’s over now. https://jezebel.com/scotus-declares-racism-over-strikes-down-section-of-vo-572129965 This…

Pigeon-Headed Humans Prank Google Street View In Japan

When the Google Street View team rolled through Tokyo recently, a bunch of writers from a Japanese humor website were there with these eerie pigeon masks. The “human pigeons” then stood around gawking at the Google van, and here are the weird results.

Google Reveals Data on Sites That Are Phishing and Installing Malware

Google’s latest Transparency Report is out, and in its latest incarnation, the document reveals data on its “Safe Browsing” initiative, which attempts to protect users from sites that are either phishing for data or installing malicious software. According to Google, it keeps 1 billion users safe and flags some 10,000 sites per day. Additionally, Google’s…

Take a Ride on the Roller Coaster With the World’s Tallest Loop

Full Throttle is a brand new roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California. But it’s not just any new thrill ride—it features the tallest vertical loop in the world. And this gravity-defying first-person perspective footage of the new loop de loop will twist your stomach into a Gordian Knot. What should you…

Here’s one more awesome Pacific Rim trailer, because why the hell not

Are you the last person on the planet somehow not exited about Guillermo del Toro’s giant robots-vs.-giant monster movie Pacific Rim? Well, if this final extended trailer doesn’t do it for you, you might want to consult a doctor.

Future Stunt Pilots Could Train in These All-Electric Planes

Didier Esteyne and EADS turned heads at the 2011 Paris Air Show when they debuted the the world’s first all-electric airplane, the single-seat Cri-Cri. Fast forward two years, and the miniscule Cri-Cri has grown into a sleek tandem-seat training craft that’s as green as it is acrobatic. Dubbed the E-Fan, this Light Sport Aircraft prototype…