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Comcast’s New X2 Cable Platform Saves Your Shows To the Cloud

The X2 is a big update to Comcast’s X1 content platform that lets you save the shows you DVR to the cloud rather than the hard drive. X2 is a new uniform interface for your cable viewing experience that you see on your TV, computer, or mobile device via Comcast’s Xfinity app. It boasts more…

Wireless Dice Guarantee Tablets Are the Board Games of Tomorrow

You can already get beloved board games like Monopoly on your tablet that provide a somewhat similar experience to the original cardboard sets. But they’ll never fully replace those old versions because they lack the tangible satisfaction of grabbing a pair of dice, going through your shaking ritual, and tossing them across the table—oh wait,…

Opera Next’s Mail Client Is Now Its Very Own Desktop App

The arguably unnecessary race to “revolutionize email” just found another contender in Norwegian software company Opera. After stripping its Opera 15 browser of a mail client, the group is officially releasing Opera Mail as a standalone desktop app. The Mail app conveniently makes use of tabs in the same way you might see in a…

Native Instruments Makes a Portable Controller for Its Hot iOS DJ Apps

We’re quite fond of both the iPhone and iPad versions of Traktor DJ. Rather than mimic the turntable rigs of yore, they’re DJ apps admirably designed with interfaces tailored to touchscreen interfaces. Today, the app’s developer, Native Instruments, announced small piece of hardware designed to control the apps. Traktor Kontrol Z1 is a lightweight two-channel…

Rat poison strychnine was an early performance-enhancing drug

Today’s performance-enhancing drugs take years to severely damage an athlete’s health. Back in 1904, they didn’t have time for such things. A couple of strychnine injections during the marathon at the 1904 Olympics helped Thomas Hicks nearly kill himself by the end of the race. It also helped him win a gold medal. Today, you’re…

Can you guess the subject of this photograph?

Here’s a hint: it’s big, gassy, and rhymes with pattern. It’s Saturn! Kind of. Technically, it’s of Saturn’s D-ring, the innermost (and faintest) ring encircling our solar system’s second-largest planet. Via the Cassini mission’s image page: Saturn’s D ring may be faint and difficult to observe, but it rewards our patience. In this image, the…

Here’s the First 5.0 GHz CPU You Can Actually Buy

AMD just one-upped its own series of eight-core FX processors, and the golden child of this newest lineup is unquestionably the FX-9590, which they claim to be the world’s “first-ever 5 GHz processor.” While technically that record was already beat—and by AMD themselves, no less—it is, in fact, the first commercially available 5GHz CPU processor.…

Basis Releases Its First App And It’s For Android

Last we saw the Basis B1 it hadn’t launched with an app and users had been relegated to syncing the activity tracker with their desktop. Today that changes for some users with the launch of the Android app. If you have one the supported devices—the list can be found here but it’s all Samsung devices—you’ll…

A Robotic Moving Touchscreen That Touches Back

Microsoft Research has come up with a clever way to let users actually feel what they’re interacting with on a touchscreen. And it doesn’t involve complex finger contraptions, or bulky gloves. Instead, the researchers simply installed the display on a robotic mount that moves in response to where and what is being touched, simulating an…

Robots can learn by imagining the existence of people

By hallucinating the existence of humans, robots can learn how to better cater to people and understand our world, researchers say. For robots that interact with and react to the world around them as best as possible, scientists want to design machines that know what’s in their surroundings. Attempts to identify an item based on…

Check Out This Otherworldly Footage of a Storm Supercell Forming

It took photographer/storm chaser/all-around brave guy Mike Olbinski four years to capture this footage of the formation of a supercell near Booker, Texas. That is some real commitment, and it finally paid off in an awesome way. Shot in the Central Plains of Texas, the footage was captured on a Canon 5D Mark II with…

World’s Greatest Wedding Photo NOW WITH STAR WARS

Last month, we showed you what is arguably the very best wedding photo taken in the history of the world. Today, a new group of clever kids getting hitched have challenged that photo’s status and raised the bar, with Star Wars. Behold. https://gizmodo.com/greatest-wedding-photo-in-the-history-of-the-world-510358157 The image was taken by Little Blue Lemon photography. Here’s the rundown:…

The Most Epic Music Videos About Space Travel

Yesterday’s sad news about astronaut Chris Hadfield’s surprise retirement made me wonder what was the most remarkable performance of the Canadian astronaut during the time he spent on the International Space Station. And yes, without any doubts, the cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity was the most entertaining. https://gizmodo.com/chris-hadfield-astronaut-extraordinaire-announces-his-512472683 Hadfield’s Oddity is a one-of-a-kind event:…

Man of Steel gets sequel and may have saved Justice League

Warner Bros. is so confident of Man of Steel’s success that they’ve greenlit and fast-tracked a sequel. Not only that, it seems that the Superman movie has filled them with such confidence that they have screenwrier David S. Goyer tackling Justice League. Deadline is reporting the sequel news, which is official; the Justice League news…

17 Incredible Photos From the Dawn of California’s Electrical Age

Los Angeles is inextricably bound to the advent of electricity in American cities—it might technically be the city of angels, but it’s really the city of lights. And lucky for us, the transformation of LA from a dark backwater to radiant city of lights was widely documented. At Huntington Library’s sprawling Edison Archives, 70,000 photos…

Watch this mesmerizing timelapse of Hawaii’s lava flows

Travel photographer Quang-Tuan Luong has put together this gorgeous video showcasing the active volcanoes of Hawaii National Park. Even though he’s photographed each of the 59 U.S. National Parks, this is Luong’s first complete video — and it’s a stunner. He writes, “One of the most mesmerizing spectacles of nature I’ve witnessed is lava flowing…

George R.R. Martin insists Game of Thrones won’t catch up to his books

Jennifer Lawrence is back in blue in new X-Men: Days of Future Past set photos… but who’s standing next to her? Check out the latest set videos for Godzilla and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, plus new trailers for World War Z and Carrie. David S. Goyer explains why fatherhood is so crucial to Man…

Every OpenStreetMap Edit Ever Made, Visualized

OpenStreetMap, the free wiki world map, is a wonderful little project that has become hugely successful. Now, the team behind it has released a report which explains how it’s changed over the last eight years—and some of the results are damn pretty. The database now contains over 21 million miles of road data and 78…

If you’re eager for a taste of OS X Mavericks, how about using its rather nice wallpaper? Apple has made it available online—go get it.

Here’s the List of Macs Compatible With OS X Mavericks

Yesterday’s announcement of OS X Mavericks unveiled some pretty cool new features coming to your Mac—but Cook and co forgot to explain just which computers would support the new OS. Fortunately, Apple Insider has chatted with people familiar with the Mavericks Developer Preview to draw up a list of the Macs which are compatible with…