Latest

How All Sidewalks Should Be Designed

Walking might be good for us, but it’s sure as hell boring too. So let’s change all that by making sidewalks a place to have some fun. https://gizmodo.com/sitting-is-the-smoking-of-our-generation-5976091 Randal Munroe is sure on to something with the idea of variable speed conveyor belts. But high-five spots are just the beginning. I’m thinking obstacle courses, pugil…

Sprint’s LTE service is now live in San Francisco, just so you know.

This Is Where Apple Sources All Its Components (Spoiler: It Ain’t Just China!)

This map, put together by China File, plots all of the publicly available suppliers who fuel Apple’s production lines. While the majority are found in Asia, it’s interesting to see that the rest of world represents, too. Each point on the interactive map represents an individual supplier, provided with complete context—from Analog Devices in Limerick,…

Crazy Guy Remasters 320×240 Doom Screenshot Into Stunning 9600×7211-Pixel Photoshop

This. Is. MADNESS. Watch Deviant Art user Elemental79 converting a 320 x 240 pixel screenshot from Doom—the legendary 1993 game that made first person shooters popular—into a stunning 9,600 x 7,211 image complete with textures, lighting and 3D effects using Photoshop. It’s absolutely nuts. According to the author, “each frame represents ten seconds of work.…

Most Traffic Jams Are Caused By Just a Handful of Idiots

Deep in your heart you know it: there are like two drivers out there on the road that are causing all the traffic jams and one of those assholes is the guy right in front of you. Well, new information collected from hundreds and hundreds of drivers’ cellphones actually backs that up. Sort of. It…

These delightful illustrations make a Jurassic Park children’s book seem like a good idea

Ravenous, carnivorous dinosaurs going to town on a group of terrified humans may seem like odd fodder for a children’d picture book, but Pakoto Martinez makes his Jurassic Park scenes adorable—even when the characters are on the verge of death. Martinez has a few more of these illustrations on his blog. And, if you like…

Neutral Milk Hotel: April 8th

I was very fortunate to have the pleasure of seeing the incredible, weird, and incredibly weird Jeff Mangum perform last night. And while the show was spectacular—really, you should be jealous—there was just one thing missing: April 8th. But let me back up. Jeff Mangum is the former lead singer and songwriter of the seminal…

Take a tour through Mexico’s island of creepy, mutilated dolls

Mexico’s Isla de las Muñecas (Island of the Dolls) is one of the most unnerving locales on Earth, a place where you are greeted by dirty, damaged baby dolls wherever you look. Take a video tour of this creeptastic island if you don’t mind plastic infants popping up in your nightmares. Isla de las Muñecas…

These Toy iPhones Come Jailbroken Right Out of The Box

If you want to jailbreak your real iPhone, you’re going to have to put a little work into it. But if you pick up one of these toys, it’ll come that way straight from the factory floor. If you look closely, you’ll see there’s a Cydia icon right there, smack-dab on the homescreen. Sure, it’s…

What’s The Best Wi-Fi Network Name You’ve Ever Seen?

I was travelling this weekend and found myself connected to the incredibly blandly named “Home_Nework” Wi-Fi network. When I go home, it’ll be scarcely better when I connect to yet another router with a boring out-of-the-box name: “FastRabbit.” Bleh Plenty of people out there are significantly cleverer than I am, we’ve all seen Wi-Fi names…

What creates this black patch in a star-filled sky?

This image from the European Southern Observatory’s Wide Field Imager in Chile reveals one of the galaxy’s brightest regions, with one weird, inky exception. Why is Barnard 86 a dark cloud in the middle of such a starry vista? What makes the appearance of Barnard 86 particularly striking is that it appears next to the…

How The Sun Might Protect Us From Future Asteroid Disasters

Two large flying space rocks have hit or almost hit Earth lately. I think everyone agrees that this needs to not be happening. So two California researchers are developing a plan for destroying asteroids in space. Get after it. https://gizmodo.com/congress-plans-to-hold-hearings-over-our-little-asteroi-5984672 The idea is to use the sun’s intense energy to vaporize asteroids as big as…

Preserved bacteria reveal how we’ve been rotting our teeth for 7,500 years

Bacteria outnumber the cells in our own body by a factor of 10 to 1 — as many as 100 trillion microbes per person — and yet we know almost nothing about how bacteria have changed as humans evolved. Although they’re much more numerous than our own cells, bacteria are so tiny that they represent…

ISS Commander Chris Hadfield is AMAing on Reddit right now! [Reddit]

Astronaut Chris Hadfield is answering questions on reddit right now!

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is currently aboard the International Space Station (and tweeting photos from space), is doing one of reddit’s Ask Me Anything chats right now. So if you’ve been dying to ask him questions about life in orbit, now is your chance. I Am Astronaut Chris Hadfield, currently orbiting planet Earth. [reddit]

This Ludicrous Safe Is The Only Sane Place For Your Million Dollars’ Worth of Watches and Cigars

We all have fancy things, but some of us have fancier things than everybody else. This safe is for those people. The new behemoth by Döttling boasts insurance coverage of up to $1,000,000. And it’s even got a built-in humidor for all your cigars! It’s like they were reading your mind, right? Billed as “safest…

On Clone Wars, Ahsoka reenacts The Fugitive with Anakin as the one-armed Jedi

Last week’s episode of Clone Wars played as a procedural, complete with a Droid who played tribute to CSI. This week’s episode title, “The Jedi Who Knew Too Much,” is an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, so it’s no surprise that Ahsoka finds herself caught up in a bizarre murder mystery, one where everything is not…

Beware: MS Office 2013 licenses will die with the computer they’re installed on. No moving ’em. [Computer World]

New Nanocapsule Medicine Could Sober You Up in Seconds

Anyone who’s ever had a couple of drinks knows that as fun as it can be, sometimes it’d be nice if you could just make all that haze go away, right away. There’s no solution for your average drunk yet, but researchers at MIT have managed to put together an injection that can turn a…

Crowdfund games based on chemistry and Machine of Death, and bid on art to support a short by Pixar artists

Machine of Death, the science fiction anthology that pissed off Glenn Beck, is back in the form of a macabre card game, and you can help fund the production. If you prefer your games grounded in science, there’s also a chemistry-themed strategy game, and the clock is ticking on sending in your pledge. Plus, a…