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There’s No Such Thing as a Fake Apple Product

By now, the year-old claim that Apple makes people work on fake products is well-known. How scandalous. To ensure the loyalty of new hires, the company puts them on “dummy” projects before letting them work on the real goods. Too bad it’s not true. https://gizmodo.com/apple-makes-new-employees-work-on-fake-products-until-a-5880510 Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica did some digging with sources…

The Carnival Cruise From Hell Refuses to End as the Passengers’ Bus Home Breaks Down

If you thought things couldn’t get any worse for the unsuspecting participants in Carnival Cruise’s new Lord of the Flies at sea program, you’ve underestimated the excessively vengeful god they’ve angered. Just as they were finally on their way home and ready to start their lives over, the ex-hostages found themselves once again stranded—this time…

Science makes rainbows dance to elevator music

This video combines the fascination of watching colors shift on the surface of a soap bubble with the old-fashioned enjoyment of watching laundry spin in a tumble dryer. But it’s more complicated than both. These are smectic films — although they look like soap, they are tiny liquid crystals along a thin plane. The film…

What if the world ended while you were at brunch? Watch It’s a Disaster

Check out the very first trailer for apocalypse comedy It’s a Disaster, starring Julia Stiles and David Cross doing what he does best (being insanely awkward). The movie asks, what if you had to spend the last hours of your life stuck in an uncomfortable brunch date with a bunch of 30-year-olds? Break out the…

Uhh, Bang With Friends Is a Sexiness Score for Your Facebook?

Even if it oozes the desperation of sex-starved C++ nerds, the theory behind Bang With Friends is genius. A service that helps people who know each other hook up—if and only if both parties are interested in getting jiggy. It’s funny! And as Mark Wilson at CoDesign points out, the service has lured in a…

40+ minutes of 30+ years of hilarious Star Trek bloopers

The word “hero” gets used a bit too much nowadays, but I think anyone who takes the time to find and assemble a 41-minute compilation video of every single Star Trek blooper and gag reel he/she could find may have genuinely earned the title. This video (which CBS/Paramount will probably not leave up too long)…

Microsoft Is Finally Merging Skype and Windows Live Messenger This Spring

Ever since Microsoft acquired Skype and confirmed the end of Windows Live Messenger, a merger has been a tiny dot off on the horizon. Now Microsoft has pinned down when the two will become one: this April. https://gizmodo.com/confirmed-microsoft-is-buying-skype-for-8-5-billion-5800329 Starting on April 8th, Messenger clients will start receiving updates that will upgrade them into Skype clients,…

Here’s How To Stop a Horrible Parody Twitter Account Before It Starts

Parody Twitter accounts are a pox on the internet. Comedian Jake Fogelnest, however, has done his part to prevent another one of these vile, unfunny things from becoming a thing. https://gizmodo.com/winter-storm-nemo-has-ruined-twitter-parody-accounts-fo-5982883 Just after the giant meteor hit Russia early this morning, Fogelnest rushed to Twitter to register @RussiaMeteor, so no one else could do it.…

How to stop an asteroid… in 1915

With all the fuss surrounding the close fly-by of asteroid 2012 DA14 tomorrow, the subject again arises of what could be done about an incoming space mountain… if anything. https://gizmodo.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-earths-close-shave-wi-5984263 The first time the potential danger of an asteroid impact was ever broached turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, to have been in a science fiction…

Google+ Is Down, Due To Neglect Probably

Google+ is apparently experiencing an outage. If a social network falls on the internet and nobody’s on it, has it actually fallen at all? G+ is down at least in the U.S. We’re getting a 503 server error when we try to pull up the site. The reason for the outage is unclear, but we’ve…

Traces of anxiety drug in rivers make fish braver and less social

Swedish researchers have discovered that the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam is having a noticeable effect on the behavior of aquatic life. Traces of this popular pharmaceutical get flushed into rivers and other waterways where they remain biochemically active. But until this new study, it wasn’t known if these chemicals had an effect on the behavior of…

You’ll Want To Eat Your Way Out of This Cotton Candy House

Hansel and Gretel would have gladly given themselves over to death by hungry witch if it meant they could have spent their last days gorging on this incredible cotton candy house. So it’s not exactly a real house. Made out of 1,800 cones of sickly sweet sugar clouds, the carnival home of your dreams is…

How Common Are Meteor Strikes?

A meteorite has fallen to Earth in Russia overnight—and the fall-out, including 500 causalities, is pretty bad. But you might not realize that giant space rocks crash into Earth all the time. https://gizmodo.com/meteorite-explodes-over-russia-panic-spreads-5984476 Speaking to AP, Addi Bischoff, a mineralogist at the University of Muenster in Germany, explained that there are typically five to ten…

What’s next on The Walking Dead? Plus a Breaking Bad star joins CBS’s Under the Dome!

There’s a major clue about Peter Dinklage’s role in X-Men: Days of Future Past. A Thor: The Dark World set report offers some tantalizing hints. There are loads of clips from the alien-abduction film Dark Skies, and dozens of photos from Jack the Giant Slayer. Plus all the latest casting news for Under the Dome…

Facebook Wins Legal Battle Which Means Europeans Have to Use Real Names Online

Facebook’s crusade against pseudonyms and nicknames has just won out. After a German court ruled Facebook couldn’t force people to use their real, full names, a successful appeal from Facebook in another German court rules it can. The result? You’re stuck using your real name on Facebook. The court ruled that, as Facebook’s EU headquarters…

Libra: The 21st Century (Libertarian) Space Colony

There’s nothing hotter right now than starting your own libertarian-minded community from scratch. Or at least threatening to do so. Glenn Beck imagines building a community/theme park somewhere in the United States called Independence Park which would celebrate entrepreneurship and sustainable living. Others envision Idaho as the perfect spot to build a fortress-like libertarian utopia…

A mysterious, budget-looking new Nokia handset has turned up in a Dutch TV commercial. What could it be?

If HTC’s New Phone Really Looks Like This, Will You Buy One?

New, high-res images are emerging which purport to be the new HTC One. They look kind of nice, featuring a bit of old school HTC grille action—but would they be enough to tempt you into buying one? The supposed HTC One looks radically different for an HTC model, thanks to the completely reworked HTC Sense…

Scientists Claim They’ve Built a Computer That Never Crashes

A crashing computer is at best annoying and at worst catastrophic. But now a team of scientists has developed a new type of computer that never crashes—and it relies on chaos and randomness to achieve the feat. New Scientist reports that the new “systemic” computer, designed and built at University College London, is fundamentally different…

Nokia’s Music+ subscription service just rolled out in the UK—so it should soon be available in the US for $4/month.