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This Is Not a Painting

This beautiful orange swirl looks like it could be an oil painting—but it is in fact a low pressure system currently floating above the Southern Ocean, just west of Australia. The image was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Terra Satellite just yesterday. The orange hues are actually false color—MODIS detects…

No, the iWatch Isn’t Definitely Coming This Year

There are headlines this morning, in abundance, that an Apple iWatch will be coming in 2013. They are declarative. They are definitive. They are wrong. The iWatch might be coming this year, or might come in 2015, or it might not come at all. And nothing in this Bloomberg report changes that. Here’s what Bloomberg…

This Bluetooth Controller Is Fluent in Wii, Wii U, and Android

When you tire of all the fancy motion controls and just want to enjoy some classic button-mashing gameplay on your Wii or Wii U, consider this wireless controller—particularly if you’re an Android gamer too. In addition to playing well with Nintendo’s hardware, this gamepad also cozies up to your smartphone or tablet. The $40 controller…

Good news, iMac buyers: Apple has ironed out supply issues, so they’re now shipping in 1–3 days rather than 2-3 weeks.

What the Out-of-Office Reply Really Means

We’ve all experienced it: you send an important email, expecting to wait at least hours for a reply, but immediately get a response. Uh-oh. It’s the out-of-office reply, a complex and coded message which essentially says “screw you”. Jorge Cham’s annotated email rams that point home. My personal favorite is the mention of the sender…

Supposed Galaxy S4 Spec List Suggests Eight-Core Processor

Someone who claims to be in possession of a Galaxy S4 prototype decided it would be fun to benchmark it, giving us a look at how the phone might, possibly, perform and what might be inside Samsung’s next Android flagship. The Antutu benchmark test reports that the S4 is powered by Samsung’s own Exynos 5410…

Microsoft Might Owe Denmark More Than $1 Billion in Unpaid Tax

A new report by Denmark’s national broadcasting corporation, DR, suggests that Microsoft owes the country over $1 billion in unpaid tax. The report claims that Ballmer and co owe the Danish Treasury a total of 5.8 billion kroner, a hangover from the 2002 acquisition of Danish financial software company Navision. The OS giant sold rights…

How Word Processors Changed The Novel

Back in the 60s, novelists hired personal assistants to type and retype chapter drafts for their books, dozens of times over. When a technician at IBM heard about it in 1968, he decided to see if the word processor he’d been working on might help. Slate has a wonderful feature about how novelist Len Deighton…

Now You Can Get Your Favorite Mountain 3D Printed

If you want a permanent reminder of an amazing hike, ski trip, or whatever else, here’s a good idea: a new website called The Terrainator lets you select your favourite geographical features and get ’em 3D printed. Dan Wilson, the man behind the project, explains how it came about: I’ve had the good fortune to…

The Asus Transformer Pad is the first non-Nexus device to get an Android 4.2 update… today!

Watch a Man Disappear Before Your Eyes

Chinese artist Liu Bolin does a wonderful job of hiding himself in all kinds of locations, but this video reveals exactly how he does it. A time-lapse taken at this year’s TED conference, it shows Bolin on stage, being painted in-situ. The artist explains: “For the talk, I stood up on stage with my outfit…

Seagate is completely discontinuing its entire range of 7200rpm 2.5-inch drives later this year. Blame SSDs.

How To Turn Fruits And Vegetables Into a Delicious Musical Instrument

If you wanted to learn an unconventional instrument, maybe you’d opt for the accordion or the glockenspiel. J.viewz decided to build his own. Out of fruits and vegetables. Sure, he didn’t have to use fruits and vegetables to create the effect, but it just wouldn’t be the same without them. Song’s not half bad either.…

Modest Mouse: Polar Opposites

You can take your “Float On” and put it right back on the shelf, because the real meat of Modest Mouse lies a bit further back in the catalogue. “Polar Opposites” is a prime example. Off Modest Mouse’s classic 1997 sophomore album The Lonesome Crowded West—home of other fantastic songs like “Trailer Trash“, and “Doin’…

Pantone Food Pairings Are The Perfect Snacks for Designers

Art nerds will know their complimentary colors, but for the rest of us, food pairings are far more interesting/important. Minneapolis-based graphic designer and illustrator David Schwen, but together this clever little collection of “pantone pairings” as little Instagram art project. And while you’d be hard-pressed to find a bucket of “pantone cookie” for your walls,…

A Baby Has Been Cured of HIV

It may sound hard to believe, but doctors from Mississippi are saying that for the first time, an infant has been cured of an HIV infection. The New York Times relays reports from doctors who say the infant had tested positive for HIV on five separate occasions and now, at age two and a half…

The Next Big Windows Phone Update Is (Probably) Coming For Christmas

Microsoft has been pretty quiet about their long term plans for the Windows 8 ecosystem, but its job board has been pretty loud-mouthed. First, it hinted at the plan for Windows Blue, and now a new posting indicated that the next big thing for Windows Phone is probably going to show up at the end…

Did adorable little bunnies kill the Neanderthals?

Or, to put that somewhat more accurately, did not being able to kill adorable little bunnies in turn kill the Neanderthals? When all that stood between extinction and survival was figuring out how to hunt rabbits, it seems Neanderthals chose extinction. There are lots of hypotheses as to why the Neanderthals went extinct, most focusing…

On the Clone Wars season finale, Ahsoka breaks Anakin’s heart and may push him toward the Dark Side

For five years, we’ve worried ourselves over the fate of Ahsoka Tano. After all, Anakin’s scrappy Padawan doesn’t pop up in Revenge of the Sith, and the popular theory is that she either perishes in Order 66 or, more likely, dies before the events of Episode III. But in this week’s season finale, Ahsoka made…

Women In India Use Smartphones To Map Perverts In Real Time

Let’s be real here, most of the time smartphones get used for a lot of nothing. But in India women are using their smartphones to protect themselves by tracking local incidents of harassment and violence. Safety websites and apps have been increasingly popular since a woman was fatally attacked in New Delhi last December. The…