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Japan is finally building the ultimate anime theme park

What do Dragonball Z’s Goku, One Piece’s Monkey D, Luffy and Naruto from Naruto have in common? They’re all some of the most popular anime characters in the world, they all star in the Shonen Jump weekly manga anthology, and they’re going get their own theme park in Japan later this summer. Namco Bandai announced…

10 Bets You’re Guaranteed to Win At Your Holiday Party

YouTube’s favorite conman Richard Wiseman has returned with ten more bets you’ll never lose, just in time to spice up the never-evending barrage of holiday parties and family get-togethers this time of year. The trick where simple science and a little gravity is used to magically swap water and whiskey between two shot glasses is…

Dish.fm Consults Foursquare and Yelp to Help You Decide What to Order

What should you order for dinner? Dish.fm is a new iOS and web app that pulls from thousands of reviews on Yelp and Foursquare to help you decide specifically which dish is the best. The app culls these user-generated reviews to check for mentions of specific menu items. So if the pad thai is a…

How Jurassic Park’s FX Wizards Sculpted a Life-Size T-Rex Out of Clay

Before special effect artists can bring a creation like a T-Rex to life with robotics and animatronics, they first have to build and sculpt a life-size detailed mockup of the creature out of clay. And while it’s probably one of the best jobs on earth, seeing the artists at Stan Winston Studios having to hand-carve…

NASA captures ominous video of the three-mile-long asteroid that buzzed us last week

On December 12, the three-mile-long (4.8 km) asteroid Toutatis came within 4.3 million miles (6.9 million km) of Earth — which is about 18 lunar distances. During the flyby, NASA used its 230-foot-wide (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, to generate a series of radar data images — which has revealed a slowly…

TNT is blowing up on Amazon. Falling Skies and The Closer will now be available on Prime Instant Streaming.

Hackers Take Over Westboro Baptist Church Twitter (Updated)

We can all agree that the Westboro Baptist Church is the objectively worst collections of humans in the history of the species. And after planning to “protest” the funerals of dead children, the hackers at UGNazi got revenge. Update: We spoke with UGNazi. A Twitter account belonging to Shirley Phelps-Roper, a “lawyer” and “official spokesperson”…

Your Instagram Data Is Now Officially Facebook Data

A new Instagram privacy policy goes into effect on January 16th, 2013. The service will now be sharing your data with its new owner Facebook. Get used to it. Basically, Instagram has updated a few of the subhead sections of its policy to reflect the fact that it is a part of Facebook now. Instagram…

Major Reveals for Oblivion, Elysium, Tron 3, Fringe and Amazing Spider-Man 2!

Matt Damon praises Neil Blomkamp’s sci-fi epic Elysium. Does a casting call give away a huge Amazing Spider-Man 2 plot point? Len Wiseman’s new Mummy movie is going full-on horror. Plus check out new trailers for Doctor Who’s Christmas special! Spoilers from here on out! Top image from Star Trek Into Darkness. Star Trek Into…

Scientists Develop the World’s First Chemistree

Making a strong case for the Nobel Prize in Holiday Cheer, Redditor Breokz posted a photo of the Christmas ‘Chemistree’ at the Avans University of Applied Science laboratory. Instead of the more traditional pine tree, this creation is assembled from glassware and support structures like a giant chemistry experiment. And while this ‘research’ isn’t going…

The Evolution of the Batman Logo, Visualized

The Batman logo has changed an awful lot in the 72 years since the dark knight started cleaning up the streets of Gotham back in 1940. Fortunately, Cathryn Lavery has pieced together its changing form in this amazing poster. There have been some clear trends (click on the image below for a larger version): the…

Woman Gains Full Mind Control Of Robotic Arm, Just Like in Star Wars

This is truly extraordinary: Jan Scheuermann, a 52-year-old quadriplegic woman, has gained full control of a robotic arm. Not just simple commands, but truly complete control with “skill and speed almost similar to that of an able-bodied person.” According to the study—led by the University of Pittsburgh’s professor of neurobiology Andrew Schwartz—she achieved this incredible…

Rumor: Facebook Will Launch Its Own Snapchat-Style App

Facebook is apparently testing its own version of an app which resembles Snapchat, the messaging software which allows users to send “disposable” photographs to each other. All Things D claims, citing “sources familiar with the matter”, that Facebook will launch the app in the coming weeks, sometime before the end of the year. ‘Things D…

How to Get Siri to Provide Google Maps Directions, No Hack Required

Ask Siri for directions, and by default she’ll throw up an Apple Maps solution. Which means you’ll get lost. But it’s actually really easy to get her to give you directions using Google’s maps—and it doesn’t even require a hack. As JailbreakNation shows in this vide, adding the phrase “via transit” to the end of…

Rumor has it the Nokia Lumia 800 is seeing a WinPho 7.8 update creeping out, a littler earlier than expected. [WP7.nl]

The Cinema of 2012: 300 Films in 7 Minutes

This beautiful montage, put together by Genevieve Ip, pieces together clips from over 300 films to relive the cinema of 2012 —in just seven minutes. It’s cleverly done, exposing themes from this year’s movies whilst managing to hang together in its own right as a piece of video. Because it’s inevitable you’ll want to look…

Facebook Joins the NASDAQ-100 (While RIM Gets Ditched)

The NASDAQ-100 is a stock market index which tracks the performance of the largest non-financial companies in the world. Yawn. But every year, it gets a little reshuffle to keep it fresh and relevant—and the changes can be rather telling. NASDAQ has just announced how its index will change in 2013, and the shuffle is…

How Scientists Can Tell if Your Tweets are Truthful

There’s a lot of noise and very little signal on Twitter, and sometimes it can be hard to know what to pay attention to. A team of scientists might be able to help with that, though, because they’re developing algorithms to sort the truthful tweets from the lies. Slate reports new research, due to be…

Cisco is trying to sell off the router company Linksys, which it bought for $500 million back in 2003. [Bloomberg]

Best of the Week: December 8-14, 2012

LOOK OUT BELOW | The Geminid meteor shower, photographed by Tommy Eliassen from Hemnes, Norway. See more beautiful Geminid photos here. https://gizmodo.com/our-favorite-photos-from-this-years-geminid-meteor-show-5968421 The Hobbit is a lot better once you realize it’s a war movie https://gizmodo.com/the-hobbit-is-a-lot-better-once-you-realize-its-a-war-m-5968455 The Hobbit has officially joined the ranks of franchises like Star Wars that are so eagerly anticipated that they…