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Felix Baumgartner is about to attempt the most ambitious skydive in history — watch it here (UPDATED)

When most people skydive, they jump from an altitude between 3,000 and 15,000 feet. Today, extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner will leap from a balloon soaring 120,000 feet above sea level. Should Baumgartner survive the descent, he stands to shatter no fewer than four high-risk world records. UPDATE: Today’s supersonic jump attempt has been aborted. See…

How the Hard Drive Crisis Forced a Cloud Company to Buy Up 5.5 Petabytes of Costco Storage

Flooding in Thailand made getting a hard drive a lot more expensive late last year. It wasn’t a huge deal to most of us, but for a small cloud storage company, it was almost death. Staying alive took creativity. And Costco. About a year ago, the 3TB internal drives that Backblaze—which sells unlimited cloud storage…

Curiosity discovers a chunk of itself on the Martian surface, SarcasticRover jumps all over it

Oh, oh, looks like Curiosity has just stumbled upon a shiny object that NASA scientists believe might be a fallen part of the rover. Or it could be a piece of debris that fell from the landing mechanisms. Or something else? NASA isn’t quite sure, so they’ve temporarily stopped scooping the surface until they get…

Dyson’s New Vacuum Attachment Equals No More Hairballs

Crazy cat ladies, rejoice! Dyson’s new hairball-sucking vacuum attachment should slurp all the loose strands out of your carpet without choking on a tangled mess of its own creation. Dyson’s Tangle-free Turbine tool attachment avoids typical entanglements because it doesn’t have any brushes. Instead, a pair of counter-rotating flexible thermoplastic polyurethane heads sit in their…

You Need a Tactical Chopstick Holster When You’re Serious About Sushi

If sashimi and maki are subjects you take very seriously, check out this over-the-top chopstick holster from Brandon, the incredibly talented 17-year-old behind Vanguard Armament. It ensures your personal set of chopsticks is always close at hand for those quick draw dining situations. The holster is made from Kydex, a thermoplastic acrylic material that can…

NetZero Still Exists, Wants You to Buy Friends With Data

NetZero, a brand left over from from the dialup days that refuses to die, has a trick up its sleeve to encourage you to buy one of its WiMAX data hotspot devices: it gives you 1GB of data every month to give away through Facebook, so you can buy friends with downloads. These friends—fictional or…

Which iconic Doctor Who companions will return for the show’s 50th birthday?

Chris Hemsworth reveals what director Alan Taylor brings to Thor: The Dark World. Kick-Ass 2 director Jeff Wadlow hints at a crucial cameo. The creator of Carnivale is producing a brand new Dracula TV series, starring The Tudors’ Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. Arrow adds to its Royal Flush Gang. Plus Once Upon a Time and 666 Park…

Anyone Else Having iOS Buyer’s Remorse?

Despite the problems I had with the HTC One X, I find myself missing it. More specifically—and I never thought I’d hear myself saying this—I find myself missing Android. The widgets, specifically. I just had that thing so damn dialed in. Anyone else? https://gizmodo.com/htc-one-x-after-4-months-weird-batteries-and-wimpy-gor-5931430

First Human Supersonic Space Jump Aborted (Updated With Video)

Felix Baumgartner is going to jump from the edge of space. If successful, he’s going to become the first man in history to go supersonic without any mechanical propulsion aid whatsoever. He’s now getting ready. Update: the launch was aborted. You can watch the video of the abort and the aftermath here. He will break…

The LED As We Know It Is 50 Years Old Today

Fifty years ago today, Nick Holonyak, Jr. proudly demonstrated the world’s first visible light-emitting diode (LED) at General Electric. In the process, he changed the world of lighting forever. In the early 1960s, LEDs were only capable of emitting infrared light. Nick Holonyak suggested using a mixture of gallium arsenide and gallium phosphide to create…

Math Has Never Looked as Pretty as This

When you were at high school, math was probably an uninspiring string of algebra you had to crunch through. Get to the cutting edge of computational fluid dynamics, though, and it all starts to look a hell of a lot more pretty. These images represent incredibly complex fluid flows, and were generated suing supercomputers by…

RIM’s PlayBook is being pulled from online stores, which suggests a new one is on the way. Yay? [Computer World]

AMD’s New Mobile Processor Plays Call of Duty on Your Windows 8 Tab

AMD has officially announced its new tablet-specific Z-60 processor, known as Hondo, and it promises rather a lot. In fact, the chip manufacturer claims it will allow you to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on your Windows 8 tablet, at 30 fps on a 1024 x 768 display. Sounds zippy. https://gizmodo.com/amd-mobile-processors-coming-this-year-5881820 AMD claims…

Windows Phone 8 pre-orders, including the colorful new HTC 8X and Nokia Lumia 920, will begin on October 21st. [Verge]

Microsoft Giving Away Free Wi-Fi Across San Francisco and NYC

Microsoft is rolling out some marketing for Windows 8 that we can really get behind: free Boingo Wi-Fi across huge swathes of San Francisco and NYC until the end of the holidays. The Wi-Fi hotspots in San Francisco are already up, running and free, and are concentrated around Fisherman’s Wharf and Union Square. In NYC,…

Will You Read Julian Assange’s New Book?

Julian Assange has penned a new book about his worries over government control of the Internet and surveillance. Written along with Jacob Appelbaum, Jérémie Zimmermann and Andy Müller-Maguhn, it will be published in November. Assange explains: “In March 2012 I gathered together three of today’s leading cypherpunks to discuss the resistance. Two of them, besides…

A Tesla Coil Nerf Gun Might Be The Coolest Nerf Gun Ever

Two things that are always cool: Tesla coils and Nerf guns. One thing that’s cooler than those two things: a freaking Tesla coil Nerf gun. That’s right. Rob Flickenger converted a Nerf gun into a handheld Tesla coil. Freaking. Sweet. Here’s how Flickenger and Rusty Oliver of the HazardFactory made the gun Tesla coil-ready: He…

The Stoner Channel: High Dogs, Psychedelic Science, and Pearl Jam Goes Black for the First Time

CO Tokers Can’t Stop Stoning Dogs PSA for all Denver area stoners: Yes Half Baked was a great movie. No, the part where Killer gets high goes flying was not real—doesn’t matter how badly you want it to be. So you really need to stop giving your dogs weed and throwing them out of windows.…

The New Boxee TV Might Be the Set Top Box We’ve Been Waiting For: Live TV Broadcasts, DVR and More

We’ve been waiting for a set top box that could shake up the current craptastic boxes we get from our cable companies and/or do more than some of the neutered offerings available and Boxee may have figured it out. Or at least done something different than throw out the same black square puck as everybody…

Is This the Next LG Nexus Phone?

We’ve already heard that the next Nexus phone will be made by LG and be kinda, sorta similar to the powerful LG Optimus G but this might be the first time we’re getting a good look at it. A gallery of photos of an LG Android phone that looks like the Optimus G and runs…