Latest

How a Simple Fungus Might Resurrect the Legendary Stradivarius Violin

Because the few remaining instruments can fetch millions of dollars at auction, scientists have been trying to pinpoint exact what makes a Stradivarius sound so phenomenal so they can be recreated. It’s partly due to a rare type of wood used by Antonio Stradivari that a Swiss wood researcher has managed to artificially recreate using…

Google has updated the Google Drive iOS and Android apps to include document editing on your device. Spreadsheet party!

Your Dumb iPad Picture Taking Is Keeping Real Photographers From Doing Their Jobs

Here’s a picture of Barack Obama campaigning in West Palm Beach, Florida yesterday. Except you can’t even get a great look at the prez because of all the amateur idiots taking idiot pictures with their idiot tablets, getting in the way of the real professional photographers. This disruptive behavior has to stop. Even Amazon—which has…

12 Greatest Science Fiction War Stories

War changes everything. War is an apocalypse and a technological revolution and a life-changing adventure, all rolled into one. So it’s not surprising that many of science fiction’s most indelible stories are about warfare. Here are the 12 most important science fiction war stories of all time. Top image: Ed Emshwiller’s cover art for Heinlein’s…

Where Anonymous Really Got Its Apple IDs From (Hint: Not the FBI)

According to an exclusive report from NBC News, last week’s Anonymous hack, which at the time was reported to have affected 1 million Apple UDIDs obtained from the FBI, was not actually a hack on the FBI at all. https://gizmodo.com/antisec-leaks-1-million-apple-device-ids-obtained-durin-5940183 Instead, NBC claims that Paul DeHart, CEO of the Blue Toad publishing company, told it…

Adorable kaiju birthday party has five-year-olds smashing a cardboard city

When both of your parents happen to be comic book writers, a rad birthday party is no big surprise. And for their son’s fifth birthday, comic scribes Kelly Sue DeConnick (Captain Marvel) and Matt Fraction (Casanova) built him and his friends a miniature metropolis to demolish. According to Fraction, the five-year-olds flattened the city in…

375 Completely Free Ebooks for Every Device

Last week Amazon dumped an avalanche of new Kindles on us. Huzzah for reading! Except, um, who wants to buy a whole library of ebooks? Here’s a list of 375 free books formatted for iPad/iPhone, Kindle, or for your plain old computer screen. https://gizmodo.com/amazons-new-kindle-avalanche-everything-you-need-to-kn-5941083 The list of books compiled by Open Culture consists of links…

One brief clip from this week’s TV contains more scenery-chewing than most full-length movies

This week on television, the Peter Porker: the Spectacular Spider-Ham stories become canon. Sort of. We also get to find out what it would be like if Tony Stark ruled the world. Doctor Who does a Western episode. But most of all, Syfy is having two monster movies, back to back. Check out clips and…

You Won’t Want To Hide This Gorgeous Power Bar Under Your Desk

When jammed full of plugs and adapters your typical power bar is an eyesore you’re happy to stash out of sight. But Punkt’s new ES 01 wrangles all your power cables in a beautiful UFO-like design that you just might want to put on display right next to the photos of your kids. Available in…

5 Ways to Mind-hack Your Boss into Letting You Work from Home

If you are lucky enough to have a job, why not take the whole “work” thing to the next level and work from home in your jammies? Inspired by all of the mobile-office-enabling features of join.me, we asked tech entrepreneur (and work-from-home pro) Seth Porges to outline some tactics you can use to move closer…

That Pretty New Facebook Friend? Probably Taliban

In the good ol’ days of spy vs. spy, the honeypot was a tried and true method espionage technique, laced with danger, intrigue, and sex. These days—as Australian soldiers have found out the hard way—all it takes to seduce your way to state secrets is a Facebook friend request and a Google image search for…

First footage from Eli Roth’s disaster movie Aftershock bloodies up a South American nightclub

Good news for Eli Roth fans — the horror director’s latest disaster movie Aftershock — which he co-wrote and stars in with Nicolas Lopez — has been picked up by Dimension Films, and here’s the first ever clip to celebrate. Watch as a Chilean club becomes a bloodbath when an earthquake hits. Here’s what we…

These Cool USB Typewriters Can Type on Your Screen and on Paper at the Same Time

Jack Zylkin has created something really cool: a hack to turn any kind of vintage typewriter in a normal keyboard for tablets and computers. One that actually types on paper and works like any keyboard. Watching them in action is nothing sort of fascinating. He appropriately calls them USB typewriters—thankfully, he decided to ignore the…

Who wants to see a beach covered in a million hermit crabs?

If you still bear painful childhood memories of returning from elementary school only to discover that your pet hermit crab was surreptitiously whisked away to Papa Jehoshaphat’s Hermit Crab Corral three states away — which is, incidentally, staffed entirely by crustacean-loving orphans — the following footage may be too much for you. At Nanny Point…

Why Apple Might Have a Hard Time Keeping Up With Google Maps

You know Google’s Street View cars? You probably thought they were just gathering photos and route data, right? Well it turns out there’s more. Under the hood of Google maps is the Ground Truth Project: an automated, artificial intelligence system which scans and interprets those streetview shots for relevant information and then integrates it into…

Interactive map displays the most common surnames across London

As you walk through the streets of your city, you might orient yourself by intersection, neighborhood, or the presence of your favorite coffee shop. This interactive map of London, however, lets you view the city a different way: by concentrations of Johnsons, Bennetts, and Patels. James Cheshire, a lecturer at University College London’s Centre for…

America Never Looked More Stunningly Beautiful Than This Timelapse

Photographer and Gizmodo fan John Eklund made this extraordinary time-lapse movie of the Pacific Northwest. I thought I was getting tired of these videos, but some of his shots really push it to a new level. “I started the project from July 2011 to August 2012,” he said in an email, “I took approximately 260,000…

Grandmother gives birth to her own grandchild

In vitro fertilization was developed well over thirty years ago, but its far reaching potential for helping couples with fertility issues has yet to be fully explored. The most recent reminder of this arrived on September 5, 2012 when a baby girl named Elle Cynthia was brought into this world via cesarean. But unlike most…

Sadly, You Will Not Be Able to Visit Neil Armstrong’s Grave

Neil Armstrong, America’s greatest and most reluctant hero, is not going to have a grave. He’s going to be buried at sea. Armstrong was a Lieutenant in the US Navy reserve. He originally joined the Navy in 1949, training at the Naval Air Station Pensacola and becoming a pilot. He flew 78 missions in the…

Watch These Cigar Rollers Turn a Stack of Dried Leaves Into Smokeable Art

The latest episode of the Made by Hand series profiles Martinez Cigars, a New York City-based factory and store where they’ve been hand rolling and selling cigars since 1974. Watching one of their craftsmen take a stack of dried tobacco leaves and effortlessly roll it into a cigar is mesmerizing, and the art is made…