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Dart Silenced Alarm Clock Is A Great Excuse To Sleep With a Nerf Gun Under Your Pillow

The whole ‘shoot to silence’ alarm clock idea has been done to death by now. But Hasbro has managed to eek out one more worthy of mention with its new Nerf-branded Shoot To Snooze alarm clock which requires groggy users to nail it with a foam dart or disk in order to silence its morning…

The powers-that-be have decided there won’t be any more internet-destroying leap seconds this year. Phew. [IERRSS]

Scientists Discover Tectonic Plates on Mars

For decades, scientists have believed that Earth was peculiar in having tectonic plates. Now, though, a UCLA geologist has found evidence that Mars, too, exhibits the same crustal plates beneath its surface. An Yin, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences, made the discovery by analysing over 100 satellite images of Mars, taken by…

What Annoying Wi-Fi Dead Spots Do You Have in Your Home?

Wi-Fi is supposed to provide pervasive internet access, so you can pick up your tablet, laptop or phone and browse from any place you fancy in your home. Sadly, it doesn’t alway work like that. In the far end of my apartment, in an armchair in the bedroom, my Wi-Fi is patchy at best. It…

Watch NASA’s New Morpheus Moon Lander Crash and Burn

Curiosity might be a roaring success so far, completing what must be the most complex remote landing procedure ever conceived, but not everything’s going quite so swimmingly at NASA. Watch the first free flight test of the new “eco-friendly” moon lander that’s designed to drop cars onto the Moon – it wasn’t pretty. This isn’t…

Apparently IBM is sniffing around RIM, especially its enterprise-services division. [Bloomberg]

Court Filing Reveals Confidential Apple and Samsung Sales Figures

The Apple-Samsung court battle rolls on, and continues to provide insights that the companies would rather keep confidential—like their sales figures, which have just been released in a new court filing. All Things D has laid the documents out for all to see and, while they’re not the most surprising figures in the world, they…

Samsung’s New Exynos Mobile Chip: USB 3.0 and 1080p Video at 60fps

Samsung has released the specs of its new Exynos 5 Dual mobile chip, and it looks set to be an absolute powerhouse. An ARM-based 1.7 GHz mobile CPU, it seems set be a massive leap forward from the Exynos 4 Quad which currently powers the Galaxy S III . https://gizmodo.com/this-chip-will-power-the-new-samsung-galaxy-s-iii-5905282 So, what can you expect…

WSJ: Lenovo Working on Convertible Windows RT Tablet

While Lenovo has already announced Intel-powered WIndows 8 tablets, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the company is also readying an ARM-based Windows RT tablet, too, which look set to compete directly with Surface. https://gizmodo.com/lenovo-thinkpad-tablet-2-looks-like-a-tablet-behaves-5933105 The Journal explains that Lenovo are teaming up with Nvidia to deliver a convertible tablet “with a keyboard…

UV Wristband Helps Prevent Sunbathers From Burning

A Swedish company called Intellego Technologies is set to commercialize a special wristband, much like the kind wrapped around your wrist at concerts and music festivals, that can alert its wearer when it’s time to get out of the sun so as to avoid burning or potentially carcinogenic sun damage. The wristband works through an…

Greedy Glitch in Pay-as-You-Go Phone Left Woman Over $40,000 in Debt

Once, I bought a cheap pre-paid international mobile phone at Target, to bring on vacation to Mexico so as to avoid futzing with my iPhone’s data and roaming and such. The phone I got ended up not working, so I spent my whole vacation asking to borrow other people’s mobile phones and buying calling cards…

Sometimes Apple Commercials Just Aren’t Any Good

Apple is known for its marketing. It’s almost always better than every other companies. But what happens when the commercials start… sucking? The recent Apple ad push that featured a ‘Genius’ helping real people in real situations was awkwardly awful. Here’s a humorous take by Jest on what went wrong. I think painting Cook as…

The Stoner Channel: The Dead Do Durham, Usain Gets a Strain, and Goku Takes on All Challengers

Dragon Ball Z – 2013 OH HELL YEAH! This is so awesome my hair’s standing on end and turning blonde! Sativex Oral Spray May be More Effective than Traditional Opiate Treatments Marijuana itself may have “no recognized medical use” according to the Controlled Substances Act but researchers haven’t had any trouble putting cannabinoids, the plant’s…

NASA’s Mohawk Guy Loves Mars and Memes in (Almost) Equal Measure

Over at Wired’s Underwire blog, Angela Watercutter spoke with Bobak Ferdowsi, NASA’s supercool mohawked mission to Mars activity lead, about his newly acquired celeb status. Of whether such sudden internet fame was something he’d expected: No! Funny story, actually at work we sometimes – to make things more lively – we make our own memes…

The Most Popular Samsung Phone Is Some Piece of Crap Called the Samsung Galaxy Prevail

For two years, from June 2010 through June 2012, Samsung sold 21.25 million phones. Its most popular model during that span? Not a Galaxy S II phone, not a Nexus phone but the not exactly vaunted… Samsung Galaxy Prevail on Boost Mobile. How do we know this? Because of the Apple-Samsung court battle. Samsung and…

Students Build Super Desktop Slingshot for Playing Angry Birds

Hideaki Matsui and Andrew Spitz, students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, built the Super Angry Birds desktop slingshot controller as project for their Haptic (tactile feedback) technology class. With a hacked motorized fader (the kind found in audio mixing consoles) to create forced feedback, an Arduino-based microcontroller called Music & Motors developed at…

The Olympics Uses Special Sand That Doesn’t Stick to Beach Volleyball Players—Could They Ever Use Synthetic Sand?

Any beach goer knows that spending time in the sand means spending infinitely more time trying to scrub sand off your body. Sand just sticks everywhere. But why doesn’t it stick to Olympic volleyball players? It’s because the Olympics always use special, highly regulated sand. Yep, according to Reuters, the sand used for Olympic beach…

Apple Retail Stores Will Price-Match iPhone Discounts Offered by Wireless Carriers

In a move of unanticipated benevolence, Apple Inc. retail stores have instructed employees to offer a discount of $49.01 to any customer sighting a lower price offered by a wireless carrier for the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 models. This comes just days after Sprint announced it would be slashing the price of its iPhone…

Sonic Bug Repellants Don’t Freaking Work So Stop Buying Them

Summer usually means sticky sweaty skin and mosquitos who love to bite that sticky sweaty skin. How do you prevent mosquitos from biting you? Certainly not with sonic bug repellants and definitely not with sonic bug repellant smartphone apps. They don’t work. They never did. They never will. BuzzFeed FWD asked Dr. Roger Gold, a…

A new human species has been identified in Africa

Homo erectus was not alone in ancient Africa. Newly discovered fossil evidence, detailed in the latest issue of Nature, strongly suggests that no fewer than three distinct species of early humans from the genus Homo co-existed on the continent between 1.7 and 2 million years ago. The findings, which run counter to the hypothesis that…