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The NIH Is Retiring All of Its Research Chimpanzees

The National Institutes of Health has announced that it’s bringing its chimpanzee testing programme to an entire halt, sending its 50 remaining primates to sanctuaries. Nature reports that the NIH director Francis Collins announced to the agency earlier this week that the 50 chimpanzees that it owns will be retired. Meanwhile, other chimps that are…

Miners Just Unearthed This Huge Diamond—the Largest To Be Found in 100 Years

Imagine putting this thing on a ring. You’re looking at the biggest diamond to be found in the last 100 years, which was discovered in a mine in north-central Botswana. Lucara Diamond, the company that controls the mine in question, reports that the stone weighs in at a frankly staggering 1,111 carats. That’s 7.8 ounces…

First-Ever Working Vocal Cords Grown in a Lab

The first-ever working vocal cords able to produce realistic sound have been grown from scratch in a lab, promising hope to people who have lost their voice due to illness, injury or invasive surgery. The vocal chords are actually, in theory, fairly simple: two bands of smooth muscle lined with delicate folds of mucosa. As…

If Only These Opinion-Cancelling Headphones Were Real

“We took the space-age technology behind noise-cancelling headphones,” this spoof ad explains, “and added our own patented algorithms to filter out unwanted thoughts and conclusions.” [We The Internet]

Bacteria Resistant to ‘Last Resort’ Antibiotics Discovered

Don’t panic (you should probably panic), but a team of researchers has discovered the first known example of a resistance gene, present in animals and some human infections, for a type of antibiotic known as colistin—the so-called ‘last resort’ antibiotic. Back in 2012, the World Health Organization deemed colistin—an antibiotic in the family called polymyxins—to…

The Five Most Earth-Like Exoplanets (So Far)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read that the “first Earth-like exoplanet” has been discovered. With nearly 2000 exoplanets found to date, it is no wonder so many of them will resemble our planet in some way. But which exoplanets are similar enough to the Earth that they could actually be habitable?…

Samsung’s New BRITECELL Camera Sensor Promises Amazing Low-Light Performance 

Samsung has revealed details of a new camera sensor technology that it refers to as BRITECELL. The sensor promises better low-light performance, while also providing much slimmer sensors. Sam Mobile reports that the new sensors use smaller 1-micron pixels that manage to persevere the same light sensitivity as pixels that measure 1.12 microns. The resulting…

Carnegie Mellon University Denies Being Paid $1M to Hack Tor

Last week, it was suggested that a research group from Carnegie Mellon University had been paid $1 million by the FBI to hack Tor. Now, CMU has issued a statement denying that money changed hands—but seems to suggest it was forced to hand over data to the authorities. In the statement, the University highlights that…

Skype’s Android app now lets you save video messages forever if you’re particularly attached to them.

The Lion King In VR Is The Most Thrilling And Nostalgic Thing You’ll See Today

If you’ve ever seen Disney’s The Lion King on Broadway, you’re already quite aware that it’s a 360-experience in itself. But now you can get even closer to the magic from a centre stage view that’ll have you feeling like it’s the first time again. Maybe you’ve never had the time or money to see…

The Strange and Wonderful World of Special Toilets

Fancy toilets are not a thing that have really caught on in North America. Being blasted in the ass with scented water is not seen as a core component of the American Dream, but as the NYT reports with some cutting-edge journalism, fancy toilets are slowly invading our shores. The Times’s piece mostly looks at…

Kickstarted Drone Company Folds, Along With $3.4 Million in Pledges

Most Kickstarter projects come through in the end, but every now and again, something fails in spectacular fashion and reminds us that crowdfunding is not all it’s cracked up to be. Back in January, the Torquing Group raised $3.4 million for a handheld drone called the Zano. For around $250, you’d get an “ultra-portable, personal…

This Finn-Centric Star Wars: The Force Awakens Commercial Is Mostly New Footage

Yet another new commercial for Star Wars: The Force Awakens is out and while some of the previous ones have been largely rehashes of the trailers, this one—which focuses on Finn—is mostly new footage. “You don’t know anything about me.” “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Oh man, we’re getting so, so close. […

So Tinder’s CEO Might Have Violated SEC Rules With That Weird Interview

Not only did Tinder cofounder and CEO Sean Rad comes off as extremely dumb in a recent interview, he may have violated the Security & Exchange Commission’s quiet period for Tinder’s imminent IPO. What’s the word for that? After an interview was published today in the Evening Standard where, among other things, Rad confuses the…

Giant Panda Cub Makes Public Debut, Hopes You Don’t Notice

This three-month old female giant panda cub made her public debut yesterday—amid some familiar-looking stuffed-toy camouflage—at the Giant Panda Conservation Center at the National Zoo in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. AP Photo by Joshua Paul

This Ingestible Health Sensor Could Help Cut Down On Doctor Visits

From drug-delivering microbots to cancer-fighting nano-swarms, the age of ingestible, autonomous health devices is upon us. So it was only a matter of time before somebody built a miniature stethoscope that sits in your GI tract monitoring your vital signs. And hey, it’s a pretty clever idea. Developed by researchers at MIT, the pill-sized sensor…

These Budding Pigeon Pathologists Can Read Your Next Mammogram

There’s a long, colorful history of using pigeons in research, particularly in the behavioral and psychological sciences. Scientists have trained a flock of pigeons to be feathered pathologists, able to spot telltale signs of breast cancer in medical images nearly as well as their human counterparts. As reported in paper published today in PLOS One,…

Could Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson Have Stopped That Bomb If They’d Just Taken An Uber?

You could use the public data released by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission to reveal critical insights about urban transit trends. Or you could use it to conduct a completely serious investigation on the plausibility of one of the transportation scenarios in Die Hard: With a Vengeance. To be fair, developer Todd…

A Textile Company Is Making Low-Calorie Noodles From Trees

It would appear that a 99-year-old cloth-making company in Japan is looking to enter the food business in an unusual way. Instead of only churning out towels and bedding, it’ll start using fiber from trees to cook up a gluten-free, slurp-able snack. Osaka-based Omikenshi Co. employs the same technology it uses for creating textiles to…

This Video of a Father’s Explanation to His Son About the Paris Attacks Went Hugely Viral

Angel Le and his six-year-old son Brandon were visiting a memorial in Paris when a reporter for Le Petit Journal stopped to ask a few questions. The resulting clip was shared more than 11 million times on Facebook, generated a tearful stream of tweets, and millions of views from around the world. It’s not hard…