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Watch New York’s crazy airport taxi activity during the holidays

Thanksgiving is almost here and it’s already wreaking havoc in transportation systems all across the United States. New York City is one of the most extreme cases, with JFK and LaGuardia airports seeing a surge in traffic before and after the key holidays, as illustrated by this beautiful interactive taxi data visualization. SPLOID is delicious…

27 Paintings From the Most Famous Space Artist On Earth (And Off)

“The nearest thing to an artist-in-residence from outer space.” That’s how Isaac Asimov once described Robert T. McCall, the renowned illustrator, conceptual artist, space-scene painter, official NASA artist, and creator of legendary movie posters including 2001: A Space Odyssey. The third piece of our series featuring the most famous aerospace artists, beginning with Attila Héjja…

Windows 10 Will Actually Be Windows 10 (Not Windows NT 6.4)

Super nerds will know that ever since Windows 7 there’s been a curious numbering scheme in Microsoft’s OS that actually meant Windows 8.1 was, under the hood, called Windows NT 6.3. No longer! It’s come to light that the Windows kernel for the 10th iteration of the OS will be called Windows NT 10, meaning…

This hypnotic music video made me go into weekend mode again

Monday mornings are tough. I had my shower, my coffee, I went through my morning work routine, and just when I thought I was recovering from my monday blues I bumped into this: A surreal and hypnotic animated music video that made me go into full weekend mode again. The video—directed by Melanie Tourneur and…

Are These the Self-Driving Cars of the Future?

The self-driving car is still a little way off hitting the mainstream, but when it does it could change the way we travel around our cities. Certainly design consultancy IDEO thinks so, if these concepts are anything to go by. As part of a future-gazing project to investigate automobility in the coming decades, IDEO has…

Europa Remastered: This 90s Space Image Has Been Retouched By NASA

It’s not just old rock albums that get remastered when technology moves on: this image of Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, Europa, has just been given a revamp by scientists from NASA. The mosaic image of the moon was first captured in the late 1990s, but now it’s been remastered using more modern image processing techniques. The…

This trick to show how invisible air moves seems like magic

This is called Schlieren optics, a cool technique that allows us to see how invisible air moves. Thanks to the difference of density between hot and cold air, light changes speed, bends, and creates visual distortions. Exactly the same thing that happens in the mirages but captured in a controlled environment. This video explains how…

Charming Paper Animations Show Tells the History of Microbes

We covered the work of Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck before, but they’re back with a new series called “Animated Life,” which will explore major discoveries and the legacies they’ve left behind. Up this week: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and the drop of lake water he bothered to look at under a microscope. https://gizmodo.com/what-happens-to-a-whale-after-it-dies-as-told-by-puppe-5850150 “Animated Life”…

Terrifying New Close-Up Camera Footage of the Antares Rocket Explosion

The up-close footage from the ill fated launch attempt of the Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket has just released, almost a month later. It’s terrifying. In normal cases photographers are allowed to collect the memory cards from their remotely controlled cameras within a few hours after lift off. But the October 28th launch was anything…

The U.S. Court Case That Made Movie Theater Concessions So Expensive

In 1948, the Supreme Court ended the stranglehold Hollywood studios and distributors had on the U.S. movie market. Declaring the big eight a monopoly and ordering them to divest of their ownership of movie theaters and cease other non-competitive practices, with U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, et al., the Court opened the movie industry to independent…

NBC Stalls Production of Constantine After 13 Episodes

Instead of ordering more episodes, which would be a sure sign that NBC is happy with the show, Constantine will only have 13 episodes in its first season. On the other hand, the numbers have been improving, so it could still pull off a renewal. Before the show even premiered, NBC showed confidence in it…

The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan just last night. The craft will carry three astronauts up to the International Space Station where they’ll undertake a five and a half month mission. And install a coffee machine. [NASA]

Apple is launching a set of 25 apps created by names—like Angry Birds, FarmVille and djay—to raise funds for (RED) and World AIDS day on December 1st. You can buy them now.

What If Websites Were Real-Life Things?

Facebook can be a little stalky, Twitter full of people who want you to listen to them, and 4chan is… well, 4chan. So what would all these corners of the Internet translate to if you imagined them as real life phenomena? That’s what Doghouse Diaries has tried to do with this cartoon. It’s by no…

Christian Bale Admits That He Was Jealous of Ben Affleck’s Batman

Poor Christian Bale. Even though he had known a new Batman was coming, he was still thrown by the announcement that Ben Affleck would play the part in Batman v. Superman. Speaking with Empire, Bale said that he still kind of wanted to reprise the role and just sunk into a bit of a fugue…

An Outpost Nowhere Near The End Of The Universe

Expedition 42 has kicked off on the space station, and they’re taking full advantage an an excuse to pay tribute to the Hitchhiker’s Guide answer to life, the universe, and everything. Top image: Launch of a Soyuz TMA-15M out of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, November 24, 2014. Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani Rollout of…

This Supercut Reminds Us How Totally Accurate Hacking Was in 90s Movies

So accurate! You know how way back in the 90s we totally hacked things by wearing visors and gloves? Yeah. This a beautiful thing. Every second is glorious, but I’m a huge fan of the clip from Universal Soldier: The Return. I laughed so hard, my lungs started hurting. The supercut is from founditemclothing, who…

A History of Violence Breaks One of Cinema’s Oldest Clichés

“The book was soooo much better” is a phrase that screams to me “let’s not be friends.” It is almost a given at this point, that whenever one thing is adapted from another thing, the original thing is always vastly superior—except when it’s not. One bit of big movie news this week is Chris Pratt…

Ariel Pink: pom pom

A couple weeks ago, The New Yorker published a lovely little essay about the eccentric rocker, Ariel Pink. The whole conversation takes place in an SUV bound from Pink’s Williamsburg hotel to a show in Staten Island. Pink rehashes some recent social media controversies and some other thoughts on his own fame. The whole encounter…

What Great Gadgets Died Way Before Their Time?

We’ve talked about tech’s biggest blunders and some of the gadgets we miss the most, but these are the wonderful pieces of hardware that have the most tragic stories—the technology that was simply ahead of its time. These are gadgets and pieces of tech fashioned into greatness after their extinction where consumers, experts, and bloggers…