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Next-Gen Gorilla Glass Wants to Save Your Phone From Fateful Drops 

Few of us ever really bat an eye if we get a scratch or two on our smartphone’s screen. The real heartbreaker is when the phone is accidentally dropped or knocked off a table and the screen shatters, leaving it completely unusable. It’s a fate many of us have experienced before, and one that Corning…

The Surpisingly Old Origins of the Fax Machine

Today, we mostly think of the fax machine as an outdated piece of technology. While there are still some uses for it in an office-setting, technological advances are sending the fax machines to the same pasture as pagers, land-line telephones, and disposable cameras. Even if this is the last we hear of the beeps and…

This is how you fold the perfect paper airplane

I used to flip the end of the wings of paper airplanes upward and breathe on the head of the airplane to make it fly farther. According to John Collins—the maker of the paper airplane with the world record for the longest distance—I was doing it wrong. This video shows how to do it properly.…

Cat Finds Heaven In a Radiator

If you’re in a part of the world that’s literally freezing right now, then you’ve got to sympathize with this cat. We’re all thinking of just relocating next to the heaters, right? https://gizmodo.com/watch-this-gigantic-wall-of-snow-engulf-buffalo-new-yo-1660348339 A few months ago, I moved my cats from sunny southern California to the east coast. They’ve never had radiators or true…

Kindle Fire Owners Now Get the Washington Post For Free

Ever since Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, there’s been speculation about how he would tie it in with Amazon. Now we know: owners of Kindle Fire tablets are getting a full 6-month digital subscription to the newspaper for free. https://gizmodo.com/jeff-bezos-just-bought-the-washington-post-for-250-mil-1032702101 The Washington Post has announced that its new app is exclusively for Kindle Fire…

Free Google Cardboard App Lets You Stand on Stage With Paul McCartney

Google’s cheap virtual reality solution—a piece of folded cardboard—is perhaps the best thing to happen to VR in a long while. And now it lets you stand right there on stage with Paul McCartney. https://gizmodo.com/turn-your-android-into-a-virtual-reality-headset-with-g-1596026538 An app created by Jaunt allows you to experience what it was like to be on stage with Paul and…

Sony Pictures Has Abandoned Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs Biopic

The Steve Jobs film we’ve been anticipating for a very long old time indeed looks like it won’t happen as soon as expected—if at all. https://gizmodo.com/christian-bale-just-bailed-on-the-steve-jobs-movie-1654099985 Variety reports that Sony Pictures has pulled its backing from the project. That leaves Aaron Sorkin stood on his own with just a script, still lacking a lead actor…

CGI has become wearingly dull and clichéd, argues British film critic Jonathan Romney. Not only are film spectacles more visually formulaic, but the absence of scenes depending on the exceptional skills of real human beings diminishes the “how-did-they-do-that?” factor, since we assume it was all done with a keyboard.

Paul Greengrass Will Bring Orwell’s 1984 Back to the Big Screen

Sony’s setting up another adaptation of George Orwell’s classic, this time with Paul Greengrass in the director’s chair. Well, it’s not like it’s a book that gets less relevant as time goes on. The question remains if this’ll come before or after Greengrass’ return to the Bourne franchise, which is supposedly going to come out…

Sony A7 II: A Mirrorless Camera That Stabilizes Shots With Any Lens

Sony clearly isn’t one to be complacent: its compact mirrorless camera, the A7, launched a year ago, then got a video upgrade just six months later. Now, it’s successor—the A7 II—has been announced. https://gizmodo.com/sony-a7-a7r-review-so-long-dslrs-hello-future-of-ph-1469132320 https://gizmodo.com/sony-a7s-sonys-compact-full-frame-camera-gets-a-video-1559531995 The new camera will be the first to feature Sony’s 5-axis in-body stabilization, which allows it to reduce shake on…

The FX Team Behind Gravity Will Explain the Universe Using Magic Leap AR

The visual effects team that made Gravity look so God damn great is planning to “tell the story of the universe,” using Magic Leap’s augmented reality technology to create an immersive live show next year. Fronted by Professor Brian Cox—the British physicists turned TV personality—the production will use the cutting-edge AR system that we only…

Pop Art Paintings Reveal the Your Favorite Characters’ Hidden Secrets

We’ve covered the work of Grégoire Guillemin before, but this time he’s taking on a completely different style of art in order to expose the secrets characters have been hiding from us. https://gizmodo.com/fritz-langs-silver-surfer-bauhaus-iron-man-and-other-5859376 Guillemin’s calling these “The Secret Life of Heroes” and they range from fairy tales to comics characters to Star Wars: And, of…

How Your ISP’s Math Can Make the Internet Slow

To work out what dizzying speeds they can offer you, ISPs have to use some simple math to predict how much the demand for delicious internet will vary at peak times. Only, they don’t always get it right. In this video, Dr Richard Mortier explains how statistical multiplexing allows ISPs to effectively gamble on their…

Drone video shows the snow wall storm from the inside

We have seen lots of impressive images and time-lapse video of the snow wall that buried entire cities in upstate New York but this is the first drone video filmed behind it, taken in West Seneca by Jim Grimaldi. A new lake effect, powered by arctic winds from the north pole and Siberia, is now…

Melissa McCarthy Will Play a “Comedy Adventure” Version of Tinker Bell

Well, it’s been a few hours since we heard news about a live-action update to a classic kid’s tales, so here we go: Fox has reportedly acquired a Tinker Bell movie from Melissa McCarthy and Shawn Levy (A Night at the Museum). The idea comes from Levy, who will direct, and McCarthy, who will star.…

The most accurate, highest resolution video of Earth ever made

This Earth video created by James Tyrwhitt-Drake using footage from the Elektro-L weather satellite—a Russian satellite that takes one 121 megapixel image of Earth every 30 minutes—is the highest resolution video of our home planet ever created. Watch it in all its 4K glory here. James Tyrwhitt-Drake writes: A timelapse of Earth in 4K resolution,…

Fujfilm Stuffs The X-T1 With a Zillion New Features in Firmware Update

The thing about software is that it’s…soft. Malleable! You can add neato things to it that make products better. Camera makers usually update a device’s firmware with bug fixes and supposed “performance increases.” Not so with the upcoming December update to Fujfilm’s X-T1 mirrorless camera. It’s replete with fancy new abilities. The X-T1 came out…

Hannibal Buress’ Matrix Rap Reveals the Many Rhymes of “Morpheus”

A recent episode of The Eric Andre Show, co-host Hannibal Buress closed the show by rapping as Laurence Fishburne’s Matrix character. It turns out that there are a staggering number of words that kind of rhyme with “Morpheus.” [Hannibal Buress via Laughing Squid]

Watching grandmas smoke weed for the first time is so great

When you combine three nice things like grandmas and weed and doing something for the first time, well, you get something wonderful. Watch as three grandmas smoke weed for the first time and hang out with them as they get high. They laugh, they get the munchies, they don’t always make sense and they want…

Dragonriders Of Pern Movie Gets A Screenwriter Who’s Also A Novelist

Few recently announced movie projects have inspired more excitement — and more “please don’t fuck this up” trepidation — than the movie based on Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern. The good news? The movie has a writer, and she sounds like she has some real storytelling chops. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the task of…