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Seven-year-old girl contracts bubonic plague on Colorado camping trip

Pictured here is Sierra Jane Downing, a seven-year-old from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, alive and recovering after briefly succumbing to a nasty little bug by the name of bubonic plague. Have you heard of it? Of course you have — but you probably didn’t know people still contracted it. A few days after returning from a…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Sep 6

Amazon’s Crazy New 4G LTE Plan Gives You 250MB a Month for $50 a Year (Updated)

Amazon surprised us by announcing a 4G LTE Kindle Fire today, along with the AT&T data plan: $50 a year gets you 250MB per month, 20GB cloud storage, and a $10 appstore credit. $30 more will get you 3GB, and $50 more will get you 5GB. However, your 20GB of cloud storage counts against your…

Commerce Leslie Horn Sep 6

What Is MIMO?

At today’s Kindle Fire HD unveiling, Jeff Bezos claimed the Fire HD will download content up to 40 percent faster than either the iPad or the Nexus 7. Neat trick. But how will it pull it off? https://gizmodo.com/kindle-fire-hd-better-faster-cheaper-bigger-update-5941061 With a little something called MIMO. MIMO is a data transfer accelerant… Multiple Input/Multiple Output (MIMO) is…

Commerce Andrew Tarantola Sep 6

Amazon’s X-Ray for Movies Knows What You’re Watching—And Who’s In It

So this feels like the future: Amazon’s X-Ray for Movies can tell what flick you’re watching on your Kindle Fire HD, and gives you every piece of information you could ever want about it every time you pause. Pretty incredible stuff. https://gizmodo.com/kindle-fire-hd-better-faster-cheaper-bigger-update-5941061 The information is gleaned from IMDB (which Amazon conveniently owns), and pulls granular…

Commerce Brian Barrett Sep 6

The Indestructible Concrete LED Lamp You’ll Own For the Rest Of Your Life

Tired of accidentally knocking your bedside lamp to the ground in the middle of the night? Not only is that incredibly difficult with this heavy concrete O-Lite lamp, it also means the odds of it breaking as it hits the floor are slim to none. Instead of a pesky cord, the lamp is powered by…

Gadgets Andrew Liszewski Sep 6

This dancing sodium is way more dangerous than it looks

Click the play button on the video above, and you’ll see a piece of sodium leaping over and over to get its (metaphoric) toes out of the water. It looks like a cute little experiment — but it’s not quite as safe as it looks. Find out why! You’d think that sodium would be right…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell Sep 6

Kindle’s New Whispersync for Voice Keeps Your Audiobooks Synced With Your Book Books

Like being read to? You’ll dig Amazon’s new Kindle feature, Whispersync for audio. Announced today at its shindig in L.A., it allows that going forward, audiobooks will sync up with your words-books, meaning you can read and listen along at the same time. Additionally, for the first time Amazon also revealed Whispersync for games, meaning…

Commerce Leslie Horn Sep 6

Weird Secrets of The Avengers That You’d Never Have Guessed

You probably think you already know everything about The Avengers. After all, the Marvel superhero team-up movie had years of anticipation and build-up — which actually paid off, with a movie you probably saw more than once. But there are still secrets you’d never have guessed about Joss Whedon’s massive aliens-vs-heroes spectacle. With The Avengers…

Movies Charlie Jane Anders Sep 6

Kindle Fire HD: Better, Faster, Cheaper—Bigger! (Updated: HOLY CRAP)

The original is now $160. That’s absurd. But the real news is the new HD model—and its big brother. The Fire HD is a little sleeker and a little rounder—a nice change from the overly boxy first Kindle Fire. The large version of the HD has an 8.9-inch screen, to go along with the 7-incher.…

Commerce Kyle Wagner Sep 6

Kindle Serials Brings Back Dickensian-Style Book Installments

Back when Charles Dickens and his cohorts were publishing, books didn’t come fully formed; instead, they came out in regular installments; that’s why each chapter tends to end with a cliffhanger. Today, Amazon announced that it’s bringing that proud tradition back with Kindle Serials. The way Serials will work is that you pay upfront for…

Commerce Brian Barrett Sep 6

Kindle Paperwhite: Amazon’s New Amazing eReader

Here’s Amazon’s new E-Ink Kindle. It’s stunning. It’s $119 and ships October 1st. We’ll update with all the details as Amazon provides them. The Paperwhite is a frontlit reader, which we knew it would be, but it’s also got a new display—based on E-Ink’s XGA display—that bumps its PPI to 212, up from 169. That’s…

Commerce Kyle Wagner Sep 6

So-called ‘Junk DNA’ could be keeping you alive

Yesterday we told you about ENCODE, the recently concluded mega-project that created a kind of Encyclopedia Britannica of human gene function. Among the initiative’s many findings was that so-called “junk DNA” — outlier DNA sequences that do not encode for protein sequences — are not junk at all, and are in fact responsible for such…

io9 George Dvorsky Sep 6

The 5 Most Unpleasant And Undignified Ways To Die In Ancient Times

Antiquity was the pits. For every advancement in philosophy or mathematics, you had half a dozen crazed aristocrats high on mercury potions trying to remove your limbs in bold new ways. Here are five particularly egregious ways to kick it centuries ago — they involve (among many things) honey, wine, eels, and inappropriate touching. 1.…

io9 Cyriaque Lamar Sep 6

Dedicated Pepper Prep Tool Rescues Utterly Incompetent Chefs

Before the Food Network, it was Julia Child’s cooking show that encouraged America to ditch their TV dinners and get back to experimenting in the kitchen. And it worked, although it encouraged inventors to come up with a glut of overly-specialized food prep tools that promise to make life in the kitchen a lot easier.…

Tech News Andrew Liszewski Sep 6

Science says underpaid people enjoy their jobs more!

Why don’t doomsday cults break up when their apocalyptic predictions fail to come true? After all of that suffering and inconvenience, people want to make the best of a situation. And this same phenomenon will allow you to treat people like crap, and pay them a pittance — and they’ll thank you. We’ve all heard…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell Sep 6

Scientists Discover Method to Control Cockroaches Remotely

Researchers have been working on this for a very long time and now they have finally achieved it: scientists at North Carolina State University have successfully remotely controlled cockroaches. Watch the video. It’s both disgusting and impressive, but it could save your life one day. https://gizmodo.com/remote-controlled-roaches-the-next-front-line-in-nucle-5474179 According to lper Bozkurt, assistant professor of electrical engineering…

Tech News Jesus Diaz Sep 6

Music Is Still Too Expensive To Be Free, Too Free To Be Expensive

In this corner, we have recording artists – those beleagured believers clinging dearly to the notion that they can quit their day jobs, just like their tune-slinging forebears did. As many have pointed out, they don’t make much per stream from even today’s most popular streaming services – about $0.003 from iTunes Match and $0.001…

Tech News Eliot Van Buskirk - Evolver.fm Sep 6

Our Amazon Kindle Liveblog Hoopla Starts Right Now

Greetings from Los Angeles, home of the second-place Dodgers and a host of brand-new Kindles. Amazon’s mega major event starts in an hour or so, but we’re firing up the liveblog now to get you up to speed on what the scene is like and what we’re expecting to see. Join us, won’t you? On…

Commerce Brian Barrett Sep 6

New treatment reduces a key Alzheimer’s Disease protein by a staggering 90 percent

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most terrifying things that can happen to people: staying physically healthy but losing their mental capacity. And now, a new treatment shows great promise in attacking a key building block of the disease. Researchers found that eliminating a single enzyme from mice with aggressive symptoms of Alzheimer’s drastically reduced…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Sep 6

Astronauts repair space station with toothbrush

Yet another reason to never leave home without your toothbrush. As Gina Sunseri of ABC reports: A $100 billion space station saved by a simple $3 toothbrush? It was the brainstorm of astronauts Sunita Williams and Akihido Hoshide and NASA engineers on the ground: a tool to clean a bolt that gave them so much…

io9 George Dvorsky Sep 6

Seven-year-old girl contracts bubonic plague on Colorado camping trip

Amazon’s Crazy New 4G LTE Plan Gives You 250MB a Month for $50 a Year (Updated)

What Is MIMO?

Amazon’s X-Ray for Movies Knows What You’re Watching—And Who’s In It

The Indestructible Concrete LED Lamp You’ll Own For the Rest Of Your Life

This dancing sodium is way more dangerous than it looks

Kindle’s New Whispersync for Voice Keeps Your Audiobooks Synced With Your Book Books

Weird Secrets of The Avengers That You’d Never Have Guessed

Kindle Fire HD: Better, Faster, Cheaper—Bigger! (Updated: HOLY CRAP)

Kindle Serials Brings Back Dickensian-Style Book Installments

Kindle Paperwhite: Amazon’s New Amazing eReader

So-called ‘Junk DNA’ could be keeping you alive

The 5 Most Unpleasant And Undignified Ways To Die In Ancient Times

Dedicated Pepper Prep Tool Rescues Utterly Incompetent Chefs

Science says underpaid people enjoy their jobs more!

Scientists Discover Method to Control Cockroaches Remotely

Music Is Still Too Expensive To Be Free, Too Free To Be Expensive

Our Amazon Kindle Liveblog Hoopla Starts Right Now

New treatment reduces a key Alzheimer’s Disease protein by a staggering 90 percent

Astronauts repair space station with toothbrush

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