The infamous Silk Road resurrected itself like a junkie phoenix this month, leaving its long-time residence on Tor for a new anonymizing service called the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P. News of the high-profile dark market's new address nudged the little-known I2P into the spotlight. Now, after a decade in the…
First, let's start by dispelling a somewhat popular myth that more or less goes like this:
The main purpose of the International Space Station is to provide an international laboratory for experiments within the space environment. Which, despite all our technological advances, is nearly impossible to replicate here on Earth. Because for many of those experiments, the key parameter is—you guessed…
A modern microprocessor is a tremendously complicated entity, and it has taken decades of work by thousands of people to get it where it is today. It's nearly impossible to cover all the bases, but I'm going to try anyway. And get a bucket of popcorn ready—because this is going to be long.
One of the six simple machines, a screw is nothing more than an inclined plane wrapped around a center pole. While today screws come in standard sizes, and typically are tightened by turning clockwise (and loosened by turning counterclockwise), this is a recent invention. A great example of how things that seem simple…
If we are just talking about an armored suit that augments a human's strength and weaponry, then we're extremely close. But if we're talking about something with all of the primary abilities of Iron Man's character (i.e. flight, clean infinite power, and repulsor beams), that may never become a reality. The current…
Consider the SR-71 Blackbird. It was meant to be used as a high altitude, high velocity recon aircraft. It was, and still is, one of the Air Force's greatest accomplishments, technologically speaking.
Those guns... would rip right off those armatures. Weapons, especially heavy weapons, cause a lot of recoil. I mean a lot of recoil. For comparison, I am going to consider the machine gun farthest back to be comparable to the US military's 240-G.
In 1998, there was a groundbreaking study telling parents that their children were at risk of getting autism from vaccines. Parents everywhere collectively gasped. After all, they had been told for years vaccines were the best way to prevent any number of unwanted diseases. Now they find out the very treatment they…
From death by micrometeorite to living without gluten, Gizmodo has explored more than 50 everyday scientific mysteries throughout this year. Here are our ten best.
We're currently experiencing colder-than-seasonal weather here in Seattle. This is causing a lot of problems with burst water pipes. Here is a picture of a couple of issues suffered by a friend of mine Ian.
The horrors of New Coke have not been easy for the American public to forget. We do not handle change well, especially when it comes to the brands that we've been conditioned to love. But did New Coke really taste that bad? And likewise, is the new Yahoo! logo really that atrocious? And is iOS7 really the flaming…
Before the age of the internet, you likely never noticed some of the keyboard symbols that you now use all the time. Most of us still don't know the actual history behind these now-ubiquitous symbols, the reasons they exist, or how they ended up in your email addresses and URLs. It's actually fascinating once you…
You have heard a lot of explanations about how and why Sandy happened, but none of them are as crystal clear, informative and detailed as this video by Science Friday.
I'm going to go ahead and guess that the computer component you take most for granted is your HDD. No longer! Bill the Engineer Guy—our favorite uncreepy uncle geek since Bill Nye—unfolds its many mysteries. [TDW Geek]
The call just died, and for no apparent reason. You were just walking down the street, for God's sake. So, let's talk about it: What happened?
Welcome to Vocab Lesson, Gizmodo's new weekly column on words—the ones you've heard, but can't quite define, or the ones you haven't, but might like to hear about. This week's lesson: Thermocouples! (Huh?)
