hands

Good News Everyone: We Found a New Species of Roundworm That Can Infect Our Brains

In a report this week, doctors have documented the first case of a human brain infection caused by a roundworm normally found in Australian snakes.

Raw Dog Food Might Be Driving the Spread of Dangerous Superbugs

Some drug-resistant bacteria from dog food are the same as those found in hospital patients.

Did Mitch McConnell Join a Fight Club?

What the hell is going on with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell? Earlier this week, McConnell was photographed in the halls of the Senate with significant bruising and bandages on his hands and discoloration on his face. The images went viral, but no explanation emerged. Speaking with reporters in the Capitol on Thursday, the 78-year-old…

Gruesome Scene as Bag Containing 54 Severed Hands Found in Siberia [Updated]

Well here’s something you don’t see everyday: a bag containing 27 pairs of human hands. The grisly discovery was made on a river island near the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, and local police are now investigating. At first, a single hand was discovered. But then, nearby, the motherlode was found—a bag containing no less than…

Why Is Christopher Nolan So Obsessed With Hands?

Closeups on hands might seem like too small a detail to become a trademark of a director’s visual style, but looking back on Nolan’s oeuvre shows just how much they reveal about his characters. Over the course of Nolan’s nine feature films, he uses hands to show in practice what dialog would only be able…

New research suggests humans have more “primitive” hands than chimps. The study, while controversial, raises some provocative questions about the origin of human toolmaking and the importance of specialized hands. Image: Denise Morgan, University of Utah

While You Weren’t Looking, Dell Made Android Tablets Interesting Again

Apple! Apple! Apple! Yesterday, you were probably too busy gawking at Cupertino’s precious new watch and giant smartphones to notice anything else that happened in the world of technology. There’s no shame in that. But if you were paying attention to the 2014 Intel Developers Conference in San Francisco, you might have gotten a glimpse…

This Incredible Star Wars-Style Bionic Hand Let an Amputee Feel Again

We geeks all have the same platonic prosthesis ideal: Luke Skywalker’s badass Star Wars mech-hand. We’re getting there, bit by bit. Dennis Aabo Sørensen’s new hand is almost there; it let him feel again. The hand is the subject of an in-depth paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine today, and has been tested…

The Galaxy Note 3 Has a Hidden Tiny Screen Mode For Your Tiny Hands

If, like many of us, your hands are too small to to comfortably use the Galaxy Note 3’s giant 5.7-inch display, you’re in luck. Android Central has uncovered a hidden tiny screen mode for your tiny baby dwarf hands. It may look a little silly, but tiny screen mode is actually pretty darn useful. To…

What your hands look like after 10 days underwater

In 2002, scuba diver Tim Yarrow set a record for the longest time spent underwater after spending 10 days submerged in a tank in Johannesburg shopping center. When he finally emerged, his hands were spectacularly wrinkled. The especially numerous dead keratin cells on our hands and feet absorb water when we’re in the bath or…

How Do You Function, When One Hand Is Out of Commission?

So, uh… cat bites are pretty bad, as it turns out. I was in the ER yesterday, after my sweet cat Franny sunk a tooth into the top of my left hand, causing it to swell up like a balloon. I’m now on a strong antibiotic and some stronggg painkillers, but it’s still a baseball…

Your Hands Will Sing with Aural Gloves

American Sign Language may soon be obsolete if these motion-sensing gloves come to market. For now, a UBC team are the only ones to enjoy harmonizing with their own themselves. The gloves, designed by a team at the University of British Columbia led by Professor Sidney Fels, recognize their position in three-dimensional space and modulate…

A Sumo’s Fingers May Matter More Than His Weight

Sumo wrestlers: they’re huge. The huger the better. End of story, right? Of course not—sumo wrestlers practice strict training including a special diet and they even live in sumo communes called “heya.” But one thing that science has found to make a good sumo, and something the athletes unfortunately don’t have control over, is the…

Prune Fingers May Help You Hold Onto Things

Scientists know a lot about the body, but they don’t know everything. Take, for example, the pruning that occurs when you spend too much time in the water. Scientists don’t know why these wrinkles occur only on the hands and feet. A recent study in Brain, Behavior and Evolution suggests these wrinkles are there for…

I’m Pretty Sure the New Hand Soap Is Trying to Kill Me

We love design at Gizmodo. It’s one of our things. But what happens when design doesn’t love us back, comes alive one night (I dunno, because of the debt ceiling or something) and decides to strangle us in our sleep? That could never happen? OK, fine. I guess maybe you’re right. Maybe. Anyway, eight hands…

LeapPad Explorer: The Tablet Your Kid Can Use as a Frisbee

The dummy-proof, interactive feel of tablets makes them a natural for kids. But letting your brat actually get his grubby, possibly poop-covered mitts on your delicate iPad? It’s probably for the best that we now have a tablet designed specifically for kids. The LeapPad Explorer tablet has a 5-inch capacitive touch screen, a built-in rear-facing…

Prosthetic Hand Isn’t Electric, But Performs Just Like It Is

I’d rather have a hook if I lost my hand in some sort of freak accident, but realize that’s not exactly conducive to typing. Rather than chucking in the tech-blogging for piracy, Mark Stark’s prosthetic hand is a worthy alternative. Awarded a place in PopSci’s 2011 Innovation Awards, Stark’s prosthetic hand combines three of the…

How wearing a glove can warp your sense of good and bad

Whether we’re right-handed or left-handed can have a huge impact on what we subconsciously associate with good and bad. Right-handers, according to psychologists, see things to the right them as being better than things on their left. But it’s remarkably easy to change this association. Putting a ski glove on your dominant hand changes how…

Stone tools shaped the evolution of our hands

Charles Darwin once speculated that the use of stone tools by our ancient ancestors had profoundly influenced the evolution of our hands. Now, 140 years later, we’ve discovered that, once again, Darwin knew exactly what he was talking about. Our hands are fundamentally different from those of our primate relatives. The bones and muscles in…

These Are the Hands of the Apollo Astronauts

There are Neil’s. And there are Buzz’s. And Pete Conrad’s. And Alan Shepard’s. These are the hands of the Apollo astronauts, the plaster casts created to make their custom gloves in Houston, Texas, 1968. High five! Each of the space suits was custom made for each astronaut, fitted to perfection. That includes the gloves, which…