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If you wanna thrive on this planet, you have to figure out a way to be fruitful and multiply. If you’re a stick bug, that could mean getting pooped out of a bird. Researchers from Japan fed stick bug eggs to birds and the eggs turned out just fine. It’s a simple experiment, but it…
A California bill that would hold internet service providers accountable for violating net neutrality has passed the State Senate, meaning it is halfway to becoming law. The legislation, first introduced in January, is considered by digital rights advocates to be the “gold standard” of state-level laws aiming to offset the FCC’s decision last year to…
Thousands of activists delivered an open letter to Amazon on Wednesday urging the company to free its contractors from forced arbitration. When an employee or contractor is forced into arbitration, they waive their right to have their dispute heard in court. They also often forfeit their right to participate in a class-action lawsuit. Instead, individual…
The first people to cross into North America from Eurasia did so by traveling through the Bering Strait, or so the theory goes. A new theory has emerged proposing a coastal route into the continent, but evidence has been lacking. A recent analysis of boulders, bedrock, and fossils in Alaska is now providing a clearer…
Twitter, in an effort to comply with the European Union’s privacy-centric General Data Protection Regulation, has begun to suspend accounts belonging users who were under the age of 13 when they first signed up. While the cynic in me is all for Twitter cleansing its service of youths, it isn’t exactly implementing age restriction as…
After an image that allegedly shows screen protectors for Google’s third-gen Pixels popped up on Weibo earlier this week, smartphone fans immediately started imagining how the shape of the screen protector might reflect the phone’s final design. And of course, some of the fans took the available evidence and spun up some impressive mock ups…
After several delays and a whole lot of confusion, Atari’s retro console/set-top box thing is available for pre-order. We finally have more details on what this thing can do and apparently more people are hyped up about it than we expected. On Wednesday afternoon, Indiegogo was struggling to keep up with the influx of traffic.…
DNA testing site 23andMe is suing its biggest rival, Ancestry.com. In the suit, filed earlier this month in a California federal district court, 23andme accuses Ancestry.com of patent infringement and false advertising. Interestingly, 23andme is also pushing back against Ancestry.com’s trademark of the word “Ancestry.” It argues the term is too generic to qualify for…
Women who say their Uber drivers sexually harassed and assaulted them are still fighting the company for the right to bring their class action lawsuit to court. The firm representing the women, Wigdor LLP, filed a legal brief on Tuesday to challenge Uber’s arbitration policies, which continue to force many people with claims against the…
By growing muscles on an artificial skeleton, researchers from Japan have constructed an agile and surprisingly durable “biohybrid” robotic finger joint. The breakthrough could eventually lead to more life-like robots and advanced prostheses. Biohybrid robotics is exactly as it sounds—an engineering technique that intertwines living, biological tissue with synthetic robotics. Scientists fashion their cyborg creations…
Nearly 170,000 packs of the birth control Taytulla are being recalled by the manufacturer, Allergan, due to a packaging error that the company notes “may place the user at risk for contraceptive failure and unintended pregnancy.” As with other hormonal birth control regimens, the majority of doses contain an active substance—in this case, ethinyl estradiol—while…
Researchers are teaching machines to get stuff done using video simulations, a database of chores, and a virtual home reminiscent of your favorite time-wasting video game. The end goal? Teaching robots the same way you teach yourself how to install a toilet: instructional videos. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the…
This podcast covers a decade-old police investigation in Utah, a qigong healing center outside of Beijing, and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.
911 dispatchers in Oregon had a busy evening on Tuesday as panicked citizens flooded the phone lines after receiving an emergency alert warning of a “civil emergency” in progress. Authorities quickly attempted to calm the public admitting that there was a “technology issue” and the message was sent in error. Around 8pm last night, the…
The LG G7 isn’t even available yet (it officially goes on sale June 1st), but that hasn’t stopped LG from pushing out another big, expensive phone in the V35. It’s rather unusual timing, as LG’s V-series phones traditionally don’t come out until the fall, and the “35″ in its name suggests that this phone is…
Benedict Cumberbatch aside, the best part of Marvel’s Doctor Strange movie was the animated spells the magical characters could generate out of thin air. Given our world lacks real magic, a Japanese cosplayer has found a way to simulate the same effect using a modded Nerf blaster and a spinning LED wand. The holographic images…
Spare tires aren’t cheap, and do you really want to spend $80 on something you might never actually use? Not when 20 rolls of duct tape can apparently be used to make a remarkably functional spare tire, as the mechanics at YouTube’s Life OD discovered. Do you want to take a five-hour road trip on…
Roseanne Barr’s show was canceled yesterday after she tweeted a racist joke against a former advisor to President Obama. She even threatened to quit Twitter after the incident. But Barr is more active of the site than ever, retweeting supposed hypocrisy by Disney, and even partially blaming the sleep drug Ambien for her racist tweet.…
Gawker Media—Gizmodo’s former parent company which is now in bankruptcy proceedings following a lawsuit secretly funded by Peter Thiel—is up for sale, with a tentative auction date of July 21st. Fantastic news: There’s already a bidder with plans to purchase the site and make it a fountain of good, very non-threatening vibes. According to the…
A Tesla sedan running in its autopilot mode crashed into a parked police car in Laguna Beach, California on Tuesday, per the Associated Press, resulting in “minor injuries” to the driver. The officer in charge of the cruiser at the time of the crash was not inside the vehicle and thus avoided being injured. According…
