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Since the advent of television in the mid-20th century, American presidents have relied primarily on cameras to communicate directly with the American people. But Twitter, and President Donald Trump’s use of it in particular, changed all that. It would have been astonishing had Eisenhower had the ability to block individual citizens from seeing his face…
For many electric clocks in Europe, time has ever so slightly been falling behind since mid-January. The agency that represents Europe’s synchronous electrical grid recently cleared up the confusion for people who might have found themselves inexplicably running late. It placed the blame on an ongoing dispute between Kosovo and Serbia. On Saturday, the European…
Congress is set to finally do something that will benefit US consumers in response to the Equifax breach last year—beyond excoriating the company’s executives on live television. Yet, as with everything, it will come at a cost. As many as 17 Democrats are lending their votes to a Republican banking bill that will scale back…
If you consider yourself a master of the yarn but have grown tired of knitting socks, sweaters, and scarves, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Textiles Lab are about to breath new life into your craft with software that can turn almost any 3D model into a knitting pattern. In a pre-print paper titled ‘Automatic Machine…
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…
Today is International Women’s Day, a day when we’re meant to celebrate the accomplishments of (and reflect on the ongoing struggles for equality by) those people who identify as women. Google Trends reveals it’s also the single most popular day in the calendar year for the angry or curious to ask their computers that most…
Happy International Women’s Day, or (as brands have it circled on their calendars) The Day We Get To Show Off Our Feminist Bona Fides In The Form Of An Unconvincingly Earnest Publicity Stunt. Rather than view the day as an opportunity to, for instance, close the wage gap or hire more women into leadership roles,…
Pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, and we’ve been wondering about her fate ever since. A re-examination of a forensic analysis performed in 1941 shows that bones found on a remote south Pacific island belonged to Earhart—a conclusion reached with a splashy 99 percent number attached to it. Skeptics, on…
H20 is oh-so very weird. It’s on the lighter side of gases, but it’s one of the denser liquids. It’s got an abnormally high freezing and melting point, and it is densest when four degrees above its freezing point, where it changes from a liquid to a solid. A new paper seems to show a…
Diamonds, the super-strong and brilliant crystals of carbon atoms produced under the Earth’s crushing pressures, are typically valued for their beauty and durability. But scientists also value them for another reason: They contain all kinds of hidden messages about the Earth’s mantle. You just need the right tools to read them. An international team of…
Over the last year, “fake news” has gone from being a niche concern that charlatans exploited for profit, to a code red existential threat to the fabric of society—or something in between. But our scientific understanding of how and why false stories spread is still limited. Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab are diving in to…
After realizing they had an unfair advantage during Nerf battles over a competitor who was missing a hand, the tinkerers at Hackerloop decided to level the battlefield by building Nicholas Huchet a custom Nerf blaster prosthetic that can be automatically fired whenever he contracts his forearm muscles. In a Medium post, Hackerloop’s Valentin Squirelo thoroughly documented…
Apple released its annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report on Wednesday, detailing the ways in which the company is trying to improve the state of its supply chain. It’s an important practice given Apple has come under fire in the not-so-distant past for its factory workers’ hellish working conditions. Apple’s latest report includes a number of…
Late last night, on March 7th, Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose tweeted something with zero context. (Who among us?) But the more I think about what he tweeted, the more questions I have. “Tim Cook is the Donald Trump of the music industry,” Rose wrote. Tim Cook is the Donald Trump of the music…
The ad blocker Ghostery is shaking up its business model and open-sourcing its code in a bid to earn more consumer trust. The company faced criticism last year over its business model, which involved selling anonymized user data to businesses—not the kind of behavior you’d expect from a privacy tool. Now, Ghostery is ditching that…
Just north of Amsterdam’s most famous canals, there’s an island of fat bobbing up and down in the sea by a wharf in a former shipyard. Right now it’s the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and weighs a metric ton, but its creators, Mike Thompson and Arne Hendriks, say it will be big enough to…
A real fireworks show requires trained professionals to handle the explosive materials, and a location that’s safe for fiery debris to rain down onto. But as The Slow Mo Guys discovered, you can get a similarly satisfying explosive experience with a high-speed camera and a couple of fruit-blasting cannons. All that’s left of a pair…
At Mobile World Congress 2018, 5G was easily one of the biggest buzzwords thrown around. Now that shouldn’t really be a big surprise, as this next evolution in wireless communication is being touted as the linchpin that’s going to make things like superfast mobile internet, autonomous cars, and armies of flying delivery drones possible. So…
The upstart virtual currency associated with Infowars guest Roger Ver now has an anthem, and it seems we have Canada to thank for it. After Japan’s foray into blockchain-inspired music with a cryptocurrency-themed pop idol group, it was only a matter of time “Bitcoin Ca$h” comes to us by way of Lil Windex, an inscrutable…
New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, a seemingly inexhaustible source of uninformed opinions, titled her most recent tirade “We’re All Fascists Now,” a sarcastic dig against political correctness, campus politics, and The Intolerant Left. Unwittingly, it begins by defending a public figure who has appeared on an explicitly ethnocentric radio show. Christina Hoff Sommers—whose name…
