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Despite feeling like ancient, antique technology at this point, the monstrously-heavy CRT television you grew up with was an engineering marvel, as the Slow Mo Guys reveal by filming an old-school TV at an astonishing 380,000 frames per second. At that frame rate you’re able to clearly see the electron beam slowly scanning its way…
Bad wi-fi got you down? You’ve got a host of hardware options that can help you out, from mesh routers to Wi-Fi repeaters, but before you upgrade any set up, do some detective work—with some carefully chosen apps you can work out where your wi-fi network is failing and come up with better possible solutions.…
Most timelapses condense a few hours or days into bite-size videos that make the world appear to fly by in fast-forward. But Ricardo Martin Brualla has created an aerial timelapse of Seattle that shows the city growing and evolving over three full years—and he didn’t even have to set up a camera himself. The city…
After what felt like five years of mayoral begging and media gimmicks, we finally know the top 20 finalists in the brutal battle for Amazon’s second headquarters. The cities are about as predictable as you’d think. Basically, all the big ones. Here they are, and among them, there can be only one winner, as the…
It only took a scandal blowing up in its face and getting hit with more than 20 different lawsuits, but it seems at long last, Apple will finally give people the option to disable the performance throttling that was slowing down older iPhones. This news was revealed in an interview between Apple CEO Tim Cook…
Apple and Google have rerouted shuttle buses which carry employees from San Francisco to their out-of-town headquarters after a series of possible attacks broke the vehicles’ windows in the past week. Per Mashable, sources at Apple believe an unknown party assaulted the buses in transit with rocks, BB guns, rubber bullets, or something else—though no…
On Wednesday night, President Donald J. Trump finally made good on a promise, sort of—rolling out the media-bashing “Fake News Awards” he originally touted for January 8th and then pushed back to January 17th as it became clear no one, let alone him, had actually put any effort into executing the idea. Lo and behold,…
Google and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, teamed up to study how Google accounts become compromised, shedding light on how the company finds new ways to fight back. “The lifecycle of hijacking begins with password theft,” Google security engineer Grzegorz Milka said at the Enigma cybersecurity conference in Santa Clara, California, on Wednesday.…
On Wednesday, Nintendo announced a new line of peripherals that use, wait for it, cardboard to supplement the Switch experience. Launching April 20, Nintendo Labo transforms the Switch into new devices, including a piano, miniature house, and fishing rod. Players order cardboard modules, build, then insert the Switch’s Joy Con controllers. Using sensors, the controllers…
A strange animal mystery captivated the internet back in 2015: 200,000 critically endangered saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan died from internal bleeding after infections. Surreal photographs showed hundreds of dead antelopes that appeared to have simply dropped dead where they stood as a herd. Some researchers now have an update on that story. Following the die…
It looks like Kristin Wiig will soon star in a half-hour comedy series. Produced by Reese Witherspoon’s company and inspired by the upcoming Curtis Sittenfeld short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It, the new project actually sounds like it might be kind of great. And guess what: it’s an Apple series. Apple, like…
Representatives for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube trekked up to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to let senators know how their personal war on terrorism is going. It turns out that things are going well, thanks for asking. “We think we’re better prepared for this election than we’ve ever been,” Carlos Monje, Twitter’s director of public policy…
Tech firms spend serious time and money trying to secure their employees and infrastructure from hackers. But gig economy companies like Lyft and Handy pay far less attention to cybersecurity for their contractors and, in some cases, encourage insecure behavior, researchers say—potentially exposing workers to greater risk of identity theft and phishing attacks. The ways…
Pour through an old album of your parents (or grandparents) and you’ll probably find a photo of them riding a classic Schwinn bike that looks like it was designed by an aerodynamics-obsessed Oldsmobile engineer. Schwinn has long since updated its bike designs, but the company pays homage to its past with an indoor bike that’s…
On Tuesday, Wired published an article (which also appears in the February edition of the magazine) recounting the stories of six individuals who were asked to freely discuss their experiences with “censorship.” Among the six chosen individuals is James Damore, the former Google engineer known for the lengthy anti-diversity memo he circulated within the company…
Google released a new AI tool on Wednesday designed to let anyone train its machine learning systems on a photo dataset of their choosing. The software is called Cloud AutoML Vision. In an accompanying blog post, the chief scientist of Google’s Cloud AI division explains how the software can help users without machine learning backgrounds…
The Yucatan Peninsula is renowned for its extensive network of submerged tunnels and caves. Now, after searching for near two decades, divers with the Gran Acuífero Maya project have proven that two massive caverns are connected, making it the largest known flooded cave on Earth. The low-altitude, limestone-laden expanse of the Yucatan peninsula is the…
A rash of reports from overly credulous news outlets would have you believe that retailers are locking up their detergent in response to the “Tide pod” meme. As proof, the articles show photos pulled from social media of soap products bearing security devices. These products really are behind safety glass in some stores, but it’s not…
A cadre of public interest groups and at least 22 attorneys general have filed petitions this week challenging the FCC order that seeks to gut net neutrality. But before the real legal challenge begins, net neutrality advocates are fighting to ensure the case is heard in their court of choice. The dubiously titled “Restoring Internet…
If you had to guess the percentage of American households that had a fallout shelter in the 1960s, what would you say? Fifty percent? Twenty-five percent? As low as 10 percent? In reality, just 1.4 percent of Americans had a nuclear fallout shelter in 1962. And the study that gave us that figure provides a…
