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One of the last magazines that’s still worth reading in print form, National Geographic has featured some fascinating stories over the years, but most of us likely pour through each issue to marvel at the photography. First published way back in 1888, the magazine celebrates its 130th birthday in 2018 and is kicking off the…
Amid seemingly endless controversies about content on YouTube (including, most recently, a Logan Paul video shot in Japan’s “suicide forest”), Google announced major changes last night to how videos would be monetized on the site. Going forward, the company says big channels included in its coveted Google Preferred program will be manually vetted for ad…
In September, the Chinese Academy of Sciences president Chunli Bai, and President Anton Zeilinger of the Austria Academy of Sciences in Vienna, made the first quantum-secured video call. But when will you get to take part in this? Will there ever be a secure quantum Slack at your workplace? A team of researchers in the…
Some residents of Illinois and Texas are angry that they can’t easily determine which work of art looks 42 percent like them while allowing Google to capture their biometric souls. The Google Art & Culture app has been out for about a year and a half, but it recently hit the top of the Android…
Humans tend to rely on crafted tools in order to harm one another, but most other species have evolved weapons right on their bodies. Normally, these bashers, spikes, and other instruments of attack appear on heads or limbs. But only rarely do they end up on tails—and scientists want to know why The tail might…
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And where there’s a repetitive job no human wants to do, there’s also a machine we’ve invented to do the work for us. Like the hyper-specific RAP 10 trimmer from Orlandi, the sole function of which is to trim tiny shrubs into perfect, aesthetically-pleasing spheres. Why can’t I…
The world’s biggest whirlwind of tech, startups, and wild fever dreams is finally over, at least for this year. But before we close the book on CES 2018, we wanted to call attention to some of the coolest, most exciting things we saw at the show. That’s because even in a down year that saw…
At 26 letters long, the English alphabet isn’t the most complicated string of symbols and characters to master, even for a five-year-old. But that’s because it has been put on a strict diet over the years that helped it slim down and shed 10 additional letters that were either deemed superfluous, redundant, or just downright…
Operating a mouse or trackpad is super easy, but behind their simple exteriors these intuitive input devices hide a whole host of shortcuts and extra features that aren’t immediately obvious—and if you don’t already know about them, you’re missing out. Here are our favorites. Universal shortcuts 1) Go forwards and backwards: When browsing the web…
BitConnect, an anonymously-run cryptocurrency lending and exchange platform long suspected of being a well-marketed Ponzi scheme, abruptly ceased operations on Tuesday after receiving cease-and-desist orders from authorities in Texas and North Carolina. Per Bloomberg, the Texas State Securities Board and North Carolina Secretary of State Securities Division told BitConnect it “isn’t registered to sell securities…
The National Weather Service says that the most likely explanation for an object which sent out illumination and a sonic boom throughout southwest Michigan, five other states, and Canada on Tuesday night was the breakup of a meteor, WXYZ reported. The American Meteor Society collected at least 200 reports of the incident, which for around…
Nine out of 12 sitting members of the Department of the Interior’s National Park System Advisory Board resigned on Monday in protest of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is very fond of having subordinates fly flags in his honor and hang dead animals in his office but apparently not meeting with them. Per the Washington…
Thousands of users’ personal information left exposed by a virtual reality porn app prompted the company to do the only appropriate thing: fix the problem and make a joke about butt sex. Researchers at UK-based security firm Digital Interruption found that the app, SinVR, included a buried function called “downloadallcustomers.” After the researchers reverse-engineered the…
Following a meteoric rise to just shy of $20,000 per coin less than two months ago, Bitcoin, the oldest and most valuable cryptocurrency, fell below $10,000 on both the Coinbase and Bittrex exchanges for the first time since early December. It’s far from the only digital token plummeting. Nearly every cryptocurrency is down, most by…
Last week, conservatives cried foul over Google’s latest attempt to provide past examples of fact-checking for news outlets. Right-wing pundits at The Daily Caller insisted that Google was targeting conservative outlets and giving left-leaning publications a pass. The answer is, expectedly, a bit more complicated than that. Google calls the feature that raised the ire…
Sometimes, if you want to understand the amazing things that happen in space, you have to make sense of them in a lab on Earth, first. Scientists are attempting to model some of the most powerful explosions in the universe by miniaturizing them into lab experiments. An international team of researchers made beams from a…
Do you remember back in the 90s, when high-definition TVs first started to become popular? Seeing that HD for the first time, the sharpness seemed almost impossible compared to existing technology. But this year, several top tech companies showed off 8K screens with 16-times as many pixels as those old 1080p HD TVs. For me,…
The Black Death, a plague responsible for killing around a third of the population of Europe during the 14th century, spread to millions of humans by rats that carried infected fleas—right? That’s the story we’ve long been told by historians. A new study upends this conventional thinking, showing that humans, and not rodents, were the…
The original Super 8 camera inspires nostalgia in every graying beardo with aspirations to make a film. The format was introduced back in 1965, and before VHS camcorders killed it in the 80s, it was the film stock of choice for budding filmmakers and family life chroniclers. A new Super 8 camera released 30-some years…
Have you seen this viral tweet? It looks like it’s from Shane Missler, a 20-year-old lottery winner in Florida, and he’s promising $5,000 to every person who retweets the account. But it’s 100 percent fake. The fake tweet reads: “Hey guys! I am the lottery winner of $451 Million. With this incredible opportunity I am…
