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So far, 2017 hasn’t exactly been a great year, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find the world is still filled with wonderful things. In August, eight children living with disabilities were given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience zero gravity. Before watching, you’ll probably want to reach for a tissue. The experience was made…
Did you know that you can buy everything on Amazon? Medical devices, snack foods, designer clothing, books, pet supplies, art, and—you’re never gonna guess this one—buildings! One Amazon listing in particular has been floating around the internet this week. It’s described as a “Pre-fabricated Tiny Home,” though some might identify the structure as a shipping…
Wildfires have consumed over 170,000 acres in California since Sunday and thousands have taken refuge in shelters as their homes have burned. But for the United States Postal Service, the deliveries must go on. In a devastated neighborhood in Santa Rosa, a professional drone cinematographer caught this astonishing footage of one mail carrier’s surreal shift.…
High-speed transportation company Hyperloop One, which landed $85 million in additional funding last month, revealed today that it has gained a new board member in business magnate Richard Branson, whose Virgin group was secretly responsible for an unnamed portion of that funding. The company will rebrand as Virgin Hyperloop One. Hyperloop One has spent the…
Dealing with the daily deluge of emails is time-consuming enough without having to waste precious minutes jumping between browser tabs or apps to check all of the accounts you’ve signed up for. These are the tools and tricks you need to bring all of your messages together into one place. Throughout this article we’ll be…
Can you really split a bullet with a sword? The Slow Mo Guys tested the logistics of such a feat, but using a safer approach that involved a giant super-sharp knife and a pellet gun firing tiny projectiles to minimize any undesired results—like one of them getting hit, or their incredibly expensive slo-mo camera getting…
Rose McGowan’s Twitter account was suspended overnight after she spent the past few days exposing the systematic sexual abuse of women in the entertainment industry. McGowan had most recently told Ben Affleck to “fuck off,” called Harvey Weinstein a “POS,” and called for the board of the Weinstein Company to be dissolved. McGowan’s account was…
Thermite, a mixture of powdered iron oxides and aluminum, can be burned to produce temperatures it would be hard to argue are truly safe outside of a meticulously controlled environment (over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit / 2,200 degrees Celsius). It’s used for a variety of purposes, from metal cutting and welding to military incendiaries. It can…
A Washington, D.C. court sent a stinging rebuke to the Department of Justice this week, telling authorities they could not issue a blanket demand for troves of information on visitors to an anti-Donald Trump website before the election. The DOJ sought a massive warrant for data from web hosting provider DreamHost on roughly 1.3 million…
Retail giant Amazon plans to give children aged 13-17 the ability to log into their own accounts under parental supervision, CNN Money reported on Tuesday. Teen accounts will be linked to parents’ main accounts, and will feature the ability to “either pre-approve each order via text or email (the default), set a spending limit for…
House Democrats and Republicans have found common ground in their joint effort to uncover precisely what Equifax knew prior to revealing an incredible data breach last month. That effort continued on Wednesday as lawmakers sought to learn more about what the embattled credit agency is doing to aid the roughly 145 million victims of its…
Facebook wants one billion people to experience virtual reality—about one-seventh of the entire human population. That’s an audacious goal even without a timeframe, which Mark Zuckerberg did not provide. But to lure that many people into the void, users don’t just need their minds blown. They also need to feel safe. During the Oculus Connect…
The Russia-funded political ads that ran on Facebook during the 2016 election will be shown to the public, members of the House Intelligence Committee said on Wednesday. House and Senate committees are investigating ads that ran on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other platforms in an effort to determine how Kremlin-backed trolls organized their misinformation campaigns…
During a recent business trip to China, the folks at Big Screen Video, an Australian company that makes giant digital signage, found a brilliant little gadget that appears to replicate the 3D floating holograms Tony Stark uses in his laboratory. What you’re actually seeing is a 3D animation being played back on a handheld fan…
Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed to know about one of them. Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse). Her “real identity”—the public one,…
You’ve probably seen that infamous photo of Madison Square Garden from 1939, where over 20,000 American Nazis held a “patriotic” rally in New York. But a new 7-minute documentary gives us an even more detailed (and terrifying) peek at just what happened that night on February 20, 1939. The documentary, produced by Field of Vision…
Following a ban on Kaspersky Lab’s anti-virus software for use by the US federal government, the Wall Street Journal reported that officials believe hackers used the software to steal sensitive NSA documents. On Wednesday, the story deepened with reports that the US government was tipped off by Israeli intelligence after its spies observed Russian agents using the…
If you don’t feel like spending $150+ on a steering wheel controller after already dropping $80 on a video game, you can always improvise like YouTuber chobiglass did. Using a pair of salad tongs, a computer mouse, and a spinning bar stool, they hacked together a pretty serviceable steering wheel accessory for the game, Euro…
Uber and Waymo have been locked in a legal fight for months over the companies’ self-driving car technology—and now Waymo is asking a judge to compel Uber to hand over the source code that pilots Uber’s fleet of autonomous vehicles. The request comes on the heels of an damning due diligence report released last week,…
When it comes to VR, you really only have two choices today: a big, expensive headset that needs to be connected to a PC, or a less immersive setup that relies on your smartphone. However, Facebook is looking to give us a third option with the $200 Oculus Go. The new standalone Oculus is scheduled…
