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“Old” is a very relative term when talking about computer history. By the looks of it, however, Radiohead hid a computer program on the tape that comes with the 20th anniversary edition of OK Computer, and making it work feels like time travel. That’s because you’ll need an ‘80s-era, 8-bit British computer, the ZX Spectrum,…
Many animals are good at healing us emotionally, like capybaras and tiny kittens in tiny hats. Regrettably though, if we got really sick, no amount of golden retriever puppies could do anything to help us. Komodo dragons, on the other hand, might not be “adorable” in the traditional sense, but they could save us from…
He might have billions of dollars, a company that promises to revolutionize space travel, and an upgraded full head of hair, but Elon Musk’s Hyperloop will never be as cool as this superconducting quantum levitation Möbius strip race track created by students at Ithaca College’s Low Temperature Physics Lab. Möbius strips, as we all learned…
You might think of Uber as a ride-hailing company or a lawsuit-ridden self-driving car developer, but at its core, Uber is a big data company. It has to constantly crunch location coordinates, traffic data, payment information, and tax rates—and putting all that data in Uber’s hands sometimes makes users nervous. But now Uber is debuting…
Vertu, the company that sells $50,000 smartphones, is shutting down its UK manufacturing operations. But everyone saw it coming. The liquidation will result in the loss of some 200 jobs, according to The Telegraph. Employees had already expressed fear of losing their jobs, since the company was reportedly skipping out on paying its bills and…
It’s amazing what kind of useless skills you can teach yourself while you’re bored at work. But twirling pens on your fingers or mastering Solitaire aren’t nearly as impressive as driving an 18-ton front-end loader on two wheels while making the gigantic machine twerk. This video comes from what looks like some kind of heavy…
When you’re on the road, your phone can be the perfect companion—as long as you’ve got it set up right. Here we’ll explain everything you need to know about the hardware and the apps you can install to get a sweet and safe in-car system up and running, powered by your phone. You’ve got a…
Back in April, the family of Pakistan’s scandal-plagued prime minister landed in the crosshairs of an investigation relating to the leaked Panama Papers. This week, the team handling the investigation concluded that documents signed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s family were fraudulent due to the fact that they were purportedly from 2006 but used Microsoft’s…
In his new, obsessively documented mission to gather (and probably, in some way, monetize) the authenticity of Common People, Facebook’s putty-faced CEO is doing exactly what common people do: showing up to places uninvited, unannounced, and demanding absolute secrecy from strangers. As Amy Dudley, one of Zuckerberg’s handlers and a former aide to Tim Kaine…
By many accounts, LeEco was set to be the next major player in the US tech market. But its bank accounts indicate that this won’t be the case. Everything is going south for the Chinese startup and in the latest blow, Vizio is suing the company for $60 million. Vizio claims that LeEco executives misrepresented…
What’s a strand of DNA but data? We often think of its units, the As, Cs, Ts, and Gs, as letters of the words in an instruction manual. But what if, instead, we think of them as biological computer bits, storing the smallest unit of information? What stops scientists from harnessing the power of those…
Imagine the worst case scenario. Dubious filmmakers use artificially intelligent computers to feed raw audio into a simulated version of Barack Obama. The audio is actually Obama’s voice, and the face really is his face. But the lip movements? Totally fake. The filmmakers publish the video on the internet, and it’s virtually impossible to see…
Like Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, and other abstract artists before her, Crystal Ma creates colorful masterpieces that are as much about the creative process as they are about the finished product. As you watch Ma pour rainbow after flowing rainbow onto a canvas, it becomes hard to care what the final result even looks like.…
A professor of cryptology has auctioned off a rare and fully-functional Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt messages during the Second World War. Incredibly, the collector found the machine at a flea market in Bucharest—which suggests Romania may house other machines still waiting to be discovered. As reported in Deutsche Welle, the unnamed…
Most people have heard that the American penny costs more to manufacture than it’s worth, but Canada really has us beat. In 2007, the country unveiled an enormous, 220-pound gold coin with a face value of 1 million Canadian dollars and a metal value of around 5 million of the same (or about $3.8 million…
Most birds get all the lift they need to fly with the downward stroke of their wings—meaning there’s no upward force being produced as they raise them back up. Hummingbirds, on the other hand, produce lift with both their upward and downward wing strokes, creating air vortices that the tiny birds use to fly with…
Donald Trump is having a complicated week. His son released a bunch of emails that appear to show collusion with the Russian government. He got sued by a bunch of people he blocked on Twitter. Even the Drudge Report turned on him. How’s the president handling all this? Definitely not by watching a bunch of…
Golf balls, some buildings, and even a few works of religious art imitate viruses. Not in a bad way, but in their beauty. If you don’t believe me, just take a half hour or so to explore University of Edinburgh Computational Biology Ph.D. student Hamish Todd’s new interactive documentary. You’ll realize that human design and…
With the meteoric rise in popularity of Ethereum, cryptocurrencies and blockchains are back in the news again. Graphics card prices have soared with the promise that those who have the computers and know-how to do some serious mining can take home huge sums in a Bitcoin-like gold rush to snatch up as much virtual currency…
Andy Serkis, the actor who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series, was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night. And Colbert, a huge LOTR nerd, had Serkis read President Trump’s tweets on air. It’s honestly just too perfect. Hearing Serkis say “the fake news media has never been so wrong”…
