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After the news on Tuesday that Donald Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey, one of the most surreal moments featured White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes to stay away from the press. But Spicer clearly wasn’t happy with that description. To be clear, Spicer was merely among the bushes. Not…
Ruslan Sokolovsky, a blogger who was arrested for played Pokémon Go in a Russian church, was found guilty today of charges ranging from “violating religious feelings” to illegal possession of a pen that contained a video camera. Sokolovsky posted a video of himself playing the augmented reality game late last year in a way that…
This is a very real graphic that appeared on very real American television sets last night. American political discourse is officially beyond the realm of parody. It’s simply impossible to skewer a world that is so completely unhinged. May God have mercy of American satirists, who are all presumably out of a job after this…
Trump thumbed his nose at the American people on Wednesday by meeting with Russian officials as suspicions about his campaign ties to the country are at their peak. Adding insult to injury, the White House didn’t allow any U.S. press to be present. But Russian press got a front row seat in the Oval Office…
After years of being missing and presumably dead, the ole maverick McCain poked his head out today to give his fellow Republicans a big middle finger. A vote to kill Obama-era environmental regulations failed to pass the Senate because of McCain, and many believe he did it because his senator colleagues aren’t condemning Trump’s bizarre…
Spotify has been the biggest music streaming service to find a business model that users can accept, and music labels can endure. In its early days, the company positioned itself as “a viable alternative to music piracy.” But allegedly, the company’s beta was filled with pirated MP3 files. Rasmus Fleischer is researcher and historian from…
Shark experts are very upset with porn star Molly Cavalli. Last week, she appeared in a video produced by the live sex site CamSoda in which she claims a shark bit her foot. Based on every piece of confirmable evidence, however, it looks like the video is a complete hoax. The video, which has garnered…
Snap Inc., the parent company formerly known as Snapchat just released its first earnings report since its IPO, and the results aren’t pretty. Snap missed analyst revenue estimates by $10 million, bringing in $149.6 million in revenue. And although Snapchat had a 36 percent jump in daily active users on a year over year basis,…
In 2014, when the Federal Communications Commission first proposed its net neutrality rules, a record-breaking 3.7 million comments were filed with the agency, the vast majority of which supported the proposal. Since Ajit Pai unleashed his “weed whacker” proposal to decimate those rules three weeks ago, the comments are pouring in yet again—more than 550,000…
In an important advance that takes us one step closer to the inevitable robopocalypse, MIT researchers have developed a system that teaches robots how to acquire new skills—and then teach those skills to different types of robots. The system is called C-LEARN, and it was developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence…
If you’re an employee under the heel of a giant corporation you should probably be terrified by the vision of the future of connected gadgets that Microsoft just revealed at its Build developer conference here in Seattle. Two demos from today’s keynote stood out, both for being entertaining and for revealing a potentially frightening future…
A couple hours after Amazon announced the new Echo Show, a touchscreen communication device powered by the company’s AI voice assistant Alexa, I got an email from a PR firm representing a company called Nucleus. The subject was salacious: “Amazon is out for blood – the Echo Show is proof.” I almost never reply to these…
The White House made it almost four hours Tuesday night after the firing of James Comey before its communications staff began demanding an end to the FBI’s Russia investigation. To Sarah Sanders, the White House deputy press secretary, the cyberattacks that laid waste to the president’s political rivals last summer is ancient history, best forgotten:…
When astronomers announced the discovery of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, Earthlings immediately celebrated the possibility that one of those planetary neighbors could host life. But to physicists, TRAPPIST-1 presented a puzzle: How could those seven planets, all packed around a single star closer than Mercury orbits the Sun, survive? Why…
Io is the closest thing we have to hell in our Solar System, a Jovian moon that features hundreds of active volcanoes and expansive lakes filled with lava. New observations suggests that the largest of these lakes, Loki Patera, produces enormous waves that repeatedly flow around the molten surface. Thanks to a rare orbital alignment…
Astronomy needs expensive things, and lots of them. You might remember that astronomers almost literally turned the Earth into a telescope just to see a black hole, by combining lots of existing radio telescope dishes. https://gizmodo.com/scientists-are-turning-earth-into-a-telescope-to-see-a-1793019946 There are telescopes in all sorts of places—Hawaii, the desolate Chilean desert, heck, there’s even one at the South…
High-speed cameras help make cars safer, factories run smoother, and athletes improve their performances. But The Slow Mo Guys have found an even better use for the technology: capturing the explosive chain reaction after diving onto a trampoline covered in 1,000 armed mouse traps. Filmed at 1,000 frames per second, it took The Slow Mo…
Neil deGrasse Tyson might be an expert in the field of astrophysics, but when it comes to the Earth’s gravity, he’s just as helpless as the rest of us. Addressing his over 7 million followers on Twitter, the winner of NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal announced on Wednesday that he tried to take his pants…
Fast radio bursts are split-second intergalactic blips of radio waves we’ve detected over the last decade. You’d think that if we pointed our telescopes and other space cameras in the direction these bursts came from, we’d spot something else, too. But to date, we’ve got nothing—just radio waves. Scientists spotted the newest burst (and the…
Jurassic Park had just six minutes of computer-generated dinosaurs in it, compared to modern blockbusters which can have thousands of shots requiring complex visual effects. It’s no surprise that animators are eager to embrace any shortcut they can—which is why realistic-looking CG mud could be a game changer. Visual effects studios are not only under…
