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Apple’s secret car project may still have some life left in it. The company just secured a permit for testing autonomous driving technology in California on public roads, which is one of the first official confirmations that Apple is indeed researching self-driving technology in an effort to compete with Google and Tesla. The iPhone maker…
Was the Segway ahead of its time, or just an overhyped product that could have never lived up to the anticipation? Being pricier than a used car didn’t help the original Segway’s chances, but at least now, electrical engineer Olaf Winkler has solved that problem with a ball-based self-balancing scooter that features a thousand dollar…
As a purveyors of supposedly factual content, it’s the job of science journalists to make sure we’re accurate about how bad things like trans fats actually are. A whole lot of our fellow fact-farters seem to have dropped the ball on that one this week. Lots of places wrote about a single new science study…
On Thursday, EPA head Scott Pruitt visited the Harvey Mine, a coal mine in western Pennsylvania, to regurgitate some of his favorite talking points—that the EPA is an unhinged, anti-coal agency that he’s reining in through systematic self-destruction. Pruitt promised the “regulatory assault” on coal was over, saying the EPA will be protecting the environment…
Even as our tech gets increasingly sophisticated and intelligent, sometimes it’s falling for the oldest tricks in the book that breach the security walls we’ve put in place—like clicking on dodgy links or shady attachments that we shouldn’t. You don’t have to get tripped up by these simplest of scams though, if you know what…
Instead of propping up a camera on a tripod for an entire year to capture a timelapse of the seasons changing, Will Strathmann piloted his drone over some amazingly scenic landscapes in the spring, summer, fall, and winter, recreating the same flight path as closely as possible each time. Filming at the Pennsylvania farm started…
New FCC chair Ajit Pai has been clear that he intends to take a “weed whacker” to net neutrality regulations, but he’s been very reluctant to open up about how exactly he’s going to go about slicing them to bits. Last week, several outlets reported that Pai is finally gearing up for the fight, but…
Is the United States going to war with North Korea this weekend? The short answer? Literally no one knows. The longer answer? Yes, we are definitely going to war if a few crucial things happen that turn a dick-measuring contest between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un into a missile-dropping contest. Does anyone really know if…
Yesterday, the US military dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal on Afghanistan. Nicknamed the Mother of All Bombs, reports indicate that it killed 36 ISIS fighters and there were no civilian casualties. TV news stations have been playing footage of MOAB bomb tests from 2003, but the military just released actual footage of…
A tough truth about Apple is making headlines this week, and you’d better hold on to your butts, because it is salacious. Apparently, Apple is snatching up all the very best trees for its new campus, leaving local tree purchasers scrambling for solutions. The scoop was buried in a recent San Francisco Chronicle story about…
Remember guys, when you have a really cool product that everyone loves and that sells out immediately, the first order of business is to kill that fucker and put it in the ground before people get too attached. This impossibly foolish logic seems to be guiding Nintendo, which just told IGN it will stop shipping…
Crunching the numbers on the millions upon millions of Reddit comments just to crack the code on upvotes would be difficult work. Thankfully, two software engineers, a Google big data project, and some careful analysis have already done the heavy lifting, revealing the simple trick to getting the top comment in most threads: get there…
The Event Horizon Telescope, actually a network of telescopes across the world, has successfully completed its highly-anticipated ten-day-long observation period. Researchers pointed the array of dishes at the center of our galaxy and the M87 galaxy in order to snap pictures of some black holes. That’s really exciting! It’s awesome! We will maybe soon see…
Saturn’s moon Enceladus features a warm subterranean ocean covered in ice. In an extraordinary new finding, scientists have confirmed the existence of a chemical energy source within this moon’s water that’s capable of sustaining living organisms here on Earth. Enceladus is now officially the best place beyond Earth to look for life. Molecular hydrogen is…
Luke Skywalker’s home planet isn’t the only place in need of moisture farms to harvest water. Here on Earth, with our deserts and droughts, we’ve got tons of folks in need of fresh, drinkable H20. There’s no doubt that many Earthlings are facing a severe water shortage—maybe four billion of us, according to one study.…
Citing military sources, CNN reports the United States just dropped a 30-foot-long bomb with a blast yield equivalent to 11 tons of TNT on suspected ISIS targets in Afghanistan. Nicknamed MOAB (short for “Mother of All Bombs”), the weapon is the largest non-nuclear bomb in America’s arsenal. This is the first time a MOAB has…
Three years ago, Kevin Bates created a Tetris-playing business card to showcase his engineering skills to potential employers. But his creation quickly went viral on the internet, and everyone reminiscing about their beloved childhood Game Boy clamored for their own. After testing the waters with the equally tiny Arduboy, Bates has finally delivered an officially-licensed…
After too many years on the internet,I thought nothing could surprise me any more. And then I saw this face-melting Cassius music video. My face actually melted into a beautiful puddle of tears and teeth. Yours will, too. Just watch.
You might see science as splashy headlines and a barrage of new results—but in the background are people with emotions and ambitions, politics, and a system that promotes publishing novel findings above all. A new paper on eel navigation highlights some of these systemic troubles. The results of the study weren’t all that surprising or…
Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, getting an email or a weather forecast popping up on a smartphone felt like magic—but now the technological novelty of these alerts has worn off. We’re growing sick of the constant interruptions. Mobile notifications are undoubtedly useful, but you need to make them smart. Unfortunately there’s no…
