Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Wine is spoiled grape juice. It’s old squished grapes mixed with yeast that get you drunk. But lots of people have a lot of things to say about wine, and maybe you’ve wondered what it is that gets them so jazzed over rotten grapes. Well, a lot of their enjoyment comes from biology, chemistry and…
Until yesterday, FBI chief James Comey seemed like a pretty savvy internet user. The guy knows that you’re supposed to cover your webcam with tape to hide from the NSA and WhatsApp is a fantastic way to communicate securely—even if he hates you for using it. But when the numbnuts set out to make a…
Privacy advocates across the country let out a collective sob this week when Congress dismantled a set of Obama-era internet privacy rules. In effect, the Republicans just gave big telecom companies unfettered access to your browsing history and will even let ISPs sell that data for profit. As we’ve argued before: this sucks. There are…
Love it or hate it, April Fools’ Day is pretty tame in the 21st century. Krispy Kreme tells you it’s changing its name to Krispy Cream or something and you’re supposed to be “tricked.” Then everybody rolls their eyes and goes on with their lives. But back in the 19th century, April Fools’ Day was…
What happens when a 200-ton boulder slides onto the road, completely blocking traffic? Well, absent Paul Bunyan, you have to blow that shit up, just to show Nature who’s boss. Which is precisely what the Oregon Department of Transportation did yesterday near the small town of Glide. The Oregonian posted video footage of the explosion…
If you thought Cadbury Creme Eggs were humanity’s greatest confectionery creation, Alex O’Brien Yeatts, a baking and pastry student at the Culinary Institute of America, has come up with a dessert that looks straight out of a geology textbook—not a cookbook. Working with cake decorator Abby Lee Wilcox, Yeatts created what looks like a massive boulder.…
In the world of competitive dominoes, stacking 4,200 tiny plastic bricks is, surprisingly, not even close to setting any kind of record. But YouTube’s FlippyCat might have created one of the most satisfying domino falls to watch, since the entire structure was stacked around a 360-degree camera, putting you in the center of all the…
Enigmatic entrepreneur Elon Musk has no shortage of hobbies: sometimes, he makes cars. Other times, he likes to do a space thing or play Martian overlord. But now, the 45-year-old billionaire is turning his attention to the arts, as evidenced by a series of cryptic drawings he created using Tesla’s new sketchpad feature, which is…
By leveraging the regenerative powers of migraine medication, researchers at Tufts University have restored the vision of blind tadpoles after grafting eyes to their tails. Sounds bizarre, but a similar technique could one day be used on humans. A new study published in npj Regenerative Medicine shows that eyes, and probably other sensory organs, don’t…
Where in the world is Palmer Luckey? Well, he’s not at Facebook. https://gizmodo.com/is-facebook-disappearing-oculus-founder-palmer-luckey-1787705084 In 2014, Palmer Luckey, the 24-year-old whiz kid who was one of VR’s most prominent evangelists sold his company, Oculus, to Facebook for a cool $2 billion. He has (almost) totally disappeared since The Daily Beast revealed last year he was collaborating…
Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission took on the real threat facing America: poor people who need to get online. FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced that he would direct the agency to eliminate the federal approval process for broadband providers who want to provide service through the LifeLine program, which administers subsidies for phone and internet…
Digital security and its discontents—from Hillary Clinton’s emails to ransomware to Tor hacks—is in many ways one of the chief concerns of the contemporary FBI. So it makes sense that the bureau’s director, James Comey, would dip his toe into the digital torrent with a Twitter account. It also makes sense, given Comey’s high profile,…
As far as amusement park rides go, bumper cars rank somewhere between Ferris Wheels and benches when it comes to thrills. They don’t drive anywhere near fast enough to do any real damage. Unless you swap out their electric motor for a gas-powered engine from a motorcycle, that is. Colin Furze, internet famous for trying…
Life is soft. If we want our robots to become more lifelike, or if we want to start using them for more biological applications, they too have to be soft and flexible. That includes robots designed to move around in fluids, robots designed to augment organs in the human body, prosthetics, and, uh, this. https://gizmodo.com/in-this-incredibly-strange-vision-of-the-future-a-robo-1741439834 Scientists…
Bill Nye the Science Guy will be joining the March for Science as an honorary chair, according to a new blog post on The Planetary Society’s website. Two other scientists, Mona Hanna-Attisha, public health advocate at Hurley Medical Center, and Lydia Villa-Komaroff, a well-known biologist, will also be chairing, according to a report in Buzzfeed…
You’re probably not surprised to learn that Jared Kushner enjoys Apple design. The Cupertino company does make some fine-looking hardware! But would you guess that the Trump suck-up actually buys expensive MacBooks just so he can install Windows on them? It’s true. At least, it was a few years ago when Gawker’s founding editor, Elizabeth…
While waiting for the bus in the dead of winter, you’ve probably wondered if taking a run around the block would help you battle the freezing cold. After all, your body generates heat and warms up when you exercise, right? It turns out that strategy has some merit, but only at certain speeds. Minute Physics…
Twitter was already really bad, but the brain trust over on Market Street just figured out how to make it worse. In the olden days (yesterday), when you included someone’s username in your tweet, it deducted from your 140 character limit. Now, for some inexplicable reason, it doesn’t. Which means you can tag a seemingly…
This week’s edition of Batteries Are Dangerous brings us to the great state of New Jersey, where a Bluetooth speaker recently started burning on a girl’s bed and then exploded. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and the house didn’t burn down. The incident still serves as a cautionary tale for us all. By now, this sort…
Fangblennies are tiny reef-dwelling fish only two inches long that look like they came from some adorable deep-sea vampire movie. Only, if you’re a predator and you piss them off, they will wreck the shit out of you with their opioid-laced venom. An international team of scientists wanted to know how venom evolved in these…
