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Thanks to YouTube, the easiest way to score your 15 minutes of fame is to buy an expensive machine, master its capabilities, and film yourself using it. Some go with high-speed cameras, while others go with hydraulic presses. William Osman, on the other hand, went the laser cutter route, and used one to make a…
Last week, we reported on some strange activity taking place on Donald Trump’s Twitter account. The tweets are as unhinged and angry as ever, but since March 8th, nearly every message has come from an iPhone, and not Trump’s woefully out of date and unsecured Android device. Given his love for his Android device, this…
You don’t have to wait around like a normal person for the Creators Update to drop—it’s available to download right now, if you’re a Windows Insider. The Windows Insider program lets you beta test advance versions of the OS for free, if you don’t mind the occasional bug, and here’s what you need to do…
Late last week, 11 Asian elephants at Cambodia’s Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary ambled into a mud-filled bomb crater that dates back to the Vietnam War. Unable to get out, and with the mud quickly drying, the elephants’ situation become dire—prompting conservation officials to spring into action. As reported yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS),…
It’s official: Come April 11, the Windows 10 Creators Update will begin slowly rolling out to every Windows 10 machine on the planet—whether you want it on said machine or not. Microsoft is clearly fond of the ample changes it made when launching Windows 10 back in 2015 because two years after its initial release,…
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating new video about the struggles that many North Koreans go through when they defect to the South. Many of the hurdles are technological. As just one example, when North Koreans first encounter ATMs they sometimes believe that there’s a person inside the machine because the ATM “talks.” The…
LastPass is one of the most prominent password managers around. It’s extremely convenient but if it were hacked, it would be quite the pain in the ass for users. In a blog post, the company has warned that a major exploit has been discovered and it outlined what action users should take immediately. Tavis Ormandy,…
File this story under shit you didn’t want to know. Police in Northern Ireland have opened an investigation to find out exactly how human feces found its way into a shipment of cans at a Coca-Cola bottling plant. https://gizmodo.com/we-spent-10-minutes-thinking-up-headlines-for-this-buck-1787440987 The soda behemoth told The Guardian that the poop-containing cans were discovered at the Hellenic Bottling Company…
The one consistent hallmark of our pissboy president’s two-month-long paranoid sitcom is his habit of retreating to Twitter to inflict his delusions on the rest of us. The diminishing returns of tweeting “fuck you” at the man several times are apparent. But, as with most jobs, incendiary responses to our least capable POTUS are being…
According to a Facebook post from the University of Louisiana at Monroe Museum of Natural History, administrators have demanded that 6.5 million plant and fish specimens must find a new home on campus within 48 hours or they will be have to be donated or destroyed. Apparently, space is needed for the track team. This…
The House of Representatives voted today to repeal rules preventing internet service providers from selling their customers’ web browsing and app usage data without explicit consent. The Senate passed the same bill last week, which means the only obstacle that remains is a signature from President Trump—and the White House has already signaled he will…
Shoe brand Hari Mari has a new line of flip flops done in partnership with baseball glove maker Nokona. These aren’t just any flip flops, though. They have a special chip inside of them that makes them smart. Allegedly. We say “allegedly” because, sadly, “smart” really just seems to mean “adds buyers to Hari Mari’s…
Daniel Hanley, a cybersecurity engineer at IBM, doesn’t want to be the center of attention. When I asked to take his picture outside one of IBM’s New York City offices, he told me that he wasn’t really into the whole “organizer profile thing.” Dressed in jeans and a light jacket, and sporting a backpack with…
Although tropical cyclone Debbie, yesterday a Category 4 beast, has now been downgraded to a tropical storm carrying a severe weather warning, this footage of the cyclone at near peak intensity captured from the International Space Station will make you glad you don’t live on the eastern coast of Australia. https://gizmodo.com/25-000-residents-told-to-evacuate-as-massive-cyclone-th-1793670605 The eight-minute clip reveals…
If Uber was hoping the release of its first ever diversity report would deflect from its recent string of PR calamities, it thought wrong. Released Tuesday, the report and accompanying EEO filing are unimpressive at best, even by Silicon Valley’s notoriously low standards for diversity. Women make up less than a third of the company,…
One month from today, a record-setting race will be held in Toulouse, France. Teams from around the world will race nano-scale vehicles built from less than 100 individual atoms, at blistering speeds of up to five nanometers per hour. To put that in perspective, it would take these microscopic cars almost 37 million years to…
Nearly a decade ago, Dallas police proposed a new program designed to get sex workers off the streets. Rather than just send them to jail, police would set up shop at truck stops, accompanied by counselors, social workers and nurses, and give the sex workers a choice of either prison or talking to a counselor.…
We all know, or at least suspect, that robots are taking people’s jobs, but new research shows the dramatic degree to which industrial robots are replacing human workers and forcing down wages. Each additional robot in the US economy reduces employment by 5.6 workers, and every robot that is added to the workforce per 1,000…
Movie fans rejoice! The obvious cinematic tale of John McAfee allegedly doing drugs, having sex, and going out of his mind in Belize will become a movie. Johnny Depp will play John McAfee, an obvious choice. But how will the A-lister manage to look as decrepit as the anti-virus software mogul? Bath salts, probably. Deadline…
To bring a constant supply of fresh water into its massive cities, the Romans built countless miles of gravity-powered aqueducts, all at a tremendous expense. But even the massive pumping stations we rely on now might one day be obsolete as scientists work on perfecting liquids that can move all by themselves. In a new…
