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South Australia, a state with a population of about 1.7 million, was hit by a massive storm system on Wednesday. The entire region went without power for much of the day as a result. The Age reports that the “mass blackout” started around 3:30pm local time. According to South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill—what a name!—the…
Stop and think about how many hours you spend sitting in an office chair hunched over a computer. Don’t you think your butt deserves to be cradled in something more luxurious than whatever was on sale at Staples? The Elysium chair isn’t cheap, but it’s brilliantly engineered to make you never want to get up…
If you include the main cast, it’s fairly obvious who has the most lines: It’s Homer, by hundreds of thousand of words, followed by Marge, Bart, and Lisa all bunched up pretty close together. But what if you just count the words spoken by the supporting cast from season one to twenty six? Which supporting…
A new report by The New York Times reveals the extent to which Yahoo didn’t really care about its user’s security, instead focusing on products and new features. Last week, Yahoo admitted that hackers had breached its servers in 2014, stealing the personal details of over 500 million Yahoo users. It’s the largest hack ever…
Is there anything worse than having a flimsy, lightweight keyboard sliding all over your desk while you type? Probably a lot of things, but not for Redditor ipee9932cd, who couldn’t find a keyboard case they liked so they went the extra obsessed mile to make their own using rock-solid concrete. At a whopping 12 pounds…
Tinder’s latest features have a very specific feel: they could lead to innocent fun, but really, they’re just a cover for far filthier activities. Tinder Social, for example, was touted as “a better way to go out with friends,” but it was really just an orgy finder. And the app’s newest foray, Tinder Boost, is…
Just days before it was scheduled to open, a park in Rizhao, China, was severely damaged when the north slope of the mountain right next to it suddenly collapsed. There were no casualties in the landslide which occurred earlier this month, but the facility’s new rock climbing facility was completely wiped out. Images taken after…
It’s the end of an era. BlackBerry, a name once synonymous with high-end smartphones, will no longer make mobile devices. Along with a dismal financial report, the company announced on Wednesday it “plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners.” BlackBerry’s journey to this point has been long and…
The real appeal of monster movies like Godzilla is that they let you experience what it would be like to be a giant rage-filled monster stomping around a big city. But instead of just sitting in a theater as a witness to the rampage, a new virtual reality experience lets you experience it firsthand—minus all…
Yesterday, billionaire tech entrepreneur and noted late guy Elon Musk unveiled his hotly-anticipated plan to send humans to live—and die—on Mars. And not just a few humans: a lot of them. In a talk that wavered between overreaching science fair presentation and straight-up science fiction, Musk described sending fleets of spacecraft, each packed hundreds of…
This clever video by Julian Cianciolo explains how to read sheet music and is actually much more enjoyable to watch than you’d imagine, especially if you’re a musician who can read sheet music because you can probably understand all the deadpan explanations, layered in-jokes, and trombone quips. But even if you’re not a musician and…
One of the biggest upgrades in iOS 10 goes to Messages. The native app now comes with stacks of extra features including stickers, instant reactions, and even its own app store. Most of the new functions work best inside conversations. Here’s how to make the most of the app on your iPhone or iPad. 1)…
A group of major record labels—including Universal, Sony, Capitol and Warner Brothers—is suing YouTube-mp3.org, which rips audio from YouTube videos, for every single instance of piracy the site allegedly facilitated. The plaintiffs claim YTMP3 provides and “facilitates…means for its users to engage in copyright infringement, while profiting from the infringement,” as well as violating YouTube’s…
Go almost anywhere these days and they’re out there, lurking. At our festivals. By our pools. Even in our prisons. Drones have now infiltrated just about every area of human society, as a member of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony learned recently when a quadcopter savagely bonked him at his own concert. A video obtained by TMZ shows…
A team of European researchers put six highly-trained sniffer dogs to the test to see if they were any good at detecting lung cancer. The results were surprisingly bad, but the scientists say factors other than the canine sense of smell were responsible for the poor performance. The new study, published in Journal of Breath…
Today, noted space cadet (in every sense of the phrase) Elon Musk revealed his plan to colonize Mars. He also basically told us to prepare to die for him. Cool idea, Elon! “The risk of fatality will be high,” Musk told the audience in Guadalajara, Mexico, of the SpaceX mission to the Red Planet. “There’s…
The most immersive virtual reality experience is still going to feel fake with your body plopped motionless in a chair. Adding motion into the mix, through the use of a simulator, greatly increases the realism of the experience—particularly if it can fly around a room like this amazing cable-controlled contraption. The CableRobot Simulator, jointly developed…
DARPA, the agency that helped invent things like email in the early 1970s and the internet itself in the late 1960s, just launched a podcast. Podcasts have been around since the 2000s, but better late than never, I guess. DARPA, of course, is known as the “mad science” wing of the US Department of Defense.…
The Federal Bureau of Investigation thinks Russian hackers may have targeted the mobile phones of democratic party officials, according to Reuters. The US government also blamed Russia for the hack on the Democratic National Committee, which exposed a trove of embarrassing internal emails and documents. According to the report, elected officials may be among those…
I should have seen it coming, and I did, in slow motion, as my phone landed face flat on the pavement with a soft crunch.
