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Researchers from New Zealand have restored the very first recording ever made of computer generated music. The three simple melodies, laid down in 1951, were generated by a machine built by the esteemed British computer scientist Alan Turing. Computer scientist Alan Turing is primarily remembered for being the father of artificial intelligence and for hacking…
A good photographer will do anything for a photo—and now that can even mean wielding a super long lens that looks like a teeny telescope. As ePhotozine reported from Photokina, Venus Optics is introducing this macro lens to keep photographers from getting too close to subjects Venus Optics says this wacky new macro lens is…
The last time the amateur scientists at Braille Skateboarding tested a deck made from a sheet of glass, it shattered as soon as they stepped on it. But when it was upgraded to bulletproof glass instead, not surprisingly, the second attempt at making a see-through skateboard was far more durable—almost to the point of being…
Earlier this year Roku announced a single new product, an excellent $50 stick that was, for the most part, the only set-top box the average person would ever need. Now Roku is back with five new boxes meant to fill every possible user niche—from the person that still has a tube TV from 1995 to…
You can’t complain about Facebook News Feed serving you up stuff you’re not interested in if you haven’t taken the time to customize all of the options and tweaks available. There are more than you might think. From prioritizing the friends you like the most to controlling the sponsored links you see, here’s how to…
Here’s a good reason to be happy about finding yourself perched on an office chair behind a desk on a Monday morning. You can safely watch Ryan Paul Robinson attempt to slackline over surf-pounded rocks to the 105-feet tall Moai Tower in Tasmania with a coffee in one hand and a danish in the other.…
The first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is tonight at 9pm ET, 6pm PT. And while every broadcast network will be airing the debate commercial-free, cordcutters might be wondering how to watch without a traditional TV connection. Well, we’ve got you covered. Thankfully, cordcutters have a vast array of options to watch…
Trump is bad. So is ASMR. This will ruin your night. I’m sorry.
In a self-described “master plan” released earlier this year, probable hologram Elon Musk declared the future is solar, but this weekend, teen mystic Jaden Smith suggested the Tesla founder ignored a far more obvious answer: Water, the kind we drink and occasionally promote on social media. On Sunday, Smith tweeted a photo of his Tesla…
Or was it Twitter itself? Salesforce? Google? Neoliberalism? A16Z? An act of god? Marc Andreessen—billionaire Netscape founder, famed venture capitalist—will forever be a Twitter legend, even though he took a leave of absence from the troubled social network late Saturday night. Never afraid to shy away from controversy, Andreessen shared his very Silicon Valley views…
These beautiful photographs of fast food were taken by Brea Souders using a radiometric thermal camera. They demonstrate that all matter with a temperature greater than absolute zero emits electromagnetic waves—no microwave oven required. And that Day-Glo Warholish quality is more than appropriate for junk food. The work was commissioned by VSCO. The company made…
The circle of life is gross. It’s even grosser when you throw in a cockroach, larvae and some violently ravenous fire ants. This 18-minute video would seem to be for the true ant farming aficionado. That’s a lot of time to dedicate to the insane process of thousands of ants eating a live cockroach. It’s…
The field of psychology is currently in the midst of a kind of civil war, with one side claiming a widespread reproducibility crisis, and the other just as loudly proclaiming that concerns are greatly exaggerated. There’s certainly evidence for the former. Last year, a University of Virginia initiative called the Reproducibility Project repeated 100 experiments…
Libertarian nominee for president Gary Johnson got a lot of heat recently for comments he made in 2011 about not having to worry about climate change because the sun was eventually going to destroy Earth anyway. So Johnson went on ABC’s This Week today to tell everyone to lighten up and explain his real solution…
Do you remember that Will Smith movie where he got the big high-powered Wall Street job by solving a Rubik’s Cube in front of the company’s CEO? With a little deception, that could be you, by using this Rubik’s Cube-solving application. Cubr is a project that Carnegie Mellon student Chris Barker put together for his…
You had a good run Arecibo, but there’s a new big dog in town. China has switched on the massive dish that now officially holds the record for the world’s largest single-aperture telescope. Among other things, researchers hope it will provide a big boost in the hunt for extraterrestrial life. What’s been dubbed the “FAST”…
Those used coffee grounds you dump into the trash every morning might just help remove lead and mercury from drinking water one day, according to a new study by a team of Italian scientists. Recycled coffee grounds have a lot of practical uses, from marinating meats and serving as natural deodorizers, to providing a nice…
The governor of California signed a bill into law today that will make it illegal for entertainment websites like IMDB to post the ages of actors if that actor requests the information to be taken down. Needless to say, free speech advocates are outraged. The goal of the bill, AB-1687, is to discourage age discrimination…
Paul Soros, shipping innovator and the older brother of Democratic mega-donor and businessman George Soros, died in 2013. Paul (originally Paul Schwartz before the family changed their name in the 1930s as the Nazis swept Europe) fled Hungary in 1948 and came to the United States on a one-year student visa. And according to new…
Back in the mid-80’s, the “cyberdeck”—the neural-connected, on-the-go interface from William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy—captured the imagination of every cyberpunk fan. IMGUR user D10D3 has uploaded pics of one of the slickest attempts at a real Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 I’ve seen. Built using a dead Commodore 64c, Raspberry Pi 3 and an assortment of connectors, this…
