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Earlier this week, a fire at a power plant in Puerto Rico set off a series of failures across the island’s aging electrical grid. These before-and-after pics from space show what it looks like when 1.5 million customers suddenly lose power. These nighttime satellite images were captured by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS)…
According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is moving forward with plans for a smart home hub, joining the Amazon Echo and the upcoming Google Home device in the battle to take over your house. Like the Echo, this device would let users control their lights, locks and other smart-homey stuff using voice activation.…
There are a lot of logistical problems that pop up when you build a 600-foot structure like the Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei province. For example, how do ships navigate the sudden extreme difference in water heights on either side of the dam? That’s an easy one. You just build the world’s largest elevator…
Rats in tiny trousers, pseudoscientific bullshit, the personalities of rocks, and Volkswagen’s, shall we say, “creative” approach to emissions testing were among the research topics honored by the 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes. The winners were announced last night at a live webcast ceremony held at Harvard University. For those unfamiliar with the Ig Nobel Prizes,…
While Facebook’s stock has continued to boom throughout 2016, this year has been full of PR nightmares for the world’s most popular social network, which, among other things, has been accused of censorship, grilled by the US Senate and sued by the IRS in recent months. On Thursday, however, that bad press finally became something…
Chemistry sure is a pretty science, especially in macro. Just check out the stunning crystallization process of things like potassium chromate, sodium chloride, ammonium chloride, and more. Each one is totally unique and packs its own flair, you don’t know how it’s going to end up until it’s finished. The colors, the structure, the wild…
Most of us can only imagine what it was like in the early 2010s, when visual content was still primarily consumed via plastic video discs, but one lucky urban explorer got to experience it firsthand when he discovered a deserted but otherwise intact Blockbuster store in south Texas. Incredibly, YouTube user RubarGar _ found the…
Lyft—the ridesharing app that most people only use when Uber surge pricing is too high—does something a lot of tech companies do: it runs a blog. It’s where the company publicly celebrates its own excellence, for things like new features and anniversaries. It’s also where, earlier this month, a story appeared praising one of the…
Earlier this week, the Daily Mail broke a story reporting that former New York congressman Anthony Weiner was sending explicit texts to an underage girl. Now, federal authorities have issued a subpoena for Weiner’s “cell phone and other records,” according to CNN. The CNN report is still thin on details, and the federal subpoena isn’t…
Yahoo just announced that it was the victim of a devastating state-sponsored hack that resulted in the personal data of half a billion users being breached. If you’re a Yahoo user, your account may have been comprised. It’s so far unclear exactly which accounts were breached. Yahoo says personal information “like names, email addresses, telephone…
Ötzi the Iceman, the world’s favorite prehistoric mummy, has been subjected to every scientific test imaginable, since his remains were discovered poking out of a glacier high in the Italian Alps in 1991. Now, a team of Italian researchers has reconstructed Ötzi’s vocal cords and used it to reproduce what his voice may have sounded…
The Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t officially recognize this enormous inflatable city of fun as the world’s largest bounce house, but when was the last time you were at a birthday party and saw one of these as big as a McMansion? Not only does it look larger than most homes, you can apparently…
Before Walt Disney’s Epcot was a theme park, it was supposed to be an actual city. With actual humans inside of it around the clock. After Walt died in 1966, the plans for Florida slowly changed. But in a newly uncovered proposal for the park’s computer and communications system in 1968, we can see what…
Apple has released the first public beta for iOS 10.1. In addition to fixing some niggling bugs, it adds a beta version of the new “Portrait” feature for owners of the iPhone 7 Plus. Portrait mode uses both then normal wide-angle lens from the iPhone 7 Plus and its secondary “telephoto” lens to create a…
By the time ITT Technical Institute (ITT) closed its doors earlier this month, the for-profit college had been selling tenuous diplomas at exorbitant prices for more than 20 years. The company had been taking millions in federal grant money, burying low-income and first-generation students in insurmountable debt, and evading regulators since the early 1990s—all while…
It turns out the Yahoo hack was much bigger than we expected. https://gizmodo.com/report-yahoo-to-confirm-massive-hack-affecting-200-mil-1786936019 Yahoo just released a statement claiming that state-sponsored actors breached the company’s servers and stole data from half a billion users. The statement reads: A recent investigation by Yahoo! Inc. has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen…
We’ve all fibbed a little when it comes to our resumes or during a job interview. But apparently ‘knowing how to expertly back a truck full of metal pipes onto a floating barge’ isn’t something you’re going to want to just try and fake on your first day of work. There’s a really good chance…
It’s nothing to lose sleep over—really, I promise—but Earth’s atmosphere is leaking oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen levels have dropped by 0.7 percent over the past 800,000 years, and while scientists aren’t sure why, they’re rather excited about it. “We did this analysis more out of interest than any expectation,” Princeton University geologist Daniel Stolper told Gizmodo.…
Time to warm over that 10-year-old dancing Nebraska newscaster clip with some spicy new mashups, pretend pumpkins taste like cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar, and join in collective dread of the coming days when it becomes so cold that social obligations are a legitimate health hazard. Carve a decorative gourd. Eat a dried leaf. It’s fall,…
Sony has a long history of dumping tons of money into spectacularly over-the-top commercials for its Bravia line of TVs. This time around it packed an abandoned casino in Romania full of glitter-filled balloons that were then popped to create a shimmering explosion of color. Will the ad actually help sell Sony’s 4K TVs that…
