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In May 2013, a bridge spanning the Skagit River along Interstate 5 in Washington state catastrophically collapsed, after an oversized trailer clipped one of the bridge’s cross beams. A new analysis by engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign confirms the many factors that contributed to the collapse, and offers recommendations for how…
Hillary Clinton has yet to offer a definitive policy stance on strong end-to-end encryption, the mathematical algorithms that protect our data, instant messages, and web browsing. Instead of calling for a ban on government mandated encryption backdoors, something computer security experts have universally urged, she’s taken a backseat, supporting a hand waving “encryption commission.” Clinton’s…
Unlike the gorilla himself, the Harambe meme simply will not die. Since the incident at the Cincinnati Zoo in late March, the Harambe meme has jumped the shark dozens of times over. We have tribute songs from anonymous YouTubers, aspiring rappers, and award-winning artists alike. There are themed cocktails and fratty tweets calling for “drinks…
You forgot to buy milk. Naturally, it’s all the big bang’s fault. Cheeky video essayist exurb1a uses human forgetfulness to explain the concept of determinism. Essentially, it’s the idea that because the universe and everything in it follows rules, we all exist in a highly complicated chain reaction that governs everything from the movement of…
The queen of shitty robots is back, apparently, with a hankering for a peanut butter sandwich. Her most recent invention is a pair of robotic arms. One holds a plastic knife for peanut butter spreading, and another that a human operator moves to cue identical motions in the knifebot. The human puppeteering the second bot…
Climb aboard kids—it’s time to tune in, drop out, and have your mind expanded. The Acid Interstate is the third and (so far) grandest attempt at a hallucinatory on-rails experience from Mincrafter MiningGodBruce. It took him a year to build this swirling landscape and 250 hours to record. Pay attention to the pylons along the…
NBC News has a new article about Donald Trump’s doctor of 35 years, Dr. Harold Bornstein—the guy who claimed that Trump, if elected, would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” The dude looks like a character from a bad 70s porno flick, but Deadspin’s Tim Burke spotted something weirder: Dr. Bornstein is…
According to a new report, Spotify really hates artist exclusives so much that it’s penalizing acts that put their jams on Apple Music first. Bloomberg cites “people familiar with Spotify’s strategy” as saying that if an artist releases an album exclusively on Apple Music—as Frank Ocean just did—they can expect that their tracks won’t be…
Today, Facebook announced that human curators will no longer write short descriptions that accompany trending topics on the site. Instead, the company will rely on an algorithmic process to “pull excerpts directly from stories.” The company also said it will stop using human curators to sort through the news. “A more algorithmically driven process allows…
After creating a near-perfect functional replica of Captain America’s iconic shield, YouTube personality the Hacksmith is trying to build his own flying Iron Man suit. To test a couple of compact jet engines the suit will rely on, he strapped them to his waist, hopped on a longboard, and lived every 10-year-old’s wildest fantasy. In…
Twitter has spent an entire year working on a common sense tool that would help users protect themselves from harassment and abuse, according to Bloomberg. So where is it? Twitter has been criticized for its failure to combat abuse for years. The company has been embroiled in a number of public relations catastrophes recently, most…
Okay, it’s probably hell if you actually tried it. Alex Gorosh visited 13 museums in London, saw more than 140,000 works of art, and walked more than 22 miles in one day in an attempt to see all the art there is to see in London. He didn’t even see more than 1 percent of…
If you try hard and believe in yourself, anything can be a knife—but turning rebar into a legit-as-hell kunai is a fresh take. Rebar is that tempered steel often seen holding together concrete structures. Sometimes it’s in mesh form but more commonly rebar comes as a long braided-looking pole. Besides creating a beautiful pattern in…
If you look closely at a map, you’re bound to find some really weird shit. Countries you never knew existed pop up, bodies of water reveal themselves, and the borders of countries look totally random. What’s more random about those borders is when they have weird panhandles or salients, basically appendages of land that have…
Five years ago, Jennifer Storrar and Troy Reddington buried a time capsule together on a remote campsite in South River, Ontario. This summer they went to dig it up, but the jar that had been filled with memories now just contained a mysterious card. Storrar was confused until she opened it up. The note read,…
Last night, Kanye West kicked off his Saint Pablo tour in Indianapolis with a crazy flying stage. Instead of a boring, normal, stationary stage—you know, the kind most artists jump and gyrate all over—Kanye decided to float above the audience on a suspended platform. It’s visually mesmerizing, especially when the light shows kick into gear.…
If you travel with a lot of expensive camera, video, or music gear, there’s a good chance you stuff it all in a Pelican case to ensure it arrives unscathed. The company is known for its nearly indestructible cases, and now that it’s made a cooler, you’ll never have to worry about something happening to…
Are you ready to get your mind blown? You can now play Solitaire inside of a Google search. Just search “solitaire” and watch what happens. Now try Googling “tic-tac-toe” and “flip a coin” and “what sound does a pig make.” Have a great weekend! [Google Blog]
There’s no end to the impressive stuff handy YouTubers will make out of wood, metal, and plastic. Peter Brown, however, favors unorthodox building materials. Crayons, he’s found, are a reasonable substitute for clay. In lieu of plastic, he’s turned hardened milk on a lathe with less successful results. (He tells us he subsequently had set…
If you book a hotel through an online travel site, do they have an obligation to tell you if the workers at that hotel are on strike? You’d think so. But apparently Expedia doesn’t. The Trump Taj Mahal hotel and casino in Atlantic City will be closing after Labor Day. But that might be for…
