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If you want to change the color of your shoes, pour some sulfuric acid on them. Sure, your shoes will turn into utter useless mush, but you can transform a khaki canvas color into a deep purple with only a few globs of acid. Outside of the color change, it seems as if the shoe…
Last week we looked at some of the consumer complaints filed with the FTC about daily fantasy sports sites DraftKings and FanDuel. We noticed a pattern of complaints about weak cybersecurity and reported on it. But there were other complaints that we didn’t publish. Many are run-of-the-mill complaints that you’d expect about any online business.…
When President Obama signed the legislation for health care reform in 2010, his salty vice president, Joe Biden, was caught on tape telling his commander-in-chief, “This is a big fucking deal.” It made headlines, even though it should shock nobody that hey—sometimes politicians swear, just like the rest of us. Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist…
WikiLeaks published more than 80 variants of malware in the second email dump from Turkey’s ruling political party (AKP), according to anti-virus security expert Vesselin Bontchev. Bontchev published his research on his GitHub page, which shows just how extensive the threats inside Wikileaks AKP email dump were. This is just the latest example of unethical…
When swimming most people try to avoid bellyflopping into the water since it feels like 1,000 people slapping you in the chest at once. But in Oslo, at the official Dødsing competition, competitors attempt to bellyflop on purpose to impress the judges. Dødsing, which roughly translates to deathing, is a sport where divers attempt to…
Any kind of home aquarium takes an inordinate amount of upkeep. Everything needs cleaning and filtering and feeding all the damn time. And fish are nasty little bastards who can’t love you and won’t hesitate to eat each other. None of that stopped Eli from turning a huge portion of his house into one of…
Watching flowers bloom in a timelapse is always fun because they sprout up in this graceful, almost balletic way. Artist Yoshiyuki Katayama somehow managed to add bugs crawling to that dance of flowers which makes it even more lovely to see because it’s like watching life happen at two different speeds all at the same…
With the Assassin’s Creed film quickly approaching, the one stunt all fans of the video game series knew couldn’t be avoided was The Leap of Faith. It’s a move where the main character—Altaïr, Ezio, Connor, etc.—jumps off of church steeples into bales of hay with physics-defying splendor you can only find in video games. But…
Like the animated portraits and paintings hanging in Hogwarts and the rest of the Harry Potter world, Jeff Lieberman’s Slow Dance picture frame appears to rely on magic to make time run more slowly. But it’s science that gets all the credit here, cleverly manipulating what your eyes see. Lieberman is no amateur when it…
When it was first released, the iPod flew off shelves with the promise of storing 1,000 songs. Thirty years prior, fitting that much music in a single piece of consumer equipment was unheard of—except in the case of the Panasonic RS-296US. While it was far from portable at 40lbs, the RS-296US could “store” roughly two-days…
To an audiophile, there’s no such thing as ‘too expensive’ if it means an upgrade to their setup could improve their listening experience. And in Japan, some acoustic connoisseurs are now installing their own utility poles, with custom transformers, to ensure all of their audio gear is getting the purest power possible. The Wall Street…
Almost every building in Washington DC is iconic and recognizable in its own way. But no structure in the city, or the country, serves as a more iconic symbol of America than the US Capitol building, with its soaring dome and imposing structure…one that’s now slightly less imposing as Lego’s newest Architecture set. The real…
Cryptography researchers at John Hopkins University have found another flaw in the encryption used by Apple’s iMessage. The good news? The flaw has already been patched; you just need to update iOS. Apple has been criticized before by the computer security community for not making the details of how it encrypts messages open source. While…
As if tornados aren’t destructive and terrifying enough, there’s a ‘firenado’ which scorched five acres this weekend in Oregon. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but it’s still terrifying. Here’s video of a bigger firenado from 2013 in Australia. “The core of a typical fire tornado is usually about 1 to 3 feet wide and…
The Slow Mo Guys have channeled their inner 10-year-olds for their latest high-speed experiment that involves crashing a Lego airliner into a miniature city built of plastic bricks. It’s something we all probably did as kids at one time or another, but the results are far more satisfying when filmed at 2,500 frames per second.…
Inbox by Gmail has been around for almost two years, and while it continues to exist alongside Gmail, it’s easy to see that Google engineers see Inbox as the email app of the future. New features are being added on a regular basis, and with each one, it’s slowly becoming smarter and easier to use.…
For nearly a week now a mystery has surrounded the Olympics and it wasn’t what country would reign supreme: why did those pools turn green? https://gizmodo.com/why-did-the-olympic-diving-pool-just-turn-green-1785047698 Officials have run the gamut on possible explanations, including algae bloom and a chemical imbalance caused by too many people using the pool. Now, Olympic officials are handing out…
Human beings have always created tools for calculating numbers, from the ancient abacus to today’s electronic calculators. But here’s an ingenious calculator drawn on paper—the creation of comic book artist Jason Shiga. And he and the folks at Numberphile have created an explanatory video of how it works. It’s basically a simple binary system using…
If you want to get as fit as an Olympic athlete you need to dedicate your entire life to training in your sport. You can also eat a whole lot of meat and nuts for breakfast. And when we say meat, we mean real meat—the kind you can’t get in basic grocery stores. Screw the…
Parts of America’s Deep South are in the middle of some out-of-control flooding, and the waters are continuing to rise. The Weather Channel reports that 30 inches of rain fell in the town of Watson, La., which is in the Baton Rouge metropolitan area, and that number is expected to climb. NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement…
