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Shifting winds and blazingly hot temperatures are fueling a wildfire in southern California that has now spread to 51 square miles and is now threatening several neighborhoods. The Sand Fire—named for the area’s Sand Canyon—started on July 22 and has now grown to 33,000 acres. This troublesome blaze is currently burning near Big Sur and…
New York City’s subway system has been through a lot: it’s survived massive blizzards and fictional attacks from Godzilla. But now, it looks like time is finally catching up with the city’s beloved, 100-year-old transportation system. New York City will be shutting down the tunnels that host the L train, one of its most crowded…
Phone makers have gotten pretty good at defying water’s electronic-destroying tendencies. But when it comes to fire, iPhones have a long way to go. Zach Straley’s latest YouTube video tests how well each generation of iPhone handles being doused in gasoline and set ablaze. Turns out, the older the phone the better the results. I…
The Tor Project’s external investigation into claims that Jacob Appelbaum, the organization’s former public face, sexually harassed and raped women has concluded, according to Tor Project executive director Shari Steele. Steele declined to discuss the conclusions of the report but said that Tor will release the general findings of the investigation as well as new…
Seeking to safeguard the future of its kiwis, parrots, and hobbits, New Zealand has just made the “world first” decision to eradicate all wild predators by 2050. That means rats, possums, stoats, ferrets, and feral cats, all introduced from foreign countries and responsible for the deaths of millions of native birds each year, will have…
Microsoft released Windows 10 in the summer of 2015, but unlike previous versions of the operating system, it was meant to be the “final” version of Windows, updated into perpetuity. Now, the company is preparing its first major update available to everyone on August 2. We spent a few days messing around with all the…
After a weekend full of rampant speculation, Verizon finally confirmed this morning that it had reached an agreement to purchase Yahoo’s core business for $4.8 billion. The press release itself was peppered with various details. The deal doesn’t include Yahoo’s cash, Alibaba shares, or shares in Yahoo Japan, for instance. Yahoo will also continue to…
The youth vote is crucial in any election, and while Trump is busy crafting Facebook-ready attack ads based on Pokémon Go, Hill is appealing to the youngs with a game of her own. It is profoundly, jaw-droppingly dull. Hillary 2016, which launched late yesterday, puts the player in the appropriately grim surroundings of their own…
Earlier last week, Nintendo was basking in a dewey post-Pokémon Go glow, its stock doubling in value because of the game’s wild success. But what goes up must come down—thanks, Newton—and after the market closed on Friday, Nintendo revealed in a press release that “the game’s financial impact will be ‘limited’ and that it doesn’t…
State Rep. Ron Sandack, a top Republican lawmaker in Illinois, announced his resignation when he issued a statement to the political blog Capitol Fax (in a password-protected post) early Sunday evening. According to the Associated Press and the Daily Herald, Sandack resigned due to “cyber security issues,” raising the question, What is this dude hiding?…
Tomorrow morning, Verizon will announce its plan to buy Yahoo’s core assets for a pitiful $4.8 billion according to “two people with direct knowledge of the situation,” Bloomberg reports. Considering that at the peak of its success, Yahoo was valued at $125 billion, this is yet another benchmark moment in the company’s fall from grace.…
If the Democratic party needs two things right now: to up their email game—seriously, how are there zero results for “harambe”—and better cybersecurity. Now you, dear reader, have the opportunity to guard the secrets of our potential next president by applying to be Hillary’s new Security Engineer!! They’re looking for someone to start right away,…
If you’ve been seeing selfies of your friends that look like paintings, don’t worry. Your friends haven’t magically become artists overnight (most likely). Prisma—an app that turns your photos into paintings—has been blowing up over the past couple weeks on Apple devices, and it’s now available for Android. The app was in beta for only…
If you were in the Los Angeles area on Saturday and looked up into the sky, you might have thought there was a storm rolling in, or that the bright, glowing red sun was an omen for Armageddon. The brown, smoky sky apparent throughout the county and in surrounding areas was the direct result of…
Controversy has long surrounded the presumed accidental death of Belgium’s King Albert I in 1934, with conspiracy theorists crying murder. Now, 80 years later, forensic geneticists have successfully matched DNA from blood found at the scene of his death with that of two of the late king’s distant relatives, hopefully resolving the mystery once and…
“Batman isn’t paid to destroy crime corners. He is actually attracted to the crimes and also The Penguin.” This is a line from the internet story “Batman Loves Him a Criminal,” which may at first glance seem like a poorly written piece of fanfiction, but in actuality was created by a predictive text generator. It…
The shitstorm that’ll likely be the Rio Olympics is almost here and it was possible that Russia, an entire nation with a huge presence at Olympic games, wouldn’t be able to participate due to allegations of widespread doping before, during, and after the Sochi games in 2014. On Monday, the Worldwide Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) released…
Are you going to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this coming week? Well, prepare to have your liberties destroyed. The LIE-berals have banned all vape products from the convention floor. First the Democrats took away all our guns, and now they want to take away all our e-cigarettes. Back in the good old days,…
As the TV show Scrubs once said, “everything comes down to poo.” This is true in sitcom land, but also in science. When Europeans came over to the Americas for the first time, they brought all kinds of diseases: the bubonic plague, chicken pox, small pox, and tuberculosis, to name a few. Similarly, researchers of…
Sound is something of an ephemeral phenomenon, existing in the moment that vibrations travel through the air. Those vibrations also exhibit distinct patterns, depending on frequency, which can be visualized by scattering a fine dust over a vibrating plate. This was the inspiration for Resonantia, an album whose catalog features photographs that capture those distinctive…
