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If you, like so many, used KickassTorrents (KAT) as one of your primary sources for downloading movies, music, and more, you’re out of luck, as the alleged owner of the site was arrested on Wednesday. According to TorrentFreak, Artem Vaulin, 30, of Poland, was arrested in the Ukraine on a number of charges, including conspiracy…
Sean MacCormac is just like you and me. He puts his (probably very expensive custom sportswear) pants on one leg at a time, then straps a snowboard to his feet, cinches a parachute to his back, and leaps headlong out of a plane and directly into a thunderstorm above Florida. Whatever! What’s so special about…
Check out this a microburst near Phoenix, AZ, sas hot from Phoenix Sky Harbor international airport. According to Bryan Snider, the photographer who captured this terrorstorm sweeping across the rapidly-darkening Arizona sky, there was flash flooding in the area. Oh yeah, and lightning, high winds, and hail. Fucking weather, man.
It’s basically every water slider’s worst nightmare. You don’t want to fall off. But you couldn’t fall off, right? The people who design waterslides wouldn’t let that happen. Right? Well, one guy from Dallas learned the hard way that you can’t trust anybody these days. Especially waterslide designers. David Salmon posted this video to Facebook,…
You ever notice how rectangular Egypt is? Me neither—until I discovered some very unscientific research from Australian statistician David Barry. In a recent blog post, Barry compared the rectangularness of all countries in the world and found that it doesn’t get any better than Egypt. Just look at it. It’s a rectangular masterpiece. Barry’s search…
A spacecraft parked in orbit at a distance of one million miles has captured the mother of all timelapse videos—an entire year on Earth. Enjoy. The EPIC camera aboard NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite has now recorded a full year of life on Earth from its position at Lagrange point 1, a sweet orbital spot a million…
“Do you want to see Gough Whitlam’s FBI file?” I said, walking into the other room where my wife was reading. “Yes!” she said excitedly. My wife’s Australian, and she knows I’ve been obsessed with figuring out what the FBI and CIA knew about former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s bizarre ouster as leader of…
A new visualization of US Census Bureau data reveals—in soothingly colorful bars and interactive key metrics—that married people are the weird ones. And you’d be surprised how many Americans get married at 15. By and large, the data plays out as one might expect. Marriage rates take off around age 28 and start to slow…
It’s an unfortunate irony that the device we now rely on so heavily is also so incredibly fragile. Your smartphone’s big, beautiful touchscreen is an accident waiting to happen, but Corning continues its magnanimous to improve the survival rate of your hardware, and its latest creation, Gorilla Glass 5, should help your phone survive even…
What movie scene scared you the most when you first watched it? Was it something embarrassing? Or is it something you’re still scared of, and if you see anything resembling it in real life, you completely freak out? CineFix lists what it thinks are the seven scariest movie scenes in film history and analyzes the…
On Christmas morning in 1989, I opened a big present, bigger than me. It was the Nintendo Entertainment System, complete with PowerPad and Zapper. Nearly three decades later, I unboxed a futuristic block of aluminum: an NES clone called the Analogue Nt. And I felt that childhood glee all over again. The Analogue console promises…
Flash is an lingering remnant of an older internet that’s basically been on life support for years now. It’s buggy, insecure, sucks the soul out of your battery, and honestly you should’ve disabled Flash by now anyway. But Firefox will soon be pulling the plug for you. In a new post detailing the future of…
There’s a whole new way to build custom scientific instruments affordably in bioengineering: a system of 3D-printed building blocks that can link together in various combinations. The system combines design elements of both biological cells and electronic components, and it can evolve over time to adapt to the changing needs of the research community. As…
Hanging over one of the lounges at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport is an unusual clock that instead of moving hands, features the work of artist Maarten Haas. For 12 straight hours the artist filmed himself painting and repainting the clock’s hour and minute hands, in real-time, minute by minute, so that it accurately displayed the time.…
Ah, true love. So pure, so wild, so brazenly marketed! On Wednesday, supermodel Miranda Kerr announced in an Instagram post that she said “yes” to boyfriend and Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel’s proposal of marriage. And in a beautiful touch, she did it with Snapchat’s just-launched product integration: Bitmoji. Snapchat purchased Bitstrips, the company behind Bitmoji,…
What could possibly be the reason for an engraving machine to make these noises? Do spacey-sounding arpeggios make it engrave better? Does it support MIDI? If you know anything about the fine art of engraving, do please enlighten us. [Digg Video]
Neuroscientists working on the Human Connectome Project have compiled the most accurate map yet of the human cerebral cortex. The researchers identified 180 distinct areas of the brain’s outer layer—effectively doubling the previous number of known regions. The new map, compiled by David Van Essen and Matthew Glasser of Washington University in St. Louis—with the…
Statistician Nathan Yau of Flowing Data has compiled a beautiful and revealing infographic showing the 50 most common family structures in the United States. As this clever visualization shows, the nuclear family—though the most common—is far from the only one. To create this infographic, Yau took data from the five-year American Community Survey (2009-2014), and…
You can never have enough free hands at the airport for juggling your boarding pass, your passport, your coffee, your snacks, and your carry-on bag. The solution to that problem came to amateur inventor Robert Lian while he was waiting for a flight one day. What about a plastic tail that let travelers tow their…
Keven McAlester’s short film which compares Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill in the 1940s to today using perfectly synced footage is the closest thing we can get to experiencing legitimate time travel. In 1959, shortly after the black-and-white footage on the left was filmed, Bunker Hill was the focus of an ambitious urban-renewal project, which is…
