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Since March 2011, a 30-mile radius around the ruined Fukushima Daiichi reactor has been a designated exclusion zone, unsafe to travel. Over 100,000 evacuees left in a hurry and left behind a snapshot of what life looked like in the moments just before they fled. A brave soul recently snuck in to photograph the apocalyptic…
We’ve always wanted body armor to look less like a chunky Kevlar vest and more like a sleek superhero suit. The Army wants that too, enough so that it just awarded a $100,000 contract to a company to see if its genetically engineered spider silk can be used for body armor. Kraig Biocraft, the winner…
There are lots of ways to prevent people from trespassing on your property, including moats, drawbridges, and roaming packs of dogs. But if those tried and true medieval approaches clash with your design aesthetics, you can instead surround your home with a new approach to fencing that secretly retracts and disappears right into the ground.…
There are so many AI-powered digital assistants out there these days, we’ll forgive you if you’ve lost track. Hound is an offering from Shazam rival SoundHound, and it’s packed with an impressive number of features considering it doesn’t have the weight of Apple or Google’s engineering teams behind it. Here are five reasons we like…
Google is making it easier—and cheaper—to share with family members. For no additional charge, you can now share purchased apps, games, movies, TV shows, and books with up to six family members across Android, iOS, and the web. The offer has been rumored for months, and it’s now available to everyone with a Google Play…
Everyone who spent the past week in the throes of Pokemon Go has an April Fool’s joke to thank—or blame, depending on whether you were robbed—for the phenomena. Two years ago, Google’s annual April Fool’s joke was a Pokemon challenge integration with Google Maps. In its promotional video, a man claims that “using the technology…
If you’ve used Google Docs, you might have noticed that all the templates use the randomly generated fake name “Casey Baumer.” Turns out,“Casey Baumer” is also the not-so-randomly generated real name of a real 20-year-old food stylist who has been plagued with suspicious messages for years. There is almost nothing good to be found in…
It’s Prime Day tomorrow, so you know what that means! Don’t forget to set out your MRE and plate of batteries in front of the family robot, as is customary on Prime Day Eve. We do this to remember how our ancestors would have to leave their homes, sometimes for several minutes at a time,…
Here’s an E-2C Hawkeye trying to land on the USS Eisenhower. Everything seems normal until the arresting cable on the carrier—which is supposed to snare an aircraft as it lands—suddenly snaps. The airplane almost looks like a runaway car until it drops and disappears out of view, off the carrier. Luckily, the aircraft managed to…
There’s no question that Pokémon Go has taken over the world in just a few short days. The app now has more users than Tinder, and single-handedly increased Nintendo’s market cap by $7.5 Billion over the weekend. But users have started turning on its creator, Niantic, after a blog post by a former Senior Engineering…
Or I guess, since the glass skateboard hilariously shatters into pieces right in the beginning, skating on a glass skateboard starts exactly how you’d think it’d start, too. Watch as Braille Skateboarding gets a glass skateboard deck, installs the trucks, sets the wheels, and then takes the glass board for a spin… only to break…
It’s been a wild couple of days and we’re not going to talk about it at all here. This is a space for silent reflection—respite from one popular mobile game which will remain nameless, and the viral content encircling it like so much frothy scum on top of a simmering pot of chicken stock. Why…
Do you hear that sound? It’s 65 million years ago and there’s a dinosaur calling out through the wilds. But it’s not a roar. Instead new research says that sound would probably be better described as a “coo” or a “mumble.” Researchers from the University of Texas did a comprehensive review of the vocal organs…
Considering all the complicated weapons that Man at Arms has made in the past, I thought forging Aquaman’s Trident of Neptune would be relatively easy for them. But then I realized that Aquaman’s trident is actually more of a quincident since it has five points welded together and that making all those individual harpoon points…
History was made when the first in-flight movie was screened over Chicago in 1921. But it wasn’t until 1939 that passengers were treated to the first in-flight TV. What was playing on the boob-tube in the sky? Live footage of their own plane, oddly enough. RCA and United Airlines staged a fun little publicity stunt…
We were all quite pumped a few weeks ago when Anki announced its plan to move beyond smartphone controlled cars into emotionally intelligent robots. At the time of the announcement Anki indicated that it would release an SDK with the inclusion of Cozmo, but until now details on what that SDK would be were sparse.…
Few movie scenes capture the horror of war like Saving Private Ryan. Seeing the storming of the beach in all its ugliness—the fear, the seasickness, the bullets, the desperation, the death—gives us a cold look at the reality of D-Day and how terrifying it must have been. But just how historically accurate is that scene?…
How many kilometers are in a mile? If you’re like most Americans, you have no fucking idea. But if you’re one of the millions of Americans playing Pokémon Go, you’re about to find out. For the uninitiated, Pokémon Go is an app that uses your phone’s GPS to detect where you are in the real…
Using pneumatic pistons and servos to power robots makes them fast and strong, but also bulky and extremely heavy. No one is going to mistake ATLAS for a real human being. To eventually create humanoid-looking robots like the Terminator we need to mechanically replicate every part of the human anatomy—starting with the muscles. Researchers at…
An Uber driver was livestreaming Pokémon Go this weekend when he said that he saw someone push a dead body out of car. Now the driver has reportedly been fired from Uber and a member of the local police believes it’s a hoax. And it only gets weirder from there. AlexRamiGaming, a small-time Youtuber, was…
