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The buzz hasn’t entirely died from that fatal Tesla crash in May, or the one that happened this week, but Elon Musk is already looking ahead. The Tesla CEO tweeted Sunday that he’s working on a “Tesla Masterplan, Part 2″ that he hopes to share in the next few days. The tweet is probably a…
Pokemon GO is a game that relies on its players going on long walks, meaning that some will eventually find any way to get around that system. Tumblr user Perchbird is one of those people. He posted a photo set that showed his phone running the app while mounted on a drone. The caption just…
Consider the water flea. They don’t seem like the flashiest animals, but it turns out they can grow helmets and spines to beat their enemies, and can even customize the defenses based on which predator they’re fighting. Linda Weiss, a professor at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, is leading research on how water fleas, or Daphnia…
For over a century, paleoanthropologists have been fascinated by a gory question: were Neanderthals cannibals? In recent years, we’ve found remains that suggest cannibalism did exist in various parts of southern Europe but new remains found in northern Europe add further evidence to the “yes” answer and tell us more about why cannibalism was practiced.…
The new augmented reality game Pokemon Go has gotten people off the couch and into the real world. But police in O’Fallon, Missouri say that four men have used the game to find players at a specific location, and robbed them using a handgun. About eight or nine people have been robbed by four men…
Pokémon Go is the best mostly-broken game I’ve ever played. It crashes in the middle of battles. There are constant server issues. It’s a menace to my health and well-being that has burrowed itself into my heart like a blood clot. But as the game claws its way to usability, players are realizing that Niantic…
One of the most surprising things about the Apollo 11 guidance computer source code isn’t just the sheer size of it, but rather the amount of in-jokes that scientists included with it. While the code for the command and lunar modules has been available online since 2003 (tech researcher Ron Burkey transcribed every line of…
While the rest of the world engages in hostile warfare over disputed territory, Canada and Greenland are using a rather more polite method of asserting their claims over a Hans Island, an island between Canada and Greenland (a Danish territory) that both want to claim.
The stereotype concerning someone with anger issues is that they just have bad impulse control. You joke that they haven’t slept in a week, they start screaming. But it may be that people blow up not because they can’t hold in their feelings, but because of poor social processing that makes them think your sleep…
Thursday night, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) used a bomb disposal robot with lethal force. After hours of negotiations failed, the police strapped a pound of C4 and a detonation cord to the robot, maneuvered the robot near the suspect, and detonated, killing the 25-year-old suspect Micah Johnson. In a police statement issued on Saturday,…
Pokemon Go is the hottest game to hit the market in forever. People are currently trying to catch their Pikachus and Fitzybutts (honestly, I don’t know what they’re called) but they’re paying the price. And by paying the price, I mean they’re accidentally getting some exercise. Just look at these poor souls complaining about their…
People all over have been trying to enjoy the new Pokémon Go app, which released this week to so much fanfare that it’s experiencing massive server overload. The hype was so real that people were passing around APK files so that people outside the countries where it’s available could side-load it on Android, something I…
A new test developed by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico can potentially alter what we know about the nuclear tests done as a part of the Manhattan Project. According to Popular Mechanics, the test involves using just a pinch of dirt. That small amount contains large amounts of information, which…
We joke about women faking orgasms both because it’s common and because public perception suggests they do it to stroke the egos of clueless boyfriends. New research suggests a much more upsetting reason for the deception: to end unwanted sex. In an upcoming study presented this week at the annual meeting of the British Psychological…
The X-men spinoff film starring everyone’s favorite card-throwing Cajun has been in the works for a while and has changed hands so many times that it’s been unclear as to where it is in the development process. It was supposed to come out in October of this year, and so far we don’t have anything.…
Engineers from the University of Glasgow and BAE Systems, a defense company, think that “within this century” we could chemically “grow” drones in labs. Whatever you say, guys, whatever you say.
Being able to play music is a gift, but learning to play an instrument is morass of frustration—especially teaching yourself the guitar. Hands have to be bent in uncomfortable positions, uncalloused fingers get sore, and it becomes clear that human extremities innately possess the coordination of a newborn deer that’s been grazing in a field…
Everything is dangerous. Sitting too much is bad, washing machines are infestation sites for E. coli, and now the simple act of sniffing can infect you with a bacteria that has a 50 percent chance of killing you. We’ve long known about the bacteria, which is called Burkholderia pseudomallei and leads to a disease called…
In today’s edition of Things That Shouldn’t Need Explaining, scientists have issued a warning against self-administered brain stimulation by do-it-yourself users online. In the July 7 issue of Annals of Neurology, 39 neuroscientists from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania noted that while…
Uber wants its riders to reflect on gun violence, and it’s not being subtle about it at all. After the shootings at a police protest in Dallas, Uber on Friday decked out the app with reminders to think about the incident. It changed the UberX icons to peace signs and enforced a “moment of silence”…
