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The hammer has finally dropped on blood-testing startup Theranos and its beleaguered CEO Elizabeth Holmes. US federal health regulators have announced their decision to ban Holmes from operating a lab for two years, while withdrawing regulatory approval for its California lab. In a statement issued late Thursday, Theranos announced that it had received notice from…
Snapchat is advertised as for ages 12 and up, but are 14-year-olds ready to see content like “10 Things He Thinks When He Can’t Make You Orgasm”? Not if you’re the anonymous 14-year-old (and his mother) who filed a class-action lawsuit claiming the material in Snapchat’s Discover section is too sexual. Unlike personal snaps sent…
Do you remember those birthday cards that played a song when you opened them? Do you remember how they were sort of cool, but everyone closed the card immediately out of embarrassment? That is how I feel about Spotify’s new feature, which lets you create a personalized playlist to go with your out-of-office email. The…
It was only a matter of time before spam came to Venmo and, frankly, it’s astonishing that it took so long to figure out the marketing secret: You can message anyone on Venmo, so long as you send them as little as one cent. Or, perhaps other companies figured it out much earlier and decided…
Though Facebook blamed the removal of a video showing the shooting of Philando Castile on a “technical glitch,” a new report suggests the “glitch” may have been deliberate police intervention. On Wednesday, Diamond Reynolds posted live footage of the shooting of the 32-year-old Castile, her boyfriend, to Facebook, where it quickly went viral before disappearing.…
I’m not blind, I can totally see that the square is moving. First, it tilts to the right side and then it tilts to the left side, like a seesaw of sorts. But it’s actually a mind-bending illusion that makes you think it’s moving. The parts that make up the lines are actually just “drifting,”…
Sure, Game of Thrones’ Battle of the Bastards aired a couple of weeks ago and many things have happened in life and on the Internet since then. But we can’t stop thinking about it, because we have a very bad case of Game of Thrones withdrawals. Luckily, CineFix goes in deep on the epic sequence…
Steve1989—who we previously watched eat a piece of actual civil war history—has a penchant for consuming rare and obscure military rations. Today he decided to scarf down several meals intended for the Spetsnaz (Russian special forces) for when those troops are traveling through mountains. It’s hearty. It’s weird. And there’s lots of it. Mountaineering is…
The Altwork station feels like an anomaly. It’s been in gestation so long, available for pre-order for so long, that one might be quick to count it as another stalled crowd-funded campaign. Except the desk and chair number isn’t a crowdfunder. It’s a real product that will really be shipping later this year, and if…
North America is a beautiful continent that’s home to the Rockies, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and many more natural wonders. How did that happen? How did North America get its shape? The answer is that it took millions and millions of years. Over the history of Earth, tectonic plates have smashed into each other…
Light beer is as American as apple pie, and Miller Lite is one of America’s favorite light beers. But what if I told you that the marketing man behind the creation of the Miller Lite brand was investigated by the FBI for being a communist? That’s the startling revelation that has come to light based…
On Wednesday, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Minnesota man, was shot by police during a traffic stop. The aftermath of the fatal shooting was captured live on video and posted to Facebook by a woman identified as Castile’s girlfriend. Soon after it went viral, the footage, which depicts Castile, slumped over in his seat and covered…
An enormous algae bloom turned Florida’s Treasure Coast a gnarly shade of green last week, and now we know just what that goopy nightmare looks like from space. On July 2nd, NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite snapped some weirdly impressionistic images of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, in which you can see billions of green microbes spawning like…
Some male insects—especially beetles—boast a penis that’s several times the length of their bodies, which… wow. New research explains why these insectoid wieners need be so long, and how these bugs are still able to get it on. Male beetles are currently in the midst of an evolutionary arms race amongst themselves. They must evolve…
On Craigslist, Redditor wowbobwow picked up an old, broken Macintosh SE that was destined for a landfill. But once he got the beige box cleaned up and working again, he discovered a big NSFW surprise hidden in a fake “America Online” folder. The redditor had actually stumbled upon a strange piece of Mac history in…
An international team of researchers has developed an eerily realistic robotic stingray that blurs the line between animal and machine. Fueled by light-activated heart cells, the cyborg fish could inspire the development of futuristic medical devices and incredibly life-like synthetic animals. Like an actual stingray, this miniature robot features a flat body with long wing-like…
Facebook could be in trouble with the US Internal Revenue Service. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, hoping compel Facebook to turn over information regarding any transfer of global assets to an Irish-based holding company on its 2010 tax return. The IRS is investigating whether Facebook undervalued transfer assets by billions of dollars,…
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), which sets the time which standardizes the world’s clocks, just announced that it is tacking an extra second on to the end of 2016. What will you do with yours? It’s called a leap-second, and it’s added to a year to compensate for very slight changes…
Jump scares are a staple—and one of the most divisive elements—of modern horror movies. Some people are too susceptible to them, while others find them gimmicky. To people in the former camp: does the above gif scare you in any way? The answer is almost certainly no. Despite the “jump” in “jump scare,” what I…
When I’m trying to get laid, the last thing on my mind is whether or not I should be looking for another job. But Bumble, the dating app founded by ex-Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe, seeks to address this issue with a new feature that essentially amounts to a gamified version LinkedIn. BumbleBizz, as it’s so…
