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Daniel Attinger, a professor of mechanical at engineering at Iowa State University, is working on developing a tiny device that produces a continuous supply of wine. Bless you, Daniel Attinger. Attinger, along with a team of researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, a Swiss research institute, hopes the micro-winery will aid wine experts in…
You can determine a lot by looking into a person’s eyes. For years, scientists have studied how eye contact builds trust and if it reveals whether someone is lying. Now, a new study published in the Royal Society Open Science today examines exactly how long we prefer to look someone in the eyes. The tricky…
The hoverboard day of reckoning has finally arrived. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission is coordinating the recall of 500,000 hoverboards across eight different brands sold between June 2015 and May 2016 because their lithium-ion batteries can catch fire. The CPSC says hoverboards can be returned “for a full refund, a free repair or a…
It seems like every futurist and her sister wanted to turn cars into boats back in the 20th century. Remember the Water-Mobile of 1947? Or how about the poor man’s yacht of 1958? Well, this Jazz Age invention had them all beat. The October 1923 issue of Practical Electrics magazine included this peek at the…
The official Twitter account for NASA’s Kepler, which surveys parts of the Milky Way Galaxy in search for hospitable planets, just got hacked. It’s unclear how or why the account was hacked, but it definitely tweeted a butt and a sketchy link. Unfortunately for NASA, the tweet also shows up in the mission website. This…
In the above gif you can see that the face material of a dartboard looks a whole lot like horsehair. And plenty of people will insist that high-quality dartboards are made with horse or camel hair, but it simply isn’t true. What’s really in a dartboard is called sisal, and it’s more closely related to…
Flat, two-dimensional photos are old news. The future is 360-degree photos that let you look around in any direction from a single standing position. You can share 360-degree photos everywhere from Facebook to Street View, and unlike 360 video, they can be easily snapped using the phone you’ve already got. Here’s how to get started.…
Another Tesla vehicle crashed while operating in Autopilot mode, according to the car’s driver. The latest crash occurred on July 1st, just two days after US regulators announced they were investigating the first fatality in a wreck involving a car in self-driving mode. The latest crash involved a Tesla Model X, the more spacious variant…
We’ve all got hobbies that we probably spend too much time and money on. But only one of us has spent four years and $53,000 building a giant computer that can play Tetris. James Newman’s “Megaprocessor” is 33 feet wide, 6 feet high, and weighs half a ton. It’s really, really big. It has 10,000…
Built by Christians who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, a 510-foot-long, $100 million “replica” of Noah’s Ark is set to open in a new Kentucky theme park later this week. Critics say the attraction is nothing more than a big church that’ll be used to perpetuate creationist nonsense. The new theme park, called…
Last month, Google focused on teaching its self-driving cars to honk appropriately. Now, it’s taking safety into its own hands and learning how to deal with all those cyclists on the road. According to Google’s latest self-driving car report, the autonomous cars can now detect a cyclist’s hand signals, and use machine learning to remember…
Some scientists are hard at work making a “kill switch” to overpower a too-strong AI and protect us, if needed. Others are specifically teaching robots how to hunt prey, also to help us. What a world. Researchers at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Neuroinformatics are teaching a small, truck-shaped robot to see, track, and…
Competitive eater Joey “Jaws” Chestnut set a new record this Fourth of July when he scarfed down a whopping 70 hot dogs and buns in just 10 minutes at the annual Famous Nathan’s hot dog eating contest in Coney Island. How do he and other champion competitive eaters do it? With a couple of savvy…
Summer is here, and it’s time for some hot bear-on-fish action. The bears who munch on tasty salmon at Brooks Falls in Alaska’s Katmai National Park have become social media celebrities. Thanks to Explore.org, the circle of life has turned into an annual internet event, now with 24/7 coverage, several camera angles, and the ability…
A huge vertical farm—where crops are planted, grown, and harvested all with neither sun nor soil—is being built in New Jersey. When it’s finished, it will be the largest one in the world. You can see one of the (smaller) existing factories from AeroFarm, on which the new one will be modeled, above in this…
Do you remember the first time you drank Gatorade? I do. I was 14, and I had just finished the final set of “suicides” that my asshole tennis coach made our team do in 95-degree heat. It was amazing. I got nothing on the people in this video, though. The “football milk”—alternately described as a…
Have you seen this absolutely adorable bunny on Pinterest or Twitter or Facebook recently? Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s completely fake. It’s a 100 percent bunny forgery. The bunny appears to have been made by a Chinese crafter on Weibo called Soft Mochi. The Weibo user has plenty of other adorable…
A 30-year-old Oakland man was arrested early Thursday morning for allegedly attacking Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California with Molotov cocktails. According to an affidavit, Raul Murillo Diaz launched two of the flaming projectiles—specifically, Blue Moon beer bottles, one of which still had the wick attached—at a Google building on May 19th. They landed near…
Comcast and Netflix are like David and Goliath, Ali and Frazier, Pepsi and Coke. They’re both great in their own right, but they have to compete against each other in order to reach their greatest potential. Now, after more than five years of legal punch-ups and backhanded business deals, Netflix and Comcast are finally finding…
Where will the first Hyperloop be? So far there are plans to use the tubular transportation system to move passengers in Slovakia and freight in Switzerland. But a proposed application for the Hyperloop announced today could solve a transportation conundrum that has been challenging planners for centuries: Connecting the neighboring nations of Sweden and Finland.…
