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The timelapse gets a little hectic and sometimes you don’t know what the hell is going on (unless you’re well-versed in canal building), but it’s just crazy to see a strip of land get carved out and then built out with concrete. Like, we just really gashed the Earth and filled it up with water.…
There are some troubling new details aboutthe deadly crash involving Tesla Autodrive. Police have confirmed that they found a DVD player in the car of a man who died earlier this week after his Telsa Model S hit a truck while in Autopilot mode. He was reportedlywatching a Harry Potter moviewhen it happened. Whether or…
Steve Grasse wanted to make the best spirits in the world—so he followed the water. It led him to Tamworth, New Hampshire, a colonial-era township at the foothills of the White Mountains. The town drinks from the Ossippee aquifer, an underground labyrinth of granite-purified mountain water that’s never seen a trace of industrial pollution. Grasse’s…
Before you slap a piece of bright yellow American cheese on your burger this holiday weekend, consider the plight of a poor truck driver in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, whose truck full of cheese was stolen on Friday. The thieves managed to get away with 20,000 pounds of Homer Simpson’s favorite nighttime snack, which added up…
The most important meal of the day is also the most annoying to make because you’re groggy and in a rush and haven’t had your cup of coffee yet. Genius men Peter Browne and Mervyn Huggett solved that eternal problem of making breakfast by building a machine to, well, make breakfast for them. Yep, like…
An American woman was arrested this week for flooding Stephen Hawking’s email with death threats, then stalking him at an astronomy festival in the Canary Islands. The woman, a US citizen who lives in Norway, sent emails to Hawking telling him she would kill him at the Starmus Festival, a legendary astronomy conference that’s happening…
Two seal pups died in separate incidents recently after humans—no doubt well-meaning individuals!—attempted to help them, thinking they were abandoned or distressed. Say it with me now, slowly and loudly: Stop trying to rescue wild animals by yourself. In one case, a woman picked up a harbor seal pup on a beach near Westport, Washington.…
Blackberry’s most loyal customer has always been the US government. But it looks like things are changing, for the Senate at least. According to a memo, the Senate is ending its years-long relationship with Blackberry. The memo, obtained by reporter Jim Swift, says that once the Senate runs out of on-hand BlackBerry devices (Classic, Passport,…
I came across this fantastically modern ad in the April 1945 issue of Radio-Craft magazine and just had to share it with you as we all slowly slide into the Fourth of July weekend. The ad was for Detrola, a company based in Detroit, Michigan that made some absolutely gorgeous radio sets in the 1930s…
Facebook Messenger has roughly 900 million users, which is enough bodies to fill three Americas. So, chances are good that you’ve used the app at some point, even if it means checking that weird hidden folder every once in a while to see what kind of awful spam strangers or bots have sent you. If…
Like any person scared shitless about the prospect of keeping a fragile new human alive, as soon as I found out I was pregnant I started googling the important questions. Among them: “What is the best baby monitor?” And now that my spawn has survived for 1.5 years, I am confident when I say the…
Of all the things your smartphone can do, playing music is one of the least demanding. Listening to a song puts very little strain on the CPU, doesn’t require GPS, and often doesn’t require wi-fi (so long as the music files are stored on your phone). Simple physics says that listening to louder music should…
What sorcery is at work here? Careful, this trick—er, illusion has a second, surprising twist in it. Silhouette Zoetrope is the work of Christine Veras at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. It was one of the top three illusions in this year’s Best Illusion of the Year contest, in which scientists compete with each…
When I was five, I was repeatedly falling off my bike and making my Barbies do weird things to each other. Oliver, however, puts my five-year-old self to shame, because he’s over here making cool YouTube videos about tornadoes. His father posted the video on Reddit yesterday, and it’s racked up a whole lot of…
The smell of coconut sunblock is in the air, daiquiris are being consumed in record numbers, and dudes on the subway have all forgone their sleeves to show us their poorly groomed armpit hair. Summer is here! Which means it’s time for a pool party. Unfortunately, pool parties can lead to pool drownings. You could…
Plants, they’re just like us. Or at least enough like us that they can still judge risk and make good decisions even though they happen to have a few handicaps that we don’t. We’ve long known that plants are smarter than we think. After all, they probably have memories, even though they don’t have neurons.…
Imagine training every day of your life for one big moment, only to find that the moment will be marred by wading through shit-infested water. That’s exactly what members of the US Olympic rowing team will feel when they head into the polluted waters of Rio de Janeiro at the 2016 Olympics. The team will…
The guy next to me huffed loudly—an explosive grunt of displeasure that had me halfway between amusement and horror. We were in a meeting room at the Hilton in Newark, NJ, seated in front of a giant TV with a giant sound system, and we’d just seen footage on Panasonic’s UB900 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray…
A 69-year-old retired airline pilot spent 1,000 hours over three months putting together this contraption that can serve runny soft-boiled eggs, make toast, offer tea, and hand over the newspaper. Sign us up. [Mashable]
The strange and terrible thing about that ALS ice-bucket challenge is that it ended years ago, and yet we are still feeling its effects. Facebook was inspired by its viral success to create a feature that lets all of us fundraise for charity without ever leaving the site. Let’s get the big question out of…
