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Cirrus Logic, a prominent supplier of audio technology for brands like Harmon Kardon, Sony, and Philips, announced a new development kit that will make it easier for companies to create headphones using the Apple Lightning connector. The announcement comes in the wake of a flurry of rumors suggesting that the iPhone 7 will not feature…
Alvin Toffler, arguably the most influential futurist of the 20th century, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87 years old. Toffler was the author of the 1970 book Future Shock, which was heralded for articulating the anxieties that so many people felt about the future. Future shock, according to Toffler,…
Some of the most memorable voices are those of people we’ve never met. I’ve never met Susan Bennett, but I talk to her everyday with Siri. Charlie Pellett’s voice will always rattle around the cobwebs of my brain as the voice behind New York’s subway system. Then there’s Elwood Edwards, the voice behind the most…
All the fallout surrounding Britain’s historic decision to leave the European Union is still being sorted out. But a brand new piece of bad news for Brits is that OnePlus’ new phone, the surprisingly great OnePlus 3, may get a price hike in the UK. Not because of any strong EU bias or anything, but…
What’s not not to love about VLC Media Player? It’s free, lightweight, intuitive, and plays damn never every file format under the sun. Now, a long-awaited beta is finally available for Windows 10 users. It’s okay to nerd out a little bit. Besides being its usual wonderful self, this new release works with Cortana voice…
In the photo above we see a videophone (or picturephone as they were sometimes called at midcentury) being demonstrated at the International Radio Exhibition in Stuttgart, West Germany in 1965. The weird part? The woman in the photo is apparently not even bothering to look at the person she’s speaking with. But we get it.…
Jane’s Carousel is one of the most iconic carousels in the world, but few people know it’s crazy backstory. Prior to arriving at its new home in a $9 million glass box facing the Manhattan skyline, the carousel sat in Idora Park in Youngstown, Ohio, where it was constructed in 1922. So how the hell…
Bad idea: trying to use a crane to lift a water tank before checking if it’s empty or not. You can see the crane’s arm begin to buckle under the weight of the tank and then watch it totally collapse as it drops the tank onto the side of the building and flips itself off…
A time capsule sealed by a bank in 1916 was opened in Saratoga Springs, New York this week. And it has many of the things you’d expect—like some photos of the town, a letter from the president of the bank in 1916, and some old coins. But one artifact stuck out as peculiar to the…
Hand sanitizer is a constant presence in modern life, from your purse to your office desk to the automatic dispensers in airports and classrooms. Now the Food and Drug Administration says it’s looking for data on the safety and efficacy of these products. The WSJ reports that the FDA has proposed a rule change whereby…
Female praying mantises have a habit of killing and eating their partners during sex, which sucks for the male. Or does it? A fascinating new study shows this sacrifice is actually giving the males a distinct reproductive advantage. Sexual cannibalism among praying mantises is well documented, but scientists have debated the reasons for it. A…
In the right hands, broken electronics can be turned into something useful again. But useful isn’t the best way to describe Drake Anthony’s 200-watt laser bazooka made from a bunch of old DLP projectors he bought off eBay. Words like incredibly dangerous, do-not-try-this-at-home, or “are you crazy?” seem more appropriate. For comparison, the handheld laser…
Something weird is happening to spring. It’s starting earlier and earlier—but not everywhere. The shift is limited to cities and heavily-populated areas. Late last year, a research study suggested that the spring season’s start was creeping slowly forward so that, by 2100, spring would begin almost a full month earlier than it does today. Now,…
When you go to the trouble of installing a security camera in some hard-to-reach place, you want to know for certain it will survive with little need for maintenance. That’s what Panasonic is promising with this remote camera that keeps on recording even when the wind is blowing at preposterous speeds up to 134 MPH.…
Amazon is offering pretty sweet new deal by which you can literally sell your eyeballs to the spirit of mobile advertising that lives under the sea—in exchange for a slightly cheaper phone. For the small cost of putting targeted advertisements on the lock screen of your phone, Amazon is offering Prime members $50 off the…
Google Chrome is an essential tool for many of us, but it’s by no means perfect. A slowdown in performance is one of the criticisms often leveled against the browser. If you want to quickly improve the speed of Chrome and the sites you’re visiting without delving too deep into its inner workings, you should…
Florida man Thomas Ross believes that he divined the future of human communication 15 years before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Ross scribbled together a patent application for a device back in 1992 and now claims that Apple stole his design. Now, the Florida man is suing Apple for over $10 billion. Okay so this…
Using ground penetrating radar, a team of archaeologists has uncovered a tunnel dug by Jewish concentration camp prisoners to escape the Nazis. An archaeological team led by Richard Freund from the University of Hartford and Jon Seligman from the Israel Antiquities Authority discovered the existence of the tunnel at Ponar, a suburb of Vilnius. The…
Speedrunners have long been exploiting 8-bit games by “reprogramming” them. Pixel-perfect inputs can be used to trigger memory events, usually for the purpose of beating games in fractions of the time it would ordinarily take. A similar exploit exists in the classic Mario Game Boy game 6 Golden Coins, but it exists in a physical,…
A security researcher at Google has found several fatal flaws in Symantec antivirus software (also known as Norton) that he describes as “as bad as it gets.” Symantec has issued an advisory to customers and released updates that fix the security flaws. The blog post, written on Tuesday by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy, is…
