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Just because this Huffy Carnage is sold by Walmart as a mountain bike doesn’t necessarily mean it can handle a legit downhill mountain run, as Phil Kmetz discovered after spending $180 on one. Halfway through his ride the bike’s brake pads were almost completely gone, and after the first jump its handlebars broke and bent.…
It’s no secret that the Rio Olympic games, kicking off this August, are in serious trouble. There’s crime. There’s disease. There’s Jaguar slaughter, and lots of other problems. Last night Stephen Colbert summed up all the reasons the Olympics will likely be a disaster in just five minutes.
One side effect of talking about the risk of killer robots so much is that everyone is now rushing to assure us exactly how they would prevent this. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the latest to reassure us, in an extremely vague way. Earlier this month, Google engineers published a paper outlining five principles of…
First, computers beat humans in the game of Go. Now computers are beating humans at something that might be a tad more practical: flight combat. A new AI system developed at the University of Cincinnati has soundly beaten retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene Lee in a high-fidelity air combat simulation. Lee, who has been…
The Battle of the Bastards in Game of Thrones was one of the best battle sequences seen in TV or even film and a lot of it had to do with the set up and the show’s characters and how Game of Thrones incorporated stunning practical effects. But even more probably had to do with…
Do you know what a sleeping great white shark looks like? It’s never been seen before. Until now. A robotic submersible captured the first-ever footage of a great white taking a nap, and you can see it innocently catch some zzzs with its mouth hanging wide open. It looks maybe seven percent less frightening than…
Just the presence of streetlights can deter criminal behavior. A South Philadelphia neighborhood is trying something a little more innovative than that—using neon-lit murals to brighten the sidewalk and turn the area into a destination. Electric Street, by David Guinn and Drew Billiau, transforms a wall into a work of public art that not only…
Holy. Shit. This video shows the end of a car chase in northeast Houston and it’s totally bananas. The suspect tries to outrun a helicopter in an open field, but while making a break for it, he gets pummeled by a police SUV. Somehow, he bounces off the car, gets back up, and manages to…
About six months ago, just as Flint began to acknowledge its lead crisis, a water testing expert from an EPA task force predicted that “every major city east of the Mississippi” was underestimating lead levels in their water. A big report from the NRDC now confirms that about 18 million Americans are living with lead…
Food is one of the pieces of common ground that people of all cultures share. Food is the one language we’re all forced to speak. And then there’s Steve1989 MREinfo. He just likes to eat really old military rations. It’s kind of his thing. Steve has eaten the old-as-hell food of armies from countless wars,…
What do you do if you get busted for pirating a terrible Adam Sandler movie? Deny it. That seems to be the lesson of a recently dismissed federal case, which raises the burden of proof that copyright owner must meet in order to hold you accountable for infringement. TorrentFreak reports that Oregon District Court Magistrate…
I don’t know how these tiny dancers got trapped inside this spinning zoetrope but it’s the only explanation I can come up with for this insane light animation. Their movements are so smooth, and the shining light captures the grace of their dance so well that I’m sure some sort of magic has to be…
Way back in 2008 BMW revealed an especially outlandish concept car called the GINA Light Visionary Model that traded metal body panels for a flexible lycra-like fabric wrapped around the vehicle. It wasn’t exactly pretty, which makes it harder to understand why Puma would use it as inspiration for a new shoe. Back when BMW…
British geophysicists have discovered evidence of an ancient drainage network buried beneath Greenland’s ice sheet that once extended across nearly a fifth of its total surface. Some of the channels within this system were about a mile deep and over seven miles wide. Scientists from the University of Bristol and Imperial College London described their…
Yo-yo tricks are already a miracle of physics. But Ben Conde specializes in a type of yo-yo with an unattached string, and does things that defy all logic. But there’s one sneaky feature that makes these contraptions work. Hidden between the halves of his yo-yo are tiny silicone friction pads. These—combined with high rotational speed—grab…
Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 are still exploring interstellar space today. Both probes have flown by Jupiter and Saturn while the Voyager 2 has made its way to Uranus and Neptune too. The Voyager space program has traveled further in space than anything ever has and serves as a wonderful reminder of…
As the world’s premiere auto racing league, the cars that compete in Formula One are technological marvels. But watching what goes into racing vehicles from the turn of the century gives you a greater appreciation for what our ancestors had to deal with to quench their need for speed. If you thought having to pay…
Mark Zuckerberg is building a wall on his 700-acre Hawaii parcel of land, and his neighbors are pissed. Somewhere, Donald Trump is thrusting his tiny fists in the air, furious that he’s been ousted as the world’s resident wall-loving entrepreneur. According to a report in a local Hawaiian newspaper, Zuck’s neighbors on the island of…
Every company wants kids to build stuff—not in an illegal child labor kind of way but in a fun, educational kind of way. Ball robots are teaching kids code and Google’s new modular blocks work toward a similar goal. But Bose’s BOSEbuild speaker is more interested in teaching the ins and outs of sound and…
If you have a bunch of old printed photos sitting in a drawer somewhere, there are plenty of ways you can easily save digital versions of them. You could scan the original negatives, but for that, you need a special scanner and a lot of time. On the other hand, you could also just use…
