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When you’re designing a shirt, it makes sense to cut the fabrics so that the wearer is most comfortable with their arms down at their sides in a resting position. But for a swimmer, whose arms are constantly in motion, Roka Sports believes it’s advantageous to instead design a wetsuit with an athlete’s arms raised…
If an active volcano nearby suddenly kicks up its activity with steam, smoke, and below-ground rumblings, it’s a good idea to get away very quickly. But now researchers have found an even more dangerous sign to watch volcanoes for: sudden, total silence. A team led by researchers at Carnegie Institution of Science has been monitoring…
On Thursday, YouTube announced the launch mobile live streaming capabilities for select users, a service that will compete with Periscope and Facebook Live. “We’ve been offering live streaming on YouTube since 2011, before it was cool,” the blog post publicizing the news began, which sounds an awful lot like the rationalization of a company that…
Britain is saying goodbye to the European Union, a monumental decision that’s triggering some serious alarm bells among the country’s researchers. Here’s why they have a right to be worried. For months, scientists and environmentalists in the UK have been warning about the consequences of a Brexit. And now it’s actually happened. It’ll likely take…
For the past decade, Hollywood’s battle against online pirates has been mainly been focused on leaked DVD screeners and illegal streaming sites. Now a pair of security researchers say they’ve discovered a vulnerability in the Google Chrome browser that allows people to save illegal copies of movies from streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime.…
It’s a harsh lesson to learn, but internal chat messages like Slack are really not your friend. In fact, they can be your worst enemy. Teachers at the Blackstone Valley Prep High School in Rhode Island learned that lesson in the most embarrassing way possible. Earlier this week an unknown hacker used a teacher’s email…
It’s (almost, maybe) here. Finally, Netflix could have offline video—the service we’ve all been waiting for—by the end of the year. Netflix is working on a “download-and-go” video feature like the ones already offered by Amazon and Comcast, according to industry sources who spoke with communications trade company LightReading. The report cites both the COO…
You may have woken up to news that the UK voted to leave the EU which sent the global markets plunging and led to the resignation of the prime minister. But there’s more! Google Trends suggests that many people in the UK still aren’t sure what passing “Brexit” even means. According to Google Trends, there…
Smithsonian Channel’s Secrets of Shark Island is a wonderful documentary about the ecosystem in the waters around the Revillagigedo Islands, a group of four volcanic islands 240 miles off of Mexico. Because it’s “the only natural juncture for miles” in the Pacific Ocean, there’s a lot going on around there. Most scarily, a shit ton…
Disaster movies are one and the same—we’re all just watching them to see the world come under attack and famous landmarks get destroyed. “Oh my god, did they just do that to the Golden Gate Bridge?” “Not the Sydney Opera House!” But there’s one disaster movie that’s better than them all: Independence Day. Lessons from…
In 2012, Frank Gehry and Mark Zuckerberg posed for a series of photos that sealed their intertwined fates: Gehry, arguably the world’s most famous architect, would design a new campus for Zuckerberg, arguably the world’s most powerful not-lizard person. Surely with all this money and talent coalescing like a hunk of molten aluminum, Facebook’s new…
Do you like jokes? I like jokes. Jokes are silly. But jokes aren’t just all yuck-em-ups and goof-a-lots. They can be great tools for history-lookers. History studiers? Historians. Jokes can give us a peek at how a particular group of people look at the world. Take, for instance, the people of the 1960s. Their jokes…
This past weekend, Bulgarian-American artist Christo unveiled his latest piece—a 1.8 mile floating walkway across an Italian lake. New satellite photos show how this ambitious work of art was put together. For the next two weeks, visitors will be able to walk just above the water from the village of Sulzano on the mainland to…
Salt preserves food, and we’ve using it in that capacity for thousands of years. But here’s a neat tip: meat and fish aren’t the only things you can keep from going rancid with salt curing. It also works with egg yolks. Your friends (the ones with reservations at Stone Barns anyway) are going to think…
What would convince transit riders to pay attention to an oncoming train instead of Instagram? Apparently, a graphic depiction of certain dismemberment. Some very disturbing safety videos have been created by LA’s Metro that might make you think twice about leaving your house. The five videos in the series feature people being dismembered, decapitated, impaled,…
An ambitious but controversial plan to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch moves closer to reality this week, with the deployment of an ocean plastic cleanup boom off the coast of the Netherlands in the North Sea. The 100-meter floating boom is a scaled-down version of a 100-kilometer long system that Dutch nonprofit The…
Drone racing is exciting in its own right, but for spectators the sport still can’t quite match the horsepower and top speeds of auto racing—or can it? Nissan’s GT-R drone, designed and built by Tornado XBlades Racing, can hit a top speed of 115 miles per hour. It can accelerate from zero to sixty in…
Kurzgesagt goes deep into the history of the origin of humans in its latest animation explainer. And while it’s fun to see how far we’ve come, it’s almost more interesting to find out how little we know about the time before history. For instance, we know that there were at least six other kinds of…
Jack White is divisive musician. Mayo is a divisive condiment. For some people it’s the only thing that ties a sandwich together, while for others it’s a boring, expensive quest to achieve some dated form of rock-and-roll authenticity that totally overshadows its musical talent. …Yup! What I’m trying to say is that they’re a tangy…
A recent survey shows that people want self-driving cars to be programmed to minimize casualties during a crash, even if it causes the death of the rider. Trouble is, the same survey shows that people don’t actually want to ride in cars that are programmed this way. That’s obviously a problem—and we’re going to have…
