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Facebook is adding political scenarios to its orientation training following concerns, first reported by Gizmodo, that workers were suppressing conservative topics in its Trending news section. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, announced the change during an interview with conservative leader Arthur Brooks, president of the prominent conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. Brooks…
Of the seven cities chosen as finalists for the US Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, Columbus, Ohio may have seemed like the underdog. (It was the only finalist that has no rail system whatsoever.) But today, USDOT announced Columbus as the winner of over $50 million in cash that will transform its transportation system…
NOPE (But it’s just chocolate cake) NOPE (There’s even Boston cream filling!) NOPE (Just a tiny little bite? Pretty please? It took Katherine Dey a long time to make…) NOPE NOPE NOPE [Laughing Squid] SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
For some reason every superpower has to come with a downside. The X-Men, for example, are rejected from society for being mutants. But why can’t it just be win-win? It turns out it can, you just need to be a mad scientist like Colin Furze, and build your superpowers yourself. In Furze’s latest series of…
1998 was such a good year for PC gaming. Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Baldur’s Gate, Star Craft, Rogue Squadron, and many, many more. Dang. Those looking to relive the glory days could easily run most of these games through a virtual machine, but YouTuber nine took it a step (or several) further and built a period-accurate…
Does anyone else feel like the natural order of the world has been flipped upside down? I do, and I know why. It’s because Instagram switched its feed from photos appearing in chronological order to photos being sorted by an algorithm. You may have noticed the change roll out in the past few days, and…
Two poor souls suffered through MRIs, heart scans, and other medical tests to figure out what was causing them to go blind for up to 15 minutes at a time. After discovering that checking their phones in bed was to blame, one woman still couldn’t stop. Such is the power of technology. The women (ages…
Amazon just racked up two more fines—amounting to a total of $130,000—from the FAA for improperly shipping dangerous chemicals. Turns out putting acid and flammable gas into a box and putting it on an airplane is not okay. The fines Amazon picked up this week stem from two events in 2014. In one instance, Amazon…
We assume that all biological processes come to an end when we die, but new research shows that many genes remain active for up to four days following clinical death. These zombie genes can’t bring a person back to life, but this discovery has serious implications for forensics and organ donor recipients. A pair of…
Fiat Chrysler will begin sending final notices to customers affected by the recall of 1.1 million vehicles with confusing gear shifters tomorrow, the company said Wednesday. The news comes on the heels of the death of Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin, who was crushed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, one of the models affected…
When Chromebooks launched in the summer of 2011, they seemed destined to fail, much like the underpowered, internet-dependent netbooks that came before them. But in the five years since, Chromebooks have defied expectations, becoming the most used device in US classrooms and even outselling Macs for the first time this year. Still, people complain about…
It doesn’t matter how much storage Apple stuffs into the latest iPhone, your ever-growing music, photo, video, and app collections will max it out in no time. Instead of constantly having to delete files so you have room to keep adding new media, SanDisk’s new iXpand Memory Case will simply boost your iPhone’s storage capacity.…
No one thinks to use milk as a building material, but it’s possible. It’s also a huge pain in the ass. So much so that trying to carve the stuff nearly drove craftsman Peter Brown insane. Brown’s inspiration to build stuff out of milk came from a Household Hacker tutorial. In that video, it was…
Here’s a conundrum: A kidnapper forgets his phone at the scene of a crime. Police find it, use it to call 911 and gather information to track him down. Now his lawyer argues that all evidence should be tossed because calling 911 from an abandoned phone is illegal. Matthew Muller is charged with the March…
Many New Yorkers have schlepped to Penn Station to take a train out. We’ve sat in the waiting room, bored, and said to ourselves, I know what would improve my experience. If only I could go on a 1,200 foot amusement-park ride before my train arrived. One group—Brooklyn-based design studio AE Superlab—had the bravery to…
Action movies are fun to watch but there’s a smart way to do action scenes and an epically dumb way to do it. The smart way focuses in on the details, tells a story within a story, and makes sure we know just what the hell is going on amidst all the crazy. The dumb…
Vote for whoever the hell you want to vote for. But don’t make your decision after watching an emotionally prying, stupid-person-targeting, specifically edited campaign ad. Now You See It explains how all political ads, no matter which side they’re on, use the same methods to trick voters into believing the worst in the opposing candidates…
Last night, a DC subway station turned into a surprise water park ride. It wasn’t a huge deal—the station was closed for a few hours, the water drained, and service went back to normal—but it certainly looked like it. Seeing a timelapse of the whole thing from the station’s entrance shows how this happened. The…
Poor snake. This slithery Stimson’s Python somehow managed to shed its skin completely within itself. The tail, oddly enough, finished shedding inside the mouth of the snake, forming a perfect circle that unfortunately trapped the snake inside of its old skin. According to the Alice Springs Reptile Centre in Australia, the non-venomous snake was just…
This morning, House Democrats, led by Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), staged a sit-in to force a vote on gun control. Almost immediately after, the cameras and microphones of C-SPAN—which typically broadcasts the action happening on the Senate and House floors—went off. But the network found a workaround: Periscope. After viewers noticed that C-SPAN’s cameras went…
