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Though it bears some resemblance to a Tim and Eric sketch, the AspireAssist is a very real medical device, approved by the FDA for installation in people 22 or older “with a body mass index of 35 to 55, and who have failed to achieve and maintain weight loss through non-surgical weight-loss therapy.” It allows…
Commuting by bike with a backpack or a messenger bag can lead to a sweaty back and sore shoulders. But with the help of the right rack, basket, and panniers, you can more efficiently haul and protect up to 65 pounds of stuff without affecting the ease of your ride. After nine months spent road-testing…
Yahoo, the once-vaunted internet giant, is in shambles. Its revenue is in decline. Its shareholders are crying foul. Its prized public faces are scrambling for an exit, and the company has laid off 15 percent of its workforce. Its core business—internet search and advertising—is negatively valued. Looming over all of this is a prospective sale…
Facebook wants to show advertisers that their ads make you visit their bricks-and-mortar stores and buy their stuff. To do this, they’ll use phones’ location services to track whether people actually walk into the stores after seeing an ad. The company’s new Local Awareness ad features will be fascinating for businesses and depressing for the…
Occasionally you come across a video that’s so satisfying to watch that your brain never wants you to close the tab. That’s what Dutch puzzle designer Oskar van Deventer has managed to create with this complex web of 19 magic gears that are all somehow able to rotate against each other without completely locking up.…
To help reinforce the idea that its clothing is designed for rugged outdoor adventures, Columbia is turning the informational hang tags on some of its garments into stainless steel survival tools that do everything from cut wood, to fix clothing tears, to filter water. It’s first and foremost a clever marketing gimmick for Columbia. After…
“Hmm, should I listen to this Barenaked Ladies song again?” you ask yourself. “Yeah, sure, why not, it’s not like my future partners are going to see it.” Think again! In what is sure to delight music snobs and terrorize Justin Bieber fans everywhere, users of the dating app Bumble will now be able to…
Many of us keep our coffee beans in the fridge or freezer to keep them fresh, but a new study suggests there’s added benefit to this practice: more flavorful coffee. Scientists from the University of Bath, in collaboration with a local cafe, studied the effects of grinding beans at different temperatures—from room temperature all the…
Now that Uber owns the loyalties of tech-savvy folks, it wants to charm another population: people without smartphones. Starting next month, the company will experiment with a service that lets people call in to request a car. For now, it’ll only be available in a Florida county that already partnered with Uber to help fix…
In January, the videos started creeping onto YouTube, Vine, and Tumblr. They were distinguished by a sepia-toned freeze frame, an excerpt of the Yes song “Roundabout,” and an arrow that read “To Be Continued.” The videos spread well beyond the small group who understood the joke’s origins, and despite being little more than a wrapper…
The death of the written word continues apace, as a Facebook exec predicted the site would probably be “all video” within the next five years. Let’s prepare ourselves. Speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, pointed out that video has taken off…
Two hours outside of Paris stands Guédelon, a castle that looks like it’s from the medieval period, but is actually being constructed right now. What’s more, the castle isn’t being built with new technology but instead with medieval techniques and materials. That means every stone, every tile, every single part of the castle is assembled…
Mark Zuckerberg hosted his first ever Facebook Live Q&A today. And it went about as well as you’d expect. One of the key things we learned? Mark Zuckerberg is not a lizard person. Or so he says. The hour-long Q&A has been viewed by nearly 6 million people, and it even had a celebrity cameo…
Ignorance is bliss, and no where is that more applicable than when it comes to the food we eat. It’s no surprise that many guilty pleasures are far from ideal when it comes to your health, and if packaging listed the total calories of the food inside, you’d think twice about finishing off an entire…
Update 6/15/16: The Air Force found the supposedly corrupted files. Last Month, Lockheed Martin, the government contractor which operates the servers that store sensitive information about internal Air Force investigations, came to realize that all of the data on said servers was missing. The apparent reason was a run-of-the-mill system crash—but what caused that actual…
Ripped straight from the wild scenes of a car chase in a spy movie that’s way too unrealistic, this most baddest of asses used a shield of smoke and threw spikes at the police car that was chasing him. The dash cam footage from the police car shows the pure savagery of the driver and…
Hundreds of so-called “mindfulness” apps already clutter the web. Now Apple is integrating such an app into its watch, and pitching it with a quote from new-age garbage peddler Deepak Chopra—just a few days after Chopra introduced his own mindfulness app. During WWDC yesterday, Apple introduced Breathe for the Apple Watch. By reminding users to…
Volcanic lightning is one of nature’s most epic displays, but what exactly causes the phenomenon is a longstanding mystery. Now, by studying high-speed footage of electrified volcanic outbursts at Mount Sakurajima, scientists have arrived at an answer—and it points to a new method for predicting powerful eruptions. Most of us are familiar with how lightning…
Everyone knows you can do some crazy stuff with magnets, but things get really insane when you start playing with electromagnets. When you run an electric current through a coil of wire to create a magnetic field, you can chop soda cans in half in epic explosions and send discs flying up in the air…
Archaeologists working at an ancient Roman battlefield in Scotland have discovered a type of pierced sling-bullet that made a whistling sound when hurled at the enemy. These projectile weapons were hurled at the enemy using a sling apparatus. Initial digs at the site of Burnswark Hill in Dumfriesshire yielded two types: Type I were large…
