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Today Apple announced a host of new features for iOS, including more predictive software like QuickType and advanced spotlight search. In order to make these features work, Apple’s deep learning robots will need to analyze a lot of people’s data at once, so Apple announced the integration of a new feature called differential privacy. But…
Van Gogh’s The Starry Night can be recreated in real life in two ways: one of them is to be on drugs, and the other, apparently, is to swirl paint on water like artist Garip Ay. It’s sort of illegal to do the first thing, but you can watch how Ay recreates Starry Night in…
Apple, the perpetual copycat, introduced a ton of new ideas today that weren’t really new at all. Many companies have made the products and features Apple showed off today—and now Apple aims to destroy them with its own better versions. So here is our yearly roundup of the stuff Apple tried to kill at WWDC.…
We know our food is incredibly well traveled, but just where does your food come from? A new set of interactive charts help you trace the often serpentine route from farm to table. Researchers at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture have completed an effort to trace just how far food travels across the planet.…
In response to the deadliest mass shooting in American history, Spotify has created a music playlist, ostensibly to honor the victims and offer support to the communities that were affected. The playlist, called “Pulse” after the gay club in Orlando, Florida where the shooting occurred, includes a photo of a rainbow flag and the following…
Coins are supposed to sink. When you toss ‘em in a fountain, they drop right down to the bottom, right? Not always. There’s a trick that can actually make metal coins float, and it’s totally trippy to see. You carefully level the coin (which needs to be made of aluminum and not zinc) onto the…
Carbon nanotubes have been pegged as the wonder material that could finally allow us to build a space elevator. A discouraging new study suggests these microscopic strands aren’t as resilient as we thought—and all it could take is a single misplaced atom to bring the whole thing crashing down. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are tiny hollow…
For $35 ThinkGeek will now sell you an animatronic cat tail, powered by four AA batteries, that will contentedly swish back and forth as it hangs from the back of your pants. You can pretend you’re buying it for cosplay reasons, or maybe for a Halloween costume, but deep down you know it’s really your…
Apple has been moving out of the computer business for awhile. Where once the WWDC keynote would have revolved around OS X (just renamed macOS), now the event is the iOS show. Which is totally understandable! iOS is one of the most widely adopted operating systems in existence and it makes Apple major money every…
The WWDC keynote is finally over, and if we learned one thing, it’s that Apple has fundamentally changed. Most of the news from the developer’s conference wasn’t too earth-shattering: there were no new apps being ported to Android, no allusions to any Apple hardware whatsoever, and Tim Cook even seemed a little off during his…
My college transcripts will plainly show I nearly failed Latin (twice!), but if there’s one thing I’m certain of it’s that Adelotypa annulifera translates roughly to “ungrateful dickhead.” That’s the scientific name of an Amazonian butterfly whose behaviors have finally been documented by entomologist Phil Torres and biologist Aaron Pomerantz, revealing what a horrendous manners…
Weren’t you just saying that iMessage would be so much better if it was less about words and more… well, more like Snapchat? No? Well, too bad. Sometimes it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it that matters. Here are some things you’ll now be able to do with iMessage’s new features,…
Birds are capable of extraordinary behavioral feats, from solving complex puzzles to tool making. There may be good reason for that. A new study shows that, pound for pound, birds pack more neurons into their small brains than mammals, including primates. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this study is the…
Apple just announced the tenth version of iOS, the heart and soul of all the company’s mobile hardware. In celebration of the operating system’s double-digit milestone, Apple is making lots and lots of upgrades. Let’s take a look. A much better lockscreen Craig Federighi started his massive iOS demo by saying this was the biggest…
There’s nothing I want more in the world than to be surrounded by so many sardines in the ocean that it looks like you’re stepping into a magical vortex that’ll transport you to another dimension. Which means, I need to book a ticket to the Philippines, drive to the airport, figure out how to get…
Hmmm, a photo tool that uses face recognition, can be easily searched, and plots all your geotagged photos onto maps? Where have I heard all this before? At today’s WWDC 2016, Apple announced a few Photos features that gave us a serious case of deja vu. That’s because Google Photos already does pretty much the…
Janet Waldo, the voice actress who gave life to the original Judy Jetson in 1962, has died. Waldo was 96 years old. Waldo appeared in shows like I Love Lucy and was the starring voice actor in Hanna-Barbera’s late-60s animated show The Perils of Penelope Pitsop. But her legacy will be forever linked to The…
Years after announcing HomeKit, Apple finally announced an all-in-one smarthome solution. It’s an app called Home, and it sounds… fine. The Home app will come with iOS 10 and essentially puts controls for all of your HomeKit-connected devices in one place. You can also set up scenes that will trigger a number of activities. So…
The Men at Arms folks can retire now. Not only did they faithfully recreate the blazing sword from Voltron, but they took “blazing” in the best, most literal way, in the sense that the blade itself is always enveloped by flames. It seems extremely dangerous but it’s also so damn cool. Technically speaking, this build…
Last year, Apple jumped into the streaming music game with Apple Music, which turned out to be a wholly uninspiring clone of Beats Music. Here comes Apple Music’s second movement, but will it be enough? Apple Music wasn’t the Spotify killer it needed to be. The product has acquired 15 million users by virtue of…
