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I honestly don’t know if I can take five more months of this.
Earlier this year, three individuals stole a total of 67 iPhones from an Upper West Side Apple store. Last week, 19 more iPhones were snatched from a SoHo store. How could these criminals possibly infiltrate the impenetrable security of a retail store run by certifiable geniuses? By dressing like Apple store employees, of course. It’s…
Every driver has experienced the frustration of traffic jams that develop out of thin air on the freeway—no accident, no lane closure, no presidential motorcade. Just a sudden, maddening, inexplicable slowdown. Now you can explore this phenomenon firsthand with an online interactive simulation. It’s the creation of Martin Treiber of the Dresden University of Technology…
What does a “modular” smartphone even mean? Google thinks it means breaking apart almost every component of a phone, as with Project Ara. LG’s newest G5 smartphone has a removable bottom, which allows you to slide on a camera grip or a bigger battery. Today, at Lenovo Tech World in San Francisco, we saw what…
New technology is scary. Just ask the people who think that their illnesses are caused by wifi. But blaming unfortunate things on newfangled technology has been happening for decades, if not centuries. Like when farmers of the 1920s used to blame too much rain, earthquakes, and droughts on the new technology of radio. The October…
At. Last. The great leap in smartphoning that all us schlubs have been waiting for is here. Point your phone at a wall to measure how wide it is, or choose a table on Wayfair and put it in your dining room to see how it works in the space. Hell, get lost in a…
TED Talks were forever shamed by that skewering The Onion gave them a few years ago, but this commentary on what every TED Talk is like from CBC’s This Is That is pretty perfect. It breaks down the things that every person does at one of these talks, including the structure of their speech, the…
You don’t even need grade school science to know that water flows wherever gravity pulls it. But somehow when poured onto Arthur Carabott’s intriguing fountain, it instead sticks to impossibly perfect straight paths and corners on its way down. Is it made from some extraterrestrial material science hasn’t classified yet? Nope, just a strategic use…
A Dalek standing in the foyer of the BBC’s broadcasting building in London was recently found to contain an interesting compound that could be used to solve an ongoing medical crisis. Bacteria that cause dangerous infections are become increasingly resistant to drugs, leading us inexorably towards the so-called antibiotic apocalypse. A recent report warned that…
To help celebrate his three-millionth subscriber, YouTuber Colin Furze, the creator of the thermite cannon and questionably-safe hoverbike, has successfully topped all of his inventions to date by building his own miniature Death Star covered in 58 boxes of fireworks all wired together for one magnificent 20 second spectacle. If you’re trying to keep score,…
At some point, every trendy YouTube channel is going to fight every other trendy YouTube channel. And this week, the blender brand made famous by Will It Blend dukes it out with the red hot nickel ball from carsandwater. Spoiler: No one wins. Like so many street fights, everybody walks away from this one a…
If you thought Disney’s only reason for buying Lucasfilm was to make more Star Wars movies, you’re way off. The company is also currently in the process of converting parts of Disneyland and Walt Disney World into sprawling Star Wars-themed lands, and it’s already testing some of the new characters it’s designed to interact with…
When Charter Communications completed its acquisition of Time Warner Cable a few weeks ago, it wasn’t exactly the birth of a shining new star. TWC has a longstanding reputation for being godawful! Luckily, the New York Attorney General’s Office knows what’s up and just called out the company’s awfulness. On Wednesday, the office—spearheaded by Tim…
We’ve spent hundreds of hours over several months using six multiroom wireless speaker systems in every possible room and even outside to find the best multiroom wireless speaker system. Though new competition is better than ever, Sonos is still the best for most people. If you want something cheaper, Google Chromecast Audio does a decent…
A discouraging new study concludes that most antidepressants are ineffective for children and adolescents, and may even be harmful in some cases. But the researchers caution that the low quantity and quality of clinical trials are obscuring the true effects of these drugs. For the new Lancet study, researchers analyzed 34 trials involving over 5,000…
The adage goes, “measure twice, cut once.” Frank Howarth’s projects are a little more complicated than the average woodworker’s, so he measures a slew of times, cuts out test pieces, and yes, still makes mistakes. But it’s all in pursuit of the perfect bowl. This particular bowl started as a raw hunk of maple. Howarth…
This horrifying metal octopus is “The Only Seven Person Tricycle,” and its human victims are being slowly devoured by bad decision-making. Lets try to understand what we’re looking at here. So who would make such a thing? It’s made by Hammacher Schlemmer, the 170-year-old mail order curiosity company. Some of the catalog’s most popular products…
The only thing that rivals the sheer number of cute kitten videos on YouTube is footage of extreme stunts. There’s no shortage of daredevils taking to the skies in wingsuits, but Roberta Mancino has bested them all by soaring over the active Villarrica stratovolcano in Chile. Flying through a ring of fire just doesn’t seem…
The Windows registry is a sprawling, usually impenetrable settings file covering just about every aspect of the operating system and applications running on a computer. A lot of these settings are hidden from the user, but if you know what you’re doing, you can don your tweaking and customize Windows in a variety of ways.…
Forget self-driving cars. For years now Google co-founder Larry Page been thinking ahead by personally—and secretly—investing in two start-ups that promise something much more exciting: flying cars. One of the startups, called Zee.Aero, launched in 2010 with a plan to make, as Bloomberg describes it, “a small, all-electric plane that could take off and land…
