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Okay. The great spring phone glut is over. The big manufacturers have revealed their flagship devices. Apple even joined in with a cheaper alternative to its flagship iPhone. I’ve spent the last few months benchmarking a lot of phones, and something has become exceedingly clear: All the CPU and GPU benchmarks in the world can’t…
Here’s a 500 watt halogen light bulb vaporizing a ping pong ball. The wimpy plastic ball starts melting and then completely vanishes in seconds, leaving behind no evidence that it ever existed in the first place. It’s like the coolest way to dispose of anything. You can see it in slow motion at the end…
Blackberry—the financially floundering smartphone maker that prides itself on end-to-end encryption—may have finally met its match in the form of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Motherboard reports that the RCMP, as part of a criminal investigation, was able to intercept and decrypt more than a million Blackberry messages over the course of two years. The…
What if the CIA created a reality show? That’s the premise of the upcoming movie For All Eyes Always. And it’s a ridiculous fucking premise. But it’s just ridiculous enough to be plausible in some perverted near-future that turns every subject imaginable into entertainment. I suppose espionage is the last remaining topic that hasn’t gotten…
Have you ever wondered how those clever YouTubers get Obama to sing and rap entire songs? They usually spend countless hours carefully splicing together individual words taken from footage of the president, but you can now do the same thing in just seconds with a new website called Talk Obama To Me. Using the app…
Our conscious perception of the world feels like a continuous and uninterrupted flow, but a new study suggests that it’s actually more like the frames of a movie reel running through a projector. There’s still a lot we don’t know about consciousness and how it arises in the brain. Even though perception—such as vision and…
There’s one big drawback to Apple’s thin, svelte laptop: once you pull the trigger on a Macbook, you’re generally stuck with the specs for life. So when a company claims to offer an idiot-proof SSD upgrade, it’s worth checking out. OWC’s new Aura SSDs are designed to replace the stock SSDs in 2013-or-newer Macbook Pros…
Remember the November 2011 pepper-spray incident at UC Davis? After video footage of a campus police officer casually blanketing Occupy Wall Street student protestors with pepper-spray went viral, the episode prompted mass outrage, sparked conversations about the militarization of police, and launched a thousand memes. UC Davis and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, however, would prefer…
The newest addition to Lego’s Minecraft collection is also the largest to date. The Village set, which weighs in at 1,600 pieces, now gives Alex, Steve, and other characters plenty of places to hang out including a library, a blacksmith, a butcher, and a marketplace. And there’s no risk of any of those buildings burning…
There are plenty of reasons why you might want to see mobile alerts pop up on your computer. Thankfully, there are a several free tools to help you do just that. The tools available to you will ultimately depend on the operating system you use on your phone and laptop. But for the sake of…
Facebook’s new Messenger chatbots are barely two days old, and it’s definitely showing. Right now, you can only interact with a few, and finding them is a huge pain in the ass. But after tracking some down and shooting the shit for a couple of days, I realized that using these robo-assistants is like trying…
All the predictive text and auto-correct tricks in the world can’t make a touchscreen keyboard as usable as a physical set of keys. LG has updated one of the most portable Bluetooth keyboards available with an extra row of keys so that it no longer requires an extra key press to type numbers. The original…
Universal Studios is a bizarre theme park that welcomes over seven million people a year. Lately, the big draw is a sprawling replica of Harry Potter’s world, though it’s long been famous for making tourists feel like they’re characters in one of Universal’s many hit movies. The technology involved in these spectacles, however, has remained…
Death Valley is one of the harshest environments on the planet, but you wouldn’t know it if you happened to visit last month. As weeks of El Niño-fueled rains percolated into the soil, thousands of dormant seeds were awakened, and the barren landscape bloomed into an ocean of wildflowers. A “super bloom” is a rare…
Abandoned subway stations are equal parts fascinating and creepy. Due to its role in World War II, the Down Street tube station in Westminster, London is historically fascinating and creepy. And soon, it will be open to the public. The lifespan of Down Street as a tube station actually lasted less than three decades. The…
The best games are the geekiest games—which is why I’d desperately like these virus trading cards to become a real thing. They were created just this week by Eleanor Lutz. In fact, the versions she’s posted online are also animated, showing a full 3D view—well, the external protein shell at least—of the viruses described on…
Despite paying a team of hackers to unlock the San Bernardino iPhone, the FBI may have no power to share the secrets behind the method. Sources from within the Obama administration have told Reuters that the team of hackers that helped the FBI unlock the iPhone have “sole legal ownership of the method.” That means,…
In the ongoing fight against Islamic State, the US is said to be attacking militants with “cyber bombs” according to Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. Reuters reports that Work explained the approach during an interview earlier this week, though he didn’t explain what those bombs involved or exactly how they were targeted. But he did…
Microsoft just launched a new online app that offers to try and understand the contents of your photographs and write captions for them. And it’s surprisingly impressive—most of the time. You can simply upload an image to CaptionBot and have it return a description for you. (It’s worth noting that Microsoft will hang on to…
Statistically speaking, most Kickstarters aren’t failures. But boy, when they fail, do they fail big. The latest tale of crowdfunding woe is Coolest, a company that was meant to build an all-singing, all-dancing cooler with a built-in blender and Bluetooth speaker. The project was funded to the tune of $13 million, but that’s when things…
