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Earlier this year the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena was named the winner of the Pritzker Prize, the top honor in the field, in recognition of his revolutionary affordable housing projects. This week, Aravena made the designs for four of those structures open-source, in a move that could help cities everywhere with their housing troubles. Aravena’s…
Yesterday, Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein released a draft of what they’re calling the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016.” The so-called “encryption bill” manages to be both breathtakingly ignorant and condescending at the same time. Let’s start with the way the bill’s language grandstands to an offensive degree. Or the way it…
Just one year after scientists in China made history by modifying the DNA of human embryos, a second team of Chinese researchers has done it again. Using CRISPR/Cas9, the researchers introduced HIV-resistance into the embryos, showcasing the tremendous potential for gene-editing. In that earlier work, the Chinese scientists modified a gene responsible for a fatal…
The battle between the FBI and Apple isn’t over yet. The Department of Justice filed a court document declaring that it will not modify its request to seek Apple’s assistance in unlocking an iPhone 5s related to a drug investigation in New York. While the Brooklyn request has been overshadowed by the San Bernardino case,…
And we thought carbon freezing looked painful… Jeweler and all-around maker of things JerryRigEverything took a LEGO mini-fig of everyone’s favorite scoundrel smuggler and turned him into solid gold. First Han gets coated in plaster and then heated until he vaporizes. The resulting hole is filled with molten gold and then polished to a high…
Man, this is just so fun to watch. The beautiful alien world that is Iceland is always so picturesque but it’s even better when seen from up close, like from the perspective of Klemen Premrl and his crew of climbers ice picking their way up to the top of an ice structure. The crystal glow…
The one redeeming feature of a spider is that the webs they create are usually too small, or too weak, to entrap a human. But Festo continues to corner the market on unsettling and slightly creepy robots with a machine that can create giant webs and even 3D cocoons that could easily hold a human…
Cooped up in a city or squandered in a suburb, it’s easy to forget how damn wonderful nature can be. Here are some truly stunning views of the Drakensberg Escarpment in South Africa. I love how the shadows and light shutter over the mountains throughout the day. Drakensberg is derived from the Afrikaans word Drakensberge…
Since the first reports of the massive Panama Papers leak, Mossack Fonseca—the company responsible for creating offshore accounts for some of the world’s richest and most powerful people—has claimed the leak was the result of an outside hack. Recent reports have pointed to an outdated Outlook login and web portal software as possibly weak security…
Master toy customizer Sam Kwok has turned Hot Toys’ sixth-scale Starboost Iron Man XXXIX figure into what Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear would almost certainly look like in real life. If Tony Stark ever started doing children’s birthday parties, this is definitely the armor he should wear. It’s too bad that Sam Kwok doesn’t sell his…
The vibrant colors of many of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous paintings—including his Sunflower series—have been fading over the last 100 years. Now a team of Italian scientists has come up with an explanation as to why the lead chromate dyes favored by the artist when mixing his pigments degrade so much under light. They…
So you want to start spinning records in your living room. Here’s a collection of the advice I’ve given n00bs just like you over the last couple of years. Getting started can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be expensive either. Here’s how to get going. What you need…
Jedis are supposed to be the wise peacekeepers of the galaxy, eschewing personal belongings and human desires. But they’d surely make an exception for this life-size 32-inch tall Yoda figure from Sideshow Collectibles, even if they had to sell their lightsabers to afford one. At $2,500 you’d expect this figure to include at least some…
The CIA is very interested in skincare products. It wants to stay up-to-date on all the latest tips and trends—do you think the spooks have tried those crazy looking sheet masks?—because it knows the secret to aging well is taking good care of the skin. Ha ha, just kidding, it wants to use skin cream…
Have you tried to write an email, or worse, an essay on an iPad touchscreen? Well, soon that may be exactly how you type on a Macbook laptop. An Apple patent reveals a new type of laptop where the keyboard is replaced by one giant touchpad. The company describes a “force-sensitive input structure for an…
Getting a robot to balance and walk on two feet is a massive challenge, as the DARPA Challenge revealed. But it turns out it’s a little less tricky when you focus on just the legs, as the Alphabet-owned SCHAFT’s newest bipedal creation demonstrated by confidently walking out on stage at the New Economic Summit going…
No one wants a slow phone, but many of us have to settle for one as the hardware grows older, storage space runs out, and the number of bugs add up. The good news is that you don’t have to accept a slow Android smartphone. Here are four quick tips for increasing your old phone’s…
Good news for those who hate Flash: the next version of Microsoft’s Edge browser will automatically stop the software running when it’s not essential to the page. The updated browser will, according to Microsoft, be able to discern peripheral content—so, that’ll be ads, then—from the main attraction, which might be video or games or whatever…
Would you plug a random USB stick into your computer? According to a new study by researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, plenty of us are still morons and would do exactly that. To work out just how dumb we are, the team littered 297 USB drives around their university’s grounds—in lecture theaters, parking…
