Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Meet the Gameboy Zero. It’s a classic Gameboy shell with a Raspberry Pi’s heart. But the mod isn’t purely cosmetic. Using Emulation Station, this Pi board is able to play games from NES, SNES, and the Gameboy’s many iterations all up to and including Advanced. That’s where things start getting tricky, since the Gameboy had…
Yesterday Mattel revealed it had named designer Jonathan Adler as the Creative Director for Fisher-Price. It’s part of a continued effort to breathe new life into the baby-focused brand, and if Fisher-Price’s new wooden toy line is any indication, it’s already on the right track. For decades plastic has been the go-to material for making…
As if the Great Barrier Reef needed more terrible news, the Queensland government issued permits this week for a controversial new coal mine that marine biologists fear could choke out portions of the reef with pollution. On Sunday, Queensland premier approved leases for the Carmichael mine, Australia’s largest proposed coal project, which would tap into…
Netflix had some 75 million paying subscribers around the world—but how many of those people are getting the most out of their subscription? You can supercharge your viewing experience with these browser extensions and online apps that will take your Netflix game to a whole new level. Extensions Flix Plus by Lifehacker: a Chrome extension…
Moleskine, makers of some of the most popular paper notebooks in the world, have teamed up with the creators of the Neo Smartpen to make it a lot easier to digitize your hand-written notes and sketches, to move them onto your mobile device, and to share them. The Smart Writing Set, available starting today, isn’t…
Sending your child off to pre-school for the first time is apparently a stressful time for parents. But if you’ve properly prepared them for the challenges of dealing with other kids, like by playing with a 3D-printed baby rattle that looks like a miniature broadsword, they should be just fine. The plans for this unique…
Bringing the world one step closer to having real-life replicators like Star Trek promised, researchers at MIT’s CSAIL lab have developed a new 3D printing technique that allows fully-functional robots to be created in a single print run. Add a motor and battery, and they’re able to walk right out of the 3D printer. Typically,…
The Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca has spoken out about the huge data leak it’s suffered, claiming it’s been the victim of an external hack. Over the weekend, an international team of journalists announced that it had obtained what’s been referred to as the “biggest leak in history”: A 2.6-terabyte stash of data about offshore…
Eat your heart out, Star Wars. This long-exposure photo shows British Army soldiers being taught how to use the L12A2 para-flare during a training mission earlier this year. It’s quite something to look at. The hand held device shoots bright, rocket propelled flares high up into the sky in order to signal the position of…
SLAC’s National Accelerator Laboratory is already home to the world’s brightest X-ray laser—but it’s getting an upgrade. The $1 billion project will see the device become 10,000 times brighter and 8,000 times faster. The X-ray laser will eventually throw out up to a million pulses per second. That will allow it to probe the the…
This is the future of in-flight entertainment according to the aerospace giant Thales. Called Digital Sky, the prototype system provides 21-inch touchscreens that take up a huge swathe of the seat back. The Points Guy spotted the displays at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg. The site explains that the large HD screens are installed…
Your RAM’s about to get an upgrade. Samsung has announced the world’s first 10-nanometer 8-gigabit DRAM chips, and it promises that they’ll be 30 percent faster and 20 percent more efficient than what went before. The new memory chips use a much smaller 10-nanometer manufacturing technique than the 20-nanometer version that Samsung’s been using since…
Last week, the autonomous racing series that is Roborace unveiled what its cars will look like. But now we also know what will control them: Nvidia’s liquid-cooled Drive PX 2 computers, which crunch through 24 trillion AI operations every single second. Nvidia first announcedthe car-specific computer at the start of the year. Said to be…
If the ongoing Flint water crisis has taught us anything, it’s that providing clean running water to millions of people is an optional luxury. Wait, that’s not right. But without being sarcastic, it’s difficult to understand why Mayor de Blasio has postponed further work on Water Tunnel 3, a vital infrastructure program to safeguard water…
I know that hypotheses need to be proven by experimentation and all, but was it really ever debatable that giving elderly patients a fluffy robot seal would make them happier? In any case, the answer is yes, obviously. Parois a $5,000 therapy seal that’s said to have therapeutic effects on elderly individuals with dementia. The…
Among the many different hazards Google’s cars have to handle on the road is one particularly annoying one: pedestrians acting like jerks when they see Google’s cute little machines in the wild. During the SXSW conference last month, Director of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project Chris Urmson detailed the weirdest things that the cars have seen…
How is it even possible to have this much control over an ordinary piece of string? Once again, Kuma Films have taken an unusual interest and captured it in stunning detail—in this case, some of Taiwan’s finest traditional spinning top enthusiasts. Watch as they land their tops on objects of every size or height with…
Yesterday, news broke that Google will be discontinuing services for Revolv smart hubs, rendering a lot of people’s smart homes anything but. Following some (highly justified) backlash, the company has said it will help individual owners, possibly including compensation. In statements posted to Twitter and given out by Nest’s PR, the Google-owned company is encouraging…
Finish him! Every gamer knows when that Mortal Kombat voice reigns down, something truly horrific is about to happen to your dazed opponent. We’re talking about fatalities. We’re talking about seeing a character’s skeleton or ripping someone’s heart out or punching their head off or turning them into blood goo or whatever else totally sick…
Making handmade goods might be the easy part when you consider all the work that goes into selling those products online. Now Etsy is giving its sellers a new tool for building a standalone website that easily populates with data from Etsy’s own online marketplace, making launching and maintaining an e-commerce site a whole lot…