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The world mostly knows IKEA for its flatpack furniture and mediocre meatballs. In the past year, however, the company’s doubled down on a new category: gadgets. And you know what? They’re kind of awesome. IKEA just announced its new summer line, and a lot of it is what you’d expect from IKEA in the summertime.…
Martha Stewart has always been on the bleeding edge of domestic tech disruption: Using drones to survey her vegetable plots and 3D printers to squirt out funky custom napkin rings. Now she’s employing hoverboards to efficiently zip around mansions, as one does. On a visit to Qatar, where hoverboard imports are still legal, Stewart borrowed…
A new study has shown that people with Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED), associated with bursts of overblown aggression, are twice as likely as healthy people to have Toxoplasma gondii. This parasite, famously carried by cats, has been shown to mess with the neurochemistry of mice. Could it be doing the same to us? Published in…
A volcano spewing ash, magical forest fireflies, and a monkey who feels just like we all do about winter weather. These are just a few of the remarkable photos from the Smithsonian’s annual photo contest. The winning photos for 2015, released this week, were selected from more than 46,000 submissions. The grand prize winner, seen…
A team of scientists has hacked a light-responsive protein into tadpoles, and used it as an on-off switch to suppress tumor growth. It’s a fascinating development that could one day lead to new tools for fighting cancer in humans. Optogenetics, first developed by neuroscientists at UC Berkeley, is an exciting new field that’s precipitated a…
Hitchcock is the unquestioned master of suspense. But what is it about his scenes that makes them so gripping, and why do they stand up to repeated viewings, even when you know the twist? To answer this, the Nerdwriter turned to blocking—how you position stuff and people in relation to each other—specifically, the blocking in…
Devices like Nest Cam and Canary can keep an eye on your home while you’re away, but all you really need to set up your own home security system is an old phone or tablet you’re not using, an internet connection, and the right app. Here’s how to get started and what you should know.…
Well, it finally happened. After months of crappy cam videos, the Blu-ray version of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is available on torrent sites all over the internet. Let me be very honest with you, though: you probably shouldn’t download it. Lots and lots of people are downloading it, however. Torrent Freak reports that 250,000…
A new artificial intelligence chatbot by the name of Tay is here, and wow, I wish it weren’t! The bot is the brainchild of Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams, which created it in order to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding.” As Microsoft Power User points out, Tay was recently released…
The video game versions of blockbuster movies are usually made available close to the film’s release to capitalize on the hype, but the Lego video game version of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is six months late. Watching the game’s latest trailer, though, the wait appears to have been worth it. Not only does the…
Have you ever wanted to try porn in virtual reality? Secretly, we all have, and Pornhub just made it insanely easy. The world’s biggest adult site partnered with established VR porn store BaDoink to offer free 360-degree content. It is obviously NFSW. If you’ve never tried VR porn, let me tell you: It is a…
You can’t please everyone when it comes to resurrecting one of the most beloved franchises in film history. So if you were disappointed with how Star Wars: The Force Awakens ended, maybe you’ll prefer the How It Should Have Ended alternate finale featuring Kylo Ren getting his comeuppance. As a bonus, this HISHE was animated…
Screwing up a nice flat sheet of paper is usually a sign of failure—but if the material’s graphene, it may be a good idea. Researchers have shown that crumpling the carbon-based material can actually provide it with some impressive new properties. Researchers from Brown University have been putting wrinkles in smooth sheets of graphene. In…
Bubbles are delicate little things, which are incredibly sensitive to what goes on around them. And when you hit one with a sound wave, it expands and contacts, creating beautiful patterns in the fluid that surrounds it. A bubble is (usually) a small, spherical pocket of gas in a another gas or liquid. When sound–which…
Like opening Chrome apps using Google’s dedicated launcher? Tough: As of July, it will be entirely scrapped on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Why? Google says its “found that users on Windows, Mac, and Linux prefer to launch their apps from within Chrome.” Apps, of course, are here to stay. The launcher will continue to live…
Intel has announced that it’s moving away from its current “tick-tock” chip production cycle and instead shifting to a three-step development process that will “lengthen the amount of time [available to] utilize… process technologies.” For years now, Intel has run its chip business on a ‘tick-tock’ basis: First it develops a new manufacturing technique in…
In case Google’s free voice calling or Skype wasn’t enough for you, iPhone users on AT&T now have a stupid-simple way to keep in touch when they’re travelling. Wi-Fi Calling—connecting a phone call over Wi-Fi, rather than the cellular network—has been a feature on iPhones since iOS 9 came out last year. In that latest…
Randall Monroe’s XKCD does a stellar job of explaining scientific concepts while also making people laugh. So, it makes a surprising amount of sense for those comics to find their way into high school textbooks. Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has agreed a deal to use pages from Monroe’s latest book, The Thing Explainer, which explains…
Mix a little dirt and mud, shape it with your hands, and out pops a beautiful shiny mud ball that’s actually the Japanese art of Hikaru Dorodango. It takes so much more work than that, of course, but it really looks like a person is just (skillfully) playing with mud. And then you see the…
Nintendo may not ever be on the leading edge of gaming, but it writes some bangers. Even the Wii shop song—which is essentially the home console version of hold music—is fertile ground for mashups. Soundcloud’s obsession with the Wii Shop jam also intersected with many of its other memes (“Bonfire,” Smash Mouth/Shrek, Space Jam, etc.)…
