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3D printers have revolutionized the speed at which prototype parts can be created, but what if your deadline is so tight you can’t wait for the printer to finish before the part is shipped out? That’s easy, you just pack up the entire printer in a box, with a battery for power, and send it…
Happy Apple day! According to the rumor mill, we’re getting two new gadgets today: a 4-inch iPhone SE and an 9.7-inch iPad Pro. The new iPhone, which will probably be called “SE” for reasons still unknown, will reportedly be a throwback to the 5s with its manageable, 4-inch screen. But also expect some lighter specs.…
One of the major elements of the the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Program will be the gigantic SR 99 tunnel which will host a double-deck roadway under downtown Seattle. In this stunning new photo, you are looking south inside the tunnel dug by Bertha, the SR 99 tunneling machine. It is hard to say less…
The quest for perfect ice is older than mankind, and slightly younger than the quest for perfect whiskey. One of those problems can be solved for you with a stroke of genius. But why is ice cloudy in the first place? Cocktail Chemistry explains that impurities in water are the last to freeze, and those…
Designer Love Hultén is probably best known for his Pixel Vision, a tiny portable gaming machine made of wood that’s reminiscent of the folding Game Boy Advance. His latest creation doesn’t play games, but it does generate mesmerizing fractals guaranteed to burn hours of time. Unlike the Pixel Vision, the new Echo Observatory isn’t available…
Cuba is one of the least digitally connected nations in the world. But Barack Obama has announced that Google will start providing the island nation with internet service. Speaking to ABC News during his historic trip to Cuba, Obama explained that “one of the things that we’ll be announcing here is that Google has a…
Ever wondered if your choice of job was influenced by what your parents did for a living? Well, researchers at Facebook have taken a look at parent-child profession choices to find out. In a blog post, Facebook research staff Ismail Onur Filiz and Lada Adamic explain how they’ve sifted through 5.6 million parent-child pairs in…
Now this is a gadget. Just look at the 6-megawatt direct-drive generator, equipped with a huge permanent magnet rotor: it was designed by General Electric’s engineers and it is one of the largest of its kind that ever built. The numbers are impressive. The 150-ton generator is 24-feet wide, and it will be sitting hundreds…
The current scrap between Apple and the FBI feels timely and relevant to most of us. But as a new Bloomberg feature explains, it’s been brewing for at least 18 months. The feature explores some of the tensions between Apple and the FBI over the past 18 months. It makes clear the fact that the…
Ever wondered how tasty you are? In this video, Greg Foot has a biopsy of muscle taken from his leg in order to discover what it tastes like. It’s a reasonable thing to wonder, of course, but quite another to actually explore in detail. That doesn’t seem to bother Foot, who happily has a small…
A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University has discovered a flaw in iMessage on older version of iOS which makes it possible for a third party to intercept and decrypt images and video. A team led by Matthew D. Green believed that the encryption in iMessage could contain a weakness after studying the finer…
Standing desks are the latest way to trade comfort for the moral high ground, and their health benefits have always been dubious at best. Following an analysis of studies into their benefits, researchers have come up with a loud, resounding “meh”. A paper in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews analyzed 20 studies that looked…
Amidst all the startups and tasteless PR stunts, it’s easy to forget that South by Southwest is technically a music festival. Thankfully, the organizers didn’t forget, and have continued their years-old tradition of releasing all the music, DRM-free. Since 2005, SXSW has made music from participating artists freely available as MP3 downloads. Since manually downloading…
Manning the NOAA’s research station at the South Pole is a lonely job at the best of times. But when you’re watching the last sunset for half a year, things have to be feeling particularly bleak. The NOAA’s Jesse Milton describes the base as the “coldest, driest, flattest place you can imagine,” and that’s probably…
Lithium-ion batteries and aircraft have some bad blood: Boeing’s 787 Dreamliners were grounded three years ago because of battery fires, the FAA banned all lithium batteries in hold luggage, and now an innocent iPhone has caused a fire on an Alaska Air flight. According to a KOMO news report, a girl on a spring break…
Great Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council has a £200 million polar research vessel set for construction, and for some reason, they decided it was a good idea to ask the internet to come up with a name for it. The boat sounds pretty spiffy: it will be one of the world’s most advanced research vessels…
First, we taught robots how to walk and keep their balance, even when we tried to push them over. Now we’re teaching them to run?! AMBER, which stands for Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics Lab, is located at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There, they’re working on figuring out how to best construct robots that…
The infinite number of ways you can build a complicated Rube Goldberg machine makes it infinitely fascinating to watch them run. Even when they’re built from tiny watch parts like this Seiko creation, and are so small they can easily squeeze onto a table, instead of filling a massive warehouse. It’s a little disappointing that…
If you own one of Amazon’s pre-2012 Kindles, listen up: there’s a critical update that you need to install if you want to keep using it, and you must do so before March 22nd. According to an update on the company’s help community, a new update is required for anyone using a pre-2012 device that…
A university research team recently developed a new method for real-time facial reenactment that works with a regular web camera, overcoming several challenges in computer vision technology. It’s also creepy as hell. In a paper, the researchers lay out some key challenges facing computer modeling: reconstructing a scene from a video is difficult for computers…
