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Apple’s patent wars with Samsung are the stage for a multi-billion dollar fight for cash, bragging rights, and ideally control of the entire smartphone industry. Jawbone vs Fitbit is equally vicious and petty, but with far less at stake. A brief recap, in case you’ve been sitting at home wondering about more relevant things: Jawbone…
Sodium, you know what that is. Water, you know what that is. Now watch one of the oldest chemistry class tricks, the combination of two things you already know for an explosion you might have forgotten: if you throw sodium metal into water, it basically sparks up real big and blows up nicely. Here’s Crazy…
Drones getting sucked into the engines of aircraft is the defining nightmare scenario that has airports buying countermeasures, and the FAA deploying an app. But what if a drone encountering a 747 wouldn’t be as bad as everyone thinks? A new study uses data from bird strikes to try and model the frequency and severity…
The city of Sydney is setting up a new library inside a building that looks, depending on who you ask, like a stack of plates, a spaceship taking off, or a cyborg hairdo. The library will occupy two floors, and will house a lot more than just books. There are a lot of gorgeous libraries…
It has all the makings of those ASMR triggering videos we all love to feel on our scalp and spine but it’s also a little bit unsettling too since the whole video moves in reverse. We’re not watching a tomato get chopped up but rather seeing it get unsliced and that reversal of action throws…
Because the world keeps getting more bizarre, it turns out that the best way to get these microbots to navigate around obstacles is to smear them with the bacteria that causes urinary tract infections and send them through an electrical grid. See a demonstration! In a recent issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Robots,…
Turn it up to 8K if you can (you can’t), because this truly awesome video of master bladesmith Tony Swatton working on a Roman Gladius Sword made from damascus steel is a treat to watch. Damascus steel is basically art in a material as the layers get built, this sword is especially awesome because it…
Storks used to be majestic creatures, but now, they are trash birds. That is the conclusion of ornithologists at the University of East Anglia, who have confirmed that white storks are abandoning their normal migratory pattern in droves, instead choosing to nest at landfills and eat our garbage year round. Since the mid 1980s, a…
It’s the 2016 drone one. It’s 15-year-old British pilot Luke Bannister at the World Drone Prix in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to be exact. But! But….!
In a move that should surprise exactly no one, Instagram is testing an algorithm-based newsfeed for its users, similar to what you see on Facebook. And according to a blog post from the company, they plan to force this change on everyone in the long run. The New York Times was the first to report…
A geophysicist in California says the San Andreas fault could be triggered into rupturing by the smaller San Jacinto fault nearby, causing a single devastating earthquake. Such a “joint rupture” may have happened before—and it could very well happen again. In 1812, an earthquake rocked San Juan Capistrano in southern California, damaging buildings and killing…
According to a report from the Italian newswire service ANSA, Pope Francis will make his grand entrance on Instagram on Saturday, March 19th, under the handle @Franciscus. The Earth-shaking piece of intel reportedly came from Dario Viganò, Prefect for Communications, during an appearance on Vatican Radio on Tuesday. With the whole rest of the week…
If you live in DC, I really hope you get to work from home on Wednesday. Starting at midnight tonight, the nation’s capital is closing its entire metro for at least 29 hours for a system-wide safety survey of electrical cables. The Washington Post reports that the unprecedented closure is a safety response to a…
Tattoo removal is a growth industry. And I suspect it’s only going to get bigger in 2017 when people sober up after the general election this November. With Donald Trump closer than ever to being the next President of the United States, supporters are showing their allegiance to the man in increasingly drastic fashion. And…
Dutch history meets modern energy initiatives in artist Daan Roosegaarde’s latest installation, which uses beams of green light to visualize the movement of the country’s windmills. Blades on these mills can reach 170mph, but special tracking software and a thermal camera mounted behind the blades keep the light beams pointed at their targets, connecting each…
Researchers have confirmed that a 68-million-year-old fossil found in Montana came from a pregnant Tyrannosaurus Rex. This not only will make it easier for other scientists to sex different fossils, it gives us an insight into the evolution of birds. Scientists from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have…
At the age of nine, I became the first kid in my elementary school class to get braces. They did their job, but by the time I left college, I’d lost my retainers and my teeth had drifted back into disarray. Imagine the feeling of kinship, then, when I saw this blog post by a…
Fall is probably the most picturesque season but there’s always something beautiful about seeing the stillness of winter give way to the color of spring. Here’s a collection of photographs from photographer Jim Brandenburg that documents the transformation from winter to spring. According to National Geographic, Brandenburg took a photo everyday in Minnesota from the…
Indoor plumbing and unlimited clean water aren’t available everywhere. That’s why this clever, compact shower that recycles the same water several times—after purifying it after each use!—seems very handy. It’s called Hotaru, and TechCrunch spotted it at South by Southwest this week in Austin. The Tokyo-based startup behind it says that its shower could let…
It’s magnets! Seriously. There’s a layer of iron underneath the cue ball that gets nudged and pulled by a strong magnet inside the pool table so that it gets put on a completely different track from the rest of the balls in pool. That track is the one that spits out the cue ball. The…
