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The specs needed to just power a VR headset are painfully high, so it stands to reason that the hardware used by developers to make those games will need to be something special. That’s what AMD is trying to deliver with its new Radeon Pro Duo, unveiled at the Game Developer’s Conference today. The new…
Mathematicians have discovered a surprising pattern in the expression of prime numbers, revealing a previously unknown “bias” to researchers. Primes, as you’ll hopefully remember from fourth-grade math class, are numbers that can only be divided by one or themselves (e.g. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, etc.). Their appearance in the roll call of…
A new study done by Canadian researchers takes a look at nitrates in ground water in the Mississippi Basin and finds bad news. If we stop using nitrogen fertilizers today, there will still be a three-decade legacy of excess nitrogen in water—and there’s a lawsuit right now that will decide who will foot the bill.…
While most people see a hammer and just see a hammer, The Art of Weapons sees the potential to turn the brute hardened steel into an axe. Basically, the head of the hammer turned into the axe blade and the claw side of the hammer got forged together to form one spike. The whole process…
After more than twelve hours of nail-biting anticipation, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars probe has finally phoned home, confirming that this morning’s launch was a complete success. The mission is now safely on its way to Mars. ExoMars is an ambitious new endeavor to hunt for signs of alien life on the Red Planet, managed…
It’s no secret that living in a dense city—with cars pumping out endless amounts of pollution —isn’t going to do wonders for your lungs. But one London tech company wants to know exactly how carcinogenic that air is, and it’s recruiting pigeons as part of its air-monitoring arsenal. As part of a program called Pigeon…
This new app is musical wizardry: Hum into your phone, and the humming is instantly transformed into a digital song, complete with onscreen sheet music. Samsung debuted the app, called Hum On!, at the SXSW in Austin this week. The notes to whatever tune you hum appear on your phone’s screen in a flash, letting…
John Kasich held a town hall meeting in Mansfield, Ohio this weekend where he told a crowd the one thing we’ve been waiting to hear from a presidential candidate: The flying car is on its way. From WKYC: “Since I’ve been governor, we have added more than 60,000 manufacturing jobs in Ohio,” [Kasich said]. He…
Every now and again, we like to bring you a tip that’s been around for ages, but which may have somehow escaped your attention. Today’s case in point: the way you can highlight text in an email to automatically quote it in your reply. It works in Apple’s email clients and Gmail. Say there’s a…
You know what I really really want when I’m on a plane? A computer strapped to my face. No. Really. I want to be able to privately play my games and watch my shows and write my lesbian erotica without 24B glancing at my screen. Privacy while traveling was where my head immediately went when…
Time traveling back into the past is almost always a bad idea. Everybody is racist, everything is dirty, and you’ll probably get some terrible disease and/or get stabbed with a sword that everyone is carrying but you. The world is generally dumber and worse off. And on top of that! You might not even be…
Say hello to Timurlengia euotica, a horse-sized dinosaur that lived roughly 90 million years ago. Discovered in Uzbekistan, this newly described species was a distant relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, and it’s helping scientists explain how relatively small carnivores evolved into the gigantic predators that dominated the Late Cretaceous. There’s a surprising and inexplicable absence of…
You can now add lemons to the long list of random objects that can be used to start a fire. But unlike just generating friction and heat by rubbing two sticks together, the process of starting a fire using a piece of citrus fruit involves first turning it into a working battery with copper and…
Donald Trump rallies almost always devolve into autograph-signing sessions. And many of those signed items are showing up on eBay. A wide variety of Trump-signed items are just a click away, if that’s the kind of kinky shit you’re into. Like this Bible, autographed by Trump, which is going for $3,500: The only bible signed…
Spiders are notorious for their bizarre and often violent mating practices. New research shows that, in order to avoid getting eaten during sex, male nursery spiders will tie up their partners with silken threads. And yes, it’s as horrible as it sounds. The males of at least 30 spider species have been observed to wrap…
And the kick is good! I always think of a field goal in football whenever something splits the uprights of two standing posts only in this instance, it’s not a football and a goalpost but a human being in a wingsuit that’s flying through the narrow opening of two antennas. Watch as Guillame Galvani jumps…
It’s a technique that’s used around the world to show off the meals available in restaurants, but artists at a small factory in Japan are absolute masters at making the plastic demo meals look almost more delicious than the real thing. It’s definitely better than looking at faded photos in a printed menu, that’s for…
Radiation is all around us and too much of radiation is a bad thing so… are we all just screwed from all the radio waves and microwaves and ultraviolet radiation and rainbows and x-rays and radon and nuclear radiation in the world? Not exactly. Ted-Ed explains in the video animation below how not all radiation…
The tangled mess of wires under your desk isn’t just an eyesore. It can also make it impossible to figure out where every gadget on your desk is plugged in. Is it safe to unplug this adapter? Oops, there goes the backup drives. Unless, of course, everything was properly labeled with easy to interpret stickers.…
In the years after World War II, Berlin saw a number of new skyscrapers erected to provide the burgeoning middle class with affordable housing. Even though many were designed by famous architects they were eventually viewed as concrete monsters and moldered in disuse, until recently. In a recent series, 36-year-old photographer Malte Brandenburg sought to…
