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Google just combined music with its penchant for adorable animations. The result is called Chrome Music Labs, and it’s a tool to help kids learn about music and sound. But even if you’re not a youngster oblivious to the sonic world of beats, waves, and arpeggios, the site is still addictive as hell. Chrome Music…
Don’t be too quick to thank El Niño for the last wave of storms that blessed the West Coast with swamped reservoirs, replenished snowpack, and spectacular flaming palm trees. Turns out that El Niño had a little help—precipitation was increased by an estimated 15 percent thanks to cloud-seeding. According to the Los Angeles Times, LA’s…
It’s because though English is a Germanic language (the grammar and core vocabulary comes from that), there are a lot of words that come from the Romance (Latin-based) languages too which was leaked into English when French-speaking Normans ruled England. That explains why there are a lot of twin words that mean the same thing…
On a cold day, nothing hits the spot like a big steaming bowl of salty, fatty, delicious ramen. We can’t promise it will fill you up in dessert form, but watching SweetAmbs work is satisfying enough. Gentle piped icing is the basis for the noodles as well as the chashu pork, soft-boiled egg, chopsticks, and…
Sometimes the person you love is perfect except for one little, tiny, unavoidable, totally obnoxious thing. Director Lacey Leavitt and writer Robert O’Twomney teamed up to film The Costanza Breakups, three short vignettes based on responses to an Ask Reddit thread about reasons people have ended relationships that most resembled the famously picky Seinfeld character…
Chipotle’s reputation for food safety took a dive recently after a high-profile E.coli outbreak. The fast-food chain even closed all of its locations for a nationwide food safety meeting last month, but that hasn’t stopped continued problems—a Boston-area Chipotle closed down Tuesday after employees were diagnosed with a norovirus. The restaurant will be “fully sanitized,”…
For a brief moment, Ars Technica published a detailed article listing all the new features coming to Android N. It was taken down, but not before the page got archived on sites like Reddit and other Android blogs. Here’s exactly what we learned from the leak. Unlike past years, Android will be releasing an early…
Blockbuster movies that cost millions of dollars with hundreds of talented people working on them still manage to screw up all the time. Whether the screw ups pop up because of editing or deleted scenes or just plain forgetfulness, the most embarrassing movie mistakes are often in the giant sized plot holes that the filmmakers…
If you needed a reminder of just how powerful our telescopes have become, few images tell it like this cosmic gem. No, that isn’t the Eye of Sauron glowering at us from across the void: It’s the sharpest view yet of a debris disk surrounding a dying star 4,000 light years away. And it hints…
We may be one step closer to quantum computing that’s inherently protected from errors. Physicists at the University of Copenhagen have successfully created an exotic type of pseudo-particle that is immune to outside interference. The results are described in a new paper in Nature. Unlike a classical computer, with bits representing 0’s and 1’s, a…
3D TVs may have gone the way of the Dodo, but as the Oculus Rift has proven, a third dimension can make video games far more immersive. That even goes for the 2D Nintendo classics you grew up playing, thanks to a new emulator with a intelligent algorithm that automatically converts those games to 3D.…
As Android Wear devices and the Apple Watch nibble away at the luxury watch market, Switzerland is fighting back with unorthodox new designs, like Dominique Renaud’s new DR01 Twelve First, that manages to improve its traditional functionality while still looking completely bizarre. Designed by famed horologist Dominique Renaud who actually left retirement to bring the…
Lawmakers in West Virginia are excited about new legislation that lifted a ban on raw milk. They’re so excited that they recently celebrated by drinking some raw milk. Now, many of those lawmakers are sick. Representative Pat McGeehan (seen in agony in the photo above) says that he doesn’t think he or his colleagues’ illnesses…
The former high school classmates and obscure family members who populate my Facebook feed will soon be able to do that cool face-swapping trick kids love these days. In related news, my urge to delete Facebook just increased tenfold. Mark Zuckerberg and his army have just acquired Masquerade, the company that built the popular face-swapping…
Using a football field, a drone, some peas, a few pepper flakes, grapes, and some people playing soccer, Mark Rober cleverly built what is probably the easiest to understand scale model of our solar system. What’s even more interesting is that he included Planet Nine too in the scale model just to show how damn…
Ren And Stimpy was a one-of-a-kind cartoon whose grotesque insanity made it a hit with kids and a source of outrage for parents. But as the Nerdwriter points out, that insanity was both incredibly calculated and a milestone in a legacy of edgy animation. John Kricfalusi, the show’s creator, originally apprenticed under Ralph Bakshi who…
Japan has closed one of its two remaining operational nuclear plants. The shutdown comes just days before the fifth anniversary of a catastrophic earthquake that triggered a tsunami and the biggest nuclear meltdown since Chernobyl. On Wednesday, a Japanese court ordered the shutdown of Takahaka Nuclear Plant in western Japan, citing poor safety measures. This…
Hey, remember that huge natural gas disaster near Los Angeles that state officials declared completely over on February 18th? It’s not over for the residents of Porter Ranch, many of whom have filed complaints with the LA Department of Public Health since returning to their homes two weeks ago. From October 28th to February 18th,…
Wired published an embarrassing correction to a story by Jason Tanz about Donald Trump today. Apparently he or his editors had a Chrome extension turned on that changed every mention of “Donald Trump” to “Someone With Tiny Hands.” But here’s the really funny part: Not only is this not the first time it has happened,…
Nom is the new pet project of YouTube co-founder Steve Chen. People are calling it the Twitch for internet chefs. The only problem? Filming a chef is a lot harder than filming a video game. The vast majority of professional cooking shows use multiple camera setups. Nom supports multi-cam, though how it will be implemented…
