Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Greenland is one of the brightest spots on planet Earth, but ominously enough, its gleaming surface darkens with each passing year, thanks to a strange series of physical processes, one of which cannot be seen with the naked eye. According to a fascinating new study led by Columbia’s Earth Institute and published today the journal…
Mega Bloks, those weird, distant-cousins of Lego, have gotten surprisingly elaborate over the past few years. In fact, they’re the only way you can build your own official Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 vehicles and boats like the folks from Glorious Eye Candy—who then blew them all up in front of a high-speed camera.…
Open access science journal PLOS One is once again under scrutiny after a Creationist-minded research paper about the evolution of human hands got through peer review. Nature News reports that the paper, led by Cai-Hua Xiong of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, was published in early January. However, its Creationist bent…
Don’t ask why anyone would ever make a wooden switchblade just appreciate that we live in a world where a wooden switchblade could be made. John Heisz put together a wooden knife that pops out like any old switchblade and it’s pretty neat. He sands the wooden blade down and grinds it like you would…
Facebook’s Messenger app, one of the most downloaded apps in existence, is slowly but surely allowing you to do just about everything. You can call an Uber, settle up checks, or use it as a social network. It can even be a Skype replacement. So adding Spotify seems like the next logical step. Spotify’s addition…
The future could belong to robot octopuses: soft, flexible, durable, with displays written across their super-stretchy skin. Scientists at Cornell University have just taken the first step toward such robot with a light-up flexible skin that stretches to nearly six times its original size, splitting the difference between skin and screen. In a new paper…
An alleged gunman in Dallas pulled up to a car on his hoverboard, shot the driver, and made off on his two-wheeled scooter. This ain’t no Griff Tannen shenanigans. Fox 4 in Dallas reports that the unnamed victim was shot at a Dallas gas station around 4am this morning. The hoverboarding suspect, described as a…
Spoiler alert. Spoiler freaking alert. If you somehow managed to exist on this very Earth without knowing that there are twist endings in films such as Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back and Fight Club and Planet of the Apes, um, now you know. Here is what CineFix considers 10 of the best twists in movie…
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was one of the tent pole cartoons/toy lines of the ‘80s. And while Adventure Time feels like much less of a toy commercial, the two animated series still come together wonderfully with this custom He-Man and Finn mashup figure by Robotic Industries. Jake as Battle Cat completes the…
“I wasn’t being held hostage,” Chris Christie said today, explaining why popular interpretations ofhis haunted expression on Super Tuesday are wrong. “All these arm chair psychiatrists should give it a break,” Christie continued. Sure, bud. “I’ve had a lot of fun with people on the internet too,” Christie said, acknowledging his moment as the internet’s…
Apple launched a tech support Twitter account this morning. It already has over 55,000 followers. Shockingly, no one’s trolling it. People are asking actual tech support questions. “We’re here to provide tips, tricks and helpful information when you need it most,” the Twitter bio reads. “And if you have a question, well – we’re here…
Axel Braun is about as close as you can get to a household name in porn. He’s behind the biggest adult film titles of the last ten years, and his porn parody, Star Wars XXX, is one of the best selling adult films of all time. He also can’t make a film for $500,000, which…
Amicus briefs in support of Apple in its court battle with the FBI are rolling in today, and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Technology’s contribution is a horror story of impending dystopia, with eerie parallels to 1984. The CIT technologists lay out a scenario in which the FBI uses the Apple ruling…
Voltron was one of the original ‘cool transforming toy robot sets that combined to make a bigger, awesomer, toy robot’ but given the restrictions of ‘80s manufacturing techniques, the giant robot had some limitations when it came to posability. But Toynami’s new Ultimate Voltron EX doesn’t. Decades after the original Voltron set hit toy store…
Back in 1999 President Bill Clinton held an “internet town hall” hosted by a company called Excite@Home. Clinton answered questions submitted from the 50,000 people watching along. And despite the fact that Clinton admitted he was “technologically impaired,” it was essentially the first presidential Ask Me Anything (AMA). On November 8, 1999 Clinton sat at…
Welcome back to Hell’s Club, a place “where all fictional characters meet… outside of all logic.” Which explains why there’s three copies of Jean-Claude Van Damme looking for each other. This video is the creation of Antonio Maria da Silva, whose original Hell’s Club came out last summer and garnered 5.5 million views for its…
Get your best leather on, blast some Electric Wizard, and say a quick prayer to Satan, because we’re going to bone church. The Sedlec Ossuary is a tiny Roman Catholic chapel beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in the Czech Republic. Back in the 1200s, Sedlec was considered especially pious, and therefore a very…
We get it, ok? Virtual reality—it’s all very exciting and cool. Who wouldn’t want to be transported to another world that’s way more awesome than this one? But Samsung, who’s known overdoing it, is now turning popular roller coasters across North America into insane torture machines using Gear VR headsets. That image above are what…
Sure, it sucks to lose bone and muscle mass in outer space, but on the flip side, astronauts gain inches. After a year of weightless suspension in a tin can, astronaut Scott Kelly is now a full two inches taller than his twin brother Mark and has unlimited gloating rights, NASA’s Jeff Williams told CNN…
The Big Apple feels even bigger through the lens of Jeffrey Martin’s full-frame 50MP camera. This magnificent 360-degree panoramic photo of New York he created was assembled from multiple handheld shots. The final image measures a staggering 203,200 by 101,600 pixels in size—or just over 20 gigapixels. If you live in New York, there’s a…