Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
This is what the sun looks like over the course of a year. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the Sun and all of its fiery grace from January 1, 2015 to January 28, 2016. That beautiful burning orb looks unbelievable in this amount of detail. NASA Goddard writes: SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) captures a…
In 2010, DARPA announced it was creating an autonomous, submarine-hunting war machine that would be manned with exactly zero people. Now, that vehicle is ready for action. The Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV, is now scheduled to be launched April 17 from the Vigor Shipyards in Oregon. The ACTUV will continue sea-trials…
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have produced tiny brains made of human neurons and cells. These mini-brains could radically change how drugs are tested, replacing the many animals currently being used for neurological scientific research. These mini-brains may be small—about the size of a common housefly—but they still exhibit characteristics typical…
Whoa, did you feel that earthquake? Even if you didn’t, your phone did, and a new app from seismologists aims to capture those vibrations in your very own pocket seismology lab. The University of California Berkeley’s Seismological Laboratory revealed the new app, which they’ve dubbed MyShake, at the AAAS meeting today and simultaneously released it…
Damn. It’s like hitting a wall. Or rather, it’s like a wall hitting you. This footage shows giant wave after giant wave pummeling a ship and when you think they’ve finally weathered the storm, in comes the biggest and baddest wave that smacks the boat silly. The maniacal laughter from the person taking the footage…
Picasa, Google’s photo storage service that you’ve probably forgotten exists, will officially die starting May 1. Which is fine by us, considering how great Google Photos is. “After much thought and consideration, we’ve decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos,” Google…
Apple’s been real good to Dr. Dre. First they went and bought his shitty headphones company and now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, they’re bankrolling his new show, Vital Signs. Sources close to the alleged production say Sam Rockwell and Mo McCrae have already been cast as supporting characters. Dre himself will be playing the…
Tim Morgan, a commercial pilot with years of experience, has created a ten minute video he claims will help anyone safely land a 737 in an emergency. The notion that someone could plop down in a cockpit, with zero experience, and pilot a 737 to a safe landing is ludicrous, but that doesn’t make this…
Movies are sort of at their most honest when things go off script and unplanned. It’s when actors transform into their character and react as their character would to certain situations that you get some truly hilarious stuff. Here are some improvised scenes put together by Screen Rant from movies like Guardians of the Galaxy,…
Back in 1996 a young boy wrote a letter for school with predictions about the year 2016. Christopher Janitz was just nine years old and little did he know his mother would save that letter and present it to him on his 29th birthday. Here at Paleofuture we love to look at past visions of…
Batman has been a lot of absurd things to Square-Enix’s Play Arts Kai toy line—cowboy, steampunk internet fever dream, unholy draconic Final Fantasy abomination, and yes, sometimes just plain old Batman. This latest figure is a little less plain and a little more joyously crazy: Samurai Batman is finally a thing once more. Bushido Batman…
Australia’s iconic koala—a species already threatened with extinction—is currently in the midst of a devastating chlamydia epidemic. Some scientists are now arguing that in order to save these cute marsupials from extinction, we may have to euthanize them in a massive cull. Chlamydia is an ancient sexually transmitted disease that affects more than just human…
The 2016 election has intensely focused on the debate surrounding the NSA’s endless amount of spying powers. But when Iowa voters recently voiced their opinion on who should be in charge of that murky world of cyber surveillance (among other things), they didn’t know they were already targets themselves. A company called Dstillery used Mobile…
The vagina and clitoris are mysterious things. No, seriously they are. Scientists make big bucks studying the penis, but the vagina and clitoris often languish in official research circles. They languish in the bedroom too. Lesbians (intimately familiar with the pootenanny) experience significantly more orgasms then straight or bisexual woman. If woman aren’t getting down…
While building a 3D model of the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia, archivists at the Smithsonian uncovered hand-written notes and markings in areas of the spacecraft not seen in more than 40 years. The remarkable etchings offer a new glimpse into what life was life on the way to the Moon. Recently, every single nook…
The shoe-maker ASICS just announced its acquissition of FitnessKeeper, Inc., which owns the popular exercise app Runkeeper. What will ASICS do with its shiny new app and its 33 million users? It’s very unclear.
If you’re a stickler for details and accuracy, don’t assume that making your own cosplay props and costumes is cheaper than buying a replica. Often it can cost thousands of dollars to get it right, so Hasbro and Marvel are teaming up on a line of detailed role play accessories that will make accurate cosplay…
There have been hundreds of Marvel characters introduced in the comics over the years, and it seems like almost every last one has showed up in Hasbro’s Marvel Legends figure line. But you can only squeeze so much detail into a three or six-inch figure, which is why Hasbro is now supersizing its Marvel Legends…
Apple’s latest whizzy user interface technology is found in Force Touch and 3D Touch, both of which use haptic feedback to make touchpads and screens come to life. But it might not have been so new after all, because now Apple’s being sued for allegedly infringing three patents over the tech. A company called Immersion…
You shouldn’t always believe your eyes—because there’s much out there that you can’t see. A new, free algorithm created by UCLA engineers enables you to discern details in images that would be impossible to observe any other way. Originally developed for high-speed image processing of cancer cells in blood, the Phase Stretch Transform algorithm identifies…
