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A cheap digital watch can keep far better time than even the most complicated of Swiss watches. But there’s still something undeniably appealing about watching all those gears, springs, and cogs spinning about—and this incredibly complicated clock that writes out the time has them in abundance. Designed, engineered, and built by students at the Tohoku…
The rumors were true! This morning leaders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves. In honor of this momentous discovery, the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, is hosting a live webcast today at 1pm EST: “Ripple Effects: A Forum on Gravitational Waves.” The panel will consist…
Last August, photographer Will Burrard-Lucas undertook an assignment for the World Wildlife Fund in the Zambezi Region of Namibia. Over the course of the next three months, his high definition camera traps snapped remarkable images of the region’s most elusive wildlife. Here are the very best photos of the lot. Unlike traditional nature photography, camera…
Celia Gomez edited scenes from The Simpsons side-by-side with the movies those scenes are paying homage to and it’s just so much fun. We get to see how the hilarious animators of The Simpsons have repurposed and refashioned those iconic movies to be set in Springfield. That means seeing our favorite characters on The Simpsons…
Popular Science has a new interview with President Obama about science and technology. And with it, he has effectively helped kill the word “nerd.” The word hasn’t been a pejorative in roughly 30 years. But when the President of the United States acknowledges that, we can officially call it a meaningless term. PS: Do you…
Turning quadcopters into vehicles from the Star Wars universe isn’t new: Everything from TIE Fighters, to the Falcon, to even R2-D2 have taken flight. But none have been as convincing as Adam Woodworth’s Imperial Shuttle quadcopter with wings that actually retract. Woodworth used a popular technique in which a printed paper model of the Imperial…
It’s official: we’ve directly detected gravitational waves. And unless you happen to be a PhD physicist, you probably have a few questions. Gizmodo is here to help. Well, actually, Dr. Amber Stuver of the LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana is here to help. She’s one of the many physicists involved in the painstaking, months-long data…
The New York Police Department has admitted to using controversial cell phone spying systems known as Stingrays—which can be used to track the location and intercept personal communications of nearby cellphone users. In a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union, the NYPD confirmed using the Stingray more than 1,000 times between 2008 and…
Imagine a game like Grand Theft Auto but instead of committing crime and stealing cars and robbing people you’re having harmless fun and partying and seeing Colombia. This short, There and Back: Colombia by Spencer Creigh & Michael Barth, is basically that. You get to experience a person’s travel through a country from a completely…
So just how heat-resistant are the highly-engineered materials developed for use in things like jet engines, nuclear reactors, and gas turbines? Tough enough to change the meaning of the old saying, “a snowball’s chance in hell.” Apparently, its odds are quite good of surviving—when dressed appropriately. To help celebrate Thomas Edison’s birthday this year, GE…
Is it still magic if you know how it’s done? Is it still an illusion if computers are hiding the work? Marco Tempest plays around with that idea as two dozen drones buzz and fly all around him, seemingly controlled by his every move. Magic or not, it’s just cool to see 24 drones work…
The alt-rock band that made “viral music videos” a thing with treadmill gymnastics and Rube Goldberg machines on YouTube is back. This time, OK Go is busting open pinatas in zero gravity. To shoot the music video for their new single, “Upside Down & Inside Out” (released directly to Facebook earlier today), the band boarded…
Airbnb decided to voluntarily release data in December to show just how much of a boon to the local economy the service can be. The problem: Airbnb apparently tampered with the data before they released it. According to Inside Airbnb, a blog dedicated to home rental company, Airbnb “ensured a flattering picture by carrying out…
Archive.org is quickly becoming the place to visit whenever 90s internet nostalgia strikes. Last week, we reported on an amazing collection of MS-DOS malware in the Malware Museum. Now, the site has launched a collection old games from Windows 3.1. The new archive includes popular games like Brickbuster, Chessnet, and the classic Election ‘92. These…
A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine is bolstering a potential link between Zika and microcephaly, a rare birth defect in which babies are born with abnormally small heads. Researchers from Slovenia discovered traces of Zika in the brain tissue of a fetus whose mother became infected with the virus during the…
I don’t know what sort of negotiations this person made with gravity and the magnets of Earth and like, the ground because he came away with a freaking steal. The balance it takes to pull off all these crazy tricks on a moped and the creativity it takes to imagine them are just from another…
Last September Sphero set the bar impossibly high when it comes to BB-8 toys, but at the 2016 New York Toy Fair this weekend, Spin Master might actually have the last word. Not only does its new remote control BB-8 stand over 16-inches tall, it’s the first to respond to your voice commands. Including the…
Joseph Delgado is my new hero. The 21-year-old computer science student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, took his Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 and morphed the 8-bit NES classic into a virtual reality adventure. It looks super fun. The development process sounds relatively simple, too. Delgado converted the 2D sprites into 3D models…
There was little doubt that combining superheroes and anthropomorphic toy trains would be a big hit with kids. But following up on the success of the initial reveal at Comic-Con last year, Mattel is going to introduce 35 new DC Super Friends/Thomas & Friends Minis mashups including Emily in a Poison Ivy getup, a Solomon…
Four-year-olds get to play with Power Wheels, teenagers get to drive real cars, but how do all those kids in-between quench their need for speed? With the new Arrow Smart-Kart from Actev Motors that sounds as feature-packed as a Tesla Model S, without the $70,000 price tag. There are actually a few different features that…
