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So you’re heading to Frisco to experience the glorious splendor of Super Bowl City, but you waited too long to find a place to stay and now all the hotels are booked! Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered, bro. We scoured the internet to find the best the sharing economy has to offer. Rentals are…
With pizza delivery and Spotify integration under its belt just this week, Amazon’s now adding Uber support to its Alexa-powered speaker. Starting today, you can can yell “Request an Uber,” or lots of other variations on that phrase, and an Uber you shall receive. We managed to quickly setup the service under the “Skills” tab…
Russia Works shot this aerial footage of Homs, Syria and the city, which was the third largest in the country and once home to a population of over 800,000, has been completely destroyed. Buildings and homes have turned to rubble, the city look like the aftermath of the apocalypse, and the people have disappeared. It…
Earlier today, a volcano near the city of Kagoshima in Japan erupted, spewing lava and hurtling rocks nearly two miles away. The volcano is just 30 miles from the Sendai nuclear plant, but officials says there’s no immediate cause for concern. The blast happened in Kagoshima Prefecture at 6:56 p.m. local time. No reports of…
It’s official: The world champion of Go, Lee Sedol, will face off against Google Deepmind’s powerful artificial intelligence, called AlphaGo. A week ago, Google DeepMind’s team claimed to have built the best AI for the game in a scientific paper, and issued a public challenge to Sedol. DeepMind hopes it can prove that a powerful…
It’s generally assumed that when you reach retirement age, life starts to slow down. But not for mechanics David Anderson and Mathew Hine, who spent six months upgrading a 10 MPH mobility scooter into a record breaking dragster that officially hit a top speed of 107.6 MPH. Both David and Mathew hail from the Isle…
This morning, shortly before 8:30, a crane fell down on Worth Street in Tribeca. The pictures show extensive damage, but the full extent isn’t known yet. Over 100 firefighters have reported to the scene at Worth St. and Church St., and the FDNY has confirmed one fatality, a person sitting in a car on Worth,…
Yesterday, Morocco switched on the first section of its new Ouarzazate solar power plant. The new installation already creates 160 megawatts of power and is expected to grow to cover 6,000 acres by 2018—making it the largest in the world. The first wave of power production is known as Noor 1. Situated in the Sahara…
You probably know that shooting in RAW is, for most photography buffs, better than using JPG—but you might not know exactly why. This image should help. Austin Paz at Peta Pixel decided to give a visual demonstration of the difference between the two. He simply left the lens cap on his Canon 70D and grabbed…
Skimmers have been growing ever more advanced in recent years. Do you think you’d be observant enough to notice that this checkout front-plate was about to gobble up your card details? Krebs on Security has obtained these images of a card skimmer used on a self-checkout terminal at a Safeway store in Maryland. (You might…
To anyone who ever tells you that programming isn’t creative, show them this. In this video, Sébastien Rannou recreates the whole of Daft Punk’s “Aerodynamic” using just a hundred or so lines of code. And it sounds pretty damn great. In fact this is really just a teaser for what’s possible—because Rannou has taken it…
A United Nations panel has ruled that Julian Assange has been “arbitrarily detained by the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom” and believes he is “entitled to his freedom of movement.” Assange and his legal team complained to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2014 that his living in 300 square feet…
Imagine a world where robots creep up on you: Electric motors just a gentle whir, hard shells changing color to blend in with their surroundings. Well, there’s no need to imagine—it’s happened. Researchers form the Guoping Wang of Wuhan University in China have created a robot that changes color with its surroundings, much like a…
I love climbing arguably more than breathing, but when you’re stuck in the same gym with the same routes all day long, it can get just the teensiest bit boring. This augmented reality climbing game seems like the perfect antidote. Jon Cheng’s AR game isn’t particularly complicated, or even too hard to pull off: connect…
According to Apple shaman Mark Gurman, Apple will soon be expanding its iPhone trade-in program to include busted handsets. Currently, the Apple Store “Reuse and Recycle” program lets you trade in iPhones with broken screens or buttons for credit when buying a new phone. It’s worth about half face value, with a good condition iPhone…
Earlier today, a very dull press release from Visa announced an actually important thing: the world’s largest payment processing network is opening up to developers. Yawn all you like, but this is big news. Payment processing is all the rage for a very simple reason: People spend an inordinate amount of money every day, increasingly…
I don’t know how this is possible (but I am very thankful it is) but immediately after skiier Angel Collinson tumbled 1,000 feet down the side of an Alaskan mountain, she sat up and told everyone that she was going to walk back up the mountain to get her stuff. I mean, how bad ass…
1910: A painting by H.C. Ireland, pointing toward a new technologically advanced age. [Library of Congress]
A sting operation in Italy has yielded an unlikely cache of loot. Over 85,000 tons of freshly painted green olives were seized by police from food counterfeiters. The Guardian reported on the newest trick forgers are employing to fake out olive-eaters: a coating of copper sulphate, a plant fungicide considered so unlikely to be used…
Walk into a roomful of people, and your first impression is just noise. Within seconds, you start to pick out words, phrases, and fragments of conversations. Soon you’ll be merrily chatting with friends, oblivious to the din around you. But most of us never stop to think about exactly how our brain manages to pick…
