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It’s always a nice wink at an unknowing audience when a movie reveals a huge spoiler during the movie itself. It’s harmless fun that most people don’t even catch because they don’t know enough about what’s happening in the movie yet. But on future watches it gives a little extra chuckle layer for people to…
Bop It, the memory game that has you recreating a pattern of actions, is one of those toys that feels like it’s been around forever. The same goes for the classic cup and ball game, which probably predates your grandparents, and is now being given a second life thanks to Bop It’s inventor. Instead of…
There’s always a very special thrill in visiting silent and deteriorating industrial places where hundreds of men and women worked amidst loud machines decades ago. It was not a different feeling taking these photos in the abandoned power plant building of a long gone fabric factory. In 1922, the Elberfelder Textilwerke and the Leipzig Kammgarnspinnerei…
Google’s venerable (and profitable) search engine is well known for offering useful tools beyond its core functionality, and Microsoft has been tricking out Bing with a few extra features of its own—such as an app for tuning your guitar right from the search page. Here’s how to make sure you’re playing in tune using Microsoft’s…
Bendable devices may still be a little way off, but a new kind of ceramic that is flexible in the same way as paper could certainly help speed things along. A startup called Eurekite has created a new kind of ceramic that’s able to fold and crumple. That’s unusual: Ceramics are usually highly crystalline, which…
If you want fast 4G, you should live in Singapore, New Zealand or Hungary. But perhaps most importantly, you should definitely not live in the US. According to an updated report from Open Signal, the US ranks 55th in the world league table for LTE speeds. Its paltry average of 10Mbps places it just below…
It’s almost four years since Julian Assange took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. Now, according to the BBC, a UN panel has ruled that he has been “unlawfully detained.” Assange complained to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2014 that his living in 300 square feet within the Ecuadorian Embassy was unwarranted and…
The NSA is worried about quantum computers. It warns that it “must act now” to ensure that encryption systems can’t be broken wide open by the new super-fast hardware. In a document outlining common concerns about the effects that quantum computing may have on national security and encryption of sensitive data, the NSA warns that…
As all around it realize that Windows phones might be on the way out, the Sony off-shoot VAIO has proudly unveiled a new handset that runs Windows 10. Announced today in Japan, the Phone Biz—what a name!—is certainly more stylish than the middle-of-the-road black slab that constituted VAIO’s first stab at a smartphone. Beneath the…
To celebrate its 12th birthday, Facebook wants to remind you of all the friends you’ve forgotten about, through the medium of an automatically created supercut. The clips—which you can actually edit if they don’t meet your approval—will show up at the top of your feed. You can go right ahead and watch it from there.…
London is a city that was barely designed for horse and cart, let alone the automobile. Cars are still a big part of life in central London, but they’re about to be outnumbered by cyclists. Transport statistics are normally eye-wateringly dull, but Transport for London’s latest report makes for surprisingly good reading. The number of…
GoPro’s revenue and stock prices are going off a cliff right now, thanks to quarterly results that are in the tank. Company financials are not usually interesting in the slightest, but when they might spell the end days of a vastly popular camera company, it’s worth paying attention. We don’t normally cover quarterly earnings calls,…
Well, damn. That’s a heck of a close call. This footage of a thunderstorm is from South Sydney Australia and you can see how close the people taken the footage were to getting struck by lightning. Like this is very probably the closest you could get without actually getting blasted with a bolt. SPLOID is…
A new system will set aside fingerprints and facial recognition, and start doing brain scans as positive identification. Using brain imaging and a series of words and images, it will scan your mind to figure out if you’re really you. Facial recognition sounds sweet in theory, but in practice it has some problems. It requires…
If we canceled history classes in high schools across the world and replaced them with YouTube videos about history, kids would learn so much more. I just sat through this wonderful 10-minute video on the history of Japan by Bill Wurtz without even skipping ahead because it was so riveting and funny and fast paced.…
If a gondola can’t help solve Brooklyn’s transportation issues, maybe a streetcar can? New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to announce the Brooklyn-Queens Connector, an above-ground trolley that links the two boroughs. New Yorkers could be riding such a thing as soon as 2024. A group named Friends of the Brooklyn Queens…
A controversial fertility treatment requiring three genetic parents has been approved by an FDA-appointed expert panel. This means the therapy, which eliminates rare mitochondrial diseases, could soon be legal in the US. But on the recommendation of the panel, it won’t be available to girls. After months of work, a panel from the US National…
Ohlala, with its quirky almost French-sounding name, blends everything you normally see in a dating app with the twist that men are paying women for the dates. And starting tonight at 6:21 PM Eastern, New Yorkers can start using it. The original Ohlala has been up and running in Germany since August 2015, starting in…
At a big seismic summit yesterday at the White House, the federal government reaffirmed its commitment to creating an early warning system for earthquakes. A great new video shows exactly how this might work—and illustrates how it could help save lives. The ShakeAlert system developed by UC Berkeley, Caltech, the University of Washington, and the…
It’s slowly replacing Scrabble as the de facto party game for anyone who hates trivia and charades. But the newest version of Bananagrams might turn friends into enemies by the end of the night thanks to new random tiles with challenges that encourage players to sabotage their opponents’ word grids. Bananagrams Party is played almost…
