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Credit cards and passports are filled with microchips brimming with your personal information—and give off radio waves to any nearby sleazebag that wants to steal your identity. A new generation of those chips stands to stop hackers in their tracks. MIT and Texas instruments teamed up to develop new RFID chips that block identity theft.…
It appears Google is cracking down on adblocking apps in the Google Play store. Hmm. So here’s the backstory,as reported by TechCrunch. Samsung recently released a new Content Blocker API, which allows third-party developers to make apps that block ads in the latest version of Samsung’s Internet browser app. One of the first to crop…
Apple is almost ready to talk about its first product event of the year. Two independent reports claim that the company will have a special media event on March 15. A budget iPhone, an iPad Air 3, and a Watch update will likely be the stars of the show. 9to5 Mac reporter Marc Gurman and…
Google’s self-driving cars have logged over 1.4 million miles, but only on the streets of two cities: Mountain View, California and Austin, Texas. Now Google is adding a third public test track. The latest city to welcome our robot car overlords is Kirkland, Washington. A place that has weather! Kirkland is just across Lake Washington…
Ampakines are a class of drugs that have been shown to reverse the adverse effects of cognitive disorders in rats. A new study indicates that they might also help rats with aging, but still healthy, brains. Could the future belong to these kinds of anti-aging drugs? In the brain, the gaps between neurons are usually…
Instead of using billions of tiny hair-like structures and Van der Waals forces to stick to walls and ceilings like a real gecko does, Thames & Kosmos new Geckobot kit employs tiny air pumps and suction cups to climb vertical surfaces without falling and smashing. The biological science behind the kit might not be 100…
…and all of our necks are broken. Image via Getty: A man wearing virtual reality glasses, pilots a drone during the Global Robot Expo in Madrid on January 31, 2016.
Artist Bernie Mitchell creates these art sculpture masterpieces from drywall and the results are really wonderful. You can watch him use different tools in order to shape out landscape images and animals and finger objects to bring out the detail. It’s always fun seeing art get made in the most inventive of ways. SPLOID is…
Last month, quiet beachfront communities on both sides of the North Sea were rocked by the sight of sperm whales washing up dead on their shores. It was one of the largest strandings in recent history—but according to marine biologists, there may be an upside. “For individual animals, this is certainly a bad thing,” Paul…
Following Wonder Woman and Batman, the latest addition to the Barbie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice line has finally been revealed, and Mattel definitely saved the best for last. If being dreamy was a superpower, this version of the man of steel would be invincible even to kryptonite. Bearing a passing resemblance to actor…
Anthropologists in Borneo observed a rare instance of a female and a male orangutan teaming up—to kill another female orangutan. This is the first observed time a female-female conflict in orangutans has turned lethal, and the way the it went down changes what we thought we knew about orangutan behavior. Primates, being known jerks, attack…
Here’s some really cool footage from Flyability that shows a drone exploring a crevasse into the Zermatt Glacier in the Swiss Alps. Flyability says that the ice caves were previously inaccessible to other drones but they managed to get their UAV down the narrow crack because of its protective cage. It’s just really cool to…
Although the cause still remains a mystery, Chipotle’s E. coli outbreak has been declared officially over by the CDC. But just what does an unexplained, months-long food poisoning outbreak do to the line of customers waiting at your counter? The company’s new numbers are out, and from the beginning of last October to the end…
Sony’s mirrorless cameras have long been some of the best you can buy. Its new A6300 is positively loaded, and pleasingly compact. And it’ll cost you. The new update to the years-oldA6000 brings a lot to the table. The top-line feature is 4K video capture. It’ll also shoot 1920 x 1080 Full HD video at…
Wildfires scorch and blacken the Earth but turns out they’re actually essential for the environment and even good for the trees themselves. That’s right, this animation explainer from Ted-Ed explains how burning trees can actually help trees grow in the future. It’s because when trees overgrow they’ll have too thick of a canopy that’ll block…
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is the most expensive military program in the world, so it should be no surprise that the F-35 aircraft is loaded with powerful weapons controlled by powerful computers. Unfortunately, the guns don’t fire yet, and the computers still don’t work right. A Pentagon official released a damning report on…
When I decide to exercise my brain I play Sudoku. When Youtube user Derwood exercises his brain he creates a semi-automatic gun that’s 95 percent 3D printed, completely untraceable, and currently very legal. “No one had ever tried to get a semi-automatic 3D printed gun working before…I’m just one of those types, I like to…
Vultures make me think of that dopey guy from Loony Tunes or crooked-bill predators circling a poor desert rat on the brink of death. But in Peru, the carcass-eating birds will soon be outfitted with cameras so they can help map Lima’s awful trash problem. Authorities in Lima are attaching GoPro cameras and GPS trackers…
People in China have been trying to travel across the country for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday but some—if tens of thousands of people can be considered just some—have been stuck in one of the most insane human traffic jams in the world at the Guangzhou Railway Station in southern China. CNN reports that…
Amazon Echo’s added a lot of neat abilities since its launch in 2014, but this just might be the laziest of them all: Alexa can now order pizza. Mmm, delicious technological progress. As part of an Amazon-Domino’s PR schtickfor this Sunday’s Super Bowl, Alexa’s been outfitted to personally order pizza for you when asked. In…
