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The CDC’s investigation of Chipotle is over and their final verdict is in: The outbreak is finished, but the agency has no idea what caused it. So…what exactly does that mean? The CDC shut down the investigation early this afternoon, saying that it had been two months since the last confirmed case of E. Coli…
Olfactory receptors are not limited to your nose. You have them all over your body, including your blood. Now, synthetic sandalwood has been shown to promote cell death in cancer cells for patients with a certain kind of leukemia. This could open the door for a whole new kind of treatment. Researchers from Essen University…
You’re supposed to spend at least part of your day at work doing actual work, but those rare times of productivity leave you vulnerable to surprise attacks from Nerf blaster-toting co-workers. Not if you build this robotic camera-equipped sentry turret to watch your back. This isn’t a cheap hack, mind you. You’ll need to start…
Okay so the innate handsomeness of being Oscar Isaac isn’t included, but just as Poe’s jacket suited Finn, we’re sure anyone wearing this would get a Dameron seal of “Damn, looking good” approval. It’s that nice a jacket. The not-officially licensed replica comes to us from the aptly named Film Jackets. It is available in…
If you listen to FBI Director James Comey or GOP presidential candidate John Kasich, encryption is a dangerous techno-blight that lets bad guys “go dark” and plot in secret. Actual tech experts are puncturing these scaremongering claims, and a new report tells a very different story: “Going dark” is alarmist nonsense. Technology provides myriad novel…
There’s a reason they call it basic training. Because while the Army can teach new recruits how to march, hold a gun, and do push-ups, it unfortunately couldn’t give this battalion of green plastic army men the know-how to survive a surprise attack from molten copper. These tiny soldiers bravely held their ground against their…
Android’s volume controls are slowly getting better and more intuitive, but third-party tools are still required for some settings—like individual app volume levels. If you want to shut up Snapchat while keeping Spotify blaring out at a normal level, App Volume Control can help. The app is available both in both $0.99 premium and free…
At last summer’s San Diego Comic-Con, Mattel announced that it would be making a special line of Barbie figures featuring characters from the upcoming Batman v Superman film. And since the movie’s premiere is just over a month away, the Batman version has just appeared on Amazon. Last week it was also revealed that after…
The Fine Brothers pissed off a lot whole lot of people when they announced a bold new scheme to trademark the word “react” last week. I’m one of those people, and I don’t even have any aspirations to be a YouTube star. I just hate greedy idiots. You can’t trademark the word “react.” Sure, the…
Any old jerk can wear a fancy ring, but how many people can say their bling was made from materials that once flew at mach 3.2+ on the famed Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane? Now that’s some provenance. But before you fly off in a rage over the remaining SR-71 spy planes being sold off…
Divorce can be expensive, drawn-out, and painful. But one startup is betting that it can make divorce proceedings more amicable for everyone involved. Wevorce, a new web-based divorce service, allows couples to collaboratively dissolve their marriage by leading them through the process without the burdenesome time and expense of a long court battle. The company…
“50% of us live near the coast,” Microsoft says. “Why doesn’t our data?” Building huge data centers underwater might sound bizarrely Jules Vernesian, but it’s exactly something Microsoft’s testing. The plan’s called Project Natick, and its website states its purpose: “to understand the benefits and difficulties in deploying subsea data centers worldwide.” Why build data…
We had a hunch that the future of farming was going to be all about robots, and naturally, Japan is taking the lead. This morning, Kyoto-based firm Spread made a bold announcement: In two years time, it intends to be running the world’s very first fully-automated, (mostly) human-free farm. From watering seedlings to harvesting crops,…
Less than a year after scientists in China became the first to genetically modify human embryos, a research team in Britain has been given the green light to perform similar work. It’s a huge moment in biotech history—one that could eventually lead to “designer babies.” Last September, scientists at London’s Francis Crick Institute asked the…
Hanging up on annoying telemarketers is the easiest way to deal with them, but that just sends their autodialers onto the next unfortunate victim. Roger Anderson decided that telemarketers deserved a crueler fate, so he programmed an artificially intelligent bot that keeps them on the line for as long as possible. Anderson, who works in…
GE just announced that it no longer make or sell compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) lightbulbs in the US. The company will wind down the manufacturing of CFL bulbs by the end of 2016, and it will begin to shift its focus on making the newest and most energy-efficient lightbulbs, LEDs. This is good news for…
Is it a drone? Is it a plane? Nope, it’s a trained eagle hunting down an unmanned aerial vehicle like it’s a slow and useless animal that it wants to eat for dinner. The Dutch National Police has decided to take a rather unusual approach to capturing rogue drones. While others have tried nets, the…
Cuba is one of the least-connected nations in the world. But yesterday its state telecommunications company announced that it was launching the first domestic broadband scheme in Havana. The company, called ETECSA, will allow citizens who reside in Old Havana—the city’s old colonial center—to order the Huawei-provided broadband service. Cafes, bars, and restaurants will also…
Guess the Correlation is a very simple game indeed: Look at a scatter plot, guess the correlation coefficient, win or lose. Are you mathematically minded enough to take on the challenge? Get close to the answer and you win a life; get it wrong and you lose one. It really is that simple: There are…
Self-driving cars spend a lot of time looking at their surroundings to know how they should respond to the road. But autonomous cars will likely spend some time looking at you to work out how they should behave, too. A team of researchers from Cornell University has been developing a new system which trains a…
