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The National Security Agency hacked Israeli drones, working with the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters to surreptitiously track developments in the Middle East, according to a new report from The Intercept. The Intercept published a report on this mission, code-named “Anarchist,” using files obtained by Edward Snowden. The NSA and GCHQ watched for operations in Palestine,…
It’s entirely plausible that one day extreme athletes will be blasting across a snow-covered field on a snowboard, powered not by the pull of gravity, but by a flying drone pulling them along. However, as this video of the world’s first droneboarder reveals, that day is still a long ways off. It’s not that the…
Net neutrality is based on a very simple idea: Internet service providers, or the companies that we pay to connect us to the web, should not act as gatekeepers by favoring some websites and companies over others. T-Mobile’s Binge On service—which offers unlimited video streaming from more than thirty-eight video providers including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon,…
Imagine John Lennon as Gollum, Paul McCartney as Frodo, Ringo as Sam and George Harrison as Gandalf. Oh, and Stanley Kubrick directing. Yes, The Beatles in The Lord of the Rings. That was was a movie that could have happened that we never got to see. Also, Darren Aronofsky doing Batman: Year One and Tim…
A couple of New York-based architectural and design firms are Kickstarting what could be the ultimate souvenir of the city—next to those tiny Statue of Libertys you can find everywhere. Imagine hanging an incredibly detailed 12-foot long model of the entire island of Manhattan on your wall. Using detailed aerial scans of the city, AJSNY…
This photo of the fourth mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope makes the cleaning and inspection of an incredible piece of engineering looks more like some dudes cleaning out their back yard. The Giant Magellan Telescope will be an extremely large ground-based telescope situated in the Atacama Desert of Chile. It will consist of seven…
Your ride across New York City just got more affordable. Uber is set to reduce the cost of its Uber X and XL rides by 15 percent in the city from 7am this morning. Uber will apparently cut its Uber X base fare from $3 to $2.55, while the per mile rate will drop from…
If people don’t reply to your email, it almost certainly didn’t get lost. It’s either you fault or theirs—not the internet’s. [PhD Comics]
A new report reveals that intelligence agencies from the UK and US have in the past hacked into the video feeds of Israeli drones and jets. The resulting images depict military operations around Gaza and drones that appear to carry weapons. The Intercept has published a series of images that are said to have been…
Apple apparently wants to help you charge your iPhone no matter where you are in your home. A new report suggests that it’s building a new wireless charging technology that wouldn’t require direct contact with a power mat. Bloomberg reports that Apple “is exploring cutting-edge technologies that would allow iPhones and iPads to be powered…
We are slowly hurtling towards a dystopian future where cities raise themselves on hydraulic legs to begin the long hunt for resources. Only, in this case, replace cities with greenhouses, and the only resource being hunted here is dry land. Wrasbury is a town some 18 miles west of London, England, which has found itself…
As the latest continuation of T-Mobile’s quest to get more people streaming video (or possibly just take over the world in some yet-to-be-determined evil plot), the data-cap-free Binge On program now has some new members. A quick refresher on Binge On: it’s a T-Mobile program that lets you stream video without it counting against your…
NASA’s Terris MODIS camera reveals how much black smoke is being pumped into the air because of the oil refinery fires in Libya. According to NASA, the fires were “started by attacks on oil terminals in Libya in very early January.” That’s a hell of a lot of smoke. NASA writes: The stream of black…
Predictive text and neural networks have gotten crazy good in the past few years, to the extent that I would actually consider turning them on from time to time. But should you let a computer that knows your writing habits make you a dating profile? Oh hell no. As a fun thought experiment/viral marketing exercise,…
Crushing Jell-O with a 83.5 pound weight is okay, I guess. The colored gelatin laser oozes itself out like a ring of slime and gets everywhere. What’s way cooler is smashing liquid nitrogen cooled Jell-O. That delivers a perfect shattering effect, like watching a planet get destroyed or flying through the asteroid belt in the…
If you haven’t seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet, why bother? Just troll the entire world by saying you were too busy or that Star Wars is just okay or that you’re totally fine with missing out on whatever silly pop culture thing takes over the world for a few minutes every year. Just…
Goop published an interview about “protecting yourself from wifi & cellphone toxicity” today with a nutritionist whose genre of “detoxification” diet advice has been called “tantamount to fraud” by an actual doctor. Nutritionist Ann Louise Gittlemen is basically your mom’s version of Food Babe—a fearmongering opportunist who uses buzzwords like “organic” to freak people out…
More than a thousand years before the first telescopes, Babylonian astronomers tracked the motion of planets across the night sky using simple arithmetic. But a newly translated text reveals that these ancient stargazers also used a far more advanced method, one that foreshadows the development of calculus over a thousand years later. It’s a well-known…
Read a fucking book. Or freebase something at random from your medicine cabinet. I assure you, the world will still be there tomorrow—just as shitty as ever. But if you insist.
Typhoon Haiyan was one of the most devastating tropical cyclones in history. The Category 5 typhoon killed thousands and ravaged the Philippines with billions in damages that it’s still recovering from. Here’s a brief glimpse of what it was like to be inside the typhoon. It’s absolutely frightening. Jim Edds captured the footage in the…
