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There’s no law that says a portable charger has to look like a rectangular slab, so why do so many companies insist on sticking with that awkward form factor? Styled after a metal water bottle, Philips’ PowerPotion DLP3003 is lacking in sharp corners that might poke at you when slipped into a pocket. The PowerPotion’s…
Spotify has been talking about streaming video as well as music for almost a year now. But a report from the Wall Street Journal quoting a Spotify exec claims that the service will be launched later this week. The Journal says that video content will be available on Android apps “starting this week,” while those…
If you’ve never been to Frank Lloyd Wright’s inspiring Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, now you can check it out from your computer. The museum is the latest to receive Google’s Street View treatment as part of its Cultural Institute program. You can now explore the cool lines of the building in a…
Truly rousing political speeches are, sadly, few and far between. But those that are a little less inspiring can, it turns out, be convincingly written by an artificial intelligence system. Yes, politicians may be a little like robots. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have created an AI that they’ve trained using 4,000 political…
Last year, it came to light that the blue and gold braided beard on King Tut’s burial mask was knocked off during a botched cleaning attempt then hastily glued back on using epoxy. Now, Egypt’s decided that more than just poor Tut’s head must roll over the debacle. First, a refresher about what happened. While…
Late Sunday night, Jack Dorsey confirmed that four of Twitter’s most senior executives were leaving the company, including vice presidents for media, product, engineering, and human resources. Ouch. In the announcement, posted to Twitter and shown below, Dorsey explained that VP of media Katie Stanton, VP of product Kevin Weil, VP of engineering Alex Roetter,…
Netflix might have declared its plan to crack down on unblockers and VPNs to avoid users country-hopping, but there are still ways to view the different Netflix libraries from other regions. If you’re after one movie in particular, this global Netflix search engine will tell you where to take up virtual residence. Thanks to different…
Google’s all-seeing cameras have seen a lot more than just the streets: scary mountains, underwater gardens, and Venetian canals have all been visited before, and with the help of an elite team of mountaineers, Google can take you all around Mont Blanc, the 15,777-ft high point of Europe. Unlike previous Street View outings, Google went…
Given a long plane ride and enough booze, I can just about solve a Rubik’s cube. The most talented humans can manage it in about five seconds; for a homemade robot, it takes 1.019 seconds. Hardware-wise, there’s not much complicated about the robot, built by two hobbyists: there’s webcams, a few stepper motors, and an…
On January 24th, 1986, Voyager 2 swept past our system’s seventh planet, Uranus, on its way through the solar system. It was the first and last time we visited the gas giant, and we found it’s one of the stranger locations in our solar system. Throughout classical times, scholars recognized only six planets: Mercury, Venus,…
Welcome to this week’s Reading List, where you’ll find the best popular technology, culture and science stories on the internet assembled in one delightful package. This week: science art, colonizing the solar system, international business, toys and CGI. Maria Sibylla Merian was a naturalist in the 1600s, drawing up fantastic images that helped to inform…
During any of the several recent catastrophic blizzards that have draped the country with snow, you might have seen people tagging their photos #sneckdown. No, it’s not a protective garment you wear to keep your neck snow-free (although that could also come in handy!). It’s a word coined by transportation geeks. “Neckdown” is a somewhat…
As Winter Storm Jonas pummels the East Coast this weekend, Washington DC’s Smithsonian National Zoo posted up this fantastic video of one of their Pandas, Tian Tian, enjoying the weather.
The launch of NASA’s Orion Spacecraft isn’t slated for another two years, but preparations are well underway for the first mission into deep space: engineers have just completed welding together the Orion crew module. The Exploration Mission (EM-1) will take place in September 2018, with Orion perched on top of the Space Launch Systems rocket.…
The crew onboard the International Space Station has the absolute best view of Winter Storm Jonas this weekend. Commander Scott Kelly snapped a couple of pictures as they passed overhead, showing off the sheer size of the storm. These are some incredible images, looking over the east coast and the midwest. It’s a massive one,…
It’s a beautiful ballet, if you ask me. There’s a peacefulness to seeing things get destroyed in slow motion, it’s like the shock and horror is removed because all the shrapnel dances away elegantly. This destruction porn video is especially great because you get to see it happen at normal speed (completely unsatisfying but still…
All signs are pointing toward a record blizzard hitting the D.C. Metro area this weekend, and the snowpocalypse chaos is already setting in. To make the impending meteorological blockbuster even more ominous, Jonas is going to coincide with a full moon. Quick, sacrifice a goat! Now, the Moon gets blamed for a lot of things…
I think overly decorative cakes are silly—like cool, here’s a cake that looks like the Great Barrier Reef, enjoy your edible starfish—but this Super Mario Bros. cake is wonderful because it recreates the entire first level of the video game in perfect, delicious detail. It’s a stop motion animation in cake form. Every video game…
When you think “fastest land animal,” what do you think of? American Pharaoh? Usain Bolt? Nope, until today that title belonged to Sarah, a cheetah who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. Sarah died today at age 15. NPR reported on Sarah’s missile-like sprint, including breaking her own record as the fastest mammal on the planet.…
Google had a big 2015: It changed its logo, divvied up its business into startups like Sidewalk, Calico, X, Fiber, and consolidated all those companies into one brand named Alphabet. Now Alphabet is very, very close to being named the world’s most valuable company—yes, more valuable than Apple. The suite of companies that now form…
