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Apple’s team of well-paid lawyers really showed Samsung’s team of highly-paid lawyers who’s boss, thanks to a recent court order banning the sale of Samsung’s leading flagship phones from 2012. The order, handed down by Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern California District San Jose court, is the end result of a long-running patent dispute.…
One of the biggest battles of the drought in the Western US has been over the flow of data—namely, who is using (and wasting) the region’s scarcest resource. Now a victory on the water data front has been claimed with Los Angeles’s water district ordered to hand over the names and addresses of homeowners who…
What’s your favorite type of opening shot for a movie? Is it when they drop you in the middle of their world and expect you to catch up immediately? Is it when they slyly insert a spoiler that you don’t realize is important yet? Or maybe it’s when they neatly bookend the film with the…
It’s like a beautiful, colorful ballet. The Slow Mo Guys dipped a power drill in different colors of paint and then captured in spinning in glorious slow motion and to see all the colors whip around like string is pretty great. It’s like a Jackson Pollock painting in moving 3D. SPLOID is delicious brain candy.…
It’s been a weird day for weird science. Not long after researchers claimed victory in performing a head transplant on a monkey, the US military’s blue-sky R&D agency announced a completely insane plan to build a chip that would enable the human brain to communicate directly with computers. What is this weird, surreal future? It’s…
An international team of neuroscientists claims to have successfully carried out a head transplant on a monkey, along with other related experiments. But because the details haven’t been published, experts remain skeptical. Warning: Graphic image to follow. As New Scientist reports, the procedure was led by Sergio Canavero, a neuroscientist who works for the Turin…
Here’s a neat video showing ink being injected into the “yolk sac artery of 72 hour-old chick embryo to visualize the beating heart and the vasculature.” It’s from Nikon’s Small World in Motion competition which is always a great source for videos that reveal the previously unseen. Watching the ink spread throughout the yolk in…
It’s the golden rule of crowded escalators: Stand on one side, walk on the other. But passengers taking the escalator in one of London’s busiest tube stations were recently confronted with a weird rule: Everyone must stand. Officials claim it will make stations run more efficiently. But how? The head-smacking logic was explained in detail…
Today, the first of New York City’s public, gigabit wifi hotspots opened to the public. I tried them, so take it from me: They’re insanely fast. How fast? Fast enough that Starbucks’ free internet is about to get killed. Earlier this month, we reported on LinkNYC, the Big Apple’s initiative to roll out breakneck internet…
Given the shifting ice can suddenly close a massive crevasse that runs hundreds of feet deep into a glacier, safely exploring them is all but impossible. Unless you’ve got access to a flying drone that isn’t sent flying out of control the second it hits an obstacle. Many drones have protective housings around their propellers…
And here we thought only the young folks were passing on their chance to operate a motor vehicle. Turns out that getting your drivers’ license has been steadily falling out of favor for all Americans since the 1980s. Using data from the Federal Highway Administration, a team from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute…
Here’s an easy way to both clean an entire house while totally destroying it in the process: release expanding foam that will cause a huge explosion and spray foam everywhere. It’s a fun little thing to see happen (especially if it’s not your home) because the foam monster grows and grows and shoots its guts…
Have you ever been at a concert and thought, “Man, I wish I could listen to a podcast right now?” Well, you’re in luck. Because the Boston Symphony Orchestra is now handing out iPads to the audience in order to reach The Youths™. From the Associated Press: But as part of an effort to draw…
Stephen Hawking is at it again, saying it’s a “near certainty” that a self-inflicted disaster will befall humanity within the next thousand years or so. It’s not the first time the world’s most famous physicist has raised the alarm on the apocalypse, and he’s starting to become a real downer. Here are some of the…
Less than two weeks ago, New York approved the merger between customer service nightmare Time Warner Cable and not-quite-so-famously-bad Charter Communications. Almost immediately, Time Warner is raising its prices in New York. Updated: The numbers previously used in this post were incorrect and have been changed. Back in December, Time Warner announced that prices would…
Japan is a land of many weird things, and as such, its fast food creations tend to be dependably curious. The newest menu item at Japanese McDonald’s, for instance, involves french fries covered with multiple types of chocolate. They’re called “McChocolate Potatoes.” The unusual combination is only around for a limited time. Drizzled with white…
Drones are cool, until they go and crash. But new tech from MIT might turn your drone into an obstacle-avoiding craft with creature-like reflexes, dodging and making loops around trees or buildings like a nimble hummingbird. The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT just announced new experimental drone software that lets UAVs make…
Science, isn’t it great? Especially when it’s bringing us fascinating insights like this one: there could be up to 500 species of arthropods—insects, spiders, mites, and centipedes—living right alongside you in your home. Apparently, the war on bugs was always a lost cause. “This was exploratory work to help us get an understanding of which…
It’s annoying when a bird poops on your car, but large flocks of them can be a genuine problem in some areas. But when a straw-stuffed scarecrow just isn’t keeping them at bay, a company called Bird-X wants you to consider upgrading to a scarecrow in the sky. For the most part Bird-X’s ProHawk UAV…
An implantable miniature microscope lets researchers track the brain activity of mice in real time, as the animals forage for food or navigate a maze. It’s like a tiny GoPro for the rodent brain. Dubbed the nVista system, it’s the brainchild of Mark Schnitzer, a professor of biology and applied physics at Stanford University, who…
