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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced yesterday that 2015 was the second hottest year ever recorded in the United States, with a major last-minute boost from our freakishly warm Christmas holiday season. It was also a record-breaking year for fire, as the US Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday. For the first time in history,…
Revealed this past week at CES 2016, Nikon’s D5 is the company’s new flagship DSLR with a 20.3-megapixel full-frame sensor, and a hefty $6,500 price tag. But watching this video of the camera’s new 12 frames-per-second, 153-point autofocus system in action will still make you lust for one. The folks at DCFever spent some quality…
The Clinton Presidential Library recently released transcripts between President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair dating back from the 1990s. The real conversations are candid and illuminating. But many transcripts that are being passed around on social media are fake. As the New York Times explains about the real transcripts: With bracing bluntness…
Let me put this bluntly: Smart homes are pretty dumb. Or at least historically, connected devices for the everyman’s house have seemed gimmicky at best. This week at CES, however, we saw new technology that stands to reform our very conception of how homes work. But the gamechanging device we saw isn’t really a device…
The inside of a wooden surfboard looks like the skeleton of a fish. And it only gets more beautiful from there. The entire process of making a surfboard from wood (most surfboards are made from foam and fiberglass) is so fun to see. There is so much carving and shaping and clamping and an obscene…
If you own a Nest smart thermostat, you may be experiencing problems with the battery. Big problems with the battery. As in, the battery keeps draining and leaving you in the literal freezing cold. A Gizmodo reader told us that his Nest had a software bug that caused his battery to drain—which caused Nest to…
Water is a powerful mother and our dams do all their might in trying to control it but sometimes they need to pump some of that out. This is them doing that in the video. Or well, that’s what the dam is trying to do. The floodwater looks more like it’s exploding away. The AP…
A Hellfire missile that the US shipped to Europe for NATO training purposes last year somehow wound up in Cuba. As far as straight up losing sensitive military technology goes, this is one of the biggest screw-ups of its kind. A Wall Street Journal investigation reveals that authorities have no idea how Lockheed Martin’s Europe-bound—thankfully…
To make the drone in Spin Master’s new Air Hogs Connect mobile game fly as realistically as possible, players pilot a real-life toy quadcopter while clever augmented reality tricks translate their maneuvers to the action and missions in the game. To accurately translate the subtle moves the Air Hogs Quad makes to its virtual doppleganger,…
You don’t have to settle for a staid, text-only signature for your Gmail account: with a little image manipulation and the help of Google Drive, it’s possible to insert images and even links to your social media accounts (or any other part of the web). Here’s how to set it up in a few minutes.…
The new Star Wars movie made enough money to fund a Death Star because basically any human with access to a movie theater went to go watch it. Or so it seemed like it. In truth, there are still a lot of people who don’t understand why Star Wars is so special. Why does Star…
After replying to a fan’s tweet to assure her that all four female characters in the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot will be made it into action figures, last night Paul Feig, the film’s director, revealed prototypes of Mattel’s upcoming six-inch line as proof. The shots reveal nothing we haven’t seen before, but given all the controversy…
Cutting a pizza can be a stressful experience: are the slices equal? Now, a team of mathematicians has found some new ways to cut pizzas into exotic slices, while still ensuring that the all-important size considerations are met. The slicing of pizza is an oddly well-researched area of mathematics, principally because it has less to…
These images of massive black smoke plumes were captured by satellites, after battles at oil production and storage facilities in Libya between January 4th and 6th. The thick poisonous smoke looks troublesome even from space. According to several news reports Islamic State (IS) shelled two oil terminals near Sidra and Ra’s Lanuf, on the coast…
Do not adjust your monitor: this lime is weirdly red on the inside. In fact, the fruit is genetically engineered to create proteins that provide the color, as well as potentially making the lime more health-giving. Developed by researchers from the University of Florida, the Mexican lime you’re looking at has been modified so that…
Whether you’re constantly searching your own name online (you know who you are) or there’s a topic you want to follow closely, Google Alerts lets you know when new pages hit the web that match your query—and you can convert these results into an RSS feed (or something else) to make them easier to manage.…
This month, the American Museum of Natural History is adding another must-see to its legendary Fossil Halls: a cast of a 122-foot-long sauropod dinosaur. Putting it together is a pretty tall order, too. In the photo above you can see one of the final steps of assembly, as the skeleton-supporting steel structure is welded together,…
Got an ageing computer taking up space in a closet? Well, from mid-January you’ll be able to give it a new lease of life with Remix OS for PC, which will let you run a version of Android right there on a computer, gratis. The new OS is a forked version of Android Lollipop made…
Touchscreens use a mesh of almost-transparent electronics to detect where they’re being touched. Now, a new microscopic 3D printing technique could provide greater transparency and higher sensitivity than the existing state-of-the-art. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have developed a new way to create a gird of ultra-fine conductors that could…
It seems Microsoft is developing its own SIM cards that will allow Windows 10 devices to access a range of different cellular data networks without the need for a contract. The Verge has noticed that Microsoft has just released a new app called Cellular Data. It explains that the service will allow you to “connect…
