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This year, more than 13,000 photographs were submitted to National Geographic’s annual photo contest. These 13 are the very best. Dirt This stunning image of an anti-cyclonic tornado was the grand prize winner. Captured by James Smart, the photo shows a monster of a tornado infused with brown dust as it sweeps through open farmland…
Former software mogul and current cartoon millionaire John McAfee is running for President of the United States. But he will not be kissing your baby to do so. And, for that, he apologizes. On his website, McAfee claims that he will be running the “first purely electronic Presidential campaign.” Which means that he will not…
It’s basically the war of the worlds. Heaven and hell smashing themselves together. A song of ice and fire. It’s molten copper vs antifreeze engine coolant. That hot golden orange glow being poured onto the radioactive slimy green antifreeze. What happens? A lot! The antifreeze starts shooting out bolts as the burn from the molten…
The recent discovery of a new form of contagious cancer among Tasmanian devils — the second to afflict the species — suggests we still have a lot to learn about how cancer spreads. It also suggests that transmissible cancer may be more common in nature than previously assumed. To date, scientists have observed only three…
Does the shape of a Rubik’s Cube affect how hard it is to solve? At first glance you’d assume the irregularly-shaped pieces of this R2-D2 rotating puzzle would make it easy to put back together, but before you know it, you could have a real mess of droid parts on your hands. For around $25…
The James Bond franchise is entertaining and lucrative, but it’s not a very good way to learn about anatomy. That’s the conclusion of a neurosurgeon, who noticed that Spectre, the latest film in the franchise, fails rather spectacularly in its depiction of practical neurosurgery. Note: Spoilers for Spectre. When Dr. Michael Cusimano isn’t performing neurosurgery…
Google Chrome comes with a decent password manager that remembers all of your online login details, if you want it to—you can call them up any time from the Settings tab in the browser. This same database of username and passwords also lives on the web, letting you to bring up a password you’ve forgotten…
What lies beneath the deep blue sea? So much more than you might think. The results that let this new, marvelously-detailed map of the seafloor from NASA’s Earth Observatory be made were actually first published last year as part of a paper in Science from researchers at NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They were…
DARPA’s BigDog is a four-legged robot that’s too noisy for covert ops on the battlefield. But a different beast-inspired bot from Italy could have use elsewhere: Its legs allow it to trek through tough terrain in disasters, and springs up if it gets knocked over. The Italian Institute of Technology brings us HyQ2Max, a robot…
Who knew that building a snowblower looks like building your own damn Terminator crossed with some gnarly Battle Bot? Or at least, that’s what it feels like to me. The red painting process is intimidating, the way the blades get shaped in one stamping motion is impressive, and the finishing assembly process is like putting…
Many luxury vehicles offer a 360-degree view around your car on the dashboard which makes squeezing into tight parking spots much easier. Magellan now offers the same omnipotent vision to your junky ride with a new GPS nav unit that can connect to cameras mounted all around a vehicle. Given GPS navigation units now have…
The beauty of Venice Beach lies in its culture and in the people that go there and the uniqueness of what’s happening on the ground and all around the area. It’s a special place, a true treasure of California’s beach culture, and it’s like no where else in the world. This drone flyby of Venice…
Daniel Rozin is obsessed with making mirrors, but instead of using glass or silver paint, he takes a more unorthodox approach to creating reflections. Using data from a Microsoft Kinect sensor Rozin manipulates everything from animated plush toy penguins, to his latest subject, a wall of fuzzy pom-poms. Packed into an octagon just a few…
Phone-throwin’ bloke Russell “Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the TRUE emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife” Crowe took a stance yesterday against the BOGANS of Virgin Australia for confiscating his hoverboard. Only he didn’t…
Avatar and Jurassic Park. Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Star Trek and The Jetsons. What do those films have in common with each other? They used the same exact sound effects in their movies. Obviously some of those sound effects are done as an homage for movies that came before…
Not even walls can stop Disney’s and ETH Zurich’s new four-wheeled robot called VertiGo that can quickly transition from rolling on the ground to climbing obstacles like a gecko—and without those sticky feet. So how does the VertiGo seemingly defy gravity? Atop the robot is a pair of steerable propellers that generate thrust, which pushes…
A patent filed by Ford a few weeks ago reveals a rather unorthodox alternative to throwing a bicycle in your trunk. Like the Batpod that ejected from the Batmobile in The Dark Knight, the back wheel of your car could quickly transform into a self-balancing electric unicycle. The design resembles the one-wheeled self-balancing RYNO we…
We avoid mercury, arsenic, and lead exposure, but there’s one heavy metal that we gulp down in smaller doses: bismuth. And if it were less toxic, bismuth could one day keep us from stinking up elevators and other public places with our farts. Heavy metals are exactly what they sound like: metals of relatively high…
Coke is delicious. Bleach is strong as hell. What happens when you mix the two? Crazy Russian Hacker did the work in finding out and it’s a fun little experiment because you get to see the color of Coca Cola disappear right in front of your eyes. Bleach is so powerful that it strips darkness…
The LS3 robot, more popularly known by its earliest nickname, BigDog, is being retired. Despite hopes that it would one day work as a pack mule for US soldiers in the field, this dog had too much bark. Which is to say, it was simply too noisey. The earliest versions of this quadruped robot were…
