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Pumpkin-flavored arsenic marshmallow Donald Trump gave a speech at the Pearl Harbor Day Rally at the USS Yorktown in South Carolina tonight. After a day of rambling about banning Muslims, Trump offered some hazy suggestions for fighting ISIS’s growing influence online. “We have kids who are watching the internet and they want to be masterminds,”…
The four-day International Robot Exhibition just wrapped up in Japan over the weekend, and the wild machines introduced in Tokyo, one of the world’s biggest robot hubs, did not disappoint. The show attracted 450 companies and 5,000 non-robotic humans. Here’s a look at some of coolest from the show floor. RC Origami Cranes This remote-controlled…
The dark caverns created by freeway overpasses are some of the unfriendliest parts of our cities. A 16-foot chandelier has been approved by Vancouver’s city council to illuminate one such forgotten passageway. And it’s kinda brilliant. Local artist Rodney Graham conceived the piece for the Granville Street Bridge, and it’s being paid for by a…
Streaming video services now comprise 70% of Americans’ Internet use at night—which means that hardly anyone is using BitTorrent anymore. RIP, piracy. Arise, Sir Netflix. According to the results of a survey by broadband services company Sandvine, Netflix is ascendant with a whopping 37% of downstream traffic. Nipping at its heels is YouTube (18%), Amazon…
Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges is going to prison for 71 months, or nearly six years, for stealing over $800,000 in Bitcoin from drug dealers while investigating the Silk Road. Bridges conspired to break bad as part of the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force with an (excellently named) DEA agent, Carl Force. Together, Bridges…
Alphabet Inc., the newly founded parent company of Google, just added a new name to its portfolio: Verily. This Google[x] spinoff used to be the experimental lab’s life sciences division. Now, it’s Alphabet’s first new company and a creative use of the letter “V.” Verily will pursue wonderfully futuristic projects like the much anticipated smart…
In a world’s first, researchers from the US and UK have created an impression of a submerged human as recorded by a dolphin’s echolocation. To do it, a team led by Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com used an imaging system known as a Cymascope. The system, developed by John Stuart Reid (who also assisted with the…
Woo, boy. Here’s video showing Lockheed Martin conducting the first aerial test for the F-35’s gatling gun. Called the GAU-22/A, the weapon can pop off 3,300 25mm rounds per minute. The gun fires so fast that your eyes might miss it. Even though the test was successful, the GAU-22/A won’t be combat ready until 2019…
The controversial end of Interstellar features Matthew McConaughey movie through a four-dimensional tesseract, transcending space and time. Somehow, this three-dimensional anamorphic cube reminds me of that scifi fantasy. Except it’s totally real. “Emergence Lab” by artist Thomas Medicus is composed of 216 hand-painted laser cut acrylic strips. They’re assembled in such a way that an…
In the world of computer graphics, anything seems possible these days. It is possible, for instance, to make Barack Obama’s face deliver a George W. Bush speech. Or you could make Hillary Clinton do it. Or James Bond, if you want! The exciting new research that makes all this possible comes straight out of the…
When I thought Jeb’s deflating balloon full of farts of a presidential run couldn’t get any sadder, it did: If you click on JebBush.com, it redirects to Trump’s website. Like Carly Fiorina before him, Jeb made the mistake of not registering his name as a domain name. Now, this is what you see when you…
The real thing can weigh upwards of 600 pounds, but the V8 engine Aliaksei Zholner built would barely register on a scale because it’s only slightly larger than a ping-pong ball and made from nothing but paper and glue. The tiny engine has a piston stroke of just six millimeters and cylinders that are only…
When the flash on a camera goes off, we know something has made a visual record of the world. The Victorians noticed this and thought that lightning might work like a giant camera. Scientific journals and hobby magazines started mentioning the word “keraunography,” or “lightning prints,” in the late 1800s. Some felt that like the…
Have you ever tried to imagine what a building built from one half US Capitol, and one half Beijing’s Temple of Heaven would look like? Somebody in China has, and you can see the result in the image above. This is not a Photoshopped image. The three-to-four-story building is a real duplitecture gem, currently under…
Astronaut John Glenn was one of the Mercury Seven, the first Americans trained for spaceflight. Before Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in his Friendship 7 mission on February 20, 1962, he went through a lot of training. In the photograph above, he practices for the Mercury mission in a spacecraft simulator,…
Facebook quietly announced that its weird app experiment is over, and it will be closing the Creative Labs that led the initiative. That means apps like Slingshot (a Snapchat ripoff) and Rooms (a Reddit ripoff) will no longer be available for download. RIP Creative Labs. We never really knew you. Contact the author at [email protected].…
America has a huge, sprawling, incredibly productive agricultural system, the slow-grown product of our history as a farming nation. But that system has already begun changing—and what we’re growing on those farms is going to change dramatically too. The Climate of the Future Using nine different climate future scenarios, the USDA recently put together a…
You no longer need billions of dollars and a secret dream to take over the world like Elon Musk to build an electric car. If you can find a pair of round magnets and a AA battery that isn’t already dead, you can build this incredibly simple electric vehicle that’s better than watching TV. You…
It was an uncharacteristically quiet hurricane season in the Atlantic, but the same cannot be said for the eastern Pacific and central Pacific basins, which got absolutely hammered this year. New maps by NASA and Unisys Weather show the extent of this year’s storm season. The hurricane season in the Atlantic and the eastern and…
The world at large received yet more evidence that most psychological researchers have never interacted with a human being in this bizarre study about human behavior based involving, doors, pens, surveys, and researchers hiding from each other behind pillars like Cold War counter-espionage agents. In order to conduct controlled experiments, psychologists have to create bizarre…
