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Human wetware is astonishingly good at pattern recognition and interpreting complex, noisy data, but it’s also painfully buggy. Mars is the red planet, except it really isn’t. When we send robotic explorers to Mars, we equip them with colour calibration targets of known optical properties. Yet, even with those calibrated instruments, the view of the…
Freaking spiders, always getting up on the camera lens like they want to be astronomers, too. The camera dome at Marshall Space Center has a small problem: every now and then an arachnid astronomer decides to go waltzing across the lens, obstructing the view for pesky humans. The spiders climb onto the all-sky camera used…
Alice Hamilton was one of those people who used science to shape morality. Basic concepts like sanitation, worker safety, and proper chemical disposal exist because she proved there was no other choice. She was also one of the first to speak out about the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Technically a biochemist, Hamilton is a…
The design associated with smoking weed has heretofore been confined to a room draped in tie-dye tapestries with swirling blown-glass bongs glittering beneath the blacklight glow of a Phish poster. No longer. It’s Friday afternoon, you’ve made it through the long week, and it’s time for Happy Hour, Gizmodo’s weekly booze, etc. column. A cocktail…
Happy Friday, Gizmodo! We spent the week looking at the future of our favorite planet*. How’re things in your neck of the woods? Our Future Earth mission is ongoing—we’ll have more dispatches for you next week—but here’s a round-up of everything you might have missed: We’re Spending the Next Two Weeks Envisioning Our Future Earth…
A big infrastructure bill finally passed the House this week, pushing $305 billion over five years to transit and highway projects. In the same week, Uber raised another $2.1 billion, bringing its total valuation to $62.5 billion—roughly the same amount the new bill spends on infrastructure each year. Which of these figures do you think…
It seems Vtech isn’t the only toy company playing it fast and loose with children’s privacy. Security researchers have discovered myriad security flaws that make Mattel’s Hello Barbie connected doll hackable. When Hello Barbie was introduced earlier this year, the doll’s connected technologycame under scrutiny from parents and advocacy groups concerned about data security and…
In a breakthrough that could lead to printable organs and an enhanced understanding of human physiology, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Labs have 3D-printed functional blood vessels that look and function like the real thing. 3D bioprinters are similar to conventional 3D printers, but instead of using inert materials, they use “bio-ink:” basic structural building…
Samsung just announced a new project using Gear VR called Gone, in partnership with Skybound Entertainment (think Walking Dead) and WEVR. It’s either about the horrors of child abduction, or having a kid full of exploratory whimsy. The trailer is vague on that point. What’s more interesting than the actual content itself is the deeper…
TheKnobe Effectis a psychological double-standard that allows us to blame people for a bad outcome, yet not give them credit for a good one. Researchers have now studied the brains of the blamers to pinpoint a possible culprit for why we do this. The Knobe Effect started out with a simple scenario. The CEO of…
Twitter has filed an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to trademark “subtweet.” A subtweet, for the mercifully uninformed, is a passive-aggressive tweet that mentions someone without using their Twitter name. Before anyone goes around screaming about how this means Twitter now owns the word, that’s not how trademark works. The…
Anonymous published a Pastebin file containing passwords and personal information from Paris climate summit attendees today, in what it describes as retaliation for the arrests of protestors outside of the talks. Anonymous breached the website of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, accessing and dumping the personal information of officials from the US,…
Life aboard a ship in the 18th or 19th century—especially in the far north or south—was treacherous. Now, the records of these brutal voyages are playing a surprising role in scientists’ efforts to understand the future of the planet. If you’ve ever read In the Kingdom of Ice, which chronicles the race to the North…
With close to one-and-a-half billion people currently on Facebook, keeping a low profile can be tricky. It’s in the site’s best interest to make it easy for you to make connections with family, friends, and acquaintances. However, if you want to make it more difficult for people to track you down, there are ways to…
As the world warms, we lose arable land to grow the food we all need to survive. But although our changing climate is one big problem our food supply faces, it’s certainly not the only one—and even fixing the effects of climate change might not generate enough food to feed future generations. “There are 795…
In more temperate parts of the world, ice is just ice, but in Antarctica, ice is everything. It defines Antarctica: Earth’s southern polar ice cap, a 5.4-million square mile ice sheet, covers 98% of the continent. But within the next hundred years, Antarctica stands to lose much of that ice, especially in its western half.…
Microsoft’s annualBuild developer conference will be held from March 30-April 1st in San Francisco, company exec Steven Guggenheimer announcedon Twitter. Expect news about HoloLens and Windows 10 plus a surprise or two. Read our recap of the best and worst of Build 2015 here.
The Wall Street Journal picked up a hope-inspiring dataset from Google showing a swift change in gun-related searching habits from before and after the San Bernardino shootings. It showed a massive spike for “gun control” searches (blue in the image above) related to “gun shop” searches (red). Yes, maybe we’re finally ready to get serious…
Was 2015 a good year for movies? Sure, there were a lot of duds like Tomorrowland and embarrassments like Pixels and money printing franchises that weren’t nearly as awesome as the movies that came before it like Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron but I’m going to consider 2015 a good year for movies…
People in Arlington, Washington, recently discovered an old artillery shell filled with treasures from 1934. But it seems someone beat them to it, sometime within the last eight decades. And whoever it was left a note: “Thank you for the brandy.” The shell was sitting in a memorial display at American Legion Post 76, where…
