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Ice climbing is one of those niche sports that pushes the cutting edge of crapping yourself, and materials technology. Equipment has to be light, stiff, flexible enough for shock absorption, and cheap enough for dirtbag climbers. Sounds like a job for nature. Technical ice tools used for climbing waterfalls have traditionally been made of metal,…
If you’re in the Midwest, you probably noticed a lil’ bit of white stuff falling from the sky this weekend. Here’s how that looks from space. The image was taken by the Suomi NPP satellite’s VIIRS instrument on the morning of November 23rd. The snow shows up well, as do the light clusters from cities.…
Most people understand that if a big bird gets sucked into a jet engine, that causes bad things requiring a decorated pilot and a conveniently-placed river to save. But if a little birdie were to up against a fighter jet, things would be different, right? This video posted by NATO shows the result of a…
Apple, a maker of expensive aluminum slabs, might not be the obvious first buyer for Faceshift, a Swiss startup that makes motion-capture tech used in Star Wars. But when you consider how its software can be applied to augmented reality, things get a lot more interesting. As originally reported by MacRumors and now confirmed by…
Following a vicious backlash from the patrons of the New York City subway, e-commerce giant Amazon seems to have realized that plastering dystopian Nazi imagery across MTA cars was maybe kinda sorta a bad idea. Good job. The ad campaign was intended to promote The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s new, alternate history TV…
A few weeks ago LA unveiled a sweeping new transportation vision for the city that will swap car-centric planning with more transit, biking, and walking. But a different plan says getting people out of their cars is not the solution. What we really need, are more places for those cars to go. UNDERGROUND. Last week,…
When Japanese researchers wanted to see if chimps could learn things from simply viewing a situation just once, they needed to create situations where apes would anticipate a noteworthy event. So they made their own horror films just for apes. The plots of King Kong Attack and Revenge of King Kong were rudimentary. There was…
Water bears, known to scientists as tardigrades, are famously adorable microscopic creatures who can survive anything: freezing, total dehydration, radiation bombardment, and even the vacuum of deep space. Now scientists have sequenced a tardigrade genome, and are very surprised by the results. Yesterday a group of researchers led by University of North Carolina at Chapel…
This photo of Captain Christopher Bolt preparing for his last flight looks like a painting, bringing together Bolt’s monochrome profile and the ragged reflection of the carrier’s megastructure on the coating of plane window. It’s almost poetic. According to the Navy, Bolt is part of its “only forward-deployed aircraft carrier,” the USS Ronald Reagan. In…
City lights trace out settlements in the matte black of Italy at night, but moonglint softens the surrounding water. This photograph was taken by a member of Expedition 37 from the International Space Station on October 17, 2013. It covers the Elba-Follonica-Grosseto-Orbetello area of Italy. Image credit: NASA Contact the author at [email protected] or follow…
What will the family dinner of the future look like? According to the 1981 kids’ book Tomorrow’s Home, it’s filled with robots, computers, and tasty synthetic foods. Except upon closer inspection, everybody looks depressed as hell. Neil Ardley’s Tomorrow’s Home makes it sound like kitchen of the future will be a techno-utopian wonder: The kitchen…
Worms infected by bacteria often start showing signs of serious nerve damage in the brain. If a worm happens to be infertile, it can weather an infection without damage to its neurons. Scientists hope that figuring out why infertility and resistance to nerve damage are linked might help us someday fight human diseases like Alzheimer’s…
iFixit makes the greatest tech tool kits out there, and now they’ve updated their bestselling Pro Tech toolkit for the next generation of gadgets in your life. And it’s just beautiful. I want one. I have the previous generation iFixit Pro Tech toolkit, which I keep in my office, within easy reach of most of…
Whoa. It’s like being able to have the vision to see the hidden skeleton of the city of light. Antoine Delach’s Ghost Cell is a “stereoscopic plunge into the guts of an organic Paris seen as a cell through a virtual microscope”. I just love how the look of daily life in Paris is seen…
There, I said it. As countless Rdio fans sit back helplessly as their accounts go dark, it’s time to be blunt. Spotify continues to outpace its growing army of competitors, and if you’re going to spend money on a streaming music service, you should sign up for Spotify Premium. Or save a few bucks and…
In what sounds like a plot line from a BioShock game, a team of biologists has coaxed an animal into growing a new head and brain resembling those of a different species. The bizarre accomplishment adds to a growing body of research highlighting the importance of non-DNA factors—collectively known as the ‘epigenome’—in determining the most…
Smoke, fire, chaos. That’s what happens when a freight ship’s anchor loses control and dives straight into the ocean. The chains just start spinning wildly and the friction of the metal goes nuts and there’s really no way to stop it other than to just let it continue to drop and burn. SPLOID is delicious…
Eighteen-year-old Brian Blackwell was so bright his nickname was “Brains.” But that intelligence, which earned him top marks in school, also enabled him to craft an elaborate fantasy world—one he needed his parents’ money to sustain, and one he was willing to kill for. Brits Sydney and Jacqueline Blackwell were 71 and 60 when Brian…
All over the world, there are people who could live in one country or another. Some of these territorial disputes are relatively minor, while others could be the flashpoints that lead to all-out war. There are a lot of these, and they’re hard to keep track of. Enter Max Galka, a mapmaker whose work we’ve…
It’s been 6 great years, but our weekly Shooting Challenge is coming to an end. Here are the final submissions from all of you. Winner: Better Late Than Never I have thoroughly enjoyed viewing these contest, and am very sad to see them ending. I’ve always wanted to submit but have never been able to…
