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The New York Times posted a story today about Greenland’s melting ice, which could add another 20 feet to global sea levels. To give us the real scope, they used video shot by a drone, capturing a huge lake of meltwater that’s one of many. It’s stunning, worrying, and strangely beautiful. (Mostly really worrying.) We…
So you want to become a particle physicist, but you’re just not sure which area of research is best suited to your temperament. Never fear, special snowflakes! Symmetry magazine now has a fun personality quiz* to help you find out your physics destiny. Unlike getting a PhD in particle physics, the multiple choice quiz is…
I’ve seen it happen a million times in movies. Fed up with work/love/undead sorcerers, our main character hurls his/her phone into a river/volcano/garbage bin. But do people really do this in real life? Have you? The one time I threw a piece of tech in a fit of madness, it wasn’t a phone and I…
Don’t get too excited about stumbling across another video of a dazzlingly fast-moving, complicated Rube Goldberg machine. While this creation certainly has some clever mechanisms, it’s also billed as the world’s slowest—and that’s actually selling it short. Designed and built by YouTuber Bob Partington, watching a golf ball get from one end of this maze…
Here’s a really lovely process of metal working from Artismia: he melts down these basic metal rods into this metal glob and then stylizes and polishes and shaves down the glob into a beautifully designed door knocker. It’s surprisingly fun to see the entire transformation, like making art from nothing. SPLOID is delicious brain candy.…
It’s not just today’s media that reports on scandalous stories of foreign decadence that probably aren’t true. In 1912 the New York Times reported that Parisian women were injecting perfume into themselves. Sounds like a good idea to me. For about twenty years, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, papers all over America…
Verizon just unleashed two new Droid smartphones, each styled after Motorola’s latest. Where the burly Droid Turbo 2 falls more inline with the top-tier Moto X Pure Edition, the Droid Maxx 2 is a Verizon version of the Moto X Play, a phone that never actually came to the U.S. Under a slightly different guise,…
The Kepler Space Telescope recently picked up unprecedented flickering behavior from a distant star, leading to speculation that—among other things—it might be an alien megastructure. Now, some astronomers are saying it might just be caused by a rapidly spinning and irregularly shaped star. Star KIC 8462852—recently dubbed “Tabby’s Star”—is emitting a transit signature that defies…
Between our smartphones, Fitbits, and other wearable sensors, we have tons of opportunity to capture how we move during the day. So it’s not surprising that some people opt to capture the data when they have sex. But as far as I know, only one person has made music from it. That’s the newest project…
Earlier this year, Spotify beat Google to the punch when it announced its own recommendation engines for podcasts and video—not just songs. Now, Google Play Music is playing catchup and adding podcasts into its own audio offering. The announcement was posted on the Android Official Blog today. Podcasters will soon be able to upload their…
To outsiders, 17-year-old Gladys MacKnight seemed an unlikely killer, as did her boyfriend, 18-year-old Donald Wightman. But to those who knew the high school sweethearts, the death of Gladys’ mother, Helen, wasn’t entirely shocking. (Though being hacked to death in one’s own kitchen certainly is.) It was August 1936; both Gladys and Donald had graduated…
It’s truly amazing that anybody survived the Cold War. Over the past decade numerous stories have come out about Soviet and American military personnel who were given orders to fire nuclear weapons between the 1960s and 1980s. Their conscience stopped them, only to learn later that it was a mistaken order. We now have another…
Our 26th US President and the only one to ever sport a chest tattoo would have been 157 today. A birthday he might have lived to see if he hadn’t had a bullet lodged in him his last 7 years. Teddy’s popularity remains so enduring that people get him tattooed on their bodies. And he…
One of the perennial challenges of urban living is the lack of space. Biking in cities is great, for instance—but only if you have a spot to store your bike. Some furniture designers in Chile are offering a creative (and attractive) solution. The latest collection from Santiago-based Chol1 is a line of sneaky pieces with…
May 27, 1999: The Space Shuttles were always pretty, but this launch of Discovery was a particularly gorgeous start to the first mission to dock with the International Space Station. The space shuttle Discovery lifted off on May 27, 1999 for a ten-day mission to the International Space Station. The STS-96 mission was the second…
Ebola is a filovirus, and although it is the best-known of the Filovirdae, it’s no worse than its cousin, Marburg virus. One is named for the Ebola river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the other is named for a town in Germany. But how did a virus from Africa get a German…
It’s good to be rich. Because when you’re rich you can easily justify the $18,000 necessary to rent—yes, rent—a MiG-29 fighter jet that will take you on the flight of your life to the edge of space. You fly above the clouds in the stratosphere at 70,000 feet in the air, you reach supersonic speeds,…
In July 1959, the magazine Look ran an article describing the “miracle kitchen” of the future, ostensibly about the amazing advances that Americans would see in their own homes. In reality, it was part of a much larger propaganda battle of the Cold War–and it involved a proto-roomba. Last year we looked at the American…
Google’s parent company Alphabet has just hired Thomas Insel, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, who has some pretty weird ideas about what his new job will entail. Insel told a crowd at Chicago Ideas Week that he still isn’t sure what Alphabet wants him to do. But then he explained…
Ol’ Dirty Bastard was taken from us before his time in 2004. As with most artists who die (relatively) young, ODB left behind some work we never got to hear. But ODB’s definitely the first artist to posthumously release music on a Bluetooth speaker. That snazzy speaker above is the limited edition Ol’ Dirty Bastard…
