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Sure, gesture-controlled robots are cool. Even cooler? Scientists have developed a way to control a robotic arm just by blinking at it—no hands needed. Researchers at Imperial College London demonstrated this by having a human control a robot arm to paint a picture by only using her eye movements while she ate a croissant and…
Set design’s loss may be criminal justice’s gain. A new technology may eventually replace luminol in detecting traces of blood. In films or television police procedurals, the detectives go in, spray up a crime scene with luminol, and sometimes bring over a black light. Immediately their faces are lit up by the bright, blue, flattering…
iOS users have been complaining about the Facebook app’s big battery drain. Today Facebook admitted it had a problem–and pushed an update that should help. In a Facebook post, Facebook Engineering Manager Ari Grant wrote that the company had identified “a few key issues” that the update seeks to fix: The first issue we found…
Down has the highest warmth-to-weight and warmth-to-packed size ratio of any widely available material. And quality items made from it can last for decades. If you take care of them. Here’s how. We spoke to Heidi Allen at Nikwax, which specializes in treating, cleaning and conditioning outdoors gear. Heidi used to be a climbing guide,…
The mouse is anathema to Apple’s grand utopian touch-based future, in which nothing but the supple pads of your ten digits (and a Pencil?) dictate how you navigate a digital interface. The new Magic Trackpad 2 is the fullest realization of that future for desktop users. I’m enamored, but mostly just want my mouse back.…
Dead 1970s comedians Andy Kaufman and Redd Foxx are going on tour this year. This is NOT a classic Weekend at Bernie’s scenario. Kaufman and Foxx are touring in hologram format. A company called Hologram USA will use recordings of the comedians’ famous bits in a show where visual recreations of Foxx and Kaufman perform.…
Spider crickets are masters of aerodynamics. They don’t have wings, but they can jump up to 60 times their body length — equivalent to a human track star jumping the length of a football field. Now a team of engineering students at Johns Hopkins University has videotaped the critters in slow motion and discovered some…
German researchers hopped in a car, turned it on, and didn’t touch the steering wheel for 1,500 miles through Mexico. The team says it’s the longest journey of its kind ever completed by an autonomous vehicle in the country. The car is called AutoNOMOS, and it was developed by a team at Freie Universität Berlin.…
The British Royal Mint makes three types of commemorative coins: bullion, brilliant uncirculated and proof. Bullion is basically made to the same standard of regular coins in circulation, brilliant uncirculated coins (a real mouthful) are finished with more attention to detail than bullion coins and proof coins are of the absolute highest quality and care.…
Giant squid are among the most mysterious creatures on the planet; the camera-shy behemoths lurk in murky ocean basins across the world. We’ve only seen adult giant squid a handful of times, and now, you’re looking at the first ever wee baby ones. The three specimens of Architeuthis dux shown here measure only 5.5 to…
Ejaculation may feel like a glorious mess, as uncontrollable as an avalanche or a runaway train. In reality, it’s a tightly choreographed court dance: integrating three different branches of the nervous system, triggering cascades of contractions in smooth and striated muscles, all accompanied by the electrical storm of orgasm. Here’s how it works. Sexual Feedback…
Usually this is where a witty opening paragraph would go, but I’ve been stupefied by the cuteness. Just look at this little darling. So sweet! Kaiyodo’s Revoltech line has been churning out amazingly articulated action figures for ages—you might have seen their Star Wars figures featured before. This new Movie Revo Lilo & Stitch Stitch…
You can now preorder The Priv, one of BlackBerry’s strangest creations (and it’s made some weird stuff), for $700 in United States currency. $700! That puts BlackBerry’s latest in direct competition with some of the best smartphones you can buy. That’s not to say you’re not getting some great stuff for the money. The Priv…
Toys are meant to be touched and played with, but there’s one toy that kids (and grownups) are happy to just stare at for hours on end: marble mazes. But Marbleocity’s laser-cut wooden marble runs aren’t completely hands-off; they arrive ‘all assembly required’, making them even more fun. The Marbleocity marble machines are laser cut…
The government has been wiretapping computers for twenty years, as of today. If your immediate response isn’t “AHHH HAPPY BIRTHDAY FORM OF SURVEILLANCE THAT I FEAR,” congratulations, you are normal. While this wiretapping anniversary isn’t worth celebrating, it is a reminder of that the government has been dealing with cybersecurity threats for a long time,…
So. Cool. Here’s a photo from the US Army showing M1A2 Abram tanks and a M2A3 Bradley fighting vehicle during a live-fire demonstration. Because their cannons have kicked up the sand from the ground, they almost look like desert sand sculptures. But then they start to take shape and you realize that yep, they’re war…
The Black Death wiped out nearly half the population of Europe during the 14th Century, a blight that swept through the continent in the gut of fleas. But a new analysis of ancient human DNA shows that the dreaded bacteria emerged at least 3,000 years before the first plague pandemic—a time before it mutated into…
Even eruptions from the usually-gentle Hawaiian volcanoes can pack a hidden punch. The hot, molten splatter of lava from a bubbling explosion at Halemaʻumaʻu Crater sloshed onto the webcam, melting wire insulation. But the webcam is hearty, and kept operating without interruption. Top image: Lava splatter on the Halemaʻumaʻu webcam on Kīlauea on April 28,…
You don’t want to be caught wearing the same Harley Quinn costume as the rest of America–and thankfully, Google is using Big Data to help you avoid it. Google’s Frightgeist map ranks costume popularity based on searches and by location. You can scroll around the interactive map, landing on the info that the top costume…
Microsoft has its own streaming music service, just in case you’d forgotten, and while its feature set is rather par-for-the-course in a lot of areas, there is one interesting trick that’s worth trying out—the ability to stream music tracks stored in your OneDrive folder to any computer connected to the web. Anyone with a OneDrive…
