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Your neighbor’s droning hobby is about to get a little more complicated after an announcement of a new task force from the Department of Transportation. The group of 25 to 30 will decide which drones won’t need to be registered with the feds. The takeaway? Some drones will need to be registered. This announcement shouldn’t…
Road access to the mudslides that trapped hundreds of cars in California last week was impossible, so a photographer strapped on a backpack and hiked 10 miles in to bring you these photos. “It took a 10 mile hike to get to this massive mudslide, but it was so worth it,” writes Vincent Hernandez of…
Something odd is happening to the seasons. Spring has been showing up progressively earlier, and a new model shows that by the end of the century, it will likely be showing up a full 23 days earlier—but it may not look quite like the Spring we’re used to. A new study in Environmental Research Letters…
Thanks to talented artists like Johanna Basford, coloring books have somehow become an incredibly popular pastime again—and not just for kids. Bookstores are now flooded with intricately illustrated black and white books targeted at adults, including an upcoming collection featuring scenes from A Game of Thrones. Hopefully there aren’t actually any six-year-olds familiar enough with…
This extraordinary image of an apparent floating city has created a stir among conspiracy theorists, but a well-known optical illusion is the likely explanation for the phenomenon. As reported in the Independent, the bizarre cloud formation appears to show a cityscape high above the city of Foshan in China’s Guangdong province. Footage of the phenomenon…
Critter & Guitari’s Brooklyn-based workshop is the source of beautiful, if borderline esoteric electronic instruments. Its latest box, based on the colorful metal-and-wood design the company is known for, is fully programmable, so that those lovely lacquered keys can make any sound you want. https://gizmodo.com/inside-the-small-brooklyn-studio-making-the-wackiest-sy-1692188992 The new Organelle is perhaps the logical extension of the…
They came for your toyshelves. They came for basically every sort of random product you could think of, really. Hell, they came for your showerheads! Now, the heroes and villains of Star Wars are here to perilously dangle off the side of your beverages. These cutesy little plastic figurines went on sale at the Japanese…
It’s been over two months since The New York Times published a lengthy and rather scathing report on what it’s like to work at Amazon. (Working at Amazon is soul-crushing, by the way.) But Amazon just can’t stop defending itself. Star Amazon hire Jay Carney just published a blog post on Medium, detailing several instances…
Why do some wheat dough balls rise well and bake into perfect loaves while others are flat and hard as a brick? A new study says it’s as much about the flour as the yeast. That was the conclusion of Mathieu Meerts, a chemical engineer at KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, and his collaborators.…
It’s a lot of fun to watch Darbin Orvar hand make a beautiful bat from maple and walnut planks. Seeing the separate pieces get merged together to form a block and then seeing that block get shaved down to reveal a cylinder and then to see that cylinder get turned and shaped into a bat…
The Lego Ghostbusters can’t really be expected to do their jobs without a place to store all their gear. There have been some strong rumors that Lego plans to release a Ghostbusters Firehall set to accompany Brent Waller’s Ecto-1 released last year, and Toys “R” Us may have just finally spilled the beans. The page…
Once upon a time, NASA contemplated building an inflatable solar-powered space station. Unlike most early concepts for bringing humans to space, this one made it from concept art all the way to a testable prototype, although it never left the planet. This is a 1961 prototype model an inflatable space station, the Erectable Torus Manned…
Thanks to digital photography, everyone has a camera in their pocket and pictures are now instantly accessible and shareable. The only drawback is the hassle of managing so many snaps and all the more apps and services that make it even more confusing. Here are the tools you need to know to bring order to…
If a despotic regime is trying to break into your Facebook messages, you’d probably want to know about it. Now, the social network is finally offering a feature that tells you when a suspected state-sponsored attacker targets your account. It will also tell you to buy a new computer. The new hacker alert feature isn’t…
In developing countries, an unbelievable 45% of food goes bad because of a lack of cold storage. It’s an especially big problem during transportation from farms to outdoor markets, where food sits in the scorching sun for hours on end. But one startup has a solution: solar-powered refrigeration stations that could save the livelihoods of…
For years Love Hultén has been making gamers jealous of his woodworking and electronics skills with hand-crafted arcade cabinets, portable consoles, and handheld gaming units. But now he’ll be the envy of Mac fans too with a new replica of the original Macintosh he calls the Golden Apple. It’s understandable why Apple chose to make…
Chances are you’ll never plumb the depths of the Mariana Trench or explore the ruins of an ancient shipwreck. But you can hold part of geologic history in your hand with these ceramic pieces glazed with various muds collected from the deep sea, courtesy of The Soft Earth Speaks. Back in 1996, a sailor with…
The ruins of the Temple of Santiago are not an easy destination to visit, or even have a look at. The walls of the once sacred building are usually hiding under water, but now drought lowered the river the temple has been hiding in, revealing a rather awesome sight. The mid-16th century Mexican church (also…
SpaceX is getting back on the launchpad after their rocket explosion in June. The first payload is a constellation of eleven miniature relay satellites that will launch in late 2015. The new order switches the launch order from the pre-mishap schedule. Originally, the next launch on SpaceX’s docket was SES 9 television broadcasting spacecraft that…
If you fell in love with the new Nexus 5X when it was announced last month, good news: you can buy one right now in a store or from a carrier. If you’re in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, India, Korea or Japan, you can now buy one of the handsets from a store or…
