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NASA astronauts rock the internet, but how do they get so good at social media? This is how the astronauts pick a platform, find their personal voices, and get help from a ground on sharing their unique experience with us, becoming social media superstars.
Where does gold come from? The answer: space, basically. Supernovae, specifically. Alchemy, sort of. So gold doesn’t actually originate from the core of Earth but actually from a star explosion that showers the universe with debris and well, gold. That means there’s not that much of it actually on Earth (all the gold mined in…
A prosthetic hand is about more than just improving the wearer’s physical capabilities. It’s also about improving their self-confidence. So Open Bionics, makers of low-cost but highly capable prosthetic robotic hands, have teamed up with Disney to realize some very cool designs. Kids can be bullied for something as innocuous as wearing the wrong shirt;…
Police in Philadelphia are looking for a man who robbed several people at gunpoint on October 5th at a Chinese take-out restaurant. He stole the victims’ phones, their wallets, and a “hoverboard.” Yep, people are getting robbed for their hoverboards now. There’s been debate about what to call these things, but I’ve officially surrendered to…
Chinese hackers have allegedly read the Obama Administration’s emails, stolenmillions of federal employee records, hijacked US health care records, and attacked anti-censorship projects. Now they’re reportedly getting arrested on US orders. The Washington Post reports that these arrests were made prior to the agreement on cyber espionage China and the US announced during President Xi…
A few days ago, a drone captured this eye-popping video of the world’s worst traffic jam on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway. Blame foggy weather if you like, but physics says it all comes down to a question of density — namely, an unusually high number of people returning to Beijing after a week-long holiday…
Google is now part of Alphabet, a parent company created to house all of the web giant’s diverse efforts. But unfortunately for Google, they couldn’t buy Alphabet.com, which was already taken. So they’ve done the next best thing. They bought the entire alphabet: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com. Strangely enough, Alphabet.com is owned by BMW who, as the Financial…
Key fobs have all but eliminated the difficulties in finding the key hole on a car door at night, but what if finding your actual car is the problem? If you parked somewhere dark and sketchy, BMW’s new 7 Series will make it easier to find your vehicle with a glowing pathway that leads right…
The Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady is a beautiful spy plane that flies at high altitudes (70,000 feet in the air) to provide reconnaissance for the military. It’s also a pain in the ass to land too, requiring an actual chase car on the ground to tell the pilot how far the U-2 is from the…
Dear Mr Artist, this is just not the way to turn an iconic photograph to sculpture. Robert Capa is spinning in his grave. Please, take your disgusting polystyrene work out of our sight. Everybody knows this legendary photograph taken by Capa, the famous Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist, of Spanish anarchist militiaman Federico Borrell García…
The largest lake in California is slowly fading away, and that’s bad news for local residents. As the Salton Sea’s water sources dwindle, southern Californians are bracing themselves for toxic dust storms, noxious smells—and disease. The Salton Sea is massive, but shallow, artificial lake located on the San Andreas Fault, some 125 miles (200 km)…
When Star Trek got rebooted for the big screen, Hasbro put out a line of construction sets to go with it. But now Mega Bloks have taken the reigns on Star Trek construction toys, and they’re boldly going where no brick has gone before: all the way back to the original series. Although the line…
Driverless cars are designed to cut down on traffic accidents, but that hasn’t stopped human-driven cars from crashing into them anyways. The California DMV just published all of its driverless car accident reports online—low-speed, minor fender-benders, with human error to blame. But there is a common thread besides human dumbassedness in the reports: Driverless cars…
You know that giant tub of Lego bricks in your basement you think is really impressive? Take a look at the vast collection of bricks that Lego artist Nathan Sawaya has to work with. He not only designs his own Batmobile models, he’s actually able to build them large enough to drive. At 18-feet long…
An international NGOtrains rodents to find buried bombs and a deadly respiratory disease. Meanwhile, I’ve taught my dog how to carry three tennis balls in his mouth at once. More than 59 countries—a third of the world—are contaminated with ground explosives leftover from past wars. In 2012 alone, 1,066 people were killed by such explosives,…
Stephen Hawking makes headlines with every utterance, whether he is making bets with colleagues, attending movie premieres, expounding on A.I., or slyly suggesting women are the ultimate mystery. Now he’s inspired a lyrical sonnet ruminating on relativity, quantum mechanics and (of course) black holes. In a poignant essay in The Paris Review, poet Sarah Howe…
Now that the X-Files is officially returning, Lego fans have decided that Minifig versions of Scully and Mulder are must-have additions to their collections. Lego has tried to suppress that truth, though, so Minifigures.com has stepped up to create tiny versions of the FBI’s best paranormal investigators. The custom X-Files Minifigs are compatible with all…
This complex web of fibers is in fact a digital model of a small chunk of rat brain — containing 31,000 neurons, 37 million synapses and the ability to fire just like a living chunk of grey matter. It’s small, sure — in fact, the structure is equivalent to a piece of real brain that…
A math question posed to Scottish teenage students has received a great deal of criticism for being too hard. Can you solve it? The BBC reports that the question, which was set by the Scottish Qualifications Authority, was “not fit for purpose” because it “proved to be challenging for most candidates”. In other words, it…
This amazing visualization brings together the world’s history from Wikipedia into an interactive timeline stuffed with information and images. If only history lessons at school had been this much fun. On the timeline, called Histography,, each dot represents an event and the position on the horizontal axis represents time. You can zoom in and out…
