Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Ceres’ bright spots have been a winking mystery for months, but NASA finally thinks it’s solved the riddle: No, we’re not looking at a giant alien ice rink. More likely, enormous piles of salt. “We believe this is a huge salt deposit,” principal investigator for the Dawn spacecraft Chris Russell told scientists on Monday at…
T-Mobile customers should be on alert: Hackers stole the personal information of around 15 million people, including Uncarrier users, from its credit reporting agency, Experian. The stolen data including social security numbers, addresses, and phone numbers. Customers who signed up for T-Mobile recently are most at risk—people who joined between September 1, 2013 and September…
If you ever find yourself with an itch to leave your desk job and like, never come back, I highly recommend disappearing away into Southeast Asia. It’s such a stunning place with so many different cultures and landscapes and wonderful food and to properly do it right, you need to be leaving something behind with…
You never forget your first. There are so many specialty sites these days that it can be hard to remember when the web felt like a vast desert with a few choice oases of content. I was reminded of one of my first online “homes,” the recapping site Television Without Pity, when I sat down…
Atom Central recently published these four unreleased videos of atomic bomb testing in 1955. The footage, taken from Operation Teapot at the test site in Nevada, is in glorious HD so it’s pretty incredible but watch out for the blinding light. Even in a small little YouTube window, it hurts. SPLOID is delicious brain candy.…
I’ll come right out and say it: OS X El Capitan isn’t that exciting. However, Apple’s newest operating system wasn’t meant to be a revelation but rather an under-the-hood upgrade full of little improvements. I will admit that a handful of the design tweaks are downright delightful. As the name implies, OS X El Capitan…
Think about it this way, now we won’t have to bother teaching our kids how to walk. “He can ride one of these things before he can walk” says the caption of the video posted by drbatookhan. Note the wise word choice of “these things” not “hoverboard.” Also judging simply by this baby’s height and…
Flower stalls have been embellished, for the last two years, with a special kind of orchid known as the “Big Pink.” Researchers thought it was a hybrid. Turns out it’s totally new to science. When researchers spotted this odd orchid showing up at flower shops, they figured it was a hybrid of two established species.…
Today is the deadline for US retailers to switch over to a payment technology called EMV. That means you’ll have to start verifying your credit card with a chip, as well as a swipe. We talked to payments industry experts about how EMV works, what’s happening today, and what it means for the average shopper.…
The first time my grandma visited the Sistine Chapel, she almost passed out. When she recovered she said she saw God. If the premise of this short is correct, she didn’t. She only suffered a weird type of epilepsy triggered by certain images. Those visions of God follow a precise pattern and can be induced…
Last year, scientists in China used a gene-editing technique to produce pint-sized pigs for medical research. Now they want to sell them as pets. Critics say the precedent could lead to bizarre versions of cats and dogs, while at the same time preventing biologists from focusing on more important research. As reported in Nature, BGI…
When you go to the doctor, there’s a medical code that determines how your treatment gets billed. Getting treated for urban rabies? Well, that’s distinct from woods-based sylvatic rabies, and your invoice will reflect that. Until today, the system in the US was the same one we used in the 1970s. But there’s a new…
We love whiskey, we drink whiskey, we’ve seen whiskey get made. But what’s cool about this latest episode of Raw Craft with Anthony Bourdain is how we meet the people behind the alcohol we all love. It’s combining generations of knowledge with unique skills and a real passion to just make good things. Thankfully, these…
Self-driving cars are coming to a street near you. And their earliest customers might not be harried tech-savvy millennials in big cities, but rather their grandparents out on the farm. Tech titans like Google, Uber, and Apple, plus auto giants like BMW, Mercedes and Toyota, are racing to plop driverless cars on the road. In…
Lots of human cells are specialized, but I can’t think of any that are as stripped down to a single purpose as spermatozoa.Sperm have just one job, and they’ll die doing it. Every single piece of a sperm cell’s internal machinery is tied to getting to an egg for fertilization. That affects everything about the…
When competition heats up, you can expect somebody to get burned. Today, Amazon absolutely scorched Google and Apple by banning the two companies’ streaming TV products from its marketplace. Amazon says it’s “to avoid customer confusion.” Third party sellers just received an email from Amazon with orders to clear out their Google Chromecast and Apple…
For nearly 40 years, paleontologists have argued over what really killed the dinosaurs. Was it an massive asteroid impact, or a spate of volcanic eruptions? Or what if a powerful impact ignited volcanoes, walloping Earth’s biosphere with a deadly 1-2 punch? That double-whammy scenario has been around for a while, but new evidence to support…
Experienced Scrabble players know there’s more to the game than an expansive vocabulary. An effective player should also be able to quickly find words in a jumble of letters. Developing this skill, reports a team of Canadian researchers, will not only improve your game, it will change the way you use your brain. In Scrabble,…
The portabello mushroom: Great with grilled onions and ketchup, sure, but this fungus can do a lot more than console vegetarians at barbecues. In the future, the humble portabello mushroom might power everything from our smartphones to our cars. The anodes in the lithium ion batteries that charge our devices are made of graphite, a…
In a hilarious mix up, the movie studio behind Everest sent the BBC this clip of the movie that had no sound effects added. Which is really, really great for us because it is oh so goofy to see an impossibly tense scene of the movie with all the VFX added and everything looking right…
