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A fresh batch of images straight from the New Horizons downlink give us just what we’ve been waiting for: color views of Pluto! Ridiculously high resolution detail! Strange new snakeskin textures! Plus a first look at how methane is involved in shaping these crazy ice landscapes. These new images from NASA’s deep space probe mean…
Hot sauce is one of those universal truths that different cultures from all over the world have realized is so completely awesome. Everybody has their own preference and people use different peppers and make their hot sauce at varying levels of spice and heat but all hot sauce is good. Even this hot sauce made…
Yachts are for chumps. People who really know how to spend their money get submersible yachts from Migaloo, a mysterious company that offers five different models of underwater palaces. But true evil villains just go for the Migaloo’s crown jewel: Kokomo Ailand. Kokomo Aisland is a mobile private island that floats on two semi-submersible platforms.…
This Sunday, for the first time since 1982, the super moon will combine with the lunar eclipse. And for this week’s Shooting Challenge, we want you to photograph it. The Challenge Take a photograph of the super moon eclipse—use any technique you like. The Method Just so you’re aware, you’ll see the moon during the…
In 1964, the last time Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics, the nation revealed one of the biggest mic drops in transportation history: the debut of the shinkansen, the world-famous bullet train that became a Japanese icon. The first high-speed train in the world, it spurred similar technology to spread to Europe and other East Asian…
For those who have been itching to stream the new season of TV from the comfort of your Gear VR, a Netflix VR app will be available today, with apps for Hulu and Vimeo as well as Twitch coming on soon. At today’s Oculus developers event, the company announced that it’s getting a slew of…
People spend years mastering the tools of Photoshop. They labor arduously to create seamless images with no trace of manipulation. Lucas Blalock labors arduously as well. But in his art, the artifacts of cutting, duplicating, and transforming become the very backbone of the finished product. Bear with this video produced by PBS’ Art21, because it…
VR is coming, and Oculus has partnered up with PC makers like ASUS, Dell, and Alienware to make an Oculus-ready lineup of gaming desktops for under 1K that meet the needed specifications to run an Oculus smoothly and worry-free. These PCs will also come with Oculus bundle options. Get ready, people. It’s happening.
The iPhone 6S arrives tomorrow morning, and Reuters says the fever-pitch demand for the latest iPhone in China is spurring a boom in phony stores that look a lot like official Apple stores–right down to the bags. Unauthorized Apple stores are a perennial story in many countries, and this year is no different. In particular,…
Speedrunners play video games as a race against time. It’s not about getting the highest score or beating another person in the game but rather it’s about beating everyone by getting the fastest time. Kotaku talked to some gamers who seem to see things quicker and faster (or is it slower?) than the rest of…
Samsung has been an early adopter of virtual reality, creating headsets that use its massive smartphone screens as VR displays. Now, the company has announced its third iteration of Gear VR, compatible with the S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, and the Note 5, for only $100. For the most part, it looks just like the…
A gigantic time capsule from 1965 is going to be opened this afternoon in Bay City, Michigan. And locals have been speculating about what could be inside. Will it be filled with old movie cameras and classic records? Priceless gems and bars of gold? Probably not. Frankly, the contents of most time capsules are pretty…
The Ig Nobel awards ceremony is a marvelous spectacle encrusted with tradition. But if you really want to know how the winners did their work and why, you need to go to the Ig informal lectures, held at MIT the Saturday after the awards. The event lets winners present a short lecture to explain the…
The drought crippling the West is the worst it has seen in 500 years—and maybe even in 1000 years. It’s so bad that it’s taking a toll on some of the region’s oldest and largest residents: California’s stately sequoia trees. According to an Associated Press story, scientists gathering data in Sequoia National Park are seeing…
From 1968 until 1973, the US military spent about $1 billion a year on a new computer-powered initiative intended to end the war in Vietnam. It went by many names over the years — including Practice Nine, Muscle Shoals, Illinois City and Dye Marker. But today it’s most commonly known as Operation Igloo White. Despite…
Jeb Bush just published a love note to big business that’d be amusing if it didn’t give me second-hand embarrassment at witnessing a governor slob-knob oligopolistic corporatism so explicitly. Bush wants to get rid of unnecessary government regulations. In making his argument against various rules, he tends to play up the idea that regular folks…
Over at Science of Us, Melissa Dahl reports on an interesting new study that suggests the distress some internet pornography users feel about their oh-so-private internet activity has far more to do with their worries about internet porn addiction than the actual amount of pornography they’re watching. Contact the author at [email protected].
Of all the things we thought we might see while speeding past Pluto, we weren’t expecting the icy world to look quite this much like our home planet’s frozen poles. This is the science so far of those eerily familiar landscapes. Geomorphology is the study of landforms—what they are, how they’re formed, and why they…
The Hubble Space Telescope took a new image of the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant from a star that exploded 8,000 years ago, and made this truly spectacular flyover visualization of the beautiful ripple in space that you can see below. In the 3D visualization, red is sulfur, green is hydrogen and blue is oxygen.…
Not every app of the week is always new–sometimes even updates to apps are deserving enough for some fresh attention. This week there are a few updates to old goodies in the Windows Phone world, Android users can choose to take a step back in time to the days of analog video recording, and iOS…
