Tech News

Crane Controllers are the Most Overkill Way to Play Pong

Ever looked at the wireless remotes you use for shop cranes — boxy yellow things the size of shoe boxes, with industrial STOP buttons — and think they’d be perfect for controlling the world’s simplest video game? No, me neither. The intrepid YouTuber who put together the demo hooked up two crane controllers to a…

Thank An Aging Population For Facebook’s Proposed ‘Dislike’ Button

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company is finally working on a much-desired feature: a “dislike” button. According to Zuckerberg, this feature has long been one of those most-requested by the Facebook audience. Although his comments suggest that the new button more likely will express sympathy or empathy, rather than simple dislike, Facebook…

Drones Autonomously Build a Bridge, So the Robot Army Never Has to Stop

In the future war against the machines, humans might have gained a brief respite by powering through the flowing rivers where electronic killer robots cannot tread. These bridge-building quadrotors have now closed off that avenue of escape. The pair of drones you can see in the video use a spool of rope – about 120m…

Apple is Cleaning The App Store Of its First Major Malware Attack

Apple cleaned the App Store of apps containing malware today, having discovered a long con that saw developers using infected software tools, inadvertently turning their legit apps into data-collection tools for hackers. According to Reuters, hackers duped developers into using a bad version of Apple’s Xcode app-development tools. The bad version of Xcode, dubbed XcodeGhost,…

Massive Wildfires Are Only Going to Get Worse

Welcome to this week’s Reading List, Gizmodo’s weekly collection of fascinating science and technology reads from around the internet, gathered in one place just for you. This week, we’ll catch a ride with Uber, play with AI for kids, peer into the grim future of mega-wildfires, and jump into the hoverboard patent wars. This year’s…

You Can Print Your Own Homo Naledi Specimens

If you’re excited about last week’s announcement of a new human-like species discovered in South Africa, you can get your hands on the specimens — sort of. You can print your own 3D replicas of Homo naledi and several other important hominin finds. Anthropologist Lee Berger and his colleagues found 91 specimens, which they say…

New Satellite Images Show Just How Parched the Ground Is

It’s been a hot, thirsty, fire-ridden summer out West. But to really understand the severity of the drought, we need to look beneath the parched vegetation and deep into the ground. Spoilers: It’s looking awfully dry down there. That’s according to NASA’s latest series of soil and groundwater moisture maps, which pull together data from…

A Campaign to Bring Back Accent Marks is Sweeping the Internet

Internet shorthand is ubiquitous, but in our desire to get words out quickly, meaning can be muddled or lost. Case in point: Accent marks, one of the foremost linguistic casualties of the digital age. Now, defenders of the Spanish language are trying to bring the neglected markings back. Spanish speakers often replace simple accented words,…

In a settlement with California, Comcast will shell out $33 million in restitution fees for disclosing the personal information of about 75,000 customers who had paid for unlisted service. The confidential data was released online and made available via nationwide directory assistance. Thanks, Comcast. [Reuters]

It doesn’t take a lot to crash Chrome: Only sixteen characters. Just type (http://a/%%30%30) into a Chrome 45 or older address bar, hit enter or hover your cursor over the link to crash your browser. Or, you know, don’t. But you’ve officially been warned. [VB News]

What’s the One Device You Need to Survive the Apocalypse?

The zombie horde is coming. The pandemic is spreading. An EMP just fried the grid. One way or another, you need to get out of this soon-to-be-godforsaken city. You gaze forlornly at your glorious pile of technology, knowing you’ve gotta make a hard choice about what to bring. All week at Gizmodo, we’ve been exploring…

Scientists Have Drafted a Complete Tree of Life 

Humans, bacteria, daffodils: We’re a diverse bunch on the surface, but trace each and every Earthling back far enough, and you’ll arrive at a common ancestor. For the first time, scientists have built a comprehensive tree of life that binds us all together. A draft of the One Tree, published Friday in the Proceedings of…

The Best Nerf Gun for Every Kid (At Heart)

As a kid, I strapped a Nerf gun to my bicycle so I could dive bomb the neighborhood kids, while traveling—I imagined—at five times the speed of sound. As an adult, I’ve carried a foam-firing blaster to no fewer than three jobs. But a funny thing happened last year: I realized my old guns weren’t…

Telephone History Museum Destroyed in Recent California Wildfire

The JKL Museum of Telephony, dedicated to preserving the history of phones, was destroyed last week as one of the worst wildfires of the summer raged across the central valley of California. Located in the town of San Andreas, which was hit hard by Butte fire, the John K. La Rue museum contained thousands of…

Australia is the First Country to Get Tesla’s Powerwall Battery

That’s right, Tesla’s much talked about Powerwall — the battery that can power your entire house — will be available in the Australian market from late this year. Tesla, the company best known for its Model S electric sedan, is launching Tesla Energy in Australia, which will bring products including both the residential Powerwall and…

Cute animation shows the different ways to make coffee

How do you make coffee? Do you buy it at Starbucks? Support your local coffee shop? Just pour a mug at work? Or are you one of those fancy types who make coffee by roasting their own beans and like, performing high-level science experiments with it? Here’s a fun little animation that shows different ways…

This is How Much the Ground Moved During Chile’s Massive Earthquake

When Chile was hit by a magnitude 8.3 earthquake this week, the very ground shifted. By comparing images before and after the earthquake with an interferogram, geophysicists can measure just how much and where the ground moved. An interferogram is a geophysical tool for tracking changes in surface topography over time. It can be used…

The Best Thing About Nerf’s Modular Dart Gun Is Buying Parts on Amazon

This is ridiculous. Nobody needs this much Nerf gun. But the nice thing about Nerf’s new Modulus blaster is you get to pick just how much you want. The $50 Nerf Modulus ECS-10 is actually a pretty decent blaster. It’s one of the quietest, furthest-shooting magazine-fed, battery-powered, flywheel-driven dart shooting designs you can get without…

We’ll Be Bringing You Google’s Marshmallows (and Nexi?) on September 29th

I don’t suppose you’ve heard the rumors that Google will announce its new Nexus phones on September 29th? That seems pretty damn likely—because we just got invited to a Google event that very day. While the invite doesn’t have any smoking guns like “come see our new Nexus phones,” it sure does sound like an…

The Last Man On Earth Proves That Survival Doesn’t Always Have to Suck

I love a good post-apocalyptic tale. The Road, The Walking Dead, The Leftovers—these are all fine examples of end-times entertainment. But the problem with all these things is that they’re so damn depressing. Why does the demise of humankind have to be so sad? That’s why I was so pleased to discover the show The…